skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> So poor small time developer can't sue any large company for a substantial payout because they can't afford the $N x 1% fee? I don't think that'll work.

Do you think a small developer can sue a large company for substantial payout today? They cannot - litigation costs start at $100K and go north from there (Not to mention, filing and maintaining a patent costs a minimum of $20K-$30K). Today, when these lawsuits actually go to court, you have investors in the lawsuit - either someone financing it, or the lawfirm itself ("contingency") is the investor. So things might change a little, but not by much.

If your invention is really worth $100M, and you can't find a way to get $10M out of it -- then it's not worth $100M. The problem with the current system is that it lets you claim (and believe) that it is worth that much.

> The real solution to this is time. We'll eventually get a new set of judges and legislators that understand technology. The former is all that's really needed though their extended terms make change very slow

Every generation believes that things will change for the better once the older generation steps down. That has been wrong every single time, and I bet it will be wrong with respect to patent judges as well.

> Once you've got level headed judges willing to throw out bullshit cases and impose punitive fees on trolls, this entire problem goes away. Until then, it makes financial sense for trolls to operate and even legitimate companies have to play that game to survive.

The problem is not trolls. Trolls are a (relatively) recent phenomenon banking on the brokenness of the patent system. They might go away with minor changes or a change of the guard -- I don't disagree.

But what I argue is that the problem is much deeper - the patent system is broken by virtue of allowing the patenting of software, business patents, and other intangible processes -- as it is (even if all trolls disappeared tomorrow), it lets the incumbents (IBM, Intel, AT&T, Microsoft, Google) kill any new competitor easily and cheaply, by virtue of holding a 100,000 strong portfolio of patents that shouldn't have been awarded in the first place.

The fact no company has yet done this is not proof that the system is fine. See e.g. Shkreli & drug pricing - the broken market structure was there all along, but the incumbent players raise prices slowly (albeit at 5x inflation) so it's not noticed. But then Shkreli came along and did a fast-forward, exposing the system, which got everyone mad, and Shkreli retaliated against. The other players are not more fair - they are just more patient. And similar brokenness exists with respect to patents.
Edge already has Cortana-specific browser chrome. (Some restaurant pages, for example, will light up Cortana's halo in the address bar and clicking that will open a Cortana sidebar full of action cards like "Create a Reservation".) It's not surprising that the plans are to continue adding Cortana functionality in Edge, and to work to make that hand-off between "Taskbar Cortana" and "Edge Cortana" as seamless as possible.

Theoretically they could probably leverage extensions to other browsers, but making sure users had those extensions installed and handing off to those extensions would presumably be A) a bunch of additional work for the teams involved, and B) threaten to show a bunch of seams between the application boundaries, hurting the suspension of disbelief that Cortana is an "individual" working in our favor, potentially weakening Cortana in the public's eyes.
Coincidentally, I'm working on a travel app and had to spend some time automating let's encrypt on our servers because of the update. In the end, I came out as a huge fan of LE.
What you say made me think of hamachi, a nice vpn overlay network for windows (at first) from the late 90s, and guess what happened to it?

> For paid subscribers Hamachi runs in the background on idle computers. The feature was previously available to all users, but became restricted to paid subscribers only [0]

More short sighted business practices as usual.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LogMeIn_Hamachi
> There's even some anecdotal evidence in dating sites/posts that single mothers are increasingly more open of their demanding that men "man up" and accept another's child/children as part of the package.

If you're going to seriously date a single mother, what other option do you have?

I'm not suggesting that you meet the kids on the second date, but if you're seriously romantically involved with someone for six months, you're not going to be able to continue that relationship with the single parent without having some involvement with the kids, too.

It seems crazier to me to have the option of opting out of the kids in this scenario. Do you just live separately until they turn 18?
Gratitude Button
We already offer replication so that if a node goes down (or loses data) clients can still get their files.

We could add deduplication to our system but it's not a priority for us just yet
Like standardized testing, interviewing is a bullshit measure of what you really know.

Like standardized testing, the way to win is to get good at taking the tests. Even if you disapprove, this is how you get a job. I've accepted this.
Strange, but true:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen-cooled_turbo_generato...

- http://www.power-eng.com/articles/print/volume-113/issue-6/f...
Let me rephrase it, are we diagnosing these disorders wrongly or are we heading towards a human population which has more people with disorders then not? Because 1 in 38 or 42 are scary numbers.
This is one of the most high-impact tools Google has. Although it is difficult to use and the data it produces hard to analyze, it can tell you things that no other tool can. My favorite mode is dead code coverage mode. At startup all the trace hooks are enabled. At first function entry the hook is logged and then disabled (overwritten with a run of nop). A function that hasn't logged by the time the program exits may be dead code.
You would be surprised. While I am not looking, I get recruited often. I probably spend too much time giving recruiters feedback but I can't help myself. I am blunt and honest and recruiters actually respond well to it.

