skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"misguided SD card form-factor"

The SD card is not the only form factor the Imp is available in they also sell a surface mount module.

http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/IMP002-S-US-TR/1413...
Perhaps the most unintended consequence of these innovations will have the most profound impact: keeping our youth from turning themselves into criminals.

Juvenile crime rates are plummeting, and the leading theory is that it's because all the kids are too busy on their electronic devices to commit any crimes.

"Arrests of juveniles for all offenses decreased 15.5 percent in 2013 when compared with the 2012 number"

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/c...
...and closed to one ecosystem. E.g., Google and Facebook took XMPP and killed most of its good properties (federation).

It's that e-mail was already to widespread, or we would be using disjunct mailing systems.
I'm sure you could go on all day but this thread is about microsoft. Apple's products are not welcome here because of their walled garden approach and Google has done far worse than making a faux-pas in the net neutrality debate. Agreed on the buying up innovative start-ups and then killing them off, that's really bad and acqui-hires are hurting all start-ups.
We just landed a spacecraft on a comet for the first time. Here's why it matters
Perhaps obligation is a poor word choice. I meant it more in the sense of the invisible hand and rationality. As a rational actor, Microsoft was maximizing their utility, given whatever their utility function/curve is.
Even if I understand why the rule/criterion exists, notability is a particularly problematic Wikipedia rule. Just about everything is notable if you get local enough (whether in terms of location, field, community, etc.) And the proofs of notability, such as they are, end up being (ironically) rather rooted in things like publication in dead tree periodicals or books even if that makes actual verification difficult.

So you end up with notability being rather arbitrarily decided by admins who see nothing wrong with long articles on obscure pieces of geek fandom while being unconvinced about the notability of people like influential executives at major companies, journalists, and the like.
Something to do with the ratio between instruction cache size and cost of a jump to the pipeline?
Public companies risk being sued by their shareholders if they publicly disclose a breach, and as a consequence, the stock falls.

If only there were laws in place that protected companies from things like this...
The person had registered an account.
I would not hold it against you that you make a living with MS, that said in the present they do plenty of stuff that they really shouldn't. So it's not just the previous generation, the current one is also anything but clean.
If you aren't allowed to criticize a company because "as a public corporation, they have an obligation to maximize value for shareholders," then that means their profitability calculation no longer has to include bad PR, because nothing will be bad PR once someone like you points out that the corporation had to do it--it's all very circular.
I inferred that you probably use standard library collections. Not really an insulting inference, it'd be insulting to assume you didn't.

Personally, I make it a habit to always read (or try to read, in this case) standard library source code that I'm depending on to be correct.
Sam's question is interesting, but I think that as much as the world has changed in 10 years, it's also important to remember how much it hasn't.

I was doing a lot of the stuff I do now 10 years ago. Hell, I had a Rhapsody streaming music account and it hooked up to my TiVo, an XBMP-laden Xbox and a Denon system in 2003. And I was AIMing with friends on my cell phone in 2003 too.

But let's roll back the "I'm so l33t and the world isn't that great today" rhetoric for a second and look at why I think the real innovation argument has happened.

Where were you FIVE years ago. What were you doing then?

And in that case, with the exception of Instagram and Uber (and to a lesser-degree, Slack), almost everything I use, every service I pay for and every entity that is part of my daily life was around 5 years ago and was, more often than not, something that I used then too.

That isn't to say that the future isn't great and that there aren't improvements (and massive ones) to those services. But Dropbox, Facebook, Twitter, Android, iOS, Spotify, Tumblr, WordPress, Drupal, Skype, Evernote, Hulu, Netflix and the other countless services that exist now, existed then. They weren't all as awesome then as they are now, of course, but the stuff was there.

I don't write this to belittle Sam's point, but to mention that the way we judge what we use and how we use it is changing so fast that I think a decade can be too broad to look at to consider "innovation."

So if I'm comparing what we use today and what will exist in 5 years, or will be a "threshold" moment in ten years, we look at what's available and if I'm honest, I'm not sure what has happened in the last few years that is of YouTube level of game changing.

YouTube, Netflix streaming, Uber, Tinder (I suppose, I'm married so I haven't used it but my friends who use it have had their social lives changed by it), Facebook -- these are truly paradigm-altering services (and yes, Facebook wasn't the first or even an early social network but it is paradigm altering in the sense that its' the first service that literally everyone joined, thus making it feel necessary). If I look at something like Snapchat (just to pick on them because I'm not a fan), I don't see anything paradigm shifting about it. That doesn't mean it doesn't become a permanent thing in the future, but it's not like Dropbox or YouTube.

