skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You know what I think we should do? Institute a law where you can't sue a company for patent infringement unless you do so before they introduce and make a substantial amount of money off that product. Say, 1 million in revenue or something.
I'm not sure what you're referring to in a couple of places:

> since you essentially have to be using a version of Mono that is paid for

What do you mean? The MS-Novel patent deal was done long time ago. Now, there is a better document in place: http://www.microsoft.com/interop/cp/default.mspx - both C# and CLI are covered and no implementation is pointed at. It stops them from suing for "making, using, selling, offering for sale, importing or distributing any implementation" - as long as it's compliant with specs. Stress is on "any implementation" here. That document doesn't mention any specific party and doesn't limit the promise to any specific group as far as I can see.

> Microsoft has intentionally worded their licenses to allow them to sue anyone who isn't paying for their software in the future.

[citation needed]
The DJs at night clubs, the knob-twiddler guys in indie rock bands, and the film students at the local university are all using Macs to make their art. In fact, I'd say Apple's devices and the tools they create to publish to those devices have done a lot to make these creators' lives easier.

Think about how much more music people listen to thanks to the ubiquity of iPods. Would the indie rock movement have had as much traction if it weren't for all those college kids looking for something to fill their iPods?

Not to mention iMovie, GarageBand, and iPhoto, plus their professional-level counterparts in Final Cut, Logic, and Aperture.
"There's nothing worse than a motivated idiot." - German saying
If you are in an environment where there is decaf coffee I suggest mixing half caf/half decaf. You cannot really taste the decaf and get in half the caffeine, although it's not a real fix, it should help a little :)
I liked the line below that: "lots of people use text-only browsers like lynx". Maybe for small values of "lots".
sounds like they weren't that in to him more than anything else...
Although I've unfortunately added to it, I don't think on the whole HN discussions on the subject have been particularly enlightening, partly because, unlike with technical topics, HN posters don't generally have expertise or particularly unique insights into this area. We just have a mix of libertarian-leaning and social-democratic-leaning people arguing with each other (with a moderate majority for the libertarians).
It's really odd that Paul Allen is doing this, he certainly doesn't need the money or the hassle. Is it possible that he's suing these high profile companies to spark some kind of legislative reform re: software patents?
I'm generalizing here, but when someone decides to build a startup, it's usually because there is a problem that they want to solve so desperately that they're willing to forgo the comforts of a regular paycheck and having to only concentrate on one or two things a day. They're willing to endure sleepless nights, stress, uncertainty, and pour a huge amount of effort into creating something.

So, they tend to take care of their customers really well. They tend to produce the best product or service they can, and if they succeed at that, they become really popular.

Established large businesses have completely different priorities. Oracle's licensing schemes for one example are not designed for their customers' benefit; they're designed to maximize Oracle's profit, calculated in part by how many customers they can afford to lose.

In Backblaze's case, let's look at their business model: $5/month for unlimited storage per computer. This is great for their customers. It solves an important problem. They even mentioned in this post that they set out to create this service after one of their friends suffered an agonizing data loss.

But, that's not the most profitable way to run the business. Oracle for example would make a lot more money on it by offering it to their enterprise customers at some absurd monthly fee (plus fees for an annual support contract), and ignore the consumer market altogether, along with all of the headaches that comes from the additional data storage and support costs for supporting the consumer market.

So yeah, I'm not usually too excited by the news that some really great startup is looking to get acquired.
This is a legitimate concern, but the subject of this article concerns issues that directly affect the interests of the HN community. It's clear to many of us that political grandstanding, personal drama, and he-said-she-said do not belong on HN.

At the same time, many current and aspiring startup founders have embraced the cultural shift to learning about traditionally non-technical areas such as sales and marketing. And rightfully so; this is after the previous shift (or "great opening up") to learning about design and a good user experience.

We've done all this because there's no escaping the cold, hard reality that the success of our companies depends on getting the word out and selling people on our ideas. Good code is not enough.

The skyrocketing cost of public pensions in California affects the solvency of the state government. When the state government is desperate and must make ends meet, tax hikes are the first and most obvious options, and are always taken into consideration. When you're thinking about starting a company and setting up shop in Silicon Valley, the tax burden is a huge factor to take into account.

As things stand today, the benefits of the personal network, concentration of talent, and the established tech ecosystem in Silicon Valley are still more than enough to outweigh the comparatively high tax burden for those who wish to start and operate a successful company. "Political" articles like this are of interest to us because they tell us about important future changes in the formula we use to calculate where we want to set up shop.
1. Me, at least, and I'm absolutely certain I'm far from unique.

