skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I live in the real world. I use the tools I need to communicate with who I need.

When a customer asks for a Word Document, I deliver a Word Document. When a customer asks for a 200-page print-out, I deliver it however the hell I feel like it. I'll deliver it using InDesign if I believe its the best tool for the job.

Here's why Microsoft Office is used. Because it works. Sticking with a standard office font works across Mac, Windows, and yes, even Linux (thanks to Crosstools). Abiword and OpenOffice are much better at reading Microsoft Office documents than they are at reading each other.

But when it comes down to beautiful typesetting, semantic markup and the like? LaTeX is quite hard to beat.

When it comes to opening up a 25 year old document and it still looking exactly like how it was typeset in Word 95? Well... Microsoft actually has accomplished that quite decently. Tell me, does Libre Office support the StarWord format as well as Word 2013 supports a Word95 document?

On the other hand, LaTeX supports documents from the 80s quite well, ditto with TeX.
For the likely error I spot, you don't even need To know C. Anything remotely algol-like Will do.

I wonder whether the software from the guys at viva64.com would spot that.
I don't think that was the parent's intent. Dave Winer basically invented RSS and OPML.
The idea that through "powerful therapeutic algorithms" (whatever that is) people can wholly regulate their own emotions is dangerous and false.

We are a social species and need other people to help regulate our emotions. We are not self-sufficient and believing otherwise feeds a dangerous fantasy that will only lead to more suffering.
I'm sorry, but I've just noticed that "If you don't like [Microsoft product], don't use it" is an awfully frequent argument of pro-MS people. An awfully weak argument, too. (Edit: because, you know, sometimes there just isn't a way to avoid using an MS product).
Keep in mind that monks in Carolingian France knew the Earth was round in the 8th century. It took a few hundred years for this knowledge to work its way into popular literature (but was present by at least the 13th century). If the paper had been thrown out, this would have made a great topic for a follow-up.
Flat design refers to a graphic design concept:

http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2013/05/what-is-flat-design/
You don't need fancy software, compilers warn about this kind of thing.
> Do I hate Japan for World War II? [...] I said, "No, we're cool with Japan. We've done some good stuff together." And he was like, "Cool."

No we are not cool. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731 is not cool, still not cool. I won't repeat the horrific things that happened there, read it for yourself, but no, just saying "we are cool" about it goes a little too far.

> Is Microsoft circa 2014 worse than Google, Apple, or Facebook? We're not nearly as organized as we'd need to be to be as evil as you might think we are.

Microsoft has been, as most people perceive today, de-fanged. It was a scary monopoly, it was pushing crappy APIs, not following standards, perverting them. That legacy crap is still there. It is still maintained. Someone deals with it. So it wasn't just about browser wars. Imagine perhaps Facebook merging with Google so now everything you do online or anywhere on your computer is controlled by one company. That was kind of how Microsoft was viewed.

So, true, there isn't as much reason to hate anymore. But there is a lot of reasons to not forget as well.

What does that mean in practical terms? It means I won't be jumping on or using any Microsoft technologies if I have a choice. F# looks awesome, but nope, I am not touching it. Maybe Visual Studio 2014 is going to be really great, but I won't even try it. If it is tied with .net anything, not touching it.

> Moreover, I think that Microsoft is very aware of perceptions and is actively trying to counter them by actually being open.

Too late. Open source Windows if you want to be open. Open source your browser if you want to be open. Go back and fix your broken APIs and start following standards. Google as much as many don't like it (and I am in that camp too, when it comes to privacy), has to be commended for being open and contributing to Open Source. So use Google as your example in that respect.
Flat refers to the on-screen aesthetics, not the hardware.
Sharepoint ? Now that's a turd that needs constant polishing.
He's not mentioning Microsoft's patents related attacks on Android, their involvement in SCO's war on Linux, their refusal to implement web standards that compete with their own homegrown solutions, or the Nokia partership that basically killed Nokia.

I really like Hanselman and his blog and I even like some of the stuff Microsoft has been doing, but this is a distasteful marketing piece.