And as an analyst, that's what I want to see more of and what I'm not really seeing over the last few years (with the exception of VR stuff).
Missed opportunity to explain why those are 'fundamentally misguided'.
I'm a fan of C#, although I prefer F#; however I have to agree, I think the choice of < > for generic definitions was a real mistake, it can be so hard to parse. The side effect of this is that first-class functions (Func<>) are chronically underused by C# programmers.

Annoyingly F# brought them along for the ride too, although you rarely have to explicitly write them.
Maybe you were able to stream music from virtually any performer 10 years ago (probably illegally), [...] - but those things were out of reach for the general public.

That's definitely not true, many of my non-tech friends were using Napster and later Bittorrent. Also, ICQ was popular among the general public in the nineties. Many people were already on social networks, e.g. Hyves had millions of users in The Netherlands.

I think the most radical change the last ten years is that mobile devices have advanced extremely hardware-wise and UI-wise over the last 10 years (initially pushed by Apple). The applications themselves are not so revolutionary.
Google Killed the RSS Feed
"Technical innovation" has been redefined to mean a much lower bar of novelty. And business / commercial novelty is not technical novelty, though I realize that may be hard for the ycombinator gang to agree with.
I think it would be tough to attack TLS with this.

A couple important stumbling blocks off the top of my head:

We need to pull off the attack in the context of a single TLS session, because new AES keys are generated for each one. This means we can't choose any inputs to the AES function. If we try to manipulate or forge a message, the MAC will fail and then the jig is up. This might not be a big deal, since the AES ciphertexts will seem random anyway.

There will be a large amount of overhead in each request compared to Bernstein's original experiment. This will likely introduce a large amount of per-request jitter. With enough requests we can iron this out, but again: one session. So there may be an upper limit on the number of samples we can realistically take.

We may have a tough time comparing like to like. Certainly we can request the same static resource each time if we control malicious JavaScript, but there may be confounding factors. This might not be a big deal, since I think this just amounts to more jitter.
Obama Administration Reverses Bush Policy, Says U.S. Torture Ban Applies Abroad
The first thing to realize is that the constraints you are feeling are mere social convention, and you don't have to follow most of them. Just because your peers are smoking up and chilling out doesn't mean that you have to do the same thing. It's your life, and your choices. Other people do play into it: you're still gonna want your friends and family to be happy with you, but you don't have to be the same as everyone else for them to be happy. They would probably be happier seeing you be your best self.

The second thing to realize is that there is no shortage of work to be done in this world, merely a shortage of money and motivation to aim towards that work. If you can't find something to aim towards, you aren't exposing yourself enough yet to the real problems that need solving. College can be good for that - wait for the moments in class when a prof says "and no one knows how this works yet" or "someday someone will figure out how to do this and make a million". Then go deep on that problem. You may not solve it, but you'll develop real skills like you want to.

Thirdly, work and school are not a mutually exclusive choice. Yes, your parents will be unhappy if they think you are failing out, and may put up resistance to the idea of a job interfering with your schooling. But it sounds like you are in need of more challenge, not less, and you should be able to spin an internship, job, or project as a good career move to your parents.

You do only have one youth. You should enjoy it. But good work can leave you with just as many good memories as partying it up. Don't be a slave, but don't be a zombie either. Find someone with a similar mindset and go do something cool.

BTW, I started my first startup when I was your age, while in college. My partner dropped out of school to work on it, but I stayed in while working. It was hard. My profs would get mad at me for getting Cs when they knew I was capable of As. But I learned so much more. The Cs didn't really affect my career. Finishing my degree did, and the learning definitely did.
But what about exams that consist almost entirely of trivia? That strategy, while effective against those who don't attend class and barely read the book, also punishes those who skip ahead. One might remember the grander concepts and ideas, but those bits of trivia will be lost.
It's clear you object to taxation and redistribution, not scientific research. As such, your argument here is inappropriate, since this discussion is about science and technology, not taxation.

I suggestion you take your arguments to an economics and politics blog. In the meantime, unless you are a completely dishonest hypocrite, you will stop using everything that has been funded by the coercive taxation you so incoherently decry. That would include most medicine--including vaccines and anti-biotics--as well as a good deal of dentistry, GPS, cell phones, computers, and indeed all semi-conductor technology, as well as roads, railways, airplanes, radio, sailing ships, and almost everything else.

While almost all technology has a private component in its development, it almost all has a fairly significant component that was funded by coercive taxation. Since you believe for some reason that coercive taxation is a bad thing--despite it being responsible for massive increases in human well-being. It seems a bit odd to be against something that has been, empirically, unarguably, responsible for so much good. It's a bit like being against capitalism, or free trade.
Speaking of platforms, user behavior hasn't changed at all and front ends aren't different other than style and name, but back ends have changed a lot.

