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q2on Ask HN: Anything better than Tableau for data viz, dashboards?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FusionCharts

EDIT: This seems to be heavily used in industry as well as in Federal IT dashboard...etc. So it appears to be a good choice.

q2on Microsoft Shakes Up Its Leadership and Internal Structure

It seems, new Microsoft is sharply focused on consumer part (aimed at Apple and Google) and enterprise part(aimed at Amazon cloud and others). Article conveys the same.

I won't be surprised if bing is handed over to yahoo completely.

q2on WikiLeaks publishes 30,000 leaked Sony documents

No one is forcing openness here. You are not in "follow it or else" situation. You can just ignore as if nothing has happened. Where is force applied? It is imaginary.

In many cases, people act without consensus based on their decisions. Did you take consensus before posting above message? Just like you did what you thought as right, some one else make other decisions w.r.t wikileaks. Always, there will be initiative and later on consensus comes into picture.

q2on WikiLeaks publishes 30,000 leaked Sony documents

All societies, at some point in the past, may have started at similar level of privacy ...etc. Due to various reasons, if we see now, some societies are more open than the rest and this is due to the choices they made consciously or accidentally or made by influencing entities in those societies. Wikileaks is following the same trend but may be with more speed/velocity.

If we see history, there are no absolute boundaries of privacy and it changes with time and it may feel outrageous now but if we see multiple similar incidents, then it becomes natural,common and after few years, it becomes standard of life and I won't be surprised if future generations in these societies feel proud of that level of transparency and make fun of those who lack that level of openness.

q2on WikiLeaks publishes 30,000 leaked Sony documents

This is more freedom and more transparency. What is wrong with that?

Remember, openness and transparency has many levels. You may be at different level than Wikileaks. If this level of openness is uncomfortable, so be it but there may be many who feel, this level is ok. Look at how some Govt's point at others as closed societies. Just in this case, there is some one who took more higher level of openness than traditional ones.

q2on Finance world in the dark as Bloomberg terminals go offline

Support people at Bloomberg must have been really busy today and phones may be constantly ringing. Wish we get post mortem report later on.

q2on Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition

Can anyone share financial details of this company like, is it VC funded or public enterprise ...etc and sources of funding?

q2on The Apple Watch

Honest questions: How people can write such long articles? How many hours they might have spent in writing? Does anyone read it from the top to bottom completely? Is it not possible to express the whole thing in a small article without losing the gist?

EDIT 1: Gruber's articles have lot of useful information,analysis and insights but I feel, current article is too lengthy.

EDIT 2: Anandtech's reviews are also detailed but they are easy to select to go to required part of the review. Hope interface of DF may change in future.

q2on Make: Theory and Practice

Thinking of make as an example of "declarative programming" helps in appreciating its functionality.

This aspect needs to be highlighted to those who have knowledge of imperative/object oriented programming paradigms only.

Otherwise, understanding how those makefiles actually work can become confusing and painful.

q2on How Wall Street Middlemen Help Silicon Valley Employees Cash in Early

As long as this industry exposure is low, bubble bursts may not impact main stream economy but if the exposure is more, then as previous financial crisis shows,---due to inter linkages in finance sector and due to wrong judgments of even supposedly sophisticated investors,--- main stream economy cannot live insulated life.

So as of now, risk may be limited to investors in question only but if the scope and invested money increases, then it can create fresh financial crisis worldwide.

q2on How Wall Street Middlemen Help Silicon Valley Employees Cash in Early

>>> Do you talk like this in public?

Honest question: What is wrong with above sentence?

q2on Germanwings plane crash: Co-pilot 'wanted to destroy plane'

My understanding is, the more hardware/software reliability,durability increases, the less may be the need for humans to intervene.

If we look outside, technological trends and intents of organizational leaders are in the direction of more automation and lesser human dependence.

q2on Germanwings plane crash: Co-pilot 'wanted to destroy plane'

If they are licensed to operate, why they are less secure than human driven planes? It is one more area where automation may drive human jobs away.

May be self-driving planes is next stage of aviation evolution just like drones for military purposes.

q2on Germanwings plane crash: Co-pilot 'wanted to destroy plane'

We need self driving planes too. Google and Musk, please do the favor. Thanks.

q2on Fuzzy Math That's Creating Many Billion-Dollar Tech Valuations

>>> Is it being withheld? Have you asked?

Does it needs to be asked? Isn't it transparency in operations and responsibility to people who believed and invested before in terms of effort or money? It is unbelievable, if they are hidden/undisclosed to remaining stakeholders.

q2on “Your monthly rent .. shall increase from $2145 to $8900”

>>> Why so many globally reaching, internet based, in every home in the world companies think that they absolutely must be positioned in the mecca of startupdom

Why people join twitter or facebook or any other virtual social network? I think both have similar answers.

q2on When peeing in public in this German city, beware walls that pee back

>>> Public urination is quite common in Germany

This is surprising. I thought it is only a third world problem and Germany is very clean.

