skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've also been pretty unforgiving about things that Microsoft did in the past to crush competing web browsers, competing standards like OpenGL or ODF, Linux or open-source in general. And sorry, but I do not agree with that article by Hanselman.

Thing is, I treat companies like I treat people. Legally speaking, isn't that what they want, in the US anyway? So if you violate my trust, it's goodbye until I see serious amends being made.

However I must say that with this move I'm finally ready to forgive Microsoft. I've always seen .NET as a platform created for achieving lock-in with Windows, the ECMA standard (while better than Java's JCP, which is a farce) I've seen as an attempt to paint a turd and Mono, while a wonderful effort, I've never seen as good enough. Open-sourcing .NET is a wonderful move, because now we've got a credible alternative to the JVM and this move couldn't come with better timing, given the dickish moves by Sun/Oracle against Apache Harmony and Android's Dalvik / ART.

And don't get me wrong, compared to other people I do not have double standards in this regard. I've been a Google fanboy for years, but my eyes are wide open now and I'm making moves to escape their lock-in ;-)
Start with vxWorks.
Are you talking about the .NET misfeature that gave managed programs running from network shares less permissions than native programs running from the same network share?
Because that was removed a long time ago (.NET 3.5 SP1?).
I get that part but what tangible benefits will I/humanity see from it? Or is it more of a case of gaining more knowledge about how the Universe works in the hope that that knowledge combined with other knowledge may lead to something eventually?
There is not much to find, but apparently, they do software updates over the "air": http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/03/28/software-upgrade-at-...
My initial impression is that this is a very significant advance; enabling full-duplex on a single frequency band effectively doubles the communication bandwidth. But, I'm not sure if this translates to the real world.

Can any RF engineers comment on this?
I am sure that companies like Planetary Recources (and anyone who wants to make refueling in space possible) will greatly benefit from the discoveries made during this mission.
U.S. states' pot legalization not in line with international law: U.N. agency
Touchdown Rosetta’s Philae makes first ever landing on a comet
Learning languages is a workout for brains, both young and old
> Try listing Kahn Academy or free open online classes/certificates on a resume.

I list Coursera on my resume. I understand it bears about the same weight as 'hobby' section, but I think it still tells my potential employer more about me than 'hiking' or 'skiing'.
ReactOS seems mostly meant for supporting old Windows applications (a very noble effort). So... nothing?
We shall see. There is lots going on, both from Microsoft and from the rest of the OS community. It's definitely going to be interesting.
Well, there was a certain ogle in the repos before,
but it seems it's not being developed any more?

Edit: It is still being developed.
Nokia was also definitely pre-Nadella. The Xamarin theory supports Nadella's whole "cloud and mobile services" schtick.
Like other embedded systems, spacecraft computers use real-time operating systems (RTOS) and languages:

* The Rosetta probe ultimately runs SCL (Spacecraft Command Language) [1], a COTS spacecraft programming language developed for sale to the military [2]; SCL is based on the syntax of Ada 83, which has a long legacy in spaceflight and other real-time applications (e.g. Boeing 777) [3]. However, what are known as Flight Control Procedures (uploaded commands), are written using another language and transformed and compiled into SCL in a two-step process that involves XSLT [1]. On-board Control Procedures, which are procedures the probe decides on its own to run, and handle tasks such as receiving FCPs and sending back telemetry, are written in SCL [1].

* The Mars rover Curiosity is programmed in C and uses the VxWorks RTOS [4], which is very much like many commercial embedded systems. It has about 2.5 million lines of code, much of it autogenerated. Curiosity's predecessors, Spirit and Opportunity, used the same software stack, as did their predecessor, Sojourner [8].

* The Voyager probe, which has now left the solar system and entered interstellar space, uses "...interrupt driven computer[s], similar to processors used in general purpose computers with a few special instructions for increased efficiency. The programming is a form of assembly language." [5]

* The Space Shuttle was programmed in a custom language called HAL/S (High-order Assembly Language/Shuttle) [6], as was the Jupiter probe Galileo [7]. The language is descended from PL/I and its compiler is written in a subset of PL/I called XPL.

[1]: http://www.rheagroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/SpaceOps...

[2]: https://www.sra.com/scl/

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_(programming_language)

[4]: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/159638

[5]: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/faq.html

[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL/S

[7]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(spacecraft)

[8]: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/159687
Real world benefit? In 20 years, we move the production capacity of China to space, and everyone, anywhere on the Earth, has the ability to order a product, remotely assembled on our comet moon, for direct delivery.

sigh A man can dream.
Your M.O. is to shit on anything Microsoft.

