skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It would seem to me that I cannot use the described algorithm and put it to work without landing in possible legal troubles.

These patents may actually slow down technological development rather than increase the pace.

We get the fringe benefit of knowing something for real but we are unable to put it to work.

In the world where open source hardware companies like Makerbot Industries are coming into existence and that the phrase "the atoms becoming the new bit" is becoming more true everyday, this is a worrying obstacle in technological progress. People cannot voluntary share and benefit from each other without a fear of patent holder infringing on their ability to do so, no matter how innovative he might be.

The patent system is incompatible with certain business models that relies on the openness of their product, and a whole path of technological development.

This is the price we pay for assuming that people won't share information about algorithms and other useful knowledge. The only question is, will the positive black swans of the patent world will truly outweigh all the lost potential of the open source paradigm?

Just remember, positive black swan in the open source world can happen too!(Linux, Mozilla Firefox, and more)
I vastly prefer being able to redownload software that I've paid for, but some people may prefer physical copies.
I have been studying this level of software development since 1979 (sic, when I first encountered the obviously by then doomed MULTICS, saw how much had been dropped in the transition to UNIX, and wondered "why did it turn out this way?") and this is perhaps the single most useful document on it that I've ever read.

Plus a tremendous motivator to work in low politics startups, yes ^_^?
I've thought about this a lot as well, its a tougher problem to crack than meets the eye. I started working on something like this that I ended up scrapping to solve the payment tracking part first. That is also a really tough problem :)
It was the backlash that was "unexpected". As usual.
That's true. Brooks mentions this as the "program-system" and/or "program-product"/"system-system product" boundaries (I may have the terms confused, I don't have the book in front of me).

There's probably a range of software development:
0. "Script" (not necessarily something written in a scripting language, merely a short program written in an ad-hoc manner).
1. Program (could well be in a scripting language)
2. Project
3. Possibly a system (composed of multiple programs and/or projects)
4. Product
6. Company
> Health should always be far far far more important than money

Your most important asset is your ability to produce income.

By that definition, your health is very, very important.
In other words, Steam DRM comes with some carrots, instead of just extra sticks.

I'm sure there's a lesson in there somewhere...

I'm a fan for the same reasons you listed. Also, their aggressive sales and price reductions on older archival titles significantly increases my buy-in of the Steam service, which in turn makes me far more willing to turn to them when I am buying a full-price, day 1 title.
DevCentral Weekly Roundup Episode 125 - Virtual Goodbyes
Halliburton already tried this in 2008.

http://techdirt.com/articles/20081107/0118162765.shtml
Yes, everyone's favorite "Halliburton".
Alternatively, it's possible that those using other languages just wanted an exercise to learn more about those languages.
Heh, not quite.

This would be a normal college and thus would be able to take people who want to go into any field.

The more I think about this the more I think it has potential. All kinds of interesting things could be products of it. For example, the career services department (or whatever they call the unit that helps people find jobs after they graduate) might be substantially better than at most colleges because it's seen as an investment, not just a nice, but nonessential, way to help their students out.
Ok serious question...

What do people feel about url shorteners doing this? Also, what about free twitter clients - as a mechanism for monetization?
You do get other perks though - not having to keep track of discs, not susceptible to damaged disks, download-anywhere, unlimited times... etc.

The online features are also not too shabby - being able to join a friend's game in a single click is a pretty nifty feature that I use often.

Also, Steam generally gives 10% off for preorders, which is something brick and mortars aren't doing.
They've claimed to disable it, but it's still active. (Just click the "glutenfreebay" link in the OP.)
There are obviously limits about what an employee can say about his boss, but I'd trust Boz's assessment more than just about anybody else's at Facebook. He didn't glorify Mark as some perfect boss but tried to communicate honestly about the nuances of his management style.
I think the psychological problem isn't as big as it's made out to be. Every time you turn on the lights or plug in your mobile phone charger, you're making a micropayment to your power supplier. Yet you use electrical appliances every day without giving it a second thought. Why? Because you know, more or less, what your typical usage ends up costing you and you mentally accept that expense in advance.
2. Books can have some taxonomy data. For example, I could see a list of main characters which were presented in the book until the page I have read. I can see their short description, their relationship, or even where are they currently.

You don't even need the book to do this explicitly. Having the app reference Wikipedia based on content read would probably serve as a good 90% implementation.
Worse than the Trabant? And I've seen pricier cars than the Yugo drip oil onto the exhaust--no doubt many miles past the test state, to be fair.
We've just added a Meld/IntelliJ style diff to FishEye 2.2, e.g., http://sandbox.fisheye.atlassian.com/browse/rails/actionpack...
Academics continue to publish papers in fields where patent protection is unavailable (history, literature, etc.), so I fail to buy the argument that no scientific papers about computing would be published if it weren't for software patents.
I did before I posted the link, and I didn't get redirected to eBay.
Yet another alarmist title. No, RSA hasn't been zapped. Not even remotely close.

