skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
uaygsfdbzf, you are marked as dead. I believe this is due to a somewhat brusk comment you made earlier, but your other comments deserve to be seen.
>Voice Search

God yes. The level of stupidity of all the set-top boxes I've used is staggering. I sit there and use a tiny keyboard to type in B-R-E-A and get tons of hits for things nowhere close to Breaking Bad until I practically type out the whole title.

I'd love to be able to just say the title and be done with it. Heaven forbid I'm ever allowed to say "Season pass, bob's burgers, new episodes only," and walk away. I do similar things with my Nexus phone and google now. The tech is certainly here.
It seems so because the system hasn't really changed. Only the flag did.

It will take at least a generation to transition out of the current system. If people work hard at that goal. If they don't it will take even longer.

This is what eastern Europeans need to understand.
Yep. Interestingly, the company name was correct, but the email was one of my personal emails...
Awesome. I once replaced an intern's 540 lines of code with 12 lines of my own. Feels great.
#2 has been my biggest issue with Win8 since beta. One of the first things I noticed was how weird it felt constantly switching between the two UIs. I could probably adapt to a metro-only UI (Lord knows I'd throw a fit along the way and it would take forever), but there is ZERO incentive to use it when the classic UI is there.
Actually it's a terribly efficient design. The usability studies that involved eye-tracking showed that when the start menu is open, users gaze is purely focused on the start menu, not other objects on the desktop. If this is the case, then why not use the whole screen as your start menu? Now you can show many more apps, search results, and allow users to spatially group apps and folders to their liking.

The backlash came from the fact that it was a change from 20+ years of ingrained behavior, not that it was an inherently poor design. However, you could argue breaking the previous mental model of users will definitely create issues and therefore is a bad design.
LinkedIn warns of Sell Hack browser plugin that claims to reveal email addresses
Sounds like iWork.
I once had the opposite happen, I wrote a ~12 line hack to get something to run which was replaced by ~10,000 lines of code that added no new functionality but was less 'ugly'.
I put a policy in place at my company that the company would match charitable donations 2:1 up to $5,000 (you put in $5K and we put in another $10K). We match 1:1 after that (though if someone went nuts we'd cap it). Predictably, charitable donations went up.

Seems like other companies could do the same thing and now it is more of a grass roots crowd sourced thing.
It looks like Plex is available at launch, so my local media library should be playable (with transcoding) on day one.
Exactly, except Microsoft has taken it to the logical conclusion we all want supporting all platforms, and sadly Apple hasn't. I have code that runs on both iPhone/iPad and shares most of it with the Mac version yet I have to build the Mac as a separate app and submit to a different store. That sucks.
How did you simulate 100 million interconnected accounts? Did you just randomize it? How many people does the average twitter account follow?
What's the consensus on CryptoCat? So far that seems the best secure candidate on iOS.
So, the solution to the shortcomings of Apple devices is yet more Apple devices? Oh, ok.
Mix Strong Opinions With Big Open Ears
8.1 has the option to boot to desktop, they could enable that by default.

Personally I don't see Metro as a UI failure, my productivity actually increased with metro. I rarely need to use the mouse, which is great.

Also, hitting the windows key to switch screens is not a big deal, my grand parents complain about it a little, but the pains of having to explain finding stuff in the start menu to them and other older relatives has stopped happening.

Additionally with the docking capability of the task bar aka "pin program to task bar" had made the start menu quite redundant since win 7.
Done. I also removed the author name from the title. For the most part, we keep author names out of HN titles. It's a trick I learned from pg for keeping the focus on content rather than personalities. Of course there are always exceptions.
There's a saying that goes something like "Measuring the progress of developing software by lines of code is like measuring the progress of manufacturing an airplane by kilograms of mass."
Why is this priced on par with Apple TV? That's like pricing a Kindle on par with an iPad. I always thought that unlike Apple, Amazon's strategy was to sell really cheap hardware so that you can consume more content.
Cortana vs Siri commercials from Microsoft
The original hackers.
From the poster who suggested the use of the term "thought police":

> "The term 'thought-police' does not necessarily have a government connotation."

If it is not government, then the party under discussion therefore must be a private individual or organization. I don't understand how this is anything like the commonly accepted understanding of "thought police". It is simply one private party critiquing the behavior (in this case, a monetary donation to support certain legislation) of another private party.

It is an inherent double standard.

Also: if Eich, rather than fund legislation which discriminates against gays, funded legislation that discriminated against, for example, black people, would you be confident that black people who worked for Mozilla would be working in a fair environment? Would another private organization, like OKCupid, be justified in questioning such an individual?

If this is to be branded the "thought police" then I worry about freedom of expression and our cultural mores, in general.
Posts like this is why Hacker News needs a downvote button. Or better moderators.
Looks like you can watch the full session now that it is over.
Or just go to the bottom right corner of the screen, wait for the charms bar to pop up, click the Preferences icon then shutdown. Which still doesn't make a lot of sense, but is simpler than what you described.
I mostly agree with your opinion about why Windows 8 was bad.

