skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. Yes, they did have a choice. They had no realistic chance of catching either Apple or Google as an OS provider -- both Apple and Google had more mature products, better consumer brands and the platform lock-in from their app stores. If you're a billion dollar company and you can't be #1 or #2, you shouldn't bother entering the market. What they do have is the world's largest business computing platform, and they could have leveraged it into a BYOD powerhouse by making it easier to integrate Apple and Google products into the Microsoft platform. Selling to businesses is Microsoft's strength, and if they weren't so focused on selling to consumers, they could have done much better.

2. Apple's product strategy is vastly different from Microsoft's. Apple makes most of its profits from he sale of consumer electronics. Microsoft makes all of its profits from the sale of software licenses to large corporations (they make revenue elsewhere, but I don't think any of their consumer products are actually profitable). It's just not a good market for Microsoft because it doesn't fit with how they operate as a company.

3. Microsoft vastly overvalued its online properties and was playing in a space it had no business being in (media and advertising). Microsoft's core business revolves around selling software licenses to large businesses through reseller channels. While the advertising world has some similarities structurally, Microsoft just didn't have the relationships or corporate culture to make it work.
Protect American innovation
Thanks for the report. We're using a new tool to roll the release binaries, and you have discovered a bug. On it.
AWS Budgets and Forecasts (new services)
The code you don't commit is guaranteed to be bug-free, something you can't say about the code you do commit.
Sass, wat? Yet another introduction to Sass
I asked for that.
If ISIS were at least semi competent I could possibly be worried.
You state this in response to a comment linking to a good description of why, precisely, this is broken thinking. Did you even read it?

Also, you've got Occam's razor around backwards, always a good way to cut yourself in public (Occam's razor resists adding more complexity to the solution without evidence)
5 Tips to Improve Employee Engagement
I think all the criticism from that article applies to Python as well.
killing nginx is good for testing load balancer application crashed, but insufficient for testing load balancer host mysteriously vanished; for that I would set your firewall to drop incoming SYNs on the load balanced port. You'll have a much bigger client side delay when there's no response than when there's a quick port closed response.
According to the release notes [1], "For the amd64 architecture only, the compiler has a new option, -dynlink, that assists dynamic linking by supporting references to Go symbols defined in external shared libraries."...so I assume if you want all of your Go signatures visible in your shared Go libraries, you can do it on x64. I have not tested this myself.

1 - https://tip.golang.org/doc/go1.5#compiler
Seems to me that someone could write a bot to chaperone newbs until they got to a certain level of community standards.
> It's been a while since I wrote much Ruby, but I can vividly recall wanting to find the definition of a method and being frustrated at how difficult it often was.

Given Ruby's open classes and per-object metaclasses (which are still open), I'm pretty sure a general solution to "find the definition of the method being called at this point in the code" is impossible (and not just, "there is a single correct answer, no general solution is available" impossible, but "there is no guarantee that there is a single correct answer, and even for the subset of cases where there is, no general solution is available" possible.)
What are you trying to say? That somehow American born engineers are better than those from the rest of the world?

The attitude of a small subset of people in this country is a constant reminder of why I don't feel at home here.
These comments seem really fake.
The author touches on something important when comparing Ruby to Unix, and why we love them more than more structured systems.

Rigorous language is the enemy of expressive language.

That's not to say you can't be expressive within a rigorous system - it's just more difficult. And you can only express the things that the rigorous language is capable of expressing. So less rigorous, less formal environments, like Ruby and Unix, allow for a great deal of fast and intuitive expressiveness.
Instead of going for secure credit card with cash deposit in the initial stage, you can get credit card without deposit in some of the banks like DCU and other credit unions. This will help to build your credit score.
No, that would be s/o/u/g
| So you're a fat SJW

Really? That's the level of thinking that those who claim censorship on reddit are operating on?