For those not wishing to slog through this paper, here's what it amounts to: If you can get close enough to the hardware that is encrypting data, and have sensitive enough equipment, you may be able to grab enough of the data to break the encryption through various indirect means.

Interesting, sure, but pretty much meaningless. It should always be assumed no system is secure when it is physically accesible by an attacker.
You are correct. I got redirected to ebay.
Shady. Shady.
It's interesting to note that the sites that are most successful in the long run are the ones that take the higher ground and employ some basic ethics and decency - and actually live by it. This is a perfect example of a sleazy practice that, while it might make them some petty cash in the short run, will end up costing more in bad press and fleeing customers than the gained revenue.
That is interesting indeed. If you go on to page 2 of the rankings* you can see that there were indeed a large number of Haskell, Python, Lisp and Ruby entries, but the top 100 (and especially the top 25) are totally dominated by C++.

The other thing I find interesting is the lack of Java entries. Java is as widely-known as C++, but there's only one Java entry in the top 100, and even in the top 200 Java is only about as common as Haskell or Ruby, and far less common than Python.

* http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/contest/rankings.php?page=2
"Praise them equally for failing, if they worked hard, learned something, and are willing to keep trying."

I Agree. I guess I was lucky in this regard - I learned to love failing, and saw it as a challenge. One of my favorite pastimes, chess, was taken up because I was so bad at it, yet saw that it could be a master-able skill.
Awesome - I had a very quick browse at the time and couldn't find that. Now that I'm looking through the archive, I see I've already read a few of these :-)

This format has inspired me to try a similar approach on my own news related blog. Pithy short paragraphs, no uncertainty, no fuss. Thanks for the inspiration.
The difference here is that had he not spent that money on living, the money saved could have gone to saving dying kids in third-world countries, but probably would not have done so. It would have just been more profit in the bottom-line of some insurance company and less revenue for some doctors/hospitals, that's it.
How do hackers here concentrate?
i am trying to get a startup going and finding it hard to keep my attention focused on it.. I am very passionate about my startup but still always come up with an idea for simple small application that could potentially make money.. but again its a distraction. Any tips?
There's definitely a lot of jealously, particularly among the wantrepreneurs that frequent this site. Why don't you go out and try to build your own thing rather than spend so much time trying to nitpick at the foibles of successful people and feed off karma points as a sense of validation for your valueless comments?

This is one of my favorite quotes of all time: "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." - Teddy Roosevelt
I ran them on a site that was making $3-5k a month from Adsense. Big mistake. I got away with it for about 18 months but eventually Google "got to me." Which was quite impressive considering I'd tweaked the hell out of the TLA code to make them appear as natural as possible (even adding my own descriptions to the links). Now I make $300 a month on Adsense if I'm lucky. Oops.

The amount of money that revolved around TLA used to be gigantic and it's slumped hard since Google started playing hardball. A friend of mine was a top affiliate of theirs making 5 figures a month in commission - no longer though!
An allergist I know told me that the New England Journal of Medicine once offered a lifetime subscription for $500. For context, the annual price right now $159. Among medical journals, that's cheap. $500 for a lifetime subscription would be unfathomable. Only problem was that in the mid 1980s, medical residents just didn't have $500 to cough up (well, about 75% of their parents might have, but that's another story).
Its quite funny that at last years startup school he was berated for being too good a public speaker.
The problem with Java was that it was impossible to get it running fast enough. You had 1 second of thinking time, but with Java you could barely access 0.05s, while compiled languages like C/C++ or even C# could easily use 0.95s without having any timeouts (which leads to disqualification).
Yeah, it doesn't look very good on my Netscape Navigator 4 either or my WebTV. You'd think people would know how to design Web sites by now, eh?
That link is currently still redirecting me to ebay.com.
Not to be an apologist, but you still have to account for programmer skill and number of programmers. I'd be interested in seeing the average and median for different programming languages, not just the top results.
Also try chromeexperiments.com.

And, I have a collection of UI links at the bottom of this page:

http://wiki.factoryjoe.com/Screenshotting
try to look objectively over your past, have you given up on projects that in hindsight could have done well?. If you have a habit of giving up when the hard part arrives, then your past 'failures' should give you motivation to work through the hard parts. If you dont have that habit, then I would pay attention to the idea that you night not be as passionate about the idea as you think you are.
Good point. We haven't charged anyone for data export yet though. When you cancel most SaaS, you lose your data. I don't know of any service that allows you to keep your data even after you cancel subscription and can come back and reactivate. However, we like the idea. Maybe we will allow users to do that.
Well, you should understand that at the end the bot had to be pretty complex to be competitive. Fast prototyping wasn't so important, as most of the theory was already there. But only a few managed to get them working together. In this case a prototyping language didn't have an advantage (like with most project with >4k lines, it's hard to oversee).

