Corvus

Yeah, and look how well that turned out: http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/crtc-skinny-basic-pick-and-p...

(Spoiler: the unbundled packages cost more and have fewer shows)

The Bernoulli family produced several generations of outstanding mathematicians. According to http://www.storyofmathematics.com/18th_bernoulli.html they were quite competitive among themselves.

Many musical terms, e.g. “a capella”, “tempo” and others are Italian. I am curious about the potential impact on increasing diversity among musicians, especially when we consider the number of people globally who do not have access to a (good) Italian education that is an implicit prerequisite for learning to play a musical instrument.

I remember a similar bug in the early 1980s when a line-of-business system went haywire every Wednesday. Every other day it worked fine.

We eventually found a maintenance programmer had changed "Wensday" in a database to "Wednesday". Unfortunately this was passed to a C char day[9], so the string had no trailing '\0'. Hilarity ensued.

The subject and object of a sentence are often ambiguous; if Tom put Bill's suitcase in his car, whose car is the suitcase in?

Ordinarily I would brush off complaints about prerelease alpha software quality. But the same problems are affecting mature flagship products.

Last month a Microsoft Visual Studio update intercoursed all our Azure development machines. We never got any reply from Microsoft, and had to reimage all the machines. I see from https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/... this has nearly a dozen repos, and still no official reply or workaround.

Consult the previous thread on Increasing Cognition: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3277457

Glad to see it go. I signed up a while ago and soon deleted the app; 99% of the "schemes" it sent me were pure advertising. E.g. "Eat at this restaurant", "Go to this casino", "Donate money to this charity", "Book a trip with this travel agency for 10% off!".

Fredericton, New Brunswick, is a beautiful city with great cultural, government and academic facilities, and great business and communications infrastructure. Much cheaper to live in than Toronto or Montreal.

I believe the title is even better now than when it was written in the 1930s; the fact that when most people hear it they think of Machiavellian back-stabbing is evidence how important its lessons are today.

I think comments themselves are the “negative incentive”, not the scroll bar. If comments were as informative and well-written as the article, then including them in the total article length is what you want because you would also want to read them.

But, as we all know, comments are usually total garbage. The problem is not that they get included in the scroll bar, but that they get included with the article. We need to fix, or remove comments, not scroll bars.

Hardware like nails and screws that you only need one of, but have to buy in packs of 100.

It's not just Filezilla. I have been using PDFCreator for years, and the latest installer from SourceForge has more adware, spam, and crapware than I have ever seen. It replaces your browser and email handler, adds Windows file handlers, and I don't know what else. I tried removing everything, and opening files still shows me ads for crapware. I tried to post a warning on the SourceForge review page, http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/reviews, but they have removed all posts.

I don't know if this is SourceForge's or PDFCreator's doing, but I will never download anything from the site again.

While I have no personal insight into Barack Obama, I have dealt personally with several politicians; and while there are many earnest politicians dedicated to public service, there are also those who conflate public service with their own personal interest.

I do not mean they are cynical; that they are lying or have abandoned their principles, but that their principles are directed solely to getting themselves elected. Any form of lie-detection or telepathy would reveal they truly believe they are doing the best, most moral thing by getting themselves in a position of power. I find this attitude hard to describe; imagine “I am a good person”, “anything that is good for me is good for everyone”, “I should be leader”, “anything that makes me leader is good”, “anything that restricts my leadership is bad for everyone” all merged together into one single thought. Perhaps “I am the state” is the best summary.

This is how you get civil libertarians restricting others’ civil liberties, homosexuals getting elected on anti-homosexual legislation, and drug-users campaigning for harsh penalties for drug use. These people do not see any contradiction between their words and their actions; it is as if words and actions are the same thing to them. If I campaign for civil rights, then I am a civil rights leader, my actions are irrelevant. They do not seem to understand that other people can be good, that they themselves can be evil; or how restricting their own power could possibly be good. They do not seem to understand that arrests, investigations, or invasions, whether of privacy or of nations, which do not harm themselves could harm other people.

A machine that can turn garbage into useful raw materials.

A site to propose informal gatherings. The problem with MeetUp and EventBrite is that it requires someone to do the research on what everyone likes and send out proposals. If a proposal fails they're back to step one.

I'd like a site where a circle of friends can add events, meetings and such they are planning to attend. The site shows everyone in the circle when everyone's available and what they're doing.

Also note getting the count of articles by language, in fact all the language tools, require hover. This thing is unusable on tablets or phones.

A perfect example of Betteridge's Law of Headlines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_Law_of_Headlines):

“Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'”

Between 1582 and 1752 England had two different New Year's Days, January 1 and March 25, used for different purposes. The same day had different years depending on who you were talking to. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_dating.

From the Vista era: Windows Live Messenger

My relatives still use that. That was also the one that added advertising to the bottom of the window.

Geeks will not be "rock stars" until non-geeks start calling other non-geeks "the new geeks" as a compliment.

That the illustration is Nixon's resignation letter should be a clue.

Please note this question was asked in 2008, when StackOverflow was considerably more tolerant of subjective questions, and it was locked to prevent any more votes. The notice on the question says "This question exists because it has historical significance, but it is not considered a good, on-topic question for this site".

Mind Performance hacks (http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/personal-productivity/0...) by Ron Hale-Evans, and his web site (http://www.ludism.org/mentat).

We use MS Visual Studio to build WPF desktop apps (what MS is calling "Windows Clients" this week) in C#. Why?

1. Great dev environment (IDE, debugger, docs, online resources).

2. Powerful API (3D graphics, networking, local device access, application interop).

3. Versatile security model (can install under user credentials, lock out features).

4. Versatile deployment (local or remote install by users or administrators).

5. Can share code with server and web teams.

6. Targets 99% of our installed base.

TNG? The original series had Uhura using an electronic clipboard with stylus back in 1968: http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/08/how-star-trek-arti...

There are many graphics APIs for Windows. Which one is best for you depends entirely on what kind of application you are building, which you have not told us.

I would not worry about Microsoft deprecating an API in "6-8 months". Microsoft has been extraordinarily diligent in maintaining old APIs; I know of new desktop application development being done in WinForms, and 20-year old 16-bit MFC applications that are still being used.

If you are building an application now, choose the best API now. Do not worry about what will happen in 6-8 months, because by then there will be another new API coming. Waiting for the ultimate API means you will never start.

Vsedach may want to consider raising money for this project on http://www.kickstarter.com/

Indeed that is true, but it is also true that if you are writing things for other people to read, then what value those other people put on your delivery is more important than what value you put on your delivery.

If you are writing only for yourself, then things like grammar and spelling are less important because, presumably, you know what you meant. However, if you want other people to value what you write, grammar and spelling become very important.

First, because poor grammar and spelling sabotage your meaning and delivery. There were several sentences in the article where I had to stop and think "err... what is he trying to say?" It is entirely likely I misinterpreted the meaning of some of these sentences. The fact that the author understood and valued those sentences is of utterly no help to me.

Second, there are people who believe confusing and ungrammatical writing are symptoms of confused and unknowledgeable writers. I understand you may not agree with this but, again, if you are writing for other people then it is the other person's impressions you must consider, not your own.

Defending ungrammatical writing by challenging a reader's inferences and thoughts is not convincing because, if you are writing for other readers, it is precisely those inferences and thoughts you should be addressing.