skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree completely. The biggest patent bullies have a gigantic portfolio to kill or milk any possible competitor. In particular some of the big software houses. Patent trolls don't bite IBM/Microsoft/Oracle just like piranhas don't prey on each other. They go attack/bully weaker prey. Most patent trolls seem to rarely go against any corporation with a big legal team/budget.

IBM vs. Sun: http://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html (It's great this was published on Forbes, else I'd be dismissed as a waco lefty, just like their reporting on Enron at about the same time.)
I wonder what their definition of an "active user" is.

I would be curious to know how many of their users have signed in within the last year and how many of those users have more than 0 friends.
High unlikely your app is going "viral". It's probably on the front page of something big. Uhh, can't you look at the referrer logs to find out where?
Is that because those 75% are farmvile players?

Ok in all honesty, many f2p games are intended as exactly that. Free to play and buy some online goods. I find that sometimes these f2p models are actually quite nice and can be worth spending money into. Other times I find f2p models evil and crippling the none f2p people. A good example was a mmorpg where you pay for a month of faster (2x) exp gain. Which is great and many do it, but the mmo was free otherwise. And you are not really crippled without the double xp.
Like Windows, Facebook, and others; it is the platform that makes Linux scalable. With that being, we'd like to create a platform for other developers to collaborate and develop their own.
The simple reason that's not true, is the general population contains many people with IQ below 60 but you don't find them holding down jobs let alone working as programmers.

As to there being more high IQ programmers or not that's a little more complex. However, I know the HN population has an extreme oversampling of people with 160+IQ's vs. the general population.

PS: Given there are less than 700k programmers in the US you would expect less than 100 to have an IQ > 160. So, if you can locate say 200 of them you can easily settle the issue.
Should have waited a day or two and then posted it so you spread out your HN coverage.

edit: Not to say that it isn't cool. It's very neat!
Threads are difficult. Concurrency is easier because most of it can be pushed to Databases, Web servers, ThreadPools, etc.

The heavy lifting has been done almost even before the crisis started.
I'm writing medical software that has the potential to save lives and has a real, measurable social impact. That's hardly factory work; I think that's a gross misrepresentation of our craft.
Ask HN: Do you think an interface like Flipboard is good for reading HackerNews?
I think Flipboard is beautiful, but it seems that Flipboard takes much more time to skim content. There are definitely pros/cons, but what do you think?
Some valid points, but he overemphasizes the new user experience. Logged in users answer questions and create value. Optimize for them. Badges, votes and tags exist to encourage certain behaviors from that community.

New users get answers easier than on any other site. Users who understand the value of the site will spend time to learn become valuable community members. Lowering the barrier to entry would lower the quality of the content.
-steep learning curve compared to rails, django, grails, etc
- lots of configuration (I mean a lot, no convention over configuration)
- application servers are not easy, tomcat can be a nightmare in term of rapid deployment/undeploy routines, just think about heroku on the other hand
Woops. I totally missed this one:

> It has to be a "real" language. As in: a language that is actually used by a significant number of people in paid jobs.

Either way, as first languages go, they're not bad, as they let you get those immediate results. There's pretty minimal fluff. (I think. To be honest, I couldn't write anything in either of them, anymore.)

I suppose you could call them oddball, though.
I would have mentioned it had my university of choice not been Oxford though...
How would you rate yourself?
It would probably have to be an idea to add value for a business (since the normal ads and user won't bring in the real money). Maybe you are right about the monetizable, Hacker News was kind of my last hope to get to that idea. :)
Actually, there are far more apps being built on various Java stacks than the alternatives - it's just that the people using them collect a paycheck and go home at 5 rather than blogging about it. The heavyweight, large business and government market is almost exclusively Java