And secondly, most bots relied on minimax, which is a brute force algorithm. Performance was a big difference. For example, a friend of mine ported my code from C# to C++ (from compiled language to other compiled language) and got in the top 50 (I finished 81st), this without any changes to the algorithm.
Related to "confidence": you should be completely comfortable with your material. In fact, you should have mastery over it.

Nothing kills a presentation faster than someone in the audience asking "where did you get that number / equation / data?" or "why did you choose that technology / layout / structure?" and the presenter not knowing. People aren't going to trust you with their money if you don't understand what you're telling them well enough to answer probing questions.
I was struck by this paragraph in John McCarthy's detailed critique that followed the manifesto and thought it pointed out a real issue for many systems:

"Unfortunately, the making of computer systems and software is dominated
by the ideology of the omnipotent programmer (or web site designer) who
knows how the user (regarded as a child) should think and reduces the
user's control to pointing and clicking. This ideology has left even the
most sophisticated users in a helpless position compared to where they
were 40 years ago in the late 1950s.
Are you logged into LJ? Try logging out and clicking again.
Away3D Lite and Haxe - Getting Started
overblown for algorithms experts, maybe. selection bias.
The bigger problem, I think, is not being able to control costs. I'd rather pay $12/month for Github than $0.02 per commit, for fear that I'd have a really productive month and end up with a bill for $200.
I will always remember LiveJournal as the reason for Memcache being invented. It's funny how you can be nostalgic about a key-value system...
The $100 laptop is here, someone tell OLPC.
Ruby on Rails Backup Solutions
We haven't. We plan to.

Good point. We will move that above the fold.
I think the best way to stay focused on a project is by finding other friends that you can trust to bounce ideas off of. Sometimes you might get stuck working on something because you hit a roadblock and because you are so close to the project it is hard to move forward. If you have someone there to bounce ideas off of they might be able to help you by providing suggestions to your problems. If you are always moving forward on one project you will be able to keep focused on it and not get distracted...
Fast prototyping lost its edge early on in the competition. Once people figured out the winning formula is something like Flood Fill + Minimax + Voronoi it all came down to tweaks and optimizations to search deeper, and making sure your evaluation function was accurate, not trying out completely new paradigms or anything like that.
Product Review of Yes, You Can Still Find a Job
Google App Engine Team's Post-mortem for February 24 Outage
It's really difficult to know because all the programming contest culture is C++, from what I can see. Someone who is experienced with programming contests is much more likely to do well than someone just trying something out for the first time for fun, and all those people use C++ because the programming contests mostly accept only a small handful of languages, of which C++ is the clear winner for performance.

I would expect this effect to utterly dominate any actual differences in languages right now. Comparing programming-contest-experts-in-C++ to newbies-with-$FAVORITE_LANGUAGE is not going to be a fair fight in something like this, where algorithms and insights dominate.

If TopCoder et al took the same suite of languages, and had for long enough that skills had equalized after the first mover network effects to whatever was really best for this sort of thing, we'd be able to make a better guess about what languages are good for what. (I would then conclude that I still don't really care because I'm not usually doing programming contests. But it would at least mean something, unlike the current results.)
If you read the whole thing (links and all) you'll find this nugget of a comment:

Ooh, wait, I can do one better: I'm telling Amazon. (Anybody with me? A
plurality of e-mail speaks louder than one.) This is in strict violation of
the Operation Agreement for the Associate program, which forbids attempts to
hide links, links being processed through redirects, failure to disclose use
of the Affiliate program, and tampering with other Affiliate links without
disclosure.

I'm sure there are plenty of similar clauses in the affliate programs from other e-commerce sites (and if there aren't it's an oversight for sure).

Assuming that you're asking about stripping affilate ids and replacing them with your own, then that's a shady, shady business and I wouldn't touch any VC with a ten-foot pole that would fund you that idea. How would you even propose to grow such a business seeing as you're in clear violation of the terms of the programs you would be relying on for revenue? It would be like proposing a startup where you hire ex-cons to mug people nightly in parks nationwide for a cut of their 'earnings.' Would you really think that such an idea had any thought put towards the future of the business?

If you're talking about pattern-matching URLs and redirecting to the wrong site (e.g. DownByTheBay.com -> eBay.com), then that kind of breaks the idea of a URL shortener. The shortened URL is supposed to take you to the location of the full URL.
Great PM. It's always interesting how much thought goes into challenges like this.