And BTW, in society trust is a fragile thing and many people don't forget so easily. Other companies should pay attention to this fact. Fool me once shame on you and all that.
The first thing that shows up in a VIM session is a small introductory text that includes

type :help<Enter> or <F1> for on-line help

And of course the GUI also has the familiar Help menu as most common GUI apps.
Sorry but no. Facebook is not bleeding users in fact they are still gaining them with engagement still incredibly high.

What is happening is that we are in a period of transition from feature phones and PCs to smart mobile devices. And it is a new landscape with new winners and losers. Facebook is no longer the only player like it was on the web and so it needs to acquire companies with existing mindshare.

Ultimately Facebook is trying to do one thing. Make sure that every minute you spend on a mobile device is within one of their apps.
Removing Android makes it nearly worthless for me. Also Apple doesn't have a good track record when it buys companies. The same thing happened with Logic - they immediately dropped Windows. Its rude and anti-competitive.
It surprises you? Pretty big chance that a programmer once offered an ICQ job is on HN these days and would comment in a thread about the Mirabilis purchase.
I spend pretty much all day every day in the shell and haven't had problems like that in a long time. I think maybe because at some point the checkwinsize option got turned on by default, at least on ubuntu.
Oh god, that's horrifying. Get ready to check certificate validity, then report success before actually checking validity!
Microsoft's approach to Web development is not in favor of openness, despite of all of Scott's efforts.
They are still pushing the closed, proprietary Silverlight over HTML5.
Yap, Fairsearch actions tells a lot about how Microsoft has changed, amicus brief in support of API copyrightability tells a lot about how Microsoft has changed
Different people have widely varying experiences working at Microsoft. There are 130k people in the company. That might mean your boss might vary a bit over a company that is bigger than many cities.

WebGL shipped in IE11. I argued with them over getting it in earlier, too, but they had some semi-valid concerns over running web-delivered instructions directly on your GPU.
Lime text fits this description I think.
Also there is integer overflow in the C code and maybe others because the sum doesn't fit in 64 bit integer.
What happens when VS2013 hasnt been used for a while then whilst being offline you fire it up?
Im referring to requiring a login here... whats the expected behaviour?
yep, flat and thin font thing, which now the whole web is doing. Not sure Google and Apple.
If we're talking about LaTeX, Word, Markdown and LibreOffice - well, then LibreOffice is a contender for the worst usability, it's superficially similar to a mature product but it's a case of "the remaining 10% of goodness will take more work than the first 90%".
Tell HN: AngularJS Hackathon in South Bay Today (Saturday) 11.30am kickoff
http://www.meetup.com/AngularJS-Silicon-Valley/events/166270732/
I have :) http://wp.me/pqEwh-2x
Two or three spots left and would love to have some HNers join :)
I've worked in enterprise software and when customers are paying tens of millions of dollars per year for your software, it's difficult to tell them to fuck off... even more so when your customers all know each other.
Enterprise wikis are where documents go to die. Enterprise wikis are 'WORN' - write once, read never. (And edit/refactor even less often than never.)

If I want to know what the spec was six months ago before someone changed it, I'll go check the wiki.

There's little motivation to keep them up-to-date. They are usually sold to companies on the basis of feature lists rather than getting the simple shit right. I can't edit Confluence in text/plain any more.

I'm a Wikipedia admin. We actually know how to use a wiki and there's at least some motivation to make shit presentable because even minor topics are going to have a couple hundred readers each month. There's no such motivation in enterprise wiki-land. I can write a long and detailed document, put it up on the wiki and people still won't read it.
Sure there is. Just don't use it if you don't want to.

Again, use Tex, use LaTex. Google Docs (although I really dislike the cloud). Make .rtf files in WordPerfect if you really want to avoid Word.

I guarantee you, building RTF files is just about the most cross-platform thing you can do. Its supported by damn near everyone, Word, WordPerfect, OpenOffice, Abiword.