I'm almost at 10 yrs on my linode cloud account. My servers at work have gone from hardware to mostly virtual images. I used to store data on spinning rust, now I put my trust in the NAS guys. NoSQL went from 0 to hyperspeed hype back down to a normal-ish technology. JVM went from nothing but java to I deploy scala apps on it and think about deploying clojure apps. GIT has gone from doesn't exist to every piece of code I write is in git. Puppet is the same age and trajectory. About 9 years ago I started my first ruby on rails project. If you told me a decade ago that I'd be paying for an account to store my version control repos I'd say you're kidding, but here I am a github subscriber.
Probably mega million. Hard to maintain > 250PCs on just $1M in revenue.
It depends on your definition of native. Xamarin lets you use all the native Android APIs, but you're using them via bindings in C# or F# instead of Java.
HealthSherpa Launches 2 Minute Obamacare Signup
From the preview it looks like a lot of the refactorings/tools I use ReSharper for in VS2013 is actually going to be built in when 2015 ships. So Resharper may feel overpriced in a hurry, if many of their users didn't pay an arm for the IDE itself (making the plugin relatively cheap) and if what they are offering suddenly isn't as much as it used to be.
i think the potential for F# just got bigger and better with a brighter future!

this pretty much highlights the whole movement at Microsoft +Xamarin:
(and directly answers most of the questions in this thread)
Microsoft intends to make Xamarin's job a lot easier and realign its developer-oriented strategy in the same direction

Scott Hanselman outlines it concisely here (http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MicrosoftKilledMyPappy.aspx):

Delivering on its promise to support cross-platform development, Microsoft is providing the full .NET server stack in open source, including ASP.NET, the .NET compiler, the .NET Core Runtime, Framework and Libraries, enabling developers to build with .NET across Windows, Mac or Linux. Through this implementation, Microsoft will work closely with the open source community, taking contributions for future improvements to .NET and will work through the .NET Foundation.

“A strong, open source, cross-platform CLR opens significant new options for building large server-based systems,” said Brian McCallister, chief technology officer, Groupon. “This significantly expands the choices developers have when finding the right tool to solve their problem. I’m very excited to have access to the quality virtual machine and tooling of the CLR without having to completely rework our production infrastructure in order to run it!”
____

this will be of great interest to those already using the CLR as it gives more incentive to those developers / dev shops
Android 5.0 Lollipop, thoroughly reviewed
We are live in all 37 federal (hc.gov) states. Same plans, prices and subsidies, substantially faster / easier shopping and signup. We are connecting directly to the federal data hub to get people enrolled in subsidized plans.

You can test enrollments HealthSherpa.com. Use any hc.gov state (ex: 33604 in FL). Enrollments submitted now are finalized 11/15. On and after 11/15 on they are immediate.
Am I the only person who's mind really wanted to read this as "Chinese hack U.S. Weather Control Systems"
There's the problem with a generic encyclopaedia extended to include news and current affairs to leverage the dynamics of the web: policies that are good for some usages are bad for others.

I don't think Wikipedia should base its policies to be suitable for pop culture and sports fact checking if this conflicts in the slightest with good coverage on science, research, and well established philosophy and culture.

I can imagine how hard was it to get Wikipedia where it is today, therefore I will trust their judgement moving forwards.

It's not the best at everything but that's okay.
Xamarin.Forms is not supported on Mac.
Yep, this is Amazon reaching out to those who won't/can't take the 'immutable infrastructure' approach.

It's fair to say if you're already doing things in the way you describe, this service isn't for you.
Depending on the number and variety of sites that you visit, enabling javascript universally is hazardous. You can easily observe this to be true by clicking 30-50 links randomly as fast as you can in your browser. You will find that inevitably your system will become infected with malware in the process of doing this, regardless of protection.

Generally for accessibility purposes websites should be designed so that basic text and links appear and are functional with JS disabled, and even CSS disabled. If the website is some sort of dynamic application with moving widgets than I can understand that JS might be needed, but not for a basic list of project Microsoft has put on Github.

Even if JS is used for templates, it is preferable to use semantic HTML that can be enhanced rather than using a template for the entire page and show "{tags}" all over the page when JS is disabled.

TLDR: A page with a basic list of projects shouldn't need JS. Web applications: yes, basic lists: no.
Of course if you were an evil genius bent on destroying the US by sending a massive hurricane into the eastern seaboard, your first step would be to disable the ability to see it coming ... :-)
Agreed. Most obvious modern stuff, especially things that are well-known in popular or tech/geek culture. But I'm constantly surprised how many topics, including technical ones, are little more than stubs or are actively bad. Mind you, there's a lot of material that doesn't follow these generalizations but it's very inconsistent.
I wonder why nobody has forked Wikipedia yet. There's no restriction to doing so, is there? To avoid having super high server costs, it could even be a "soft-fork", where only the pages which are edited are stored locally, all other content is fetched from the original.