It wasn't about views people disagree with (hence why the chimpire subreddits are still active). FPH actively engaged in harassment of individuals by both subscribers and moderators. And speaking of censorship the FPH mods would ban any "sympathetic views" of ridiculed individuals.
I've been pleasantly surprised by the async workflows in F#. Behind the scenes it is one big ass monadic construct that has been grafted onto the language, but it doesn't feel that way at all when you use it...it is incredibly elegant and easy to read/write and understand exactly what is happening in terms of control flow. I think it is perfectly possible for C# to improve it without starting over from scratch, simply for the fact that F# has already done it.

EDIT: See this link for more info on how F# has solved this problem, as well as others. http://tomasp.net/blog/csharp-async-gotchas.aspx/
If that's the best they could do and what got the job done, good. It's as simple as was possible and necessary. What exactly does this prove against simplicity, again?
Or as Avdi has rightly pointed out, it means that the language is not conducive for tooling. Tools have to operate on the static representation of code, and the more it diverges from runtime reality, the harder it becomes to understand the codebase structurally. The extreme opposite of all this would be Kotlin, which was built from the ground-up to have first-class IDE support.
>Effectively Maya is a core program written in C++ that then executes ~1500 Mel scripts to implement itself. Everyone [sic] of those mel scripts is editable. Every command can be scripted. Every command goes through it's [sic] command line. You can see them being executed as you choose features in Maya. I don't know where Maya got it's [sic] inspiration but I'm guessing blender got theirs from Maya.

Sounds like Maya took inspiration from Emacs!
I love Bend!

Even though there does seem to be a large influx of people in cities like SF, NYC, Austin, it seems like there is going to be an even larger exodus to smaller towns with sane costs of living in the coming years. It could also be my that my friends are all also finally entering the age where we want to buy homes, so these sorts of places are more appealing than ever.
Basically it's a human powered translator with a Slack Bot. You send your text via Slack and a person translates it back.
> Google cannot be removed as a search engine (inc. Google Now)

The swipe up gesture for search/google now is easily replaced (e.g. just install Firefox and you get asked via intent if you want to use Firefox search instead). The search bar and the swipe from the left gesture can't be removed from the Google Now launcher as far as I know, but it's trivial to replace the launcher itself (just install one and the next time you hit 'home' it'll ask you which launcher you want to use).
Nearly impossible.
On a related note, I really dislike the dispatcher paradigm, especially with the inclusion of async-await.

For good performance of IO async calls you usually want to call .ConfigureWait(false), otherwise it will wait for the UI context to switch back to, you might even risk thread starvation.

But now each async call is a potential switch out of the UI thread and certain crasch down the road, meaning you have to put Dispatcher.HasThreadAccess checks on all your UI methods. It just feels... clunky and unnecessarily explicit.

In my opinion UI controls should be able to handle switching to UI context themselves and not crash the whole program, or if nothing else you should be able to annotate methods as UI threads rather than the clunky HasThreadAccess syntax.

There's also these annoying "barriers" that you can't do certain UI stuff on background threads without some ugly hacks, like creating and working with images.

The Dispatcher is cool for being able to prioritize UI operations though
In case you are on Windows, this is a good choice,

https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/features/python-vs.aspx
Probably not. Their previous round was $37.2m on a $153m post, so about 25% equity. Hosting is very low margin, so valuations trend lower than other businesses.

I would say $500m valuation, tops. Most likely <$400m.
"Look at your IDE. Look at the menus and buttons and hierarchical whatchamacallits and text-filled panes."

I use emacs. Without menu and buttons etc. Guess it's not talking about me.

"hands up anyone who wouldn’t claim to be an expert in object-orientation!"

raises hand. Yes, not talking about me.

"So, I’m asking you to give up programming – or at least everything you have learned about programming and believe is true. I want you to give functions a go."

That's a bit of a typo - functions are also part of imperative languages. Fortran has functions but is not a functional language.
I think they're charging for the delivery and giving the customer the cannabis for "free"
But if I have 15, then it's $13.3 per node. And at my work place we have >100, which means >$36 per node.