Microsoft, Google, Apple and every other F500 company has engaged in "institutionalized criminal behavior sanctioned at the highest level" yet I don't recall seeing you in other threads.
Personally, I'd prefer that they concentrate on stuff that's properly within the scope of the project. This is way, way outside what the reasonable scope of the project ought to be.
The lander's mission is:

> elemental, isotopic, molecular and mineralogical composition of the cometary material, the characterization of physical properties of the surface and subsurface material, the large-scale structure and the magnetic and plasma environment of the nucleus

Amongst other things, they'll be looking for complex organic molecules.
Holy Shit We Landed a Spacecraft on a Comet
Small comfort. When a project has the incredibly poor judgment (and, frankly, hubris) to write a caching DNS resolver without even the most basic cache hardening protections, and then declare it "a pretty complete caching DNS and LLMNR stub resolver"[1] instead of just leaving it to people who know what they're doing, it calls into question the rest of the project. This is a major reason why so many of us are wary of systemd.

[1] http://lwn.net/Articles/609740/
Wouldn't you think the shipping company is circumventing your countermeasures, despite not having copied your cargo?
I think Xamarian made a very good move in getting into cross platform toolkits, rather than just relying on support contracts for Mono. At this point I think they're in a position where Microsoft Open Sourcing the .Net runtime isn't going to hurt them too badly.
Eh, I've always considered space missions global. As a European, I consider this "everyone's" mission.
But it's Nadela who allowed that vision to move forward.
This article is a classic, coming up on 20 years old, specifically about how differently the shuttle software team was from the dotcoms. http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff

No idea how relevant it is today, or any differences between the shuttle team and whoever's building/built the software for this lander, but it's definitely worth a read.
Ukraine crisis: Russian troops crossed border, Nato says
Honest question from an outsider: it looks like Epic and Crytek have finally gotten around to moving in to the "low-end" of the game engine market. What's still unique about unity?
It's a different article of course. But I gave you an upvote anyway. Way too many "MS Open Sources .NET . . .. " links right now.

And the hanselman blog won't load for me.
Agreed. Just look at what Ballmer did with Office for iPad.
> Also, as the comet nears the sun and parts of the comet start flying off, is there a threat of Philae getting swept along with it?

To add to what everyone else mentioned: Philae's science mission is slated to last for 2.5 days - the batteries have ~65 hours of charge, that's it. The hope is that they may be able to charge it and keep gathering data afterwards.

So it's not going to last nearly that long.
Apart from discovering the unknown and adding to the body of knowledge facts about an object that we currently know nothing about, "comets are thought to have delivered a vast quantity of water to Earth, and they may have also seeded Earth with organic molecules" [1] which means that they might hold important clues to how life started here on Earth. Realistically this could have potential future benefits to things we can't even phantom about today - perhaps such discoveries about the origins of life could lead to fundamental innovations in human health.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(spacecraft)#Search_for...
The actual real world benefits of Space Flight are strange. For example the Apollo program didn't bring back DeathCrystals from the moon, that allowed us to crush the Soviets in a glorious patriot war (obviously sarcasm).

Instead it gave us seemly random things, that we were looking for, but are beneficial nonetheless and some which may not come out right away.

The Apollo Mission gave us

ASICs, Cordless Tools, CAT scan, Ear Thermometer, Smoke Detector, Shoe insoles, carbon based water filters, satellite television (boardcasted, not passive reflected), Scratch resistant lenses.

These things aren't why we went to the moon. Inventing them kinda just happened to see the program though. Space travel challenges the status quo of technology. Its really REALLY hard. So when ever we (humans) do it, we face new problems, and our solutions sometimes have effects for those on earth.
A Full Night's Sleep Can Really Pay Off–in Salary and Investments
Congratulations Europe. But why don't we hear people saying that the EU should focus on their poverty first and would be better off putting this money into getting the Greece, Spain, and Italy economies in order?
Lessons From My First Hackathon
While France signs with Elsevier, many scientists around the world have been protesting against Elsevier in a movement called "The Cost of Knowledge".

The Open Journal (http://theoj.org) is an example of doing open science well and efficiently. All the papers are hosted in arXiv, which means they are publicly accessible. And the review is performed using their own open source platform.
This demonstrates the importance of documentation in the framework wars. What could Microsoft possibly gain from open-sourcing .NET? They already have a few thousand great developers working on their jeweled prize, designed to lure developers to the brand as resolutely, and immutably, as possible.

.NET going open source is Microsoft admitting that, despite its best efforts, developers still want to know whats going on behind the curtain, whether the mirror really works, and just what kind of smoke is being blown up their ass in the effort to capture their minds and bind them to the brand.
Thanks. I would definitely consider the second point a real world benefit but if we are going to spend over $1bn to learn about the solar system's history I take it we are hoping to discover something that actually has benefits to humanity (e.g. when the money could have had more immediate impacts treating disease or helping the poor etc.). Don't get me wrong I'm all for these kinds of missions I just thought that to get that kind of funding the scientists would have had to put forward a list of possible things they might learn which could benefit humanity in the short term to help justify the cost. I'm basically looking for the idiots list of why we should spend so much money on this.

