svas's comments

This is what I don't get about Bing though. $10 billion dollars, 5 years of investment, and I don't know how many man hours.

At BEST it's a mediocre imitation, and at worst, a disaster. Search is definitely not a solved problem; I think that there's still a huge potential for disruption there, but throwing money at it won't work if Microsoft's attempt is any lesson.

Looking above (dllu's comment) a significant factor in success at these competitions is practice. There's a good chance a lot of these folks are just students trying this for kicks. Basically, its really unclear how much self selection goes on with these contestants. Genuinely "trying" here means genuinely practicing; its unlikely that you would fail the first round if you practiced

Here's the difference between urls:

Posted: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230387360...

Google: http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20140411-711057.html

Why not post the google one and save us the collective time lost?

Curious how the author knew to seed the backdoor'ed Notepad++ before Bill clicked the link?

I suppose you could just serve up a fake backdoor program for every *.exe\msi download, and remove the honeypot on the second download? The first download would execute and maybe do nothing (or error) - prompting a second download which led to the real thing.

Even in the AJAX timeframe, there was still a way to do async push style interaction from server to client. See Comet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_%28programming%29

Gmail used this technique via a hidden iframe.

Isn't this just a trailing GET? This technique has been around since the 90's and has been used in lots of applications.

The comparison to AJAX in 2005 is a little odd for me, as this is already a pretty mature technique. AJAX in 2005 was pretty novel because the prior (to Google, and others) use-case was for early Microsoft web apps tied heavily to IE.

I wonder if this will be the death of Hiku? Amazon's product is definitely going to be cheaper than $79 price for Hiku with (obvious) heavy ties into the Amazon ecosystem.

I suppose they could try to pivot and cater to a different ecosystem (Google shopping express, or the like), but seems like an uphill battle.

This is awesome. Intellisense support will certainly beat using vim for my node projects :-)

It also appears to work with the free version of VS (Visual Studio Express).

A significant subset of .NET had to exist anyway for Silverlight to run on the Mac.

I'm sure the codebase is factored internally to have some sort of platform abstraction.

If imgur approaches Youtube's scale won't the comments on imgur also become toxic?

This still appears to be an unsolved issue (although, one could argue whether it is really an "issue"). Google's G+ approach (barring anonymous comments, etc) does not appear to have addressed the core concern.

That makes sense. I can certainly see how giving away freebies is not the way to attract serious developers, and can be distracting.

I was hoping there would be an announcement at Build that they had acquired Xamarin, but that didn't happen. All that was mentioned was that they were a partner that they were working with. Still a possibility in the future though.

The open sourcing of Roslyn can only mean good things for Xamarin.

That said, Apple's "return" compensation in terms of giveaway gifts and the like is a bit... stingy. Especially given how unbelievable Apple's profits have been of late.

WWDC giveaway: A $40 jacket that says "14" on it. Google I/O giveaway: $1449 Chromebook pixel.

So much for loyalty.

Has anyone tried to "port"/augment bootstrap CSS for this?

Not sure if you have tried doing this. In practice, it's quite painful as you need to have a separate visual studio project file for each platform (phone vs tablet).

Further, the Phone implementation of WinRT is a subset of the tablet's, so sticking to the WinRT API alone isn't enough. Complicating matters further, the phone lets you actually use a Win32 subset which is not allowed on tablet.

This (appears to atleast) unify everything towards more of a write once, run on all windows platforms world.

Interesting move in the right direction. I wonder if they'll take it further and let you write iOS and Android apps using Xamarin / Mono?

This would actually provide an easy path for developers to get into the Windows ecosystem while ignoring the whole market share issue. Combine first class integration with an awesome IDE (Visual Studio), and frankly way better tooling than Eclipse this would be a pretty compelling reason for me to use Xamarin, and by extension have a Windows run target for my app.

The real key here is sharing business logic.

Microsoft apps are written using the MVVM (Model View, View-Model) framework. The idea here is that you would share almost all of your model code, and really only rewrite the view layer (XAML) per platform. You're also allowed to share the exact same views across platforms, but it's unlikely that will be a good experience for users, given the differences: screen sizes, input modalities, etc.

The basic crux of how the app works is similar to how regular bitcoin miners work. As you run the app, the app runs compute jobs (known as Stynts) which generates proof-of-work (that it did something) and sends it up to our servers. The more you run the app, the more proof-of-work you generate. You get rewarded via virtual currency (we assign to you) when you successfully run a Stynt which can then be exchanged for real goods.

Of course, the amount you get compensated should feel valuable and commensurate to the "effort" your device expended for this to be worthwhile. It largely boils down to user expectations, but given economics of scale, I'm confident that we can have more than a 1:1 ROI of effort to reward.

Folding@Home, and the BOINC network over at Berkeley have done a great job at this already. http://boinc.berkeley.edu

There's still an immense opportunity to tap unused cycles if you give people another reason to donate their device time. Unfortunately, altruistic purposes don't always appeal to the masses :-)

The app actually monitors the battery temperature (exposed on all Android phones) and throttles down when it exceeds a certain threshold.

The charging circuitry on some phones (not all) actually disengages the battery from the charging circuit path once 100% AC power is reached. In other words your phone's CPU runs off of AC power (and not via the battery) once 100% charge is reached.

Why you would sign up is where it gets interesting - the app works via a similar incentivization scheme as how bitcoin miners work - the more you run the app (mine) the likelier you stumble upon a valid proof of work, and you get rewarded by virtual currency.