A full screen, searchable start menu isn't the worst thing - though it does mean I can't be read a webpage while looking for something (which is a slight loss on usability). This is just a special case of your point about only being able to do one (or two) things at a time, when on a desktop, I really want to be able to 4 or 5. It seems like an interface designed for a tablet stapled (badly) to a completely different interface.

Another problem is that they spread settings across 2 or 3 different places, hid things like shut down commands (because, you know, I'm never going to be shutting down my desktop!), and generally broke any consistency/sensibility to how the controls interface with the system.
Oh, please. Stop denouncing all criticism as the "bash MS bandwagon." Removing the start menu was a terrible idea that anyone who cared could have predicted - MS screwed up somewhere. But this is no surprise. Their UI design has been consistently poor for decades. Sure maybe they did user studies but their dog ate them. Maybe their initial designs were all so poor that what they rolled out was the best of the bunch. Maybe they had the most amazing UI design but couldn't get it through the office politics. I don't know everything they failed at in their process but it doesn't matter. Whatever it is they are doing doesn't work.
This is the technical blog post: https://blog.twitter.com/2014/manhattan-our-real-time-multi-...
You can rely on C# being on all platforms by default? Linux and OS X? Really?

Last time I used Windows (several years ago), there were always apps that needed to download and install the latest version of the .NET runtime... - is that still a thing?
They need a funky catchphrase, how about :

"write once, run anywhere"
Sounds like something from Clients From Hell.

http://clientsfromhell.net/
People like the start menu over a tile based system full screen solution. Apple tried to do the same thing with launchpad, i have yet to see anyone use it.
This is the biggest issue with window management on all new/mobile platforms, they can run multiple apps simultaneously but they can not run multiple instances of the same app! Compare the weather in two cities using the weather app, forget it. Compare two PDF documents with the office app, forget it. Compare two bus routes with your local public transport app, forget it. Why are we creating systems that are worse than what we already have.
oh my, it looks like it supports mkv containers.
Then they should probably ask for that money back.
I would like the ability to highlight all instances of a highlighted word, like in Notepad++
C# is both higher-level and lower-level than C.

If you try and add a "JumpList" to a program in C, you end up using Windows-specific extensions / APIs that make it no longer crossplatform. C# + Low-level Win32 APIs is closer to the OS than the generic C-libraries designed on a DEC PDP-11 40 years ago.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/products/feature...

Besides, your typical C-program will not understand SEH Exceptions or DLLs (concepts that are extended as part of the "Win32 Runtime". Its not like Win32 is POSIX compliant ya know...
Yeah, ChromeCast is a great product and a major marketing failure. Hardly anybody (even techies!!) understands that it is about competing with Apple TV (and now Amazon Fire TV) in the streaming market, not sending arbitrary stuff from the browser to your TV. Honestly, they should have launched without any of the confusing and crappy tab-casting functionality at all and probably called it something different than ChromeCast. The thing has (ridiculously cheaply) solved my entire internet-television-entertainment problem but I've literally never once used it for a browser tab.
Thank you, bunnie, Xobs, et al., for listening to the interest that was expressed for what was a personal project and deciding in response to expand its scope (quite significantly), providing this momentum to open-source hardware and systems.

(I don't know bunnie nor Xobs, but this is what I gather happened based upon reading occasionally about the project over the past some months.)

From my perspective, bunnie provided a write-up of what he was up to, purely for the interest of those who cared to read. There was overwhelming response.

If you care about open systems and hackability (in the classic sense), this is really worth looking into and hopefully supporting. (From my admittedly limited perspective.)
WIndows Phone 8.1, along with advanced Siri rival, Cortana, unveiled
NPR is reporting otherwise

> Overby says that even with the individual candidate limit still in place, the ruling "[makes] it possible for a donor to give a party leader a check for more than $1 million, with the money getting parceled out in $2,600 amounts to the candidates."

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/04/02/298326893/sup...

I'm confused!
But forcing a touchscreen UI on everybody that doesn't have one is dumb. I don't see why they are trying to combine the two. Simply detect the form-factor, default to either the Metro or Win7 UI based on that and given people the option to switch.
It's still full-screen and lacks any of the visual context of the desktop. Something like GNOME3's fullscreen Activities screen is better; when you open it up, it has little mini-screenshots of all your open windows, and you're not losing things like the taskbar (because it doesn't have one). You still have the top bar, which ties it into the system.

