skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One commonly-overlooked disadvantage to releasing early is that it may hinder your ability to construct a barrier to entry. It's true that many people spend too much time worrying about competitors, but the fact is that if you build something successful, competitors will arise. It's important to understand and make use of the aspects of your company that other people will have trouble emulating, as they can potentially result in a much bigger head-start than simply releasing early.

(Disclaimer: If your company is such that the best barrier to entry to can construct is a large user-base, then releasing early makes a lot of sense.)
Great interview. Shankman is smart, energetic, and hilarious.
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1010803

See also:

http://searchyc.com/microsoft+word?sort=by_date

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1010543
I cant speak about other schools, but where I'm currently attending, the students get honestly excited about economic theory, buying behavior, business valuation models, forecasting algorithms, and most importantly - new venture ideas.

It seems that someone that was genuinely interested in economic theory, buying behavior, etc would be better served studying economics than getting an MBA.

But I am speculating.
> Getting rid of software patents altogether is quite extreme.

Really? I'd think that most people in software have the opinion that there should be no software patents at all.

It's kind of silly, frankly.
"Mobile" sites are, more often than not, more annoying than helpful. If I've got a full browser in my phone, the right thing to do is almost always just to show me the regular site.

If you've got feature parity with your regular site and all those features work as well on my particular phone as they would if I was on the regular site, AND there's a good reason for the site to need to be changed to fit a small screen with a touch interface, then, fine, show me the mobile version.
At $1,700 per kit and a $99 per officer monthly fee, the system could cost $2,888 per officer in the first year, or $4 million.

That seems remarkably expensive, though some of that cost may be due to the difficulties of night recording. On the other hand, it only needs to record standard definition, and real-time compression and storage in consumer devices already offer the technology to record a whole shift.
Why is MSFT stock up for the day and for the week? Shouldn't this majorly affect their revenue?
the correct singular is alumnus (m) or alumna (f), not alumni.
How Apple’s App Store Reporting Changed My Perspectives on Business
It's been a concern in the past, too. The distant past.

In 1899, Stanford University limited female enrollment to 500 students, apparently out of concern that the university would dilute the men's education. Not sure when that restriction was lifted, but it's certainly not in place today.

Source: http://janestanford.stanford.edu/biography.html
My main point is, if you are going to hate, hate the person, not the degree. The degree didnt make the person who they are. Both intelligent and ridiculous MBA's exist, just like any other career or degree path.

True enough, but that is getting off the original topic. Most people who study math do so because they love math. Of course they think about the practicality of getting a job after graduating, but that is a secondary concern.

With MBAs, the reverse is true. Some may study it for the love of the subject, but I doubt this is a large percentage. Most study it because they think they can get a high paying (or at least secure) job after graduating.

This is not a condemnation of either path, but it is a statement about their motivations.
I would like to see the DropBox app use the Bump API
The Evolution of a Haskell Programmer
I have absolutely no opinion about the validity of this particular patent, but I want to forestall a bunch of random griping.

Please, please don't post commentary that involves "just reading the patent" and thinking (a) you know what it means, or (b) saying that it's "obvious" from a cursory glance.

All patents need to be interpreted in light of their "file history", which is the correspondence between the Patent Office and the filer during the patent examination. It is literally true that the words in the text may not mean what you think they do.

It is not uncommon for patent claims to be completely changed by the file history, which in complex cases can comprise thousands of pages of back and forth; if you pay the copying costs you can get the patent office to send you the file for any particular patent.

If a patent has been litigated, you may be able to figure out what the court and the original patent examiner thought the patent meant by reading the lawsuit filings and judgement, but just looking at the patent by itself is not necessarily going to help you understand the details.

[IANAL, but I've been to the rodeo before.]
What schools are these where women outnumber men? Perhaps it's just CS and engineering but my graduating class for example had maybe 5 women out of 200 total people. Not even close to a majority. The entire university was better but still bad 2/3 men 1/3 women.
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$1 / $0 = undefined ;-)
My lazy American students
I'm a little disappointed that this type of "you too can make sacrifices and work hard...for America!" propaganda made it to the top of HN, and really disappointed that it wasn't due to irony....
Hey Silly Web Designer: Get a Webcam
Meanwhile, the judge's decision was written in Microsoft Word (do lawyers still use Word Perfect?) May be Microsoft should stop selling Windows and Office in a couple of these jurisdictions. For serious document processing there still is no good alternative to Microsoft Office. I have a feeling that if this were to happen, the public would be losing a lot more than Microsoft itself.
A nice reminder that skill and raw brainpower are two different things, and the latter can retard development of the former. I worked with many pieces of code written by one particular coworker of mine who was way too smart for his own good. His code was littered with little formulae like that, repeated again and again throughout a file, and to him it was obvious at a glance what they meant. It was also easy for him to scan through his code and find errors in these expressions, as easy as it is for you or me to see that "(matthes-js2-line-ending ..." contains a typo. I have no idea how he coped with finding and changing every instance of a formula that needed to be changed. For me it was a slog every time I had to read, change, or debug his code.