That's a lot.
> Here’s the thing about people who are enthusiastic about functional programming. Most of them are just so relieved to find someone showing a genuine interest that they will bend over backwards to help you. To build you up. To make YOU feel smart.

> I know this because I was on the receiving end of this generosity from the moment I showed an interest. This is why it’s frankly baffling when this charge of arrogance is levelled. Why functional programming? Of all the areas of software development, why is the arrogance of functional programmers a thing?

It's not how welcoming FP people are to newcomers. It's how condescending and condemning some FPers are to those who are outside FP. "You're unenlightened/stupid/incompetent/wrong if you don't do it this way." Yes, I have heard that attitude, here on HN, more than once.

Immutable is good. It's not always the right answer, though. Some FP advocates don't seem to get that, and assume (and state) that everyone else is wrong to ever do it any other way. That's arrogant, because it assumes that those who choose some other way cannot possibly have valid reasons.
Nearly impossible. The code is the easiest part by far. Much, much harder is getting viewers and then subjects.
$149.99 per month
Its not true , its legal & easy to switch jobs in H1B if you find right opportunity .
The best quality, long term lowest cost roofing material is copper. But we use asphalt shingles, which are short-lived and expensive in the long term. Why? Because they're cheap in the short run, they require little expertise to install, and they're easy to customize.

Sound familiar?
management explaining firings hasn't gone well for them in the past

https://www.quora.com/Should-Reddit-CEO-Yishan-Wong-regret-h...
How do governments come up with this stuff? Don't they have state secrets to keep?
For what is worth, I've been a Linode customer for a few years and never really felt their management front-end was in urgent need of an update. It's solid and does the job for us. My only complains to be honest are 1) the lack of storage dedicated nodes, as OP points out, and 2) the price, it gets very expensive very fast as you scale and spin more nodes.

We are currently considering moving to dedicated machines but only because of 2), otherwise we would happily be their customer for life.
OpenSSH 6.8 X11 Security bug
> Do you get the ability to move the execution point back to before the the error, in order to resume execution?

You can in Visual Studio 2012 and in Visual 2015 some corner cases were fixed.

Just drag the arrow backwards with the mouse.
Nearly impossible. The code is trivial. Getting the viewers and subjects is the hard part.
I've read reddit on and off for years and have never even noticed that.
This is definitely the downside of ruby's dynamic/duck typing.

On the flip side, the limitations of ruby forces its devs to adjust the way they write code. Knowing that I may need to use ⌘-shift-f (find in project) to look up method definitions changes some of my conventions, and because operations like refactor-rename (which I use all the time in C#) are very tedious, it forces me to think a bit harder up front when designing a class's API surface.

I'm not arguing that it's better than having good tooling -- just that the lack of tooling adds some interesting constraints that, in some ways, force us to write simpler code.
Author's obviously talking about pure functions, not procedures or subroutines.
I must admit I don't take that as a negative thing. Code that's so old had a lot of time for corner cases to be ironed out. If it's maintained properly it's probably less buggy than any rewrite, even though fortran is less enticing than rust as a language.
That tweet is probably about the market situation in China.
State governments cannot enter bankruptcy. It's prohibited by both the federal bankruptcy code and the Constitution (states can't repudiate their debt under the contracts clause).
Irrelevant. You make a commitment to someone, you keep it or make alternate arrangements.

How is it irrelevant? It's absolutely relevant.

When you make a commitment to someone to do a heart transplant, you better move heaven and earth to keep it and prepare for every conceivable contingency.

When you let go a public-facing employee, even if you mishandle the communication about it and a few people get briefly inconvenienced as a consequence, it's a regrettable mistake of the sort that unfortunately happen sometimes.
> I guess client DNS retries takes a few seconds

Have you tested this in all the browsers? According to this ServerFault post[1], it could take minutes for an IP address to be considered "down" in Chromium before it cycles to the next one; Firefox apparently waits 20 seconds[2]. Those posts are dated 2011 but I can't imagine the behavior would've changed a whole lot since then. A user is not going to wait multiple minutes or even 20 seconds for a web page to render - it's effectively down.