Opening the Windows 8 Start screen loses all the visual context - your taskbar disappears, your windows disappear, there's nothing to tie it into the desktop, it feels like an entirely different system from the one you were using a second ago. And that's before the fact that how you interact with it is entirely different from how you interact with a desktop app, which is the final wedge.
Where I'm looking and what I'm thinking are different things. I used to use the start menu out of muscle memory like a zombie, it was subconscious. A full screen experience is jarring
Any syntax is less readable if you're unfamiliar with it. If you see enough of them, it reads naturally.
I'd like to see that script.
What is Google, if not the most thorough book?
Building a SaaS Business You Can Sell (Even if you Don't Plan On Selling)
I wonder if this guy's success so far is based on Zed Shaw's tech fame. There should be a trademark on tech personalities.
They are doing a bit of that too. They have found correlations with IQ and other metrics. http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~ungar/papers/forecast_AAAI_MAGG.pd...
What's funny about this is that the YCombinator application actually asks you how many lines of code your app is. I took the question as a chance to rant about the irony of a software accelerator geared on making you an "software expert" asking this question.
How We Scaled The Concierge MVP
Traversing the start screen menus without being able to see a webpage is a major downside for trying to figure out how to deal with their stupid settings layout, which is itself a second major downside to Windows 8.

Had they not spread settings between 2-3 different places, or left the menus being intuitive to make adjustments to the system, it might have been fine. But there's been several times I've had to resort to the internet to disable "helpful" features (like "power saving" by toggling my wifi on the desktop), and constantly toggling between the menu screen and the webbrowser because the menu ran full screen was rather annoying.

Not a good way to convince me you've made a good menu layout change.
Some people just don't understand that it's harder to maintain the code than to write new ones. They are probably not appreciating your refactorizations because they have not got to a point that it is almost impossible or super hard to write new code because the codebases are a large mess (they probably haven't got to this point because of your great refactorizations). But one day when they reach that point, I think they are probably going to miss and appreciate your past work.
If you take the remaining Mozilla leadership's explanations at face value -- there is no problem and Eich is most qualified -- then of course there is no problem, but let's look a little deeper:

1) If the resignations were long planned, where are their successors?

2) The directors who resigned are experienced leaders; they must be aware of the perception when,

* They resign en masse immediately before the appointment of a new CEO

* The majority of the board has resigned before a big decision

* The board is reduced to 2 people, one of whom is co-founder with the new CEO

It smells like a power struggle between the founders and other board members. Whether that is true or not, a big part of the leadership's job is public perception and they are responsible for the image they project. Could it really be an unfortunate coincidence?

3) Eich himself now says that existence of Mozilla is at stake if he is forced out (I'm not exaggerating; he repeats it many times in this interview):
http://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-ceo-gay-marriage-firestorm-...

If that is the case and Mozilla is at risk, then shouldn't Eich resign? It almost seems that he conflates his ambitions with Mozilla, or that he is holding Mozilla hostage (don't criticize me or I'll take down Mozilla with me), or that he thinks he is irreplaceable.

Whatever is going on, it doesn't look good and I wish Mozilla would do more than issue bland explanations.
Could it also be that the editors do not want writers to know their full worth?

If any of their writers gets a large enough following (and knows it), they could easily go rogue and blog under their same name.

It's much tougher to say "No, I will not stay late again tonight. You n'know what? My last 10 stories had over 2 million readers a piece and I've had it with this company. I'm going off on my own." when you have no idea how popular or valuable your writing is.
Then they will fail.

People want one box that does it all. Not a GoogleBox, AppleBox, and an AmazonBox. That's madness.

They want one box, preferrable for less than 100 bucks, that will play Hulu, Netflix, Prime, Vudu, Youtube, GooglePlay, iTunes, Plex, etc.

Right now, the _only_ way to do this with one box is to build your own NUC HTPC for a couple hundred dollars.

Amazon offers Amazon devices because they think you will be a better customer if they control the complete experience. However I can't imagine they would stop supporting Prime Video and Kindle on Android and iPad just to pump up their own device market. That's putting the cart before the horse.
Navigating the WARC file format
It's ironic that the very same types of people who are automating jobs away from the masses in all kinds of fields and industries would feel threatened by the point this article is trying to make. I love what webflow is trying to do and I really hope they accomplish it.

You're not special. You can be automated. I hope you are and I hope I am too. This is the future and I welcome it.
The costs of measuring value too precisely (model this)
I argue that it does: the more you have committed to memory of the basic units of your environment, the expotentially more efficient you will be, and simultaneously the greater problems you will be capable of solving.