I refuse to take captive positions partly because of the craziness in the workplace but also because I can make much more contracting then what most employers are willing to pay.

Funny thing is now you are starting to see companies looking to hire contractors and wanting to make the contractors jump through these silly hoops (taking silly quizzes, take home projects, etc.)

I always come back with a proposal that includes cost & timeline to complete the take home project. I have gotten a couple gigs that way :)
Prototypal Object-Oriented Programming Using JavaScript
The problem I see with his solution is on the other side. Alot of very good/creative developers and technical people tend to be of a non-social sort. As a result, restricting yourself to known people will inherently miss the people who don't move into the "scene" (whatever that happens to be). This just leads to a different set of problems and ultimately results in a "broken" process as well, just a different kind of broken.
Is this a marketing survey? It starts asking for company name, website, address.
>Fat is very dense in calories, so if your goal is to reduce caloric intake, reducing the fat will go a long ways towards that goal.

This thinking empowers so much over-eating in today's diet world. There's a trope with the broken low-fat wisdom that when you buy low-fat foods, you're almost always buying high-sugar high-salt foods (have to replace flavor somehow).

Even worse, upper intestinal lipids trigger a feeling of satiation, of fullness, through the gut–brain–liver axis.

If you deprive yourself of lipids, you deprive yourself of satiation -- eating a healthy mix of fats in your meals helps you feel more full and sated and eat overall less, and feel good about eating overall less.
> Vastly more costly than pumped water, high upkeep costs.

I dunno, large areas of land, large earthmoving equipment, and the labor to turn it into a pumped-water storage system are all pretty expensive too.
Cool, thanks for the clarification! It was a late night for me too so I wasn't as clear as I thought I was being.
If you have clients pressing you to use code that requires a permission prompt in an ad then you need to have a very straightforward conversation with them about the effect such prompts have on conversion rates.
Yes, I felt uncomfortable with how much this just re-used his article.

"How to hit your article deadlines: Copy another article and use it as your own."

Yes, they provide references, but it's still just a rehash.
Europe’s Case Against Google Might Help Rivals More Than Consumers
Bad deal for Tunsil, but as a Dolphins fan, I have to feel a bit happy about how this all played out. We got arguably the most talented O-Line player in the draft, at pick #13. If this kid stays healthy and clean, he could be the steal of the draft.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11584933
Show HN: Free Website Speed Test with Analytics and Improvement Tips
I think the joke goes that there are two kinds of people: those who look at porn, and those who lie about it.
Well. How do we deal with that ? Procrastination is a symptom for many different things. Depression being one of the worst of them.

How do we differentiate healthy procrastination from fear or depressive thoughts pattern ?
The funny thing is I quit hacking because it was easy, mostly unimaginative, and repetitive. The high-assurance systems and security fields were much more interesting. Especially the CompSci work. These are about straight-up engineering systems or security methods in ways that they'll always work given a specific threat model. Lots of good stuff came out of that field with things occasionally breaking in new ways due to immaturity of computing discipline. Yet, certain things are well understood to the point that 60's-80's era methods get 80-90% of the job done. Still unknown to most INFOSEC people in mainstream. So, don't worry when they act cocky. :)

Anyway, the market rejected that to maximize profit with buggy software and consumers wanted unnecessary complexity at a rapid pace in every aspect of computing. So, I typically recommend medium assurance solutions these days. Safe-by-default languages, interface checks (esp Design-by-Contract), usage-based testing to keep users happy, fuzz-testing to find lack of input validation, static/dynamic analysis tools, good architecture, good middleware, OS with few 0-days, and so on. These cover you mostly.

What type of apps do you build on what platforms?

EDIT to add: Link below has a link and description to lots of defense techniques that aren't boring at all. What do you think on that?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11596646
I might be moving to Zurich in a year or two. How is the tech scene there?
I think it's worth noting that the reason you have the degree isn't to show knowledge, it's to show you're willing to complete a process that's out of your control, but you do it anyway because that's what is expected.

The ideals are always nice to have, but if I have to fight with a new hire over every built-in process because he doesn't immediately see the value in it, I'm going to get irritated at him.
"Heck, there are a lot of companies that aren't "tech companies" but they still employ developers."

Exactly this! IMO these are some of the best types of jobs too. You generally have real problems to solve and can see the impact you are making in the business.
Such a tragic thing to read. I hope that his family and friends get through this.