Edit: Several downvotes even though I tried to make it clear I'm FOR this kind of spending. My problem is basically how do you explain to someone on the street why spending $1bn on a mission to a comet is worth it when we don't know what benefits it will bring.
As far as I understood, they are really slimming down the core .NET CLR (runtime). Most of current BCL .NET libraries will be exposed as separate nuget packages, which makes it really convenient.
That's 510 million kilometers for the rest of the world.
Is there a better way?

Maybe they should standardise on a particular UI for specific applications - maybe with desktop icons in specific locations for launching those apps. Then they remove the OS from user view entirely - any OS or version of an OS that will present the particular applications with the required views would then be appropriate.

That way when determining if they can upgrade to Windows 10 they just need to ask "will our current apps run, with largely coterminous views and function? Can the OS login direct to our launch icon layout?".

Most users use applications rather than OS, especially in a work setting I'd warrant.
I think some people just have moved on. Heck, a lot of people here were not in tech when Microsoft was doing bad stuff.

Stacker: 20 years ago.
IE Antitrust: 10 years ago.
SCO: 10 years ago.
Check out this gif of the orbital maneuvers required for Rosetta to reach its destination:

https://i.imgur.com/TUkKuhf.gif

This probably won't be very impressive in a few hundred years, but for now it's a remarkable engineering achievement.
Sure, that's what built on, and that's why the equivalence was incorrect. You'd might as well say that systemd = Linux.
The Tricky Business of Asking for Help
I was going to say, you might be exposed to more things in higher CS classes, but it sounds like you've already taken them up front. That's impressive. If I might be so presumptive as to give advice, can I suggest talking to your advisor about exactly what you said. I'm sure there is a way to get more out of your college experience for the remaining time.
Ask HN: Anyone from Xamarin want to comment on the MS Announcements today?
Just wondering what Xamarin's plans are in light of Microsofts major .Net announcements today. Anyone from Xamarin care to comment on all this?
Good to us, and good to Microsoft.

Great news, but this platform should be born as Open Source since the beginning. Anyway, before late than never.
This different dataset puts the Russian nationals resident in London as in 2011 at 15,000 +/- 4000
(no indication of how dual nationals are treated)

http://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/population-nationality/res...

The Russian population probably is included in "Other Europe" but probably isn't as big as people think based on the spending power of a Russian minority in Belgravia...
Good strategy Microsoft!
You are obviously driven. But you are also just 20, you don't have to be working as hard as you can (or don't have to be doing so in a job). You do just have one youth, as you said, and the truth is once you get a job and have demands, you won't have the freedom that college allows, and you might miss it. You can either realize that you will be spending the rest of your adult life after college working and take it easy on yourself for the next couple of years, or you can use that extra time you have to work really hard on learning things you won't be able to devote yourself to after college. Either is understandable and acceptable.

As much as college sucks sometimes, it will be good to have that piece of paper to fall back on, and to have finished something, and you can have an opportunity to use your time now if you look at it this way.

Best of luck.
The culture changes because new people coming in have different ideas and upbringing.

Market forces and realities impact Microsoft's decisions far more than culture does. The reality of the Microsoft stack right now is that very few people are choosing it as a greenfield option, and those already invested in it are looking at alternatives.

Just a few weeks ago I wrote about a new project I was initiating, choosing Java as the platform. Understand that I've been a Microsoft stack developer for many years, but a variety of inertia, platform support, ease of getting setup with the development tools, and trust in the platform reasons made Java the better choice.

But this announcement changes the equation to some degree, as have Microsoft's various other opening up directives. Microsoft no longer sets the technology agenda, so choices like this are simply a reaction to that new reality. That isn't being cynical, and the changes are very welcome, but Microsoft didn't just punt the old timers and now they see the light.
You know but this is actually very good. This in the end will make it better for the developers. And I loved that the licensing is MIT instead of Mono's LGPL for the runtime.

This will allow Jetbrains to create a good Intelli(j|n) IDE for C#. :D
A Review of Dash, the API documentation browser and code snippet manager
> They are just a technology company and are trying to sell the product.

If you reword things enough, nothing makes sense. For example:

"I don't see why Stalin receives such hatred. He was just a politician, and tried to stay in power so he could keep following his vision."
Sorry to hear you are not having a good time.

In any case, college is what you make of it; it might sound obnoxious but if it's boring, that's on you. Challenge yourself by taking more challenging classes, by going deeper than the professor requires in your current classes; take graduate level classes, arrange research or independent study with a professor. Learn new fields to diversify yourself, or to learn about the world -- get a double major in Chinese, Indian history, literature, experimental psychology. Access to the amount of expertise around you, with the availability to talk to you, will never happen again. They won't have time for you, and worse you won't have time for them.

