skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have 15 years of professional experience on the Microsoft platform. I'll tell you why people are pissed.

Especially among MS developers, there are many people who don't read read HN or any other tech industry site. They rely or depend on MS to provide them with career advancing technical advice, but for the last eight years they have been consistently let down. Microsoft's preferred flavor changes every two years; Win Forms, SilverLight, WPF, Html5, now Universal Windows Apps. Add Metro-flavors of some of these.

This isn't working, at least for Business Users. Customers are switching from their Native Windows apps (often Win Forms, rarely WPF) to HTML, iOS and Android. Businesses will not build another Windows platform Native app; although some consumer apps might be written.

Developers are seeing their hard-learned technology go down the drain. That was time they could have learnt something new or spent with family. Developers who are in IT/Software for just the job/money find in relatively difficult to just go and learn the web. Many of them could have done it 10 years back (when they were younger), they can't do that so easily now. The last time MS' advice helped was when they had an iron hold on the industry (aka the Monopoly).

Here's some advice for MS:
Build on HTML, perhaps partner with Mozilla. See if you can get it to work as fluidly as Native. They still have perhaps the most formidable research team out there among Software Companies. Closed, Windows Native apps are over.
One could argue that you'd need many fewer lines of test code if your compiler can prove a lot of stuff is correct at compile time. It's a personal preference thing but I prefer this situation and don't view it as having poor testing
As you verified it yourself, it's not safe at all.
That doesn't make any sense.

Azure and web tech is incredibly important. XAML can be used for desktop apps and store apps...thats been the story for about three years now.

They have said for years that WPF is the way to go if you are writing a desktop app that has rich UI needs.

I really don't understand this kind of thing...was C++ dead even though MFC is only getting minor updates?

Azure is literally the most important thing that the server and tools division is working on. Just because they are developing cloud tools doesn't mean that they wont support desktop apps.

The "mixed message" they have been sending to the enterprise is around licensing. Dev technology changes and this isn't anything new.
Thanks Bill. Nothing but praise for Nostarch!

The other greats for quality of content are Morgan Kaufmann, and Springer.
I feel like I'm missing out from just the regular life that most people on HN seem to have. I work as a baker at a food chain, I make less than $20,000 a year, and I don't have a college degree. Hell, I don't even have a smartphone because I still can't afford one. And yet, here I am trying to stay in the know as I self-study to maybe become a programmer one day. But I certainly feel like I'm looking from the outside in, not really a part of the world that is embodied in this site.
Ask HN: Reddit down from Europe?
Can anyone else confirm this?

I live in Hungary, Europe and can't load the site since yesterday night.

I have two internet connections and none of them works. Also unavailable from mobilenet.

In the other hand I ran some traceroute tests and the connection always drops in the US in the same datacenter

http://i.imgur.com/SM91jYP.png

I know one guy with the same problem from Germany and looking on Twitter I've also found some people but looks like it's not a widespread issue.

Going via proxy also doesn't work for me.
I saw a sheet of salaries for a random subset of employees. Pre-funding engineering hires were universally paid substantially less than post-funding hires. The way we're structured, there isn't an equity upside which would cover the difference. If this was a one-off, you could chalk it up to hiring error, negotiations, Dunning-Kruger with regards to estimate of my own skills, etc. However, even myself excluded, a few of our best engineers are being paid substantially less than people much worse than people hired later on. It was pretty universal.
>However, I've never seen a "WPF is dead" thread before.

Unfortunately, the word "dead" causes people to talk right past each other because it has 2 meanings. More on that later.

First, there has been lots of discussion around "WPF is dead" since that soundbite was made popular by former Microsoft PM Scott Barnes back in September 2010[1]. Predictably, Microsoft denied it with typical business-speak (e.g. "we're still committed to WPF, yada yada") but Scott did call its demise correctly. You see, you have to understand Microsoft's (and most companies') modus operandi to notice how something actually "dies". They don't "kill it" by lighting up a neon sign and issuing A Big Press Release exclaiming, "We just killed WPF and you will thanks us later!" The way companies kill products is to not give it first class attention such as adding new cutting edge enhancements and diverting resources away from it. It's very rare for a company to plainly state that they will abandon a technology. (Adobe publicly stating they will prioritize HTML5 over Flash would be a rare example.)

As for the word "dead" in technology discussions, it has 2 meanings:

#1 "dead" -- as in no longer the preferred, preeminent, first class technology; publishers no longer release new books about it; it is not updated for the latest operating systems or hardware platforms (e.g. iPhones, etc).

#2 "dead" -- as in formal official definitive statement from vendor that it is abandoned, not supported, and nobody anywhere uses it anymore.