P.S. The most frequent and flagrant was calculating array indices into multi-dimensional arrays in C++. It's so easy to write a simple class that lets you do this:

arr(n1 + i, n2 + j, n3 + k) = calc_foo(i, j, k);

instead of this:

arr[n3 + k + (n2 + j) * (nz + (n1 + i) * ny)] = calc_foo(i, j, k);
Most of the few remaining colleges in the United States with male student majorities do indeed seem to be colleges with mostly technical major subjects.
"and suggest solutions" - that is key. There are plenty of people that bitch about problems, but precious few that can also propose solutions to alleviate the pain.
The social dynamics can get really ugly when the m/f ration hits a tipping point, generally thought to be around 60%.

The focus on white males is because the system does everything it can to get "males of color" into college (well, everything but competently teach them the 3Rs, at least in the US with Dick and Jane and Their Running Dog Spot (Whole Word nonsense, phrase coined by Jerry Pournelle, who's wife's career was teaching the hardest cases how to read)).
It really seems like the Azul boxes are the new Lisp machines. it's inspiring to see solid technical work being done with this amount of integration (hardware to software).
Huge numbers of Young Albertan men who would otherwise be applying to college are now going straight to work in the oil sands.

It is dangerous, but high paying work. Few women go there at all. Actually it is attracting a huge number of men from all over Canada.

I don't know if it's the only factor, or if the experiences of educators in other countries are similar, but it probably should be mentioned...
Displaying Git repository status at your Zsh prompt
A point well taken. Perhaps, after five minutes of not recording, the device ought to issue an audible warning and turn itself back on if the officer doesn't hit the "stop" button again?
> show me a single software patent that a competent programmer couldn't develop in a few weeks given the description.

MP3.
It doesn't matter. Who cares? White males aren't a team. The only drawback I can see from white males being underrepresented in college is that white males are underrepresented in college, which is a tautology.

If white males were being treated differently so were being held back, that would be a major problem, but that's not the case[1].

Moreover, white males seem to be doing just fine professionally, because college is a very leaky predictor of professional success. College should be more of a means than an end. Apparently there's more to life than college.

[1] Except through, perhaps, several links of causality chain. And when you start making those claims, the slope gets slippery fast.
I don't think anything high schools say should have any impact on admissions at all.

70 - 90% of my grades in high school were homework.
I tested out of 2 years of math and 3 years of Japanese by studying the curriculum and learning everything. None of the classes I tested out of counted towards my GPA. I passed 4 AP tests, but my GPA was 2.4. If principal hadn't kept me there I would of been in and out in 2 years. I suspect he didn't let me leave because the high school gets funding from the state per student enrolled.

I did four years of Japanese classes in one and got a five on the calculus test, but my GPA was below the cutoff for engineering, so I had to get a professor there to write a special recommendation to let me in. Somebody with a high GPA who passed no AP tests has preference in admissions over me.

I've got nothing against using test scores for admissions, but grades are incredibly subjective. 99% of the time they're not a measure of ability, they're a measure of obedience, and your ability to persuade teachers. And colleges, by extension are choosing to admit people who are more concerned with appearances than with actually solving the problem at hand.
> You need a mechanism in place to protect the property rights of individuals and corporations.

Trademarks. Copyrights.
The 3-D Camera Technology Behind James Cameron's Avatar[video]
I suppose you could be identified as "overqualified" if you don't limit entries on your resume. Actually asking for an age or birthdate is illegal in the U.S.

At my previous company, where I began in the startup stage, we had lots of people older than 40 and 50 in IT. We had a QA guy who had to be at least 60. I suppose it all depends on the company (and probably the geographic subculture) but this "ageism" stuff is out of my experience -- I'll hire someone who knows what he's doing and is motivated to do it, period. Stupid shit like "but he has a wrinkle" is moot.
What if they told people to stand in line at the store next to Palm? Since there's a finite amount of space, they'll naturally overflow. To an outside observer, it looks like all these folks are standing in line for Palm - particularly if you do the same thing at 1000 locations nationwide, and let journalists connect the dots.

It's also far less traceable. Instead of paying 50,000 people to stand in line outside of Palm, you're paying 50 people each to stand in line outside of 1000 different local businesses, whose only connection is that they happen to be next to a Palm store. A just-as-plausible explanation is that you're organizing a "buy local!" protest that day.