Please reach out if you or someone you know are having suicidal thoughts:
1 (800) 273-8255
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
Perhaps a gentler interim solution would have been to only allow accuracy to town/city level over http.
> I expect YOU to jump through MY hoops

uh, no. he doesn't expect them to do anything, especially not jump through any hoops, because he doesn't want to work for them. end of story. that's it, there's no catch. have a nice life.

if you don't understand that, it's no wonder you're on the other side of this fence.

also, your use of the word "need" is telling of your mindset.
I opened up the console of HN's page.
Building a Unit-Testable API in Golang
Graham's number helped me deal with the fact that someday I do want to die, cause to live for Graham's Number of years would drive any sentient being to insanity.
Elektra 0.8.16 Release
Looking at a github profile would take about the same amount of time as walking to the conference room to conduct the interview. So I'm not buying the "you're wasting interviewers time with that stuff" line.

Can also serve as a good source of questions - can the candidate answer questions about his/her own code?
Much more meaningful then some riddles or BST traversal.
Thank you, Pieter. This brings up my 80 year-old father's death by cancer 8 years ago. The end came less than two weeks after the diagnosis, despite the doctor estimating 3-6 months.

Having flown halfway across the USA, I was fortunate to be there for his last two hours, unlike one brother, who arrived a day late. I wish I had come with happy memories to share, but the suddenness and shock of seeing him holding on by a slender thread obliterated such thoughts. I took over for the at-home hospice nurses and ministered care according to his heart and respiratory rates.

My mother had prayed in the next room, "Lord, take this good man," and it was obvious that his end was imminent.

Oddly, my experience felt similar to seeing the Twin Towers burn from a mile across the Hudson River. My eyes were riveted to the inferno until I turned to look away, then magically believed that when I returned my gaze everything would be right and intact.

Dad's eyes never opened, but his expression brightened when I said, "Dad, it's Dave." After hearing my mom's prayer, I busied myself with his nursing care, but was stymied about what to say. I had already told him the most important things on the phone after hearing the news from him that he was dying without regrets. He was lucid and conversant then. Now, he was teetering between states of coma and listening heart.

When my mother stepped into the hallway outside their condo, I counted his respirations – 32 per minute – and gave him a dropper of lorazepam, as directed. I said to him: "I can't ask you to stick around." I wanted him to know it was okay to let go but had no other words to say it. Facially, he shrugged. Thus did he begin his final retreat. I called my oldest brother and his son into the room and we called his name as he drew his last breaths. When Mom returned it was all over.

I still wonder, if I had come with loving memories to share, would he have held on through the night and into the next morning, long enough for his middle son to say goodbye?

It could be my life's project to write about my father, but my life has too much urgency to reflect so long on the past. Maybe things will settle enough for that in the future, but not now.

I am grateful for your valuable experience and will explore your writings. You are helping your family and others with everything you've done. I believe you are having a marvelous adventure.

David Forshtay
Bridging C++ to Scala with BridJ
Creative you are, and you're right, idea that Bloomberg would feel they're a competitor to ZH is a joke.
I like the procrastinator's matrix:

https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://...

Will print it and stick to my wall... Next time when I need to procrastinate.
GitHub Is Your New Resume (2011)
Do you know if there is any interest to re-introduce the feature? It'd certainly be nice to be able to eliminate overflow bugs without runtime overhead.
I have read through every comment here, and fail to see a lack of self-awareness in any of them. Perhaps you are seeing things from a perspective I have not considered...or you are boldly trolling from a throwaway account. If it is the former, please elaborate.
Fintech and Customer Experience
Does pre-publication "peer review" not already function to some extent similarly as an indicator of level of agreement rather than a disinterested, objective quality and significance threshold? Everything I know of human processes suggests that it would.
I know I can write a working JS application without semicolons, however I can also write a working JS application where with `eval` and `with`.

The issue is not whether or not one individual can learn to use dangerous feature X. If you are writing code by yourself for your own use, you can use nested eval's and no semicolons with a little bit of `with` here and there, nothing wrong with that. However when you are writing code that is supposed to be developed by people other than you, you might want to write less clever code.

I could write code without semicolons, however that would mean that I would have to constantly keep an eye out for that case where I absolutely need to add it to prevent ASI from doing the wrong thing. It takes probably 100ms to hit that semicolon key, however it takes a lot more time to debug code without semicolons.

If you hat semicolons with a passion for some reason, you could use Coffee Script or some other language which was designed without semicolons and has clear semantics around it.
Ah, my mistake. What would your logical explanation be for this then?
Cutting Alfalfa production is fairly cheap in the long term which fits well with California's regular droughts. However, using prehistoric water to farm Alfalfa is crazy IMO.

The problem with Almonds is they are trees, so letting them die is far more costly.
I would have to say that my problem has more to do with too many easily available distractions, instead of procrastination. I made a point that while at work my browser was never used for anything except work and email was only to be read and answered at specific points during the day, and sometimes only at the end of the day. In addition, I discouraged anyone from sending me personal email to my work address so any personal items were addressed when I got home. All of this seemed to cure my "procrastination" problem.
I'm rooting for a competitor that isn't bing. If Microsoft gets any significant market share it could mean yet another monopoly under their belt. They can't even compete directly without having to lock out their competitors.
Okay where's the data or are you just conjecturing on normalized societal "standards"?
This is true - a friend told me how he got hired in Bloomberg, he just asked a friend about their interview process and questions, breezed in. Anyone could do this. Now, Bloomberg might feel it is making a mockery of their recruitment process, I prefer to think of it revealing how crap it is.
> Is this behavior wide-spread?