Favourite line:

I don't have a good formal reason for this, it just seemed intuitively right
Note that your reports are bound to your Webmaster Tools account: http://imgur.com/NQxLT.png
Emotional intelligence is the real deal in my humble opinion. I've gotten a lot from working on mine because it's such a part of everything we do (emotions influence the choices we make, how we react to people, etc. etc.)
An interview with a real life Gordon Ramsay, A restaurant consultant
Not sure what this is. Any thoughts?
Really, memory _leaks_ are the issue. I have created a web application that needs to poll the server every few seconds. I've done everything I can to prevent memory leaks, even using a pool of reused DOM objects. I ran it for about 15 hours. At the end, Firefox 3.6 was using only 42 MB of memory while IE 8 was using over 650 MB.
Am I the only one that doesn't think this makes any sense?

Perhaps the programmer in me is dying, but this seems like a programmery thing to do. "Look at this cool new trend! Let's genericize it! Let's make a protocol for it for the whole web to use!" I understand that open standards are the backbone of the web. but as far as I'm concerned - that's where I think it ends. I'm sure there's a standardized system for how water/electricity/gas goes in & out of my house, but once it's there I get to decide what happens.

Perhaps I don't see any value in the web where this standard is pervasive. OK, so my Facebook status, Twitter tweets, and Livejournal musings are all on this fancy standard. Now what? It can be crawled better? It can be aggregated? Why do I care? I can't think of a single thing that helps me as the content producer or helps me as the consumer.

Maybe it's better that I wasn't around when things like CSS were first being specified. I can't say if I would have complained or not. But this doesn't seem like CSS being spec'd. This seems like someone taking note of Geocities, Angelfire, and Tripod in 1999 and proposing a DIY website publishing specification. It seems stupid.
I want to throw that in my kitchen, and run my web app on it. (look in my profile for more details, still a wip)
I agree, these tests are quite useless. In addition to the points above:

1. The huge variability in load times for various pages clearly depends much more on the page being loaded rather than the browser.

2. There is no discussion of what a meaningful test result might be. What does it mean if one browser is 10milliseconds faster than another in an artificial benchmark?

3. Some of the browsers couldn't successfully complete the benchmark, but were still included.

4. The overall winner is determined by the number of wins in each category. Internet explorer bombs on all the artificial bench marks, but loads real pages quite well. Because there are only 5 page load tests and 13 benchmarks, it loses badly. Honestly, which is more important?
This is a very detailed account of geography and its effects on national development. I have lived in China and studied Chinese geography a lot, but I learned new facts from this article. This article connects well with Thomas Sowell's remarks on how African river systems influenced the development of civilization in Africa.
The people who could answer your question are, sadly, not on HN, but off concentrating on their work.
When will companies learn to stop lying to their users and just issue real apologies?
Facebook Strategy: Move Fast And Break Things
Anatomy of a Rumor: The Story Behind Chief Justice John Roberts's 'Retirement'
About Eclipse: in most cases Eclipse never "invokes" a Java compiler--the compiler is built into the IDE! That's right, those .class files are getting built by the JDT Core plug-ins that come with Eclipse [1]. javac is never even used.

Of course, you could configure Eclipse to run ant or make or something else to compile your code, but the editor is still driving the integrated incremental compiler to mark up all your syntax errors.

[1] http://www.eclipse.org/jdt/core/index.php
The typical Windows user patches every 5 days
I don't think the idea itself is so terrible - there are a lot of social networks that largely duplicate each others' functionality, and it would be great if newcomers to the field could link in to a meta-network so that they were actually useful without building up huge userbases first. Facebook would have a lot less lock-in if I was able to build my own social service with some set of better features and people could choose to use it instead of Facebook, yet still reach everyone they used to interact with on Facebook without them all switching, too.

But...

OK, so my Facebook status, Twitter tweets, and Livejournal musings are all on this fancy standard

...and this might help somebody, somewhere, if any of those services were actually on this fancy standard.

I don't see any evidence that they are - I only see "Google Buzz, StatusNet, WordPress.com, and Tumblr have implemented some or all of these protocols today", which is a long shot from any true unification.

Or am I missing some other large set of supported sites?
Via coffee. Scratch that; via well-planned caffeine consumption: http://arvindn.livejournal.com/57651.html
> This seems like someone taking note of Geocities, Angelfire, and Tripod in 1999 and proposing a DIY website publishing specification. It seems stupid.

Why is making social networking distributed rather than centralized and 'silo-ed' a bad thing?
Twitter just passed 10 Billion Tweets
Revised Mac Developer Program