If these restrictions are really affecting the quality of the articles in Wikipedia, we'll see the quality of the articles on the fork grow, at which point they can be merged back by Wikipedia.
Xamarin.Mac is all about native Cocoa app development in C#.
Hell is other Wikipedia editors. Truly.
By that reason we should all go into the drugs trade. I don't buy that for a second. Rational actors are not normally driven to illegal behavior unless someone makes a decision to that effect saying 'damn the consequences, let's commit this crime'. That's a very dangerous line to cross. It came within a whisker of getting Microsoft to be broken up and I can't believe that they would have taken that risk if they knew that was a possible consequence. And I firmly believe they should have been broken up, that would have sent a strong signal that anti-competitive behavior is not acceptable. Instead, now we have a bigger mess.
I had to create an account just to thank you for this response. I always recommend anyone wondering about whether or not space exploration is worth it to view the following amazing video compilations.

"We Stopped Dreaming - Episode 1": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbIZU8cQWXc

"We Stopped Dreaming - Episode 2":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFO2usVjfQc
It's a robot prodding his finger in the ground :D
Crowd-funded projects fail all the time. What do you do when your local police or fire department fail to meet their crowd-funding goals? How do you handle those that donate very little or nothing at all but consume large amounts, if not most, of the services/resources? How would an individual possibly have the time to adequately research and figure out what to crowd-fund? How would you stop outside interest groups from manipulating what gets crowd-funded? The list goes on.
One difference is that it probably doesn't include adware/malware.
Isn't that kind of thing covered with docker on beanstalk essentially?
In theory, yes, and these days reputation plays an extremely important role because of the massive amounts of network effects social media and the like provide. I was never a fan of Microsoft because they historically shipped substandard products. (I remember the days of windows 3.1 on my p2)

My post was merely trying to indicate that what Microsoft did in a monopoly position is not in any way unique or special. Every monopoly will behave in this manner, because corporations are rational actors.
http://i.imgur.com/sovN9Gp.jpg

Is it just me, or is this apparently the reaction every time a US government or military system gets hacked by China?

"Yep, we got hacked again. But we're just going to do our best to minimize the damage and pretend it never happened. No meaningful action will be taken against the perpetrators."
Twiddler 3 chording keyboard now available
From the linked article:

> Q: How does Visual Studio Community 2013 compare to other Visual Studio editions?

> A: Visual Studio Community 2013 includes all the great functionality of Visual Studio Professional 2013, designed and optimized for individual developers, students, open source contributors, and small teams.
Oh btw C# does have immutable collections now. Adoption isn't too high yet AFAIK, but they're pretty awesome..

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn385366(v=vs.110).a...
Just slightly more expensive than the same instance with MySQL on RDS ($0.24)
I would add "yield" to your lits - a small feature, but it allows for very elegant code and easy implementation of deferred evaluation / execution.
Napster: 1999
Rhapsody: 2001

Very much accessible to the average user
The key difference here now is that billions of people are doing these things and there are emergent behaviors from the ubiquity that are powerful.
A retrospective on some of the recent college hackathons
FBI defends “ruse” of undercover agents posing as hotel cable guys
You can program Spark using JavaScript too: https://github.com/spark/sparkjs
A lot of the so-called innovation of the past 10 years seems to purely piggyback on Moore's Law, cheaper storage and cheaper bandwidth, i.e. incremental, sometimes useful improvements via the web, but no nanotech robots that detect cancer, Mars base, nuclear fusion, etc.

Innovation seems to have stalled in the world of atoms, cars (and transport generally), houses, healthcare etc all not noticeably improving, except incrementally (deliberately ignoring Tesla, which will hopefully have a widespread impact on the entire car industry in the coming years).

Some areas have gotten worse overall, such as finance, which seems to be disconnected from creating value for the wider economy and seems to be getting more unstable and risky as time progresses.

EDIT: I don't mean to sound overly negative, some of the YC RFSs sound quite ambitious, I hope they succeed in attracting more of those types of companies funded and off the ground https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/
Document-level locking and compression come to MongoDB
I was just thinking of "embrace, extend, extinguish" when reading through the class-action about Apple routing texts over its own network, so people switching away from Apple would think that Android's texts were broken.
Windows 10 Technical Preview Build ‘9879’ Touches Down Today
Project Beyond, a 360-degree 3D camera that creates virtual reality worlds