Yes, it's a universal problem and more often than not, the bigger the company-- the worse they are.

In recruiting circles, "candidate experience" is a perennial topic. The Bigger Take-Away, HR doesn't belong in the hiring business. It seems counter-intuitive, isn't that what HR is supposed to do?

Consider that instantly you understood how this reflected poorly on your company's relationships with the Dev Community. HR doesn't care about that, they don't hang with those people. More importantly, there's a negative impact on the bottom line. And if you can't ship by deadline because you're under-resourced, that impacts your bonus. Shoulder shrug from the HR flunkies, they get paid the same no matter what.
To further expand on Apple's recommendation to not make Swift libraries just yet — It's also an matter of compatibility. You could certainly make a Swift framework, but given that Swift as a language is changing every 6 months or so right now, it doesn't make sense to make a framework using Swift.

You could easily hold up another project if you haven't changed your Swift code to the latest, or the opposite is true as well: Your Swift framework is up-to-date with the latest language, but the app using your framework is not, etc.
I am extremely jealous. I would love to be able to move there.
Apparently modern Intel CPUs will fuse JO instructions to preceding adds, producing the effect of dedicated "checked add" instructions:

https://gist.github.com/regehr/65252e90fb6bad82d533#gistcomm...
Teenagers still don't have the wisdom or experience of someone in their 30s and I would hardly call them 'young adults'.

I knew so many kids that had parents that would treat them like adults..and they still made all of the stupid mistakes as the rest of us.

It's most likely a culture change. So many teenagers are becoming non-social and filling their time with the phone rather than sex.
I'd be curious to see how something like private defense agencies [1] would work out in practice.

[1]: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Libertarian/Machinery_of_Freed...
When people ask an "honest question," in general they are explicitly stating they'd like an honest answer (in this case, is there an API) and not a charged and irrelevant commentary that snarkily begins with the words "honest question."

Don't mean to pick on you in particular, but this drives me nuts on HN. The parent probably really just wanted to know if there was an API and figured fostering discussion would be nicer than simply googling for the answer.

I did not get the impression the parent was making a comment about Microsoft with any political valence attached; there are genuine technical and taste reasons to wonder if you can swap out a search engine or a browser on a computer for a given task.
#ff99cc is not the same
Yes this was meant to be my point - I didn't even consider ads using gelocation (which explains the downvotes I guess :))).

While we do use geolocation and ads on one of our sites, it's only a single page so this doesn't really affect us that much. I can see it causing big problems with ad-supported sites / services that use geolocation as a primary feature though as I've experienced first-hand the revenue drop that HTTPS causes.
I don't think any company will wait a few quarters to invest in something. And if they did that and win, well, they have invented a time machine.
The Internet Economy
Ya, I'm a computer scientist with Aspergers (part of the Autism spectrum), one app that I wrote was for non-verbal autistic kids to allow them to speak via an IPad (OneVoice). I can't imagine having to deal with that.
It cuts two ways - if the hiring company expects me to waste, sorry, invest, my time reading their corp pages to make sure I have learnt all about them pre-interview, they can damn well take the time to read my profile and code snippets.
Teen took Snapchat photos crashing Mercedes at 107mph. Her victim sued Snapchat
The author burned himself out and then tried to shift the blame onto the person he's contracting for. Taking care of your physical and mental health is part of being a professional programmer too.
Hopper both invented the concept of compiler and
wrote the 1st one.

No.

A_0 was a simple linker in 2016 parlance, not a compiler.

In Hopper's own description: "All I had to do was to write down a set of call numbers, let the computer find them on the tape, bring them over and do the additions. This was the first compiler" (cited from [1]). Here "find them on the tape" refers to
her habit of collecting
subroutines over the years and put them on tape. Each routine was given a call number, so that it the machine could find it on the tape.

I'm happy to believe that she created the first linker, although I have never looked into the history of linking and linkers.

Plankalkül was [...] before general purpose programmable
computers (ENIAC) were built so irrelevant.

The first general purpose computer was Zuse's Z3, at least in some understanding of this concept [2].

[1] C. Marx, Grace Hopper: The First Woman to Program the First Computer in the United States.

[2] R. Rojas, How to Make Zuse's Z3 a Universal Computer.
My favorite example along these lines is health care. If USA ever gets a reasonable health care system both GDP and productivity are going to plummet, even though everyone will be objectively better off.