Almost always, when people proclaim "X is dead", they're talking about definition #1, and the people who argue against it are talking about definition #2.

If someone says "Latin is dead", they're talking about definition #1. It means that today, Hollywood movies will have actors speaking in English, not Latin. The latest Stephen King novel will be English not Latin. We're not using Latin to type out comments on HN. Latin has been "dead" for several hundred years.

The detractors countering with "Latin is not dead" are using definition #2 and will say they just saw a blog post exclaiming "carpe diem!" and a mathematics proof concluding with Latin phrase "QED". High school and colleges still offer classes to teach Latin.

That's the ongoing sorry state of discussions around the word "dead". The 2 camps just talk past each other and perpetuates the endless cycle of disagreements.

In any case, just like Latin is "dead and also not dead", "WPF is dead and not dead" depending on what the context is.

[1]https://twitter.com/MossyBlog/status/23980976666
I don't find Google results to be noticeably different from other search engines. For many types of questions wolframalpha is a much better option.
There is nothing really startup-specific in the scenario. There are exploitative bosses in all industries and all sizes of company. Someone who's played knifey-spooney before would know this.
WPF is a lot more than just XAML, and you can totally write entire WPF apps without a line of XAML. XAML is mainly useful for tooling and lacks many of the niceties of C# while operating on a DOM that is a bit more complex than HTML. I'm not sure if anyone wants to edit it by hand, which is true of any XML dialect.

I really wish JavaFX Script would have taken off. It provided a nice balance between code and markup.
Man, I'm not trying to be pedantic here...but Scott Guthrie didn't make him do anything. The level of anger expressed there is strange to say the least.

The lesson there is to keep learning and stop trying to find silver bullets. What did this guy do join a WPF monastery and only practice WPF-fu without somehow becoming a better .net dev in the process?

If you haven't picked up enough web skills in the last decade to be dangerous you must have been hiding somewhere. Time is only wasted if you let it be. I had to do some crazy shit in access years ago, but I'm not angry that the skills I learned building forms in Access 2000 aren't useful anymore.
How expensive is it to NOT provide a "basic income"?
This analysis doesn't seem to account for the savings and increased efficiency from all the policy changes basic income would enable.

For example, water and parking spaces could be priced at their actual cost, rather than being subsidized. This would make the water market function properly and allocate it efficiently, and remove a bunch of car-related externalities.

Need public housing? Not if you set a high enough basic income level.

Street crime? Possibly quite reduced.

Massive corn subsidies? Who needs 'em?

And think of all the otherwise great ideas that we don't do because they'd effectively be regressive taxation. For example, congestion pricing. We could revisit all those ideas.

And what about when the children of would-have-been-poor households grow up with an actual ladder up? Think of the things they'll invent, the contributions they'll make to society.
While it seems (based on other comments) that the product mentioned here doesn't do that, if the phone has an alternative link (e.g. GPRS / 3G / 4G) data link to the server that stores the credentials, it would be possible to make this more secure.

For example, suppose Alice wants to connect to Bob's 802.11g wifi hotspot using 802.11i-2004 (WPA2) authentication in PSK mode. Charlie and Bob have the password; neither want to give it to Alice, but Charlie wants to facilitate Alice to access Bob's system. The first step of the normal WPA2-PSK process is to take the password and generate the Pairwise Master Key (PMK) by putting the password through a key derivation function (PBKDF2-SHA1). However, the PMK is essentially just a stretched version of the password - so we will assume Charlie also doesn't want to share that. To continue with the connection, Alice needs to compute the same Pairwise Transient Key (PTK) as Bob. The PTK is a hash function computed from the PMK, Alice's random nonce, Bob's random nonce, Alice's MAC address, and Bob's MAC address. Alice could send the latter four pieces of information to Charlie over the existing link, then Charlie could send the computed PTK back to Alice, allowing Alice to make the 802.11g connection without revealing the PMK or password to Alice.

A similar way of transferring enough information to allow the connection to continue is likely possible for other authentication modes like the various 802.11X options.

Of course, implementing this would probably require, at least, a rooted phone (for example, to replace the stock wpa_supplicant on Android).

Also, the server would need to store the password or PMK itself (either in plaintext or encrypted with a key that is kept available at all times to process incoming requests), so it would have a huge database of credentials that could be compromised.
I'm running noscript, ghostery, addblock, and a few others.

pages might load faster, but not every page loads. Ironically, the linked article is one of them.
They screwed up a lot of things during those years...i don't know if WPF even makes the list of screw up's.

Maybe I look at it differently, but I don't expect things like consistency from API's. They are what they are. You find out what you need to do to solve a problem.