I mean, have you even tried not using a Microsoft Product? Its a hell of a lot easier than you're making it out to be.
To make sure that your message does reach him, try to reach out directly.

His contact information is here:

http://tarruda.github.io/
I'm able to reproduce your results with cURL. However, Safari on OS X correctly shows a warning.
Can anybody explain that?
For many of us, the Microsoft hate has been displaced with complete indifference. I don't think there are more than two people in our 250+ mobile engineering company who even think about microsoft. Even the gamers are moving onto better platforms. For my ease of family IT matters, I've upgraded everybody to Ubuntu. Sorry Microsoft, the war is over. You are now irrelevant.
It's all the more absurd when you realize there were plenty of guns in Iraq under Saddam Hussein.

I'll also note that a high number of guns per inhabitants is not always correlated with a large number of firearms crimes (see Finland or Switzerland). On the other hand, you have enough examples of lunatics killing a large number of people with modern firearms that I feel a lot safer in a place with tight gun laws than I would feel elsewhere.
However... its no worse than Word documents rotting away for 10+ years.

Enterprise Wikis, while the project is active, are usually kept up to date decently. When the projects die down a bit and enters "maintenance mode", thats when the real trouble begins.

But the update problem happens exactly the same with Word Documents and classical media.

Also, to ing hell with Confluence. Piece of . But its still easier than emailing Word Documents to everyone and getting lost between the versions.
I use ShareLaTeX for all of my computer science and mathematics homework and I convinced many of my peers to as well. Thank you for the excellent product. When I saw the email in my inbox earlier today I was shocked, but I am glad that you have reached this decision.
Internet Explorer doesn't automatically update because every company disables the automatic updates.

Developing for Internet Explorer 8 is my present-day reality too, but if IT departments were instead mandating Firefox 3.0 or Chrome 1.0 I'm not sure how much better it would be.
> (Yes, it gives me shivers just thinking about how much each of those technologies sucks when you think about how good it all could be.)

I can tacitly agree that using vim running in a terminal to write LaTeX is not the easiest way in the world to write LaTeX.

However, terminals do not suck. Bash sucks a bit, vim sucks in ways this project aims to fix, but terminals are absolutely awesome.

A terminal is a dead-simple API for interacting with the user. Want to display text? Write to fd 1. Want to read some input? Read from fd 0. Want to control the cursor or change the colour? Write a special sequence of characters to fd 1, that's supported by every regular terminal emulator. There is even support for getting mouse events. Yes, it's text-only but that is enough in a lot of cases. And it's very simple. And you get it for free the moment your program starts. There is no opening connections to X, no initialising GUI libraries, no callbacks, no need to design a GUI. It's just there. It's always there.

Try coming up with a GUI system that has an API as simple as that. The only thing I can imagine is something that consumes HTML written to fd 1 and renders it nicely. But note that HTML can and will be malformed, and malformed HTML can and will be parsed differently by different "HTML terminal emulators". Plus, if you want to do that, just write javascript and stick it in a .html file.
Been in the same position with AirBnB but the photo request came after I'd already booked through them for other hosts previously. Very frustrating. I had booking history and a credit card with them already!
The common pomegranate inspires the new generation of smartphone batteries
It doesn't do that. I clicked "not now" and never signed in. That was weeks ago.
It's not about right or wrong. It's about trust. And MS burned that in the nineties. It would take a tremendous effort to rebuild it.
Content Marketers Could Become Their Own Worst Enemy
I use Gnumeric because its one of the most reliable spreadsheet programs on Linux. Its simply a high quality piece of work, and I've had no issues with it.

MS Word however, will forever be incompatible with the notions of LaTeX. It solves a different problem than LaTeX anyway. An export tool would be nice though.
I had not, so thank you for that.
Windows Phone cannot be the lesser of evils because it is very restrictive and cannot be forked. Plus Microsoft is making more money with Android through extortion. So no, they have a long way to go before they can earn my trust again.
Exciting, congrats.
First programming job – a 4 month reflection
I just created a user account for the first time to tell you that he is not actually making a false dichotomy. Had he initially presented those two as the only possible options, you would be correct. But in his response what he was in fact doing was asking which of two choices seemed more realistic, in the context of his initial statement being questioned.