Also, lots of people judge Java frameworks based on monstrosities like J2EE, Struts or Spring. But there are several very nice, truly lightweight Java frameworks, and even more for alternative JVM languages. The Java stack often does suck, but it doesn't have to suck.
A license change is a bad example. Nobody can switch the license for Linux. It has always been GPLv2-only, you'd need the approval of all contributors to the kernel to switch.
According to the 1800 US Census, 17% of the US population back then were slaves. This seems rather hard to square with a graph claiming that more than 80% of the labor force were "free agents".
You're asking this question on a site that is "startup focused" which means they aren't going to have a team of 20 developers churning out java byte code...they're going to be using more modern, dynamic languages like Python and Ruby because the popular full-stack frameworks that are behind Python and Ruby are better suited to get ideas off the ground as opposed to the monolithic JEE stack.
Indeed it's not just about the money, and the quality of the working environment is at least as important. The best companies I've worked at were were bureaucracy was deliberately kept to the absolute minimum level. It's hard to really innovate if you're simultaneously bogged down by process.
Is this the business directory of the future?
This actually further highlights the issue of code that is "self-documenting" to one person but not the other. "get_exponent" would confuse the heck out of me (is it just supposed to return the second argument unchanged?), but I would have no trouble with "pow" or "exp". But a comment that says "raise x to the power of n; n must be an int" leaves much less room for interpretation.
The Top Idea in Your Mind
Positive Sum Games Don't Require Natural Talent
> Doesn't the world already have pretty much all the software developers it needs?
I'm unaware of the job market elsewhere, but in New Zealand there's a distinct shortage of good developers and a decline in the number of CS graduates.
This one is simple, but I like it. Use -X command to launch a local x11 session for a given remote application. Works for Linux and OSX machines with x11 installed.

>ssh -X user@remoteserver.com will connect you.
>gedit file.txt

will launch a remote instance (viewable locally) of gedit with the remote file.txt loaded and ready for editing. Especially good for those who don't like command line editors (note: gedit must be installed on the remote machine for the example to work.)
We'll have many more update videos, so I am not that worried about it.

The next video with the new UI and features will be pretty mind blowing.

I'll also start writing lots of blog posts about how stackvm works, that should also increase coverage.
Returned to the site in the last 30 days.
Thanks, very useful page - I had the link to some US organization but not to NRCanada
Whenever I hear someone say "that's how it's always worked and always will", that's a red flag right there.
If you change the window.history.pushState() call to window.history.replaceState(), it doesn't add bazillions of entries to your history, which makes it slightly more practical.

javascript:var dashes = ""; var num = 20; while(--num) dashes += "-"; setInterval(function() { window.history.replaceState("", "", dashes.slice(0, num % 20) + "foo" + dashes.slice(num % 20)); num++;}, 500)
The issue here isn't whether search engines or ISPs or other middlemen collect deserved or undeserved value; net-neutrality is not at all about capping the ISP's income!

Net-neutrality rules are meant to ensure that the ISP will keep a level playing field for all business passing through it. Google has kept the playing field perfectly level for all news shops, it's just that the field has become very bad for all of them.
Totally lied about graduating from Harvard.
I like how he graduated from Harvard in '06 in '02.
The reason to document WHAT code does, is so a reader can parse it faster. The most common ignorant reader is yourself, several weeks/months later.

Method names are good, but some clue about the approach is helpful too, which the method name would probably not include.
I never meant to call anybody on here stupid, but it's how I felt about that guy back then.

It's difficult to quantify the increase in productivity using Django - since I never wrote the same project twice and a lot depends on the Java frameworks you use and the type of apps you write - but I certainly feel more productive and: happier! A lot can be explained by the fact that I'm basically forced to do the whole compile-war-deploy cycle on my current Java project and that Python allows me to write real generic code.

Be sure to first check out the tutorials in the Django docs because setting up a project for the first time can be a bit intimidating. Totally worth it, though ;)
I am. Most of the visits are direct.
How Map/Reduce works in Riak - webinar this Thursday
Today (Wednesday 21st) is the last day to register
Actually, you can code very nice lightweight apps using an embedded servlet container like Jetty, a JSP library, and an ORM (MyBatis or Hibernate). Which is kind of like the idea of a microframework.