It's not like there is something out there that is magically better. Just varying degrees of inconsistent.
Previous discussion yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9591795
Just out of curiosity, what were the agricultural subsidies like in NZ before they were abolished?

In the US, the direct subsidies are something like $0.25 / bushel for most grains, with price guarantees of around $2 / bushel. Market rates tend to be $4-15 / bushel, depending on the grain. There are, of course, indirect subsidies through the beef and ethanol industries, but that gets more complex.

I'm curious if the NZ subsidies were more distorted than that -- in the US, the subsidies will definitely encourage over-production (which I consider a good thing), but I'm not intrinsically bothered by a $0.25 / bushel subsidy on $4-7 / bushel corn.
As a big fan of the idea of a basic income I would love some numbers on this. Simplicity is sometimes worth the price.
You know people once thought tobacco was good for their health too.
How a few small landing page tweaks created five times the conversions
"It's order of magnitudes easier for me to find a good answer for virtually any question"

And as a result your ability to retain the knowledge fades. You outsource your memory and ability to think at your own peril, my friend.
> The article does not mention it of course but the reason parks
> and apartment landlords are able to rip off the poor is
> because the zoning laws all over america have closed off the
> opportunity to build more mobile home parks

The article does in fact mention this, but it probably should have dwelled on it some more.

> ... tells his students they can easily increase the rent even at
> parks that are already charging market rates, because there is
> so much demand for affordable housing and local authorities
> are very reluctant to grant permission for new parks.
If you are on a *nix machine you can probably use Links2 to get the best of both worlds, fast loading and rendering of text with embedded graphics. I wonder if anyone has tried porting Links or Links2 to Android?
"It is when we are using what we learned that we wish we had studied more" - Chinese proverb
(Replying to myself because edit doesn't work after a certain time.)

To clarify, I wasn't criticizing cryonics -- just observing that it's a field of technology whose offering is close to religion's traditional core: giving hope of life after death.
n Britain, for example, workers can earn £10,600 ($16,500) before income tax is levied on subsequent earnings (starting at 20%).

Shortly to increase to £12,500 in George Osborne's next budget in July.
I know...its like Guthrie slapped him or something. It's weird.
I don't see why, if you can torture someone into saying words, you can't also torture someone into playing a game.

People can be coerced into doing anything they would do normally (unlocking a lock; supplying their fingerprint; phoning their conspirator and saying to go ahead with the plan.) True coercion-resistance, I would think, implies that the mechanism has the ability to differentiate a stimulus supplied under coercion, even under the assumption that Mallet could have fed Alice some anti-anxiety drugs to regularize detectable symptoms of stress in her behaviour. (Coincidentally, "truth serums"—i.e. low-dose dissociative anaesthetics, ketamine or PCP being just as workable as sodium pentathol—also have anxiolytic effects. I can't imagine a state actor wouldn't take advantage of this if the goal is coercion rather than torture-for-the-sake-of-torture.)

As far as I know, there is one single useful mechanism for coercion-resistance: precommitment with counterparties. If Alice and Bob are supposed to have no further contact once the plan is in motion, and Bob knows this, then it is useless to torture Alice into contacting Bob—Bob will take the contact itself as a signal that Alice has been compromised.

You can automate this; if Alice (or her device) must attend regular KEx parties to get a new key (i.e. participate in a protocol with a security ratchet), then capturing her or her device prevents her from doing this, and so expires her key material (kicks her keys out of the keybag, basically.)
Perhaps we shouldn't take this squeamishness to signify anything other than a simple discomfort with novel sensory input, rather than any deep moral insights. I've butchered fish and game since I was in grade school. While I recognize the odors, textures, and sights involved as specific to that process, they don't put me off in any way. (Although perhaps in sufficient volume they would; I've never been in a Tyson chicken plant.) Does that mean that it's moral for me to eat all the meat I want, while more squeamish people must eat less? Frankly I'm not sure either way. Maybe the squeamishness of the most delicate among us indicts meat-eating for all of us?
Antergos
I've never found a reasonable explanation of why these long student-doctor hours are a) necessary or b) desirable. I've always put it down to the same thing as the parent, doctor's union's intentionally restricting supply to benefit their members at a great cost to society. Far more of the job could be done by nurses (or a computer), and given the choice between an experienced nurse and a tired and inexperienced doctor, I think the nurse may well win.
"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." --Stephen Jay Gould
The Gatlin dilemma
This consideration is missing in most of discussions about basic income. What is the opportunity cost of NOT implementing a basic income scheme?

What if we make an effort to assess the opportunity cost in longevity changes, public health indicators, crime rate, education levels and, perhaps, most encompassing and important parameter: human happiness.