Sorry.
>>> "LateX is slow, inconsistent and needs to be ran multiple times to give a correct result"
> It is not slow, it runs in under a second on most documents I have authored.

Slow? I don't know about that, but compared to what? Even in word it does need some time to reach the "Save as PDF" menu, right?

>> "Inconsistent"
> I'm not sure what tinco meant by this, but it does in fact return the same results for the same file across multiple runs.

Well, there is some truth about this. There is an odd naming scheme if you look at stuff like "enumerate", "itemize" and "description" - beginners get confused by this as they assume it would be called "describe". The same goes for most of the packages. This is somehow historical, but I think it also makes it unnecessary hard to figure out LaTex for beginners, right?

Also the reason why LaTex needs several runs to finally create the full document. Nowadays you would do this differently I guess as there is simply no need to start the program twice if the application would be smart enough to call sub-programs (like biblatex) by itself on the fly. It would still run the same routine several times, but users wouldn't see it and it would be one command for them to build the document. That's another point beginners tend to go crazy about :)

Having said that, I should add that I'm using LaTex (and XeLaTex, etc.) daily and there isn't a single program matching the power and beauty of it - I even design covers for my publications with it. But I'm able to use vim and emacs, right? 90% of the people are bloody beginners and it would be a shame to hide the beauty of a LaTex document from them.

>> "It's syntax is ugly."

Yeah, well...ugly is a bad term to discuss about. I like it and I think the syntax is way cleaner than reStructured text :D
Check out pandoc [1], it will let you write documents in Markdown + LaTeX for equations and then convert it to LaTeX, a PDF, or several other document formats.

Also, even though Markdown tends to be fairly easy to write, there are many edge cases where you can't really be sure what the result is unless you try it.

[1]: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
Of course he was. He was saying that Dave Winer was "whining" about Google et. al., shifting away from RSS.

Bullshit comment that I hate seeing on HN.
Google is not open-sourcing software core to their business. None of it. So your request to open-source Windows and pointing to Google as an example to follow is ridiculous at least.
> Is it really that weird that lawyers predominant in a legislative field? It seems like it would be the least weird tendency - like if street cleaners, dental hygenists or pop-stars were predominant that would be weird.

Nah. Usually I'm actually arguing on the other side of this one. But it seemed like a good example for illustrating how biases can be systemic to ethics-illiterate techies, since a remarkably large number of HNers are allergic to having respect for lawyers.
Setup deployment projects went wayward in VS2012. The 3rd party incumbent company suggested by MS is charging for an underwhelming product as an alternative replacement.
The Science of Storytelling and Memory and Their Impact on CRO
Google uses Linux on the bulk of their machines and actively contributes to the Linux kernel.
Yep that's it! Thanks
You nearly had me, until I saw your username. Well played.
> On the other hand, a number of businesses still pass around Word Documents like the internet hasn't been invented yet. Tell me this, which is easier to collaborate on. A Group-Blog hosted on Wordpress? Or the 20 copies of a Word document that your office is passing around by email?

You won't find in me a staunch defender of collaboration via Word documents (or of Word in general). However, the fact that Wordpress and Word share a relatively small use case doesn't mean Wordpress is a viable Word replacement, otherwise I'd point out that you could just as well setup a private Git repo and collaborate that way.
This is plainly rubbish.

1. Android patents is part of an all our war between all vendors. Everyone is shitting on everyone's lawn. Apple, Google, Samsung are all just as bad. The whole mobile market is lawyer driven.

2. SCO is gone, dead. They went after Microsoft as well for Xenix. They weren't involved other than to cheaply get them to go away.

3. Web standards. There were no web standards. There are barely web standards now and IE10/11 do a pretty good job with supporting them.

4. Nokia yadda yadda. Nokia was dying and knew what was going to happen. Nokia is a big company and handsets were a dead end for them so it made sense to lose them cheaply to Microsoft. The Nokia board made a killing.