You could also pay people on Amazon Mechanical Turk to pay turkers to stand in line, making things even harder to track. Now instead of one guy paying 50 people each to stand in front of 1000 different locations, you have 50 guys, each one of which is paying people to stand outside Subway, or McDonalds, or Verizon, or the corner bookstore, or whatever happens to be next to that Palm store.
The software companies themselves often argue that they don' really want software patents. However, the fact that other can file patents puts them into a position where they need to file patents themselves for protection. It's just a stupid arms race. Now and then, a patent troll with noting to lose shows up and shakes up the picture. You could call it a sort of IP terrorism :-)
I cant but help feeling that the author (who I usually find quite effusive) has read the HN/[insert other news site here] thread, scanned the article briefly and then ranted.

I'd have expected something a bit more insightful here :( (regardless of if he is right/wrong)
RSA.

But you're still correct.
>and unpasteurised milk

My grandparents had a dairy operation, and I don't think I had pasteurized milk at home until age six (when the farm was sold). I don't have any autoimmune issues, so I'm at least a datapoint showing correlation.
> I'd much rather a server service all requests properly than fail.

Depends what you mean by "properly". If you mean "within N seconds", then when overload takes you over the point at which reqs take N seconds, all your reqs are now failing to be served properly.

Whereas if you have a cap at M concurrent reqs (which you calculate so that your platform can service each of those M reqs within N secs), you get to handle M concurrent reqs properly under overload.

So, not under overload - same behaviour. Under overload, a cap allows M concurrent reqs to be handled properly, no cap allows none.

What alternative are you suggesting? Let the platform run slower as load increases until your alarm system pings you at a threshold and you then provision more servers?
awesome things like making it illegal to sell Word and therefore Office

How about just making your open source alternative to Word and Office that much better and competing with them?

* edit: downmodded without justification. Wonderful. Which just forces the quality of discussion on HN WAY down. Ironically, understanding that concept requires understanding incentives, which are the basis of patents in the first place :)
This. The only people who can afford and want to lawyer up with patents are exactly the people who shouldn't have them.

There are some rare exceptions, but continuing to punish the majority for their sake seems silly.
One author at http://www.tinaja.com/patnt01.asp feels that the break-even point for patents is $12 to $14 million.
One theory I’ve heard is that a lot of white males can get decent jobs without college degrees, so they do so. Members of other demographic groups, though, are really screwed if they try to enter the adult workforce without a college degree. So they’re more motivated to get one.
I just got a promotion where I work; it's not the position that I really want (and management knows my goal), but it's the position that the organisation needs. I got this primarily because I stepped up and took ownership of a project when it needed to be done.

I've made mistakes, I'll make more mistakes, but I'm not trying to be on the management track. However, it is important enough to me that I be involved in the decisions being made that this promotion is a good thing. What decisions?

1. How to arrange the office (we were able to partially remove the cubicles to give my team a much more open area to work with).
2. What we're working on and the technical direction that we should take in doing so (I am negotiating features and scope directly with our product managers).
3. When and how to recognise my team for hard work (small recognition; I have no direct control over pay raises).

There's more, but it's really important to me that the people that I work with get the respect they deserve, and it's now officially my job to make sure that they get it. If they've got good ideas, I want to hear them so that I can be their advocate for those good ideas.

Even though I've written very little code over the last year, I'm still developing software. I just have other people who write most of the code.
An internal memo put on a publicly accessible blog ceases to be internal. It becomes part of PR.
The stock is supposed to reflect the discounted value of all future cash flows. In the grand scheme of Microsoft's Infinite Revenue Machine, having Word off the market for a month or so while they figure out a workaround really doesn't make much of a dent.
There are a few that think they are useful: http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html
So do people from Singapore, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia, Iran.
Some more things to consider.

- Growth spurts are tied to improvements in mental performance. This means that a girl who has hit puberty has significant cognitive advantages over a boy the same age who is not.

- Test scores understate the difference. Some stereotypically female traits (like a tendency to double check work) both help in the classroom and hurt on timed tests. So the actual academic performance gap is larger than the SATs will state.

- Broad based IQ studies have found that median performance among women is higher, but variability among men is higher. This means that more women are solidly above average than men, but the top performers are usually men. (The bottom performers are even more heavily weighted towards men.)

When you get into gender and academic performance nothing is as simple as it looks. But the difficulty of the scientific questions are nothing compared to the difficulty of the political issues that come up.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for openness and transparency. But I do believe there needs to be some level of legal rights protection, and that it's a pretty fundamental pillar of our capitalist system.