I am quite sure that the opportunity cost which humanity and individual nation-states incur for not implementing basic income is absurdly, humongously huge.
Frogs can do this too (and more in fact), so I wouldn't be surprised if it was true. That said it's a bit of a (ok, not such a bit) stretch to extrapolate from being able to freeze a worm which has absolutely minimal nervous tissue to how this finding will apply to the non-science of cryonics, though I can see why those with a stake in the game would want to make such connections as strongly as possible.

Not only are there differences in scale between frogs, worms and humans, there are also differences in complexity and structure.
I was quite explicit

There are just a few differences in the APIs, but that is about it.

Meaning that of course some changes are required.

It is like when one changes SQL queries among RDBMS servers, of course some things change, but one doesn't have to throw out all the SQL knowledge out the window just because of that.
Probably as expensive as giving the homeless free housing... which has repeatedly shown to be cheaper than not
useful, but..

- What about the correct password length ?
Do you mean anyone stealing money from you and then using some percent of them to provide services for you is not a thief? This explanation do not explain why non-government entity doing the same thing is still a thief.
I don't know what to say to that. If you look at what's going on with the new app model...its pretty aggressive what they are doing. Btw...you know that they are going to let .net/winform/wpf and win32 apps be published to the store and use the new API's right? There is a build session about that as well...they are using a type of container technology to wrap them to make them safer. (ish)

I'm just saying...i think they have heard everybody and have tried to bring all of their dev's along on the new app model.

Win32 apps, WPF and .net, objective-c for chrissake...android APIs...what more do you want?
Raise tax on capital gains and stop corporate tax avoidance. You'll have enough to implement a minimum wage.
The site works here (Greece). Trace route fails after ddf-b2-link.telia.net but that's not necessarily a problem.
Can you elaborate further on the various ways Firefox phones home? I'd like to take steps on my machine to disable if possible. Thanks.
Having negative income tax brackets for those that:

1. Work +

2. Declare their income (i.e., file tax returns) +

3. Make below X amount

... is more financially reasonable and has the benefit of keeping the person working/trying/moving.

In this system, as an example, someone making below 30K year would gets the difference between what they make and the 30K mark given to them.

Otherwise, the only other solution is to just have the FED print out the 5-10+ trillion/year this guaranteed minimum income program needs - and distribute it each month.

Most people are already paying a 40-60% effective tax rate (all use, property, local, state, federal taxes - and other related fees - added up) on what they earn, and you really can't tax them more for obvious reasons.
Watch incredible footage of farthest flight by a hoverboard
'Need public housing? Not if you set a high enough basic income level.'

If everyone's income were increased, might not prices for things like housing go up as well, so some people could still be priced out?
The article points out that making basic income available to those contributing to society (working, looking for work or volunteering). That's incredibly short-sighted for several reasons: 1) the idle are best being, well, idle - out of the way while everybody else gets on with making the world a better place. Sure they will reap the benefits but their number is likely to no higher than the currently idle. Indeed the numbers are likely to be fewer since everybody is free to do what they want; 2) means testing whether somebody is eligible is going to create bureaucracy and drive up the costs of the system and finally 3) if I wanted to spend a couple of weeks cleaning up my local beach of garbage I should be free to do so - the benefit to society is obviously large but the effort might just be me or a small group of similar minded folks. Justifying that to some authority so I could collect my payment would kill a lot of creativity because of the paperwork involved. As a result of lot of trivial but useful things, cleaning garbage from playgrounds or collecting household vegetable waste for a local compost heap would go undone.
Here's some of my ideas:
1. CEO pay cap @ 20x(or some other similarly reasonable #) of the median salary of the employees. Median salary is 30k ? So I can only earn 600k ? Screw that, I'm going to get everyone closer to 75k, that'll put me at 1.5 mill, that's way better - and everyone profits.

2. Flat but fluid Nationwide Sales Tax (would mean anyone visiting, or staying illegally has to pay taxes -- way better than an income tax.) -- Adjust this yearly as needed to compensate for basic income and other needs. When there's a surplus lower it the next year, when there's a deficit raise it 1-2 cents per dollar.

3. Higher taxes on luxuries like: 4star+ hotels, First Class plane seats, fancy cars, boats, private jets.

4. All recipients must have a roof over their head, and an address to mail the check to.

5. Congress / Senate pay and benefits capped at the national average as well.

6. Allow individuals, ceo's, etc who have more money to "pay it forward" and actually donate money to the government earmarked for the basic income fund. Some of the .01% may actually want to help out the rest.

7. Tax on automation, and companies that use robots to displace workers. The age of the robot worker is coming, this may slow that down if we can make it less of an incentive.
Or a protection racket
taxes are part of the law.