skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is if you can first solve the problem of getting people with domain knowledge to work as patent clerks, or if there is a "peer review" process or something.

The alternative to patents is not "all information wants to be free", it's paranoid secrecy. If people are to invest in R&D, they need protection from copycats. I mean, check this out: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/07/business/07muffin.html
Unless you live with no tv and you check them 10 minutes daily to keep yourself informed of what's happening in your industry (i.e. they're not an addiction).
Yes, I have, which is why I said it wasn't a magic bullet, but something that should be given more of a shot. If it helps 10% of homeless get off the street, that could be a huge victory in and of itself.

BTW, for someone so attuned to the sensitivity of the homeless to condescension, you seem to have no problem saturating your own speech with it.
O'Reilly Radar posts about emerging languages
Seekers of alien life gather for SETIcon
The Corporation has gone Open Source
The Hacker News community has a strange and sad relationship with actual math, that is, math as mathematicians define it. Math formalizable in ZFC and not arguments of A/B test effectiveness and VC funding.
Or do what most companies do, buy them.
Windows 8 leaked on craigslist
I reached this point in my life where I realized I'd only be "really on to something" if I was working on something that didn't make sense to everybody else... If I was working on something that everybody else understood and see the value in, I'd be too late.
I agree with some points in this article, but there are dangerous points here as well.

Its dubious to say that in the face of Windows and Office, Ruby is not worth investing in - in the face of windows and Office, NOTHING is worth investing in.

This is a common business trap - why spend money on insignificant businesses when you already have giant product lines - that many companies fall into. Microsoft has already done it with Windows Mobile and IE, and is trying to avoid the same fate with its ZuneOS and Cloud Computing offerings.
Über Coca, by Sigmund Freud
Both Google and Verizon has denied these claims: http://twitter.com/googlepubpolicy/status/20393606477 and http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/verizon-statement-on...
Great link! I've joined one nearby and I guess we'll see what happens.
As a non-programmer, in that I use programming for math/eng problems, the main advantage for a dynamic language like python is that you do not have to compile it.

I'm not a good programmer so sometimes I have tiny errors and such and being able to vim exec.py fix ./exec.py can help tons.

I do a good amount of things in matlab and must say that I use the cmd line (REPL?) infinitely along with my programs, it is just so easy for me to find solutions that way compared to something like C# and for someone that doesn't always know how a function works using it on the command line with documentation is great.
So, in the interest of full discloser Dave, let's make sure everyone knows you named a web server after me:

http://github.com/KirinDave/fuzed

You and TPW named it "F U Zed" which to me is damn rude.

Based on that, I believe everyone should discount your opinion just from your obvious bias against me personally, but let's review what I actually did anyway.

First, I've got a decent laptop that's got 4 CPU cores and does pretty good running multiple processes. I think it'd hold up well enough for a few simple tests to make sure I didn't break anything. If you had read the blog post, I made this clear in numerous places, but obviously you didn't read the whole thing (or you're hoping other people have not read the whole thing).

Next, since I'm just testing the code to make sure I didn't break it, I just need to slam an older version and a newer version. Since they'll be tested in the same way, it should give me enough data to know. Even though there could be contention on the machine, with 4 cores it should be good enough to figure out if I screwed something up. Additionally, Mongrel2 does aggressive caching of files, so I'm really narrowing it down to just the poll code by hitting a small file.

All that combined with doing multiple runs and looking at the performance between them and for an evening of testing I've done enough to make sure it's not broken. That's it. I'm pretty damn sure you did that when testing your "Homage To Zed named FU" but hey, gotta hold the people you dislike to higher standards then yourself right?

Now, when I get Mongrel2 to a state where it's a real web server, that I actually wrote, rather than stole from Yaws and claimed I wrote, I'll let you know. I'll make sure to setup a massive EC2 cluster and test all the possible permutations a guy like you thinks are necessary to prove that it actually serves files.

Until then, this will do just fine to make sure that I'm not breaking anything.
That's a great link, thanks, but just the link would have done. Failing that if you're going to paste that much in, please attribute at the top as well as the bottom; I was very surprised to see that under "shawndumas" until I finally thought to check the end.

It should also be pointed out this response is from 1995, and I sort of started writing a half-hearted response but that's just dancing on somebody's grave at this point.
Have you ever prepared an estimate for a project with any unknowns? Can you make sure that plane on the blueprint can be successfully manufactured? Can your vendors deliver on time? Where are your vendor quotes? Are they all on time?

Having done quotes for a government agency, they always ask for you to do these estimates in half the normal time, but then take four times as long to get back to you with an answer.