2. There's nothing wrong or status-symbol-y about using books of this sort for reference, and reading only the bits one needs.
Can you make it a browser add-on instead of bookmarklet? I don't know about the others, but I find the bookmarks toolbar clumsy and unnecessary and never turn it on. But I have at least a dozen add-ons installed.
Yup, agreed with Alain that there's so much legally correct, but also legally wrong statements on this thread. This immigration question depends on like a million factors. To name a few,

* which country you are a citizen of makes a HUGE difference - every country has a different relationship with the US. Some citizens walk in and out freely and do almost anything they want, while others can't even get their foot in the door

* what stage/maturity of your startup is in. If you're already proving that you have profits, can hire US citizens, have raised $, you're going to look a lot better than having nothing but an idea (again, just a broad generalization)

* Immigration fraud is a HUGE no-no. If you get caught, they might not ever let you in again. Ever. Depending on severity

* A million other tactics. I'm not a lawyer. But I know this is a question that needs an answer that is more than just cookie-cutter advice (if you're serious about your intentions). Talk to a lawyer. Many lawyers.

Yes, it sucks and all this is very anti- to the idea that America is the land of opportunity :( Good luck and wish you guys all the best. Do share what worked and what didn't with your fellow immigrant entrepreneurs
This discussion reminds me of Joel's fantastic Camels and Rubber Duckies article (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...). It's long and won't lead you to any conclusions, but it's entertaining and very educational.
It was overkill, and selfish. I was in 5th grade when Prop 13 went through, and by 6th grade school programs had to be cut, school supplies were all but non-existent, and teachers were being fired. For the sake of what -- big corporations? Baby boomer tax rates? Tax cut we can afford, sure.
Believe it or not, I actually had figured that out.

The point was about the language in general, its verbosity, and the ability to string things together.
In fact, they probably can, after all, they're the #1 global brand. And those that they haven't reached yet they probably can't sell to. But it can be quite surprising to hear people say 'google? what's that?'.

It still happens to me occasionally (but rarely), and it never ceases to amaze me that there are still people living under rocks thick enough to block out information like that.

Same with wikipedia, you'd think that the news is out by now. But there are still people that have never heard of it.
Android uses a lot of Apache Harmony.
If you really start studying FP literature you'll discover that an enormous amount of ideas that are in vogue in today's languages have been invented years ago by functional programmers. For example, this paper from 1965(!) describes DSLs: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~crary/819-f09/Landin66.pdf

I think learning a language like Haskell can be extremely good for you as a programmer. The problem is that you just can't expect to be productive, if you're new to it, and that might be very frustrating if you're doing to do work. However, just as jacquesm writes, if you're doing it for fun you'll learn a lot (that you can sometimes apply directly to your normal programming).
Ever since chatroulette has been down, my site, http://www.boostcam.com, which I had made as an experiment when flash 10.0 was still in beta and the p2p functionality was just released, has been getting a lot of traffic. I think people think it's a chatroulette clone (it's not). I watch as people wait, in vain, for someone else to join their chat.
I was using Konqueror then. The experiment ended when I got another computer or something.
Easily: by being incented to take bigger risks than they need to, or to over-commit to things.

I'm sorry if it sounds like I'm saying you're doing something wrong. You're not. It's just how it works. It was the "burn the bridges" line that nudged me to write this comment.
Pluggio To Become Paid Only Service (no more freemium)
Your analogy is actually a pretty charitable reading. HN often discusses how the best coders are sometimes the ones who produce less code. Some principled fiscal conservatives don’t hate government, they have waste, and electing them to reduce the institution they’re part of is not absurd.

For what it’s worth, I think starve-the-beast is empirically a bad strategy. But it’s not a logical fallacy, as people sometimes seem to think.
That's not how I interpret it. The light-speed constraint isn't just about preventing matter to move faster than light, it's about information traveling faster than light. Picturing it like FTL communication being just an engineering problem (sorry for the exaggeration) and FTL travel being near-impossible in contrast is rather strange.

Quantum entanglement doesn't allow faster-than light information transfer (though it is pretty mysterious in its own right). The sweeping beam thing doesn't either. These things aren't in any way pushing the frontier with regards to FTL communication.

Do note that I hope with all my heart that I'm wrong here. We're all geeks, right.
Actually, IBM did retroactively change the pension eligibility criteria as well as the payoff during its restructuring under Lou Gerstner(This is the late 90s). There is still a pending lawsuit if I remember correctly. It makes no sense to me as to why it is OK to underfund pension accounts. One major reason IBM was able to make the change is because it had no unions(FWIW I am no fan of unions as they encourage sloth in organisations).
Tomato, tomahto.