What are other developed countries where public urination is common?

q2on Balanced payments is shutting down

>>> Seed is raised on the dream. A rounds are raised on the metrics. If you don't have the metrics, you don't raise an A round....

These are golden words which all budding entrepreneurs need to remember rather than getting carried away by seed funding/hype. Thanks.

q2on Balanced payments is shutting down

Compared to stripe[0], balanced[1] took very less funding as per the data. Reading from the comments here, their service seems to be liked by users.

In that case, may be they should have looked into funding aspect rather than shutting down and funding might have helped them to become large,independent player as they wished.

Since YC backed, funding should not have been much difficult either. So it is surprising,seeing from outside. Am I missing anything here?

[0] https://angel.co/stripe [1] https://angel.co/balanced

q2on Adopting Microservices at Netflix

We expect freedom and transparency in all aspects across the world irrespective of personal/social costs associated with it. Isn't it? So why exception in this case? Just because it is unwritten and some sort of convention inducing hypothetical fear? Won't it help future employees from joining such toxic work places? Just a view point.

q2on The Sad Truth About Developing Executives

>>> Oh, and be sure to get your regular work done too.

In a fixed day, is it possible to do regular work and also extra projects?

I think, if offered solution appears reasonable to management,then some of daily responsibilities need to be shifted to remaining workforce temporarily till that pilot work gets completed.

q2on The Sad Truth About Developing Executives

If you visit a doctor with a problem, will you go along with possible solutions or you will point out problem and expect solution from doctor?

If you are QA engineer, you will point out issues with the tool but making reasonable and appropriate solution is developer's job. Is n't it?

You can point out the problems with your car but you cannot fix them and may be mechanic/engineer can offer solutions.

So I disagree that people should not point out issues if they do not know solutions.

CEO's need not have to solve all on their own and they can route them to appropriate experts for solutions. If that is not possible to solve immediately, offer a time line. If CEO still think, that is not problem/issue at all, let him offer convincing reason. So we have multiple options here rather than suppressing discussion.

Many managers use this type of logic to suppress debate,dissent,discussion ...etc and gradually people shut their mouths even if problem is right in front of their eyes. I think this is avoidable.

q2on If programming languages were Harry Potter characters

what, Ruby is not in the list? Is Harry Potter popular enough?

q2on No-reboot patching comes to Linux 4.0

I also feel the same.

If the patch consists of executables that are in use, then it has to give prompts to admins on the usage and to patch it later.

Another concern may be, system may start patching and meanwhile, user starts related applications and it may make whole system unstable and unusable.

I guess, before patching, users need to be stopped till patching is completed successfully.

q2on Data-Crunching Indian Recipes

As far as I know, most of the Indian food is not "fast food" category i.e. you need to have patience and heart to prepare and it takes real effort and you need to have patience to sit and eat comfortably rather than eating on the way or eating while walking ...etc. It naturally helps health.

This may or may not be the case with other cuisines.

q2on An $89 remanufactured Ubuntu workstation

Focus on environment friendliness is laudable and required. But it seems this is similar to other vendors such as Dell for example.

recycling: http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/uscorp1/dell-environment-rec...

Packaging: http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/uscorp1/dell-environment-pac...

>>> Symple PC runs the open source Ubuntu Linux operating system and doesn't require you to give your data to a company you may or may not trust.

How is this possible? It has ethernet connection and so it is possible to connect to internet and thus same as any other interconnected device. How this machine will be more trustworthy than other PC's/phones?

>>> cost of $89

Following dell[1] at 500 GB hard disk is at $229. It can work safely for at least 2 years and if we go by advanced replacement warranty of in this case, symple comes to around $170. So price-wise it is not much different but configuration of 80 GB HDD is just too small.

[1] http://www.dell.com/us/p/inspiron-3646-small-desktop/pd?oc=f...

q2on The birth of Microsoft's new web rendering engine

>>> This is an ambitious goal given that the Web consists of over 44 billion Web sites

This is not the number of "web sites" but number of "web pages" [1].

[1] http://www.worldwidewebsize.com/

q2on Introducing Pebble Time

Scrolling among items (up/down) as demonstrated needs to be changed.

q2on Apple invests €1.7B in renewable energy data centres in Denmark and Ireland

Your logic on Apple makes sense and thank you for that.

q2on Apple invests €1.7B in renewable energy data centres in Denmark and Ireland

>>> How could anyone put a definitive number on that?

If existing metrics are not sufficient, then we need to innovate :) and define new set of metrics to get complete picture.

Actually it is not difficult. Let us register all existing people jobs and one year later register again and you can get the list of jobs that got changed and if you can survey the reasons for change, then you can measure negative/positive impact. There may be refinements to this idea and there can be new ones too.

>>> should we not pursue innovation that leads to increased productivity in existing sectors? Definitely, you need to pursue innovation but what I call "responsible innovation" which is inclusive of society and environmental concerns rather than mere profits.