I've used it for a demo I've made (some NLP stuff in Java that needed a web frontend, but where running it under Tomcat would have been like the tail wagging the dog) and it worked quite well.

I guess that all the people who want a microframework to get small things done efficiently have moved away from Java at this point, appalled by the whole J2EE circus. And once you have something as elaborate as the J2EE stack as it's meant to be, JSPs are not a good fit, because they don't enforce a separation between presentation and business logic.
I think that was Philip Guo's "Geek Behaviors" piece. He writes some pretty interesting stuff:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1078529
Ah, good old irrelevant Aleksey. I trust you and your site are doing well? It's always good to hear from you. I glad I was able to provide you an opportunity to advertise your website. Have an excellent day! :)
Sounds like a problem with any OS license, not just AGPL...
Not saying he graduated, rather simply saying he's attending Harvard, part of the 06 class, which at the time was definitely true.
Note the past tense.
Get Current Url in PHP
at least link to a funny one.

http://i.imgur.com/QMSbf.jpg
Is that true? The troll in this article seemed to be going up against some major companies. I'm no lawyer, but it seems like if you're looking for 8-figure payoffs it would be better to hit up companies for whom that's a minor expense, not an existential threat.
Not really. It says his last login was 2002. The clear assumption was he was a student at Harvard in the class of 2006.
They also decided not to charge any additional fees for 3G calls. This is fantastic!
Title is completely wrong.

The article says Orkut could be forced to close and Google faces fines because it lacks content control features to prevent cyber crime (e.g. child porn etc) in that network.
How can we be sure 100% it's reallly Mark Zuckerberg's of Facebook fame? I couldn't see anything definitive in the profile.
New community site for R users
Google reverses previous China policy - Censorship is OK now
It's not surprising: a lot of what's happening there isn't coding related. e.g., I keep getting unsolicited requests to do technical writing.
Yes, although the silicon was slow coming. For a while, the iPod was the only game in town. The few other devices that used AAC at the time (like a Sony 8cm CD player I used to use) used the older MP3 style container instead of the modern MOV/M4A wrapper.
In case your post wasn't a joke (like mine), the '06 is his class year, not necessarily his graduation date.
So much ink wasted on this, now please stop. Tell me what Apple going to do next.
Hmm, could it be the projected graduation year ?
I have used Swing a bit more than the author of the article did, and it really took Sun way to long to improve upon it. Before Java 6 it had some noticeable gaps and the performance was rather bad. But since then it's not that bad in that regard, you'll even get your System Tray icons (Sun used to be _very_ conservative about that. If it's not available everywhere, no soup for you.)

And any GUI toolkit is complex. Often this is hidden behind IDE boilerplate code or GUI builders, but it's there. Once you get the hang of Swing, you're able to adapt it to your liking a lot (event handling, custom UI elements etc.). I still remember early X11 toolkits that appeared to be easy, but once you went beyond their boundaries, it was "drop down to Xlib" time.

Regarding the look and feel: Strangely enough the one platform that cares the least about that is Windows. Yes, the old Metal L&F sticks out, but once you stick to the system colors, any differences vanish. The typical user probably already uses lots of so-called native apps that look differently, as every Office release has new kinds of toolbar buttons etc, there's still apps out with huge check marks and crosses on their OK/Cancel buttons etc. The main issue I had with Swing here was getting the "feel" okay, i.e. drag-and-drop, shortcuts, the behavior of tree elements...