> I'm only in my third semester ... I've taken most all of my CS classes and now I'll just be taking random classes completely unrelated to my major to get a piece of paper.

You are in your third semester and have almost completed your major? In computer science? Wow. There is so much more you could learn!
This is your fault. Thank you.
"All user passwords are salted, and encrypted with the powerful bcrypt algorithm, which creates an irreversible hash which cannot be cracked."

I appreciate that they're trying to communicate the strength of bcrypt, but this is more than a bit hyperbolic.
I linked to the VC++ blog post as there wasn't a post on the official Visual Studio blog yet. So if C++ isn't your thing or you're interested in other changes to VS, there is one now: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2014/11/12/visu...
There are several benefits gained, both scientifically and politically.

Scientific:

* Comets may show us early composition of our solar system since they change less than planets. This may help answer questions related to where water came or where DNA/RNA molecules came from.

* Lessons learned here will directly contribute to the success of future missions on both mars and the moon

* Solar cell technology was directly advanced, helping push forward solar energy

Political & Social:

* Brings governments closer together These types of missions require a great amount of cooperation and help stabilize and improve the international political landscape. Around 20 countries cooperated in this mission.

* Inspire more people to enter science, math and engineering

* Increase collaboration of universities and industry, helping close the gap between theoretical and applied science.

[edited to fix formatting]
Auto-Brewery Syndrome: Apparently, you can make beer in your gut
I'm curious then, I recently spent quite a while trying to emulate the native feel for an android app, where do you think it falls short?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.readyforze...
Good move, but (too) late.

The move is designed to attract iOS and Android Devs to .NET.

But let's see:

As an iOS developer, I've invested years in learning Objective-C and Cocoa, UIKit, etc. Now I'm starting with Swift.
I'm sure a lot of iOS devs feel this way. Besides, if I can't use it from OSX, then I'm out.

Why should I forget everything and learn C#/.NET ? If I want a write-once-run-everywhere thing, then I could go for one of the miriad Javascript or HTML5 cross-platform frameworks or C++ with Qt, JUCE or the likes.

Same thought pattern applies for Android/Java - why would a seasoned Android/Java developer want to learn a whole new framework and programming language ?

Is C#/.NET so much better than Java/Android or ObjC/Swift that it mandates switching to it ?
This is an incredible day for science and Humanity. ESA, CNSA, ISRO, SpaceX etc have done a great job so far to carry forward the legacy of NASA and ROSCOSMOS to new levels.

Still can't believe ESA planned and landed a robot on a comet. Bravo!
Are you saying core .NET libraries are worthless?

Because in that case what's the point? Why not just use Java.
We were talking about a theoretical bad client. No client I have ever used to talk to port 587 would behave that way. They would all encrypt or fail. Regardless of if "AUTH PLAIN" was inserted prior to encryption and/or STARTTLS removed.
While I'm not sure what this exact probe is built upon, some popular choices for mission critical applications I've seen in the past are:

* VxWorks for real time operating system (proprietary)

* Ada/C++ for programming language.
Business Intelligence or B2B marketplace?
What do you think about a company which is trying to index, quote, and rate all business assets (tangible and intangible) in order to allow business owners and investors to value them, buy or sell them, or else share them?
Do you consider this is a real business intelligence tool or just a B2B marketplace?
Show HN: Free iOS AppStore Installation/Referral Tracking with Google Analytics
Here's a handful of videos and presentations: http://flightsoftware.jhuapl.edu/files/_site/workshops/2013/

The last answer here has a lot of links for the Curiosity Rover: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/159637/what-i...
I'd honestly suggest trying to learn programming on your own. You're going to fail, your startup won't amount to shit, your friends will change and leave you, and things will change following school. Expect this, and don't be disappointed.

So, at the least, you can maybe learn some programming out of it.

Disclaimer: Some friends and I tried to make a game company in high-school to make an MMO (remember those?). Said company finally made some J2ME games in college, failed. Learned a whole lot about technology, networking, and programming in the process--which has what's actually been useful.
the harpoons failed to anchor to the surface, according to mission control, which was just announced on the live coverage. It appears they will try to reshoot the harpoons at some point if possible.
Doesn't Xamarin have a load of other stuff around testing and the like?

It could just mean a move away from Xamarin as a core development tool into producing things which support development on these platforms.
Very interesting. I didn't think C would be used that much (except for the core of the os of course). I somehow thought of either a specialized language with strong guarantees (such as ADA), or a high level language for IA-like feature.

Which makes me wonder, since this is HN after all, if Rust wouldn't be an ideal candidate for coding this kind of layer in the future. Maybe a compiler targeting VxWorks is in progress somewhere.. ? :))
موعد مباراة مصر والسنغال السبت 15/11/2014 والقنوات الناقلة للماتش
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