And really, the quote was at the door of the base before the deadline. Do you really need to have it on a certain desk 500 yards away from the front door to be considered in? That's just being pedantic at that point.
Learning a new language is good for your brain. Either kind of language.
Joel is correct, but there are cases where the "trendy couple sipping Chardonnay in their living room outsourcing everything" is in fact adding value, namely, their entrepreneurial insight to recognize that a market is in disequilibrium, that current means are available to meet current demands, but that such has gone unnoticed. In fact, having such insights is what defines an entrepreneur.

I would recommend that anyone interested in the economic theory of entrepreneurship read Israel Kirzner's seminal work, "Competition and entrepreneurship."

http://books.google.com/books?id=OFNVW3N9hUUC
This was a very interesting post, but to be honest it didn't make me think "I need to learn more about multithreading", it just convinced me that I need to continue to stay away from multithreading whenever at all possible [1]. Having programs run in a way that's so far away from the way you would expect can't be the right way to do things.

[1] I tend to use processes and IPC whenever I can, for example.
Last I checked (which was a while ago), I don't think they were scanning inside 7-zip (.7z) archives.
The core university market seems to be voting with its feet.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-10903088
Wow, a "computer scientist with a background in the formal specification of programming languages" thinks that the SEC should be "using a formally-specified pure functional programming language".

Yes, and when I worked at GM, I thought everyone should buy GM cars. Go figure.
You are confusing dynamic typing with dynamic code interpretation.

So there ARE statically typed languages with a REPL, for example Haskell.

And there are dynamically typed languages without a REPL - for example Perl (in the core distribution).

Static typing means that for example, a list can only contain one type of element. And because of these constraints, the compiler can find some errors that are not found otherwise.
I don't think we should change how we write code, either: I think we should change the patent system so this stuff doesn't happen. I get tired of hearing the "it's just big companies suing other big companies" argument about why patents aren't a problem. Software patents generally don't stifle innovation because people don't do something because they're worried about patents: they stifle innovation by diverting huge financial and mental resources to patent lawsuits (and patent filing) that could otherwise go to product development or something else useful, and occasionally by crippling companies that aren't large enough to defend themselves. It's just kind of tax on the industry as a whole where the net effect is to siphon money and energy away from important things and towards lawyers. You'd have approximately the same effect if you replaced the patent system with roving bands of feral lawyers that went around randomly destroying property and burning down offices. You wouldn't say, "Hmm, I don't think I'll write software because some lawyer might burn my house down," but dealing with all that destruction would drain resources from other areas, and sometimes it would be too much for a company to overcome.

I can't really get into any specifics of the litigation because it's still ongoing.
Redundancy vs. Dependencies
An interview with Hans Camenzind (the designer of the 555 timer IC)
* Politics article? Check.

* Glenn Greenwald blog post at Salon? Check.

* Decline of the "American Empire" thesis? Check.

* Thesis strung together from unrelated anecdotes? Check.

* Bereft of comparative analysis of other countries? Check.

* Bereft of comparative analysis of other "empires"? Check.

* Flagged? Check.

'abalashov, you're a smart guy. You write smart comments. You just wrote a book in HN-comment-form on quitting smoking. I'm genuinely curious: why did you think this was a good fit for HN?
Q: What patents are related to the 555?

A: There are no patents on the 555. Signetics did not want to apply for a patent. You see, the situation with patents in Silicon Valley in 1970 was entirely different than it is now. Everybody was stealing from everybody else. I designed the 555 Signetics produced it, and six months, or before a year later, National had it, Fairchild had it, and nobody paid any attention to patents. The people at Signetics told me they didn’t want to apply for a patent, because what would happen if they tried to enforce that patent, is the people from Fairchild would come back with a Manhattan-sized telephone book and say “These are our patents, now let’s see what you’re violating”. It was a house of cards – if you blew on it, the whole thing collapsed. It took about ten years to change. I guess it was some new companies that didn’t have ancient history and did have a strong patent, and started enforcing, and that changed to whole situation. It is very intense now. The same thing – I have a patent on the phase locked loop, and that would have been a very strong patent, but no enforcement.
Accelerating the Co-Evolution
Ask YC: Review my startup, Atombox
http://atombox.net

The concept: Atombox is a web app for keeping track of small bits of text. An atom is less than 256 characters and a category is just like a folder (i.e., an atom can belong to only one category). You can view all atoms in a specific category or search for atoms across all categories. It's analogous to physical index cards held in folders, with the advantage of everything being searchable and in one place.

There's a keyboard shortcut for almost everything and we use SSL for all traffic to and from the service. We also have an "RESTful" API.

Currently Atombox costs $5.00 after a 30 day trial.

There are many rough edges, especially on the landing page. Any thoughts, suggestions, ideas are appreciated.

I'll be chatting at http://tinychat.com/atombox and we're @contextlines on Twitter.