Of course, on Mac, everything that isn't done in Cocoa looks and feels alien. It's possible to get rather close with Swing and Qt, but it takes a lot of effort.
Cloud Computing It's Personal
Yeah, it's certainly somewhere in the data access portion of the code.
It is kind of interesting how there is some kind of karma in the whole privacy debate here. All of his info is being aired out in public. So far its been fairly benign, but it looks like it might get dirty here pretty soon.
Also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1536210
Should use $_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"] to detect if it's SSL or not rather than blindly using http://.
Definitely stop by and see Steve if you can, great guy to talk to.
To those who don't yet associate the mbyrne handle with Bringing The Funny (as we say in my home country), my above comment was meant as an obvious joke. Probably not obvious enough. Probably not funny enough, either.
My personal favourite:

- Get a cheap development box (Linode, Slicehost, etc.)

- Set Firefox to use Socks Host 127.0.0.1:8080

- Open up your terminal and enter this: ssh -C2qTnN -D 8080 your-user@example.com

Et voilà, you're tunneling all your browser traffic through the development box.
Using VBulletin? Make sure to update asap
How to elicit interest in Linux.
Ssh already compresses, so you can drop the z. And generally cpio does a better job preserving the file system structure (hard links, time stamps). And it tends to be a bit more cross-platform, if you don't have GNU tar on both ends.
It takes you 10 periods of time in JSP to do what you can do in PHP in 1 period of time.
Very cool, I love my analog Holga (some snaps here: http://www.velvetcache.org/2010/07/14/more-lomo-photos ). Though I'm sure many in the community would rebel against digital.
Anyone ever use codemyconcept.com for psd to html? 
UI designer here, and was wondering if anyone had any experience with them? They seem pretty popular, html/css looks good, but anyone have an experience?
Assuming it's as valid contract, can the fact that it was apparently unknown until now count against it? It seems fairly obvious that subsequent investors would have bought out this guy at a much earlier stage if they'd known that there was someone with such a significant share.
I found this useful to remind me to use stronger words in my prose.
Also, the X-Core-Value number changes with each request (appears random).
Can anyone recommend a book about working out? As in about exercises and such.
Now if only they would release their Android client for phones that aren't on Verizon's network. Artificial limitations make me rage...
Combined Effect of CD Packaging and Folder Printing on Marketing Campaigns
Many printing products can be used in combination for enhanced effects in a marketing campaign. The CD packaging and folder printing products can also be used together.
Has PG matured an incredibly amount in the last few years? Honestly, I hated his writing before (which may be part of the point, incite controversy and get me to remember who he was and what he said), but lately I've thought his essays were very well done...

Am I alone in this trend? Did he just win me over because of time?

On this particular topic he's quite right that letting your mind drift, but also controlling the environment of that can lead to good things. I'm going to actively make an effort to try this from now on.
Proper link: http://jasonlbaptiste.com/startups/how-to-become-a-millionai...
Interestingly, that all depends on how you define "internet access". They say a user is someone who has knowledge of the web and the ability to access the internet. (from http://www.internetworldstats.com/surfing.htm)

However, according to Wikipedia, most people have a cell phone (67% of the world population). I would consider access to the cellular network equal to access to the Internet, since many services (such as Google's) are available to cell
users.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_...

Edit: And for what it's worth, I think you can operate your Facebook account fully through just a phone and text messages (but I could be wrong). No need for a full-blown computer and high speed internet.
PG is a bona fide philosopher. Just as we had the epicureans and the stoics, and their houses, we now how the house of ycombinator. AFAIK PG doesn't necessarily want it to get cultish, but its not cultish if its based in reason. And based in reason it is. Articles like these are what makes yc more than just a group of people doling out money for good material ideas. Its a forum for thinking about philosophical ideas too. This makes it an idealistic culture, and thats pretty cool.

Background on sensate, ideational, and idealistic cultures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitirim_Sorokin
I have! They did a couple of websites for me, well for clients' and I have to say, mark up was impressive.