All companies are assholes but facts are facts.
Thanks for the info, "spin-ins", is exactly the idea I was trying to describe. And I agree with you, in-house incentives are probably far from being enough.
مباراة ريال مدريد والتش والقنوات الناقلة لها اليوم 22/2/2014
check the latest nightly build or install nightly tester tools
We have a saying in Yorkshire, where there's muck there's brass.
>What about them? What's your question? :)

Well, do they intend to do something like Huawei, i.e. bug the devices? My trust for some countries (US included) has been suffering a bit as of late. Otherwise thanks for the answers. (for some reason paragraphs I see when writing (or editing) a post aren't carrying over to the post itself :(
> No we are not cool. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731 is not cool, still not cool. I won't repeat the horrific things that happened there, read it for yourself, but no, just saying "we are cool" about it goes a little too far.

I think you've missed the point. You can't blame a Japanese child for the sins of his grandfather. The same goes for a German child whose family has a Nazi past or an American whose ancestors slaughtered native American women and children like they were animals.
I'd say it's more like the "Lorem ipsum" [0] of rendering. It's usually just a convenient placeholder to test things out on.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum
So your algorithm would be a MTurk api?
Dale Gardner, Jetpack-Flying Astronaut Who Salvaged Satellites, Dies at 65
"What? They won't do that?"

Why would they? Latex is garbage to 90% of the normal human beings they're trying to sell to. I finally learned it for a comp models class a year or two ago and I have no intentions of ever touching it again. I use Libre Office now but given all the incompatibilities with the rest of the world, I'd use Word if it worked on Linux.
Not as far as I know. The iterm2 - tmux integration work was done by the iterm2 author George Nachman.
I updated with a pandas script as well.

I think the strength of the languages have in part to do with their libraries. You have to pick the right tools for the right task.

The pandas version runs 3x faster than regular python, but 17x slower than C.
> But they still do rather icky things

Yes, I got reminded of that recently when I installed MS Office on my Mac. I just wanted Excel and Word - now I have Microsoft Messenger, Microsoft Remote Desktop, Microsoft Connection Manager(?!), Microsoft Communicator, Microsoft Office Setup Manager, Microsoft Document Connection, and the complementary launch agent "com.microsoft.office.licensing.helper".

Best thing: They plastered my dock with app icons that I just couldn't drag out of the dock to delete them. I had to go the rightclick->submenu->"remove from dock" route for every of the ~10 icons. Now why would they do this? So the typical Mac user won't be able to remove them because the default way to remove them doesn't work?

MS truly lives and breathes bloatware.
I don't know your exact use cases but I am reallyfond of pgfplots which, being based on TikZ, integrates much better than matplotlib. But I also happen to hate matplotlib for sticking with "that" API ...
How exactly is any of what you mentioned going to help me when I'm being sent an OOXML file (because I work in a business where sharing documents among companies is common)? It won't or it will be partially broken. Yes, I have tried. (and that's just office, don't even try to suggest that avoiding using Windows is easy)
17876045
Ehh, I don't see how that was a great point since the problem with Windows bundling a browser which couldn't be uninstalled or easily replaced was that they were a monopoly on the desktop, OSX certainly is not, and of course neither is ChromeOS.
I said core business. Don't know why is it so difficult to read the whole comment, it wasn't long. If Google wanted to, they could migrate to FreeBSD quite quickly and you would not notice too much.

Google's core products are: Plus, Hangouts, Chrome, Search, Docs, Mail, and all these products on Android. They're the same to Google as Windows is to Microsoft. Yes, Android is open source, the rest aren't. And what consumers call Android is not free/libre either. I have no problem with that, and I'm not criticizing Google, just saying, that companies very rarely open source their core business stuff.
Tmux is for your shell sessions. Emacsclient is orthogonal. Or do you do all your shell work in emacs?
Good to hear that vim development takes on some speed again. Please keep compatibility with existing vim plugins.