IP failover with heartbeat or keepalived seems like a much better solution to me when feasible.

[1]: http://serverfault.com/a/328321/85897

[2]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=641937
I'm pleased for DO. Seems like a decent company doing things well. I've never had a complaint with their services.
This is what happens when Homer Simpson works at your datacentre.
China's cyber-offense is generally considered to be top notch.
The ambiguous revulsion of object orientation is the hallmark of the inexperienced functional programmer.
Anecdote: Friend of sister wanted new phone that could take decent pictures and do Web/FB stuff. Nice man in shop suggested a lower end Lumia. Friend of sister very happy, especially with camera, which indeed produces excellent snaps.

I see quite a few WinPhone screens on my daily round in UK.
funny description. i wasn't familiar with them until today but it's fascinating.
Wow. I thought maybe it was just one comment, but Alexis really has been doing a job on reddit's PR. Why wouldn't you be more open an honest with people running the best known feature of your site?

In the end, the mods ditched reddit for actually handling AMAs, so I guess that's a good thing. Plus it'll mean reddit simply won't have monetization options as far as commercializing r/IAmA.
Introducing the Federal Election Commission’s First API
Interesting article. If anyone hasn't read it, James Halperin's Truth Machine (1997) is still one of my favorite books. It is an interesting take on technology which can reliably determine veracity and what could happen if it has a backdoor.
Get Your Startup Discovered – 5 Free Tools
I'm not saying you're wrong but I disagree from my own POV. It's a common play in the hosting business to grow big quickly then sell out to a more enterprisey company (as happened with EV1Servers, Softlayer, Heroku) and if DO is taking such large amounts of funding, something will have to happen (IPO, acquisition, etc) and some companies don't make the transition well (I'm not saying DO wouldn't, but you never know).

Linode, on the other hand, can remain a company focused on just being a long term business forever. They might move a little more conservatively, but they have owners with skin in the game and customers to keep happy. I use both DO and Linode, but Linode for my most critical stuff simply because I "feel" they're more likely to remain basically the same in 5 years' time and I value that consistency as a business.

I think DO is superb, I have great admiration for them and I recommend them a lot, but I also feel they're the riskier horse to back even if the potential upside is so much greater.
I love DO, they are doing great work. The only thing I regret is the relatively poor choice of platforms they support.

For example, there have been a really big demand for NixOS for two years now but still no announcement whatsoever.
These threads are pretty toxic, so it's not surprising they get flagged.

Also, your comment got downvotes for baiting.
Sure, I wasn't trying to be disingenuous. The difference I was illustrating was that asking for respect and communication is different than money and benefits.
One of the biggest success stories in recent times where language support has made tooling awesome is JSX.

The success of JSX shows that developers are happy to write HTML inside code, and there are clear benefits of doing so compared to using a dedicated templating language. But the reason why this wasn't popular till JSX showed up was that it is impossible to parse the HTML built in code through string munging. JSX makes XML-inside-Code parseable, which makes it possible for us to use IntelliJ's excellent IDEs to work seamlessly with it.
How do you construct a reasoned, evidence backed counter-argument to an absurd, evidence-free belief?

One answer is that you fight stupid with stupid. See for example, Ali G winning an argument with a creationist by asking him, "OK, has you ever eaten a banana?"

But, on HN, ignore and downvote. Stupid isn't welcome.
They are certainly replaceable, but they just as certainly not fungible.