You don't have to worry at all.
That's generally on sites hosted by wordpress.com (TechCrunch and others).
Unless your company will hire only the 10x programmers, though, it kills morale if you're paying some people 10% as much as other people to do similar-looking jobs. An exception is if someone is an acknowledged superstar: nobody will really be upset if Donald Knuth is hired at 10x their salary. But if you're paying two non-famous programmers a 10x difference, and expect them to work together well as a team, problems will likely result.
Just out of curiosity, why did you go through the trouble of hiding the link behind bit.ly?
You didn't take gzipping in account. Taking it in account, it's 105 bytes.
I think Morgan's figures may have excluded slaves. They weren't paid a paycheck either, so they fall in neither category.
I used CMC a few weeks ago and they're really awesome!

If you use Code My Concept service please send greetings to Diego, he was my programmer and he rocks!
Sweet! Want.
You can easily make a career in machine learning with a Master's degree, and a thesis that focuses on a ML problem.

To work as a scientist in a research lab, you do need a PhD, very few Master's candidates can make it there.

But to work in startups and some large companies doing Machine Learning mostly is not that hard.

I have worked in various companies as a "Research Engineer" and "Data Mining Engineer". I know someone who is a "Scientist" doing NLP in Yahoo Research and has only a Masters.
Years ago Facebook had a feature that would show you the shortest paths between you and the person you were looking at. I don't know if they got rid of it for privacy or performance reasons, but it was pretty cool.
A very closely related idea is that most people have a "ground state": an activity that they naturally gravitate toward when nothing else intervenes.

For many people, their ground state is shopping, or talking with friends, or watching tv. Nothing wrong with any of these.

For some people, their ground state is aimless coding, or writing, or drifting around some community (e.g., the community of actors, or musicians, etc). Again, nothing wrong with any of these, and they may be a useful way of learning, or having ideas.

But for a very small number of people their ground state is much more focused. I've known people whose ground state is writing papers about physics or mathematics. And it's simply unbelievable what such people can get done in a year. (Note, mind you, that very few professional physicists or mathematicians fall into this category.)

I haven't founded or worked at a startup. My observation-from-the-outside is that founders often have to take on many different tasks. And I wonder how difficult that must make it for any of them to become a ground state task.
Currently VMWare and qemu. Virtualbox should also also work. Anything that runs VNC actually.
They also say they hope the court ruling in their favor may deter other big companies tempted to bully a start-up, as they say Corbis did.

There is absolutely no chance of this happening.

The reverse though is another story. It may encourage start-ups to fight back. And win.
aka php
Blind Type allows you to type without looking at your screen
A mere claim that something is a deriviative work doesn't make it so; you'd have to show priority, connection and derivation. All of which are trickier than you'd think. If a company sends out a press release and two bloggers write stories about that company that are substantively similar but not word for word identical and one of them accused the other of copying, that would be a difficult case to prove.

Generally speaking a derivative work implies the overt appropriation of elements of the original; for instance if you write a novel about the rich inner life of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, that would be derivative of Ian Fleming's body of work. If however, you write a novel about a spy with a sex addiction problem who works for the Dutch Secret service and is blond and you very carefully avoid duplicating any precise plot points from any of the James Bond novels, it may be derivative in the sense that it's obvious you were emulating Ian Fleming, but it would not legally be a derived work.
I've been doing this for the last six months, and I didn't even realize it until now.

Thank you.
Well, for most of the people "web" and "internet" are the same things.

I think there was a Google experiment where they asked what is the internet, and people would just say internet explorer, meaning web is their internet.
Thanks Alec, that was a cool video!
Sign up Date: May 23, 2002 9:30:12 PM
Username: zberg02
Formal Education:
Phillips Exeter Academy '02
Harvard University '06

Unless someone was impersonating him in 2002, I'd say it's a safe bet that it's him.
Sigh, this thing doesn't actually exist as a product at this time. At the right price point, I would buy one.

If you want to experiment with plastic-lens digital photography, you can buy a lens for Canon, Nikon, Sony, and Pentax cameras here: http://holgamods.com/

Here's an example of a picture shot with my DSLR + Holga Lens:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/martincron/862955606/in/set-721...