Out of curiosity, what do you (and others) think of a patent for something like Google's PageRank?
Or military academies.
This seems partially explained by selection bias -- the slackers from "India, China, and Latin America" don't come to America for college at the same rates as American slackers do. However, this doesn't explain the actual statistics she gives.
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I'm aware of the peril of submitting my own stuff to HN, but I figured this was the fastest way to get some feedback.
Renaming local edits out of the way or preserving them is up to you, depending on whether you put %config or %config(noreplace) in the spec. It does need to be handled carefully, but it can be handy if you want one machine giving special treatment to a representative sample of your requests or something.
A guy who works for us just read that and laughed and said:

"To be honest I'd sit there and say both were equally shoddy and unlearned in their own way. There is a sweet spot middle ground that the really really good programmers learn"

I suspect he is right.
I have to agree. I'm just saying that there is the potential for it to help as well as harm.
so you can throw your phone up at the clouds and have files appear in your dropbox?
I think it's bad, because the patent wouldn't read "Google's PageRank". It would read "A system that ranks cataloged pages by their relevance to a certain search term", which would mean every other search engine would have to license Google's tech.

Copyright already covers specific implementations. That's as far as it needs to go in software.
Software is (uniquely?) protected two ways--the source code and object code are both protected by copyright, and the algorithms may be protected by patent. One form of protection should be sufficient.

Arguably, software is also protected by trade secret, either because it's difficult to decompile object code into anything meaningful or because it's hosted and run on a server that no one else is allowed to see.
when I was in college, I would take 20 minute power naps in my car between classes. this really worked to improve my mood the rest of the day.
I don't think your answer makes much sense. Historically, communism had to do with allocation of resources by the state rather than a market, in the service of certain ideological beliefs. 'Openness' was not one of them.
Here as well, look at the closet on the right and the pictures on the wall.

http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=10
http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=14
http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=45
http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=42
http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=41
http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=32
http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=31
http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=30
http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=29
An extremely simple spaced repetition algorithm
I downmodded you because you demonstrated a total misunderstanding of cookiecaper's point, quoted him out of context, and made a totally irrelevant response. He wasn't making any kind of attack or criticism against Microsoft Word or Office, he was arguing that this kind of disruptive litigation will provide an impetus to lobby against software patents.
STELLA? Lego ROBOLAB?

...Piet? :)
The point is that the slow programmer won't do just exactly the same thing as the fast programmer. Speed can make a qualitative difference; it affects what you are willing to do, not just how long you take to do it.
"they claim to be open about everything"

You're mischaracterizing the memo so you can argue with it, which, incidentally, is exactly what Gruber did. Though so often incorrectly used on the internet, this, folks, is a genuine "strawman" argument.
The problem with your just simply build your own open source competitor theory, aside from being a glib response, is that you are quite likely to be violating a patent Microsoft or someone else holds when you build said system.

Complaining about downvoting is itself noise, which will generally only get you downvoted further.
Haha Touche.
I'd rather have that _and_ the video of them abusing power than neither. Also, they're not going to be wearing the headsets while doing those things... it's not like it's implanted.
Based on his blog (which I subscribe to) he is still working on GSB quite a bit. Every few posts he talks about a tricky bug or the next patch or the new big features going into the Expansion Pack. http://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/
A tale with pictures:

http://www.benjiegillam.com/2009/12/n900-the-tale-of-the-ind...
I've got nothing against using test scores for admissions, but grades are incredibly subjective. 99% of the time they're not a measure of ability, they're a measure of obedience, and your ability to persuade teachers.

The same thing is true for college, so I imagine if they're selecting for those criteria they'll do well.
This is so awesome that I just donated $25 to Django Software Foundation. Thanks guys!!
He's spot-on about Java being a safe-haven for "data modeling" geeks who are afraid of doing real work. Writing a whole bunch of getters and setters in a freshly minted Java class certainly feels like work. However, I think he gets it wrong when he puts OCaml on the extreme "for you to model everything" end of the spectrum:

And Haskell, OCaml and their ilk are part of a 45-year-old static-typing movement within academia to try to force people to model everything. Programmers hate that. These languages will never, ever enjoy any substantial commercial success

Hold on a minute...last time I checked OCaml was a dialect of ML. ML does not ask you to "statically" type everything, in fact it does the opposite. It infers all the types. Sure, it allows you to hint types to the compiler, but this is not necessary. You get all the benefits of "static" type checking through ML's concept of type inference. It's designed specifically to make it less work for the programmer to enjoy the benefits of a sound, correct type system.

If you want to learn more about type inference in ML, check out this short introduction: http://bit.ly/8WEhD8
Where are you getting this sentiment from? At what point does the article mention "work[ing] hard for America"?