Reddit management clearly made a mistake here, not because it annoyed some moderators, but because they showed poor understanding of a fundamental part of their business (i.e. this is a lot of avoidable bad press, if nothing else)

They seem to have realized this, and are working on amending process. Nothing wrong with that, this is how things can improve.
When people ask, "Why does HN/the tech industry pay so much attention to the companies that are raising money?" I'll point them to this.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with bootstrapping and making a good living, but the stuff that goes big and wants to scale quickly usually has to raise a bunch of money to get there.
Wow, that's fascinating.
Govt of India plans to block all the porn sites
I would be surprised if they didn't have a positive cash flow by now. It's probably more about growing faster than about having money per se.
And at a minimum, it'd mean that reddit is poor at handling communication. Most likely that they aren't paying attention past, just stepping into things now and then. Who the hell bans Unidan just like that? You couldn't put some checks into your bot?
But if Boulder looked more like Denver (or Bend like Portland), you might not have made that choice, right? I'm guessing that you wanted those spots because they were semi-rural mountain cities with low population density.

So even if you did move to Boulder, you'd probably oppose the construction of more high-density housing, right?
Really? Do you have some stats on NixOS growth to support that?
This is so good, thank you for sharing this here
In true hacker spirit, we could use ML to find the reason and give a message like "It's probably because x". Not sure what algorithm we'd have to use but I'm interested now.
Might be, but (regarding ruby) not if your codebase is designed[1] and not grown. Saudi Metz does an extremely good job at explain how to use 'single responsibility' to make even huge codebases maintainable.

I believe the same is be true for smalltalk and any OO language.

[1] http://poodr.com
6 Cool Inventions You Didn’t Know Were Designed by a Brazilian
Lizard Squad teen gets no-jail sentence for 50,700 fraud, harassment charges
Consider this: what are the odds that a coincidence won't happen?
This article is horribly written. This isn't about "preventing law enforcement from accessing encryption" it's about not building back doors or using weak encryption that would potentially (or, more accurately, inevitably) allow anyone in.

Hearing this kind of nonsense doesn't make me feel less safe because I'm worried about ISIL, it makes me feel less safe because the organization that's supposed to be protecting us is apparently run by an idiot.
You are assuming that just because the prefrontal cortex sometimes knows the difference between reality and fiction, the rest of the brain must as well.

If the argument is that seeing murders causes someone to become a murderer, I'm not certain you can exempt fiction. If you outlaw depictions of murder on the presumption that it would lower the actual murder rate, you have to go whole hog.

_O \O/ ...meaning this ASCII art of
' |\+-@- one guy stabbing another guy
/ \ /| with a sword would be illegal.

Believing in such suggests that Ludovico's Technique from Clockwork Orange is real, it works, and that humans can be effectively reprogrammed by presenting the appropriate images to the visual cortex and somehow zapping the limbic system, in exactly the same manner that Pavlov's dog was reprogrammed to salivate at the sound of a bell.

So where are the televisions that shoot tiny darts of cocaine into its viewers whenever someone is killed on-screen? At least a violent video game provides some virtual reward for virtual murders, such as glowing green stacks of cash, or mission advancement, or some stupid little thing that produces a squirt of dopamine.

That part of our brains does not know the difference between reality, dreams, and Hollywood trickery. Certain mirror neurons in the brain will fire whether you are actually doing yoga, thinking about doing yoga, or watching a yoga instructor do yoga. Your reward center doesn't really care if the image is a product of good photography or good GPU rendering. It doesn't even care that it is a 2D image rather than 3D reality.

Fortunately, there appears to be no causal link provable flowing from watching something done to doing the depicted act yourself. Instead, it appears that those who are predisposed to do something, or have already decided to do it, will very often model, simulate, and practice that action--using whatever means they have at their disposal--before going on to do it. If any one tool or strategy becomes unavailable, another would be substituted.
Microsoft tried. Samsung didn't really bite (never making more than 1 WP a year or so, basically seeing "we'll make a WP" as a bargaining chip in their real concern: negotiating over patent licensing for their Android devices) because they knew what everyone knew and Nokia's leadership refused to admit: there's just not much demand for Windows Phones, and if you base your entire mobile phone company on Windows Phone, your company will fail.