Thanks!
Sometime, you don't fix what's not broken. Patents are probably a solution to a non-existent problem that everyone assume to exists.
If you have sound documentation and design methodologies, then even if someone leaves, you should be in good share.

Whether that's going to be the case is another question, of course.
The alternative to patents is not "all information wants to be free", it's paranoid secrecy. If people are to invest in R&D, they need protection from copycats. I mean, check this out: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/07/business/07muffin.html

The other alternative is that people get along with openness just fine. Beside, people don't have an inherent right to a technological secret, at least in the normal cases.
I actually used Windows Scripting Host via JScript quite extensively a while back (think 5 years ago). Built a little program that would audit all of the discoverable machines on the corporate network to see if they were incorrectly using the MSDN Windows XP key, and if they were print out their hostname and dell asset tag so we could go find them.
And in other (Hacker) News...
Ask HN: My brain refuses to think, what should I do?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1545774
Ask HN: Suggested Reading List
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1547988
Ask HN: Anyone have OCD?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1546203
Ask HN: Food hacks for eating well?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1545325
Ask HN: Your "Keeper" articles.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1540610
Ask HN: anyone ever drop everything and leave software dev behind?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1521190
Ask HN: Loosing Faith - the startup killer
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1531518
Ask HN: What's your most interesting life goal currently?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1497164
Ask HN: Lack of self-discipline driving me hopeless. Tips?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1486708
Ask HN: What are your best life hacks/best tools in life/time savers?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1419556
Hacker News | Ask HN: List everything you know that is good/bad for our brains.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1583623
I don't remember where I heard this, but there's an idea that you should only innovate at one thing at a time. For everything else you should travel the well trodden path. eg if you're innovating in your domain, don't innovate in your tech stack.
WebSRT and HTML5 media accessibility
Somewhat related:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1583938
Seeing statically typed variants of Python such as ShedSkin or PyPy's RPython, I think that one major annoyance is gone.

You still need polymorphism for some things, and having the possibility to have "implicit interfaces" (you just write x.foo() without declaring that x implements the foo interface, or that y and z also implement it - this is also useful when y or z are library classes you cannot change).

Often, the type inference that is needed slows down the compile times quite a bit; and (both with Haskell and with C++) you get incomprehensible error messages when something is wrong but it could have gone wrong in half a dozen places. (C++: 6 lines with "in ...", then "no such method: foo", Haskell: expected type bla->foo->Z x, found a->B c->d)

IMO, static type analysis on top of a dynamic language (e.g. PyDev) gives you most of the benefits of IDE and refactoring support - with the additional coolness that it can just skip the places that are not type-able. (Optional type declarations to put PyDev back on track in the most obvious
cases would be great, though).
There's a common theme in the author's reasons: "Yes, I know some clients can download the messages without downloading the attachments, but not all." and "In most email clients, you cannot just discard the attachments."

Apparently we should be held back by antiquated technology.
For me, it's all about the interactive prompt. If I can't experiment with my code interactively my productivity falls through the floor. That doesn't rule out statically typed languages - Scala has a reasonable interactive prompt for example - but in my experience such tools are more common (and more mature) with dynamic languages such as Python and JavaScript.
If they setup OpenStudy for 6.001 SICP, I wonder how many HNers would sign up? I'll raise my hand first.
I've read a ton in this area so let me offer some of my findings. If I get time this weekend I'll put together a blog post and link to it from here so I can include references, etc:

Generally thought to be good for the brain:

Fish oil (Omega 3 in general but fish oil is tough to beat)

Exercise (Read the book Spark for more details)

Meditation (While this needs to be studied more some of the studies on long-time meditators look very promising)

Keeping the brain active, especially as we age (learning a language, doing crosswords or other brain puzzles, etc.)

Quality sleep

Some supplements (While I think there may be more definitive studies necessary, certain supplements like blueberry extract, vitamin D and melatonin are showing promising benefits to the brain)

Generally thought to be bad for the brain:

Excessive consumption of alcohol (1-2 drinks/day may be OK but more than that is typically

Excessive consumption of sugar (the book Sugar Blues goes into a lot more detail)

Toxic fats (Trans Fatty Acids, etc.)

Head injuries (concussions, wear helmets, seatbelts, etc.)

Many drugs (while some drugs are neuroprotective, many are neurotoxic, proceed with caution and reference Daniel Amen's work for more details)

Overexposure to certain chemicals (many people who work in factories with constant exposure suffer problems)

Two of my favorite books in this are are Making a Good Brain Great by Daniel Amen and The Ultra Mind Solution by Mark Hyman.
In the era of cheap storage it would be a waste of time to lecture people on attachments. My total mailbox size for the last 3 years is a little over 5GB with the bulk of it being attachments. Not hurting anyone or anything. I could delete them if I wanted to but that would also be a waste of time. Even if it were 10x bigger I don't think I'd bother. A 1TB HD is $60 these days.
Massive Chinese DDoS knocks out DNS provider DNSMadeEasy
Last night we noticed failed lookups on one of our domains which is surprising because our dns provider is extremely reliable. Most of the night lookups have been shaky. Turns out it's a massive DDoS coming from China and taking out core routers at Tier 1 providers including Level3, GlobalCrossing, Tinet, Tata, and Deutsche Telekom. Our DNS provider is seeing flooding of over 50 Gbps.