Think of programming as speaking in a language. He who has more of the language committed to memory will be orders of magnitude greater at communicating in that language than someone who has to look up every odd word. Furthermore, the concepts that can be created will be much more complex and abstract than the person who doesn't have a handle on the basics: people who are clever and quick-witted in a language they are fluent in will often seem dull in a language they don't know well. Having the basics committed to memory is absolutely critical. Its unfortunately that this level of mastery has been devalued with the rise of the "just google it" culture.
An intern? Don't pat yourself on the back TOO hard... ;-)

I once sped up an intern's code by just deleting a 30-line function, and doing nothing else. Doofus didn't realize our language had a highly optimized built-in sort, and so he wrote his own inefficient sort (insertion) that overrode the existing one. Poor little guy was so proud of having chosen exactly the right sort, and then implementing it based on his recollection of college... I told him to spend the next few hours just reading the documentation of the core API for our language.
They appear to have turned the URL off.

http://twitter.com/bos31337/status/451429219881324544/photo/... has a photo of it.
What? It never did that when I used it.
SnowShoe: Create magic with a touch of plastic
Got an email from Sway wasn't sure where it was from. The email address was my github email address tho...
We've known for a long time that for instance road noise causes health issues.

I don't see road noise being all that different from white noise. Outside of the dump truck at 5AM, it's not so loud as to cause damage

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_health_effects

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadway_noise
http://twitter.com/bos31337/status/451429219881324544/photo/... shows their database username as "geniushire" which looks like a recruiting platform owned by CarbonHire (http://www.geniushire.com/).

Might be two startups from the same team, or more nefariously, maybe it's a dating app that's a front for a recruiter's data collection.
No idea what this is about. If it was a phishing email, it was very cleverly contrived, just had a joke with my wife after getting an email which said someone at work had a crush on me.

Looked like it was collecting email addresses?
Software patents in the UK and Europe are actually quite a complex issue, although Canonical have publicly lobbied against them. I'll just shamelessly repost a previous comment of mine:

Software patents are not entirely avoided in the EU, just to be clear. Quoting a little from an essay I had to write, although “programs for computers” are excluded by Article 52 of the European Patent Convention (1963), inventions that include an inventive step and solve a technical problem by the utilisation of a computer program have been upheld on appeal, for example in the case of Microsoft Corporation (data transfer with expanded clipboard features. T 0469/03 - 3.5.01, (URL now dead : http://www.epo.org/law-practice/case-law-appeals/recent/t030...)
They might tell us that computer programs can't be patented, but their courts say otherwise - including states involved in the upcoming European Patent (for those unaware, currently EU states choose which European Patent Office patents to accept, the European Patent will synchronise all states except Spain and Italy). Actually the situation in Europe is quite similar to America - software isn't part of their patent legislation literature either; but such patents have been upheld repeatedly.
Every Metro app is full-screen, every normal Windows app runs in the desktop. It's remarkably annoying to have both paradigms forced on you.
On a related note, Komodo Edit/IDE has a great feature in their fuzzy matcher.

In ST3 for example, a space is basically treated like the regex /.*/

This means that if you type something you can only the filter results on the RHS of your input do far.

Consider:
Models/player.js
Controllers/player.js
Views/player.js

If I type "play" then I need to hit home to filter further.

In Komodo, space is treated as a logical AND, which you can use to more effectively search the above.

I've not tried Zed yet, but if it can handle this case then that's a plus point from me.
I'm all for flat design should the context call for it. I don't feel like Windows 8 calls for it. I feel like that start menu looks infantile and cluttered.

Yes Microsoft, we get it, you invented metro. Stop trying to push it on us on the desktop.
The question for me is whether you're in it for the earning or the learning?
See this for more: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/11/04/is-it-time-for....
>now I have a full year before online tech media wastes an entire day highlighting products that don't exist

One full year? That's too optimistic. We'll soon be flooded with reviews and articles wasted on programs that don't exist: Apple product rumors, half-baked Google non-products, Microsoft prototypes...
With 8.1 Update 1 booting to desktop will be the default.
What this discussion lacks is a basic understanding of economics. It baffles me every time!

No one on HN would stand it for one second if a group of gardeners suddenly popped up and only with their knowledge and mastery of agriculture and botany decided to teach all the engineers and programmers a thing or two!

But by some miraculous logic, programmers and engineers are now pretending like they can replace wholesale the system that economics is built on and has mastered over hundreds of years of theory and practice.

ps money is not created by commercial banks but by the Fed through their ability to either buy or sell treasuries issued by the government but maybe that's splitting hairs
It seems like the thinking at Microsoft has been that "Windows should be the same on every platform" That's why they had a terrible desktop-like experience in the mobile WinCE, and a terrible mobile-like experience in desktop Windows 8. (There were also rumors a while back that Ballmer wanted to put a Windows interface on the Xbox.)

Mobile and Desktop are very different use cases, and it seems like Microsoft is finally understanding that.
HN does have a downvote ("flag") button.
Great question and great blog post! I am looking forward to reading the Homay King stuff that uses Queer Theory and will probably reread Computing Machinery and Intelligence more thoroughly.
Having Business Insider as an example in support of articles written with analytic is ironic.

BI is full of cheap articles that tries to bait you to read articles with pretty much no content in it.