Providers Twitter account: http://twitter.com/dnsmadeeasy

Details from the support ticket:

There has been a massive DDOS attack against all of our systems starting about 6:00 AM EST. Our networking team was immediately notified and have been working on resolution to the problem. Our full administrative team, as well as any available off duty technicians are being called in to assist with the situation and we hope to have it resolved ASAP. Unfortunately, our normal techniques used to fight this attack did not work properly. The bandwidth associated with this attack was able to bring down the Tier 1 provider core routers. The estimated size of the this attack is over 50Gbps and due to the nature and the negative affect it had on some of our Tier1 provider's backbones, we were unable to reroute traffic and contain the issue. We are currently working on a resolution to this attack and getting everything back up as soon as possible.

This is the first time the DNS Made Easy name servers have been unable to answer queries in over 9 years of business. We will be evaluating the situation and determining what needs to occur to prevent this from happening in the future. As more information becomes available, we will be informing our client base though email and updates on our website.

---

I'd like to add that DNSMadeEasy provides awesome service and obviously this isn't something they could have avoided. [And I'm not affiliated with them in any way besides being a customer]
Ten annoying status updates and how to fix them
A strange thing about the SEC proposal is all these structured deals are already structured with programming languages. They are usually proprietary languages used to run scenarios and evaluate deal structures. These could simply be made public. It would be a more enforceable standard than having two sets of code.

I agree with the author of the article that a functional programming language like haskell would be a nicer way to go than python, but we should always remember that the real governing documents--the prospectus, and the more important but more obscure trust deed--are written in legal language. The math only covers part of the semantics of a financial transaction.
A lot of programmers have a very odd aesthetic that I don't necessarily agree with. I think it comes from some misplaced inferiority complex or something, but their code always has to be "impressive". It can't just work and be simple, it has to work and be massively complex, expansive, cover every corner case known to man, and be an architectural monstrosity to rival the Tower of Babel.

I never understood this point of view. I can code like that, since I had to in order to get a job, but it always annoyed me and made no sense. It was like I was a Shaker trying to sell nice wooden houses in downtown Manhattan. Everyone wanted massive Gothic cathedrals and here I am with a damn fine house that'd last just as long and take 1/10th time to build.

Anyway, just complaining about the state of software design. Carry on.
There are lots of perfectly civil comments that add nothing to whatever discussion they are part of: stupid jokes, restating the obvious, complaining about downvoting, and so on. People often downvote such comments in order that others will be able to more easily find the comments worth reading.
Why Online2Offline Commerce Is A Trillion Dollar Opportunity
Blame the rich. It's their fault. At least according to the article. Flagged.
I've liked your comments over the past couple weeks and I'm watching what you're doing with Mongrel2 avidly, but if you want to know why you may be getting this bum rap for all-drama-no-substance (which isn't fair), remarks like this are a good place to start.

Dave pointed out (in a snarky but not overly aggressive way) that you generated a suboptimal benchmark by profiling from the same machine as your server ran on.

You responded by:

* Talking about the etymology of the name of one of his side projects

* Loosely suggested that you were seriously upset by "f-u-zed", as if f- u- came within a country mile of "over the line" (you want to trade angry detractors, Zed?).

* Claimed that as a result, his observation over your benchmark was invalid.

* Jazz-handed his critique by talking about "4 cores" and multiple comparative runs.

Dude, why didn't you just say "Yeah, you're right; can you repeat my analysis with multiple machines? I'd appreciate it." Because we all know you're probably right, and being right is a much better retort than this stuff is.
Porn is bad for your brain. http://www.google.com/search?q=effects+of+porn
Same here, I've ended up buying the book about 4 times now, from random mishaps or just giving my current copy to a friend. I've tried at times to get almost everyone I know to read it, regardless of their backgrounds (usually not math/science types) and always like seeing people go a little crazy just thinking through it or trying to explain it to other people.
Cause and Effect Essay Topics: Selection Process and Tips   
Writing a cause and effect essay will improve the logical reasoning powers of the students. The students’ skills in language, research, creativity and writing also are improved by writing cause and effect essays. Here are some tips for writing this type of essays.
Why didn't you send them a letter threatening to bring a declaratory judgment action, then settle for a wad of cash?