Why use x.__len__() rather than len(x)?
...a VC/investor passing information to the DHS about a startup founder who pitched him who was working illegally... ...was totally in his right to do so...

Huh?

From the limited details provided, that sounds highly unethical, unless the founder was endangering others by his presence.

A frank discussion with potential investors has to include legal risks, including transgressions-so-far that could, if uncorrectable, cause problems. If the investor takes it upon themselves to report people pitching to immigration (or tax or copyright or employment) authorities, then necessary conversations can't happen.

It'd be like pitching an investor and then having them say: "I like what you're doing, and in fact have some investments in a related space. But it sounds like you might not be paying everyone proper overtime, and some of your contractors should probably be reclassified as employees. I've informed my friends at the IRS and EDD. Have a nice day!"
I honestly don't look that closely; I just know what the final number is, and it's not a big deal. From the volume of Amazon traffic coming to our office, my sense is that everyone takes advantage.
>It does actually have to be so, especially for developing nations like China and India

No, it doesn't actually have to be so. Knowledge and technology transfer, more efficient markets, and alternative energy sources combined can ensure continued growth without increased emissions. It is fascinating that some free-market proponents believe in the amazing ability of human imagination and drive to surmount any dificulty (as I do). But as soon as we make any attempt to include environmental externalities when calculating the cost of something, the whole market will appearently collapse and billions die!

>thousands of Swedens and their (frankly) mediocre efforts

It is of course impossible for Sweden to offset the emissions of everyone else. The point is that everyone else can learn from Sweden and do the same.
A 9% decrease in carbon emissions over 20 years combined wth healthy growth and high living standards? What would you consider not mediocre?

>destroying the planet that there really is very little we can do to stop it without encroaching on the human rights of every person on the planet.

So destroying the planet is not encroaching on their rights in any way then?
Also at that age someone else is subsidizing your existence so you can play around with whatever projects you feel like with no expectations
Are top SV law firms' fees in the price range where they'd make sense for low-six-figures acquisition? Not a rhetorical question; I have no idea if you can expect to pay closer to $10k or closer to $100k for their services.
I actually changed my mind, after thinking about your points and refreshing myself on the relevant history. I agree that your portrait of the situation is worth reflecting on, and not that much of an ad hominem. I wish you would have elaborated on your statements instead of just dropping them off, though.
What's wrong with less cryptic books like these?

http://www.amazon.com/Algorithm-Design-Jon-Kleinberg/dp/0321...

http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Algorithms-Third-Thomas-C...
So, in other words, the bottom line in the budget should be delta (assets - liabilities). This is how individuals are encouraged to do their own budgeting; how would it hurt to require the same of the state?
I think reading Apple's marketing as being about hip and cool says more about the anxieties and insecurities of the hacker culture than it does about what Apple is actually doing. In the first place, coolness is way oversaturated in advertising, trying to project a cool image is the fastest way to get lost in the noise. Authenticity is a much more important brand value to project than cool, and Apple succeeds at that.
Don't get me wrong, I love Project Euler and had a blast doing a couple of hundred problems in Java a couple years ago. I make these claims:

1. The problem solving there has almost no connection to what it is like for the vast majority of uses of writing a computer problem.

2. It is in no sense a varied set of tasks. It's similar to a math contest problem set, with some basic string manipulation masquerading as numerical problems (pandigital numbers, etc.)

3. The programming and program design required to solve tasks in this narrow space is trivial, and not particularly instructive of how you'd write programs in another space.

4. Functional programming articles tend to mention and place stock in Project Euler problems to a degree which, in my opinion, is unusually much larger compared general programming articles.
MagnetoSphere: Beautiful Processing example
One thing that bothered me in Python is lambda expression being limited to one line (as far as I know). Procs/lambdas in ruby can be very complex which often need.

But if I wrong about this, please let me know.
Seriously, a list price of $249? Hardcover books are so damn expensive...
The P ≠ NP proof is flawed
Its not BS at all. Many states have problems with this. And if you even get close to state budgets at all which very rarely do citizens do, you will see this problem in more than just a few states and cities and even counties...
The Neuroscience of The New York Times
clicks on "Tell the Publisher! I’d like to read this book on Kindle"
On the bright side, isn't it trivial and relatively cheap to make a radio detector of GPS and other such radio transmissions? Or even a signal jammer? Like what the spies use to sweep a room for listening devices? Let's just assume you're cool with temporarily violating FCC broadcast regulations within a small personal vicinity.

GPS jammers can be had for pretty cheap, but I believe they're illegal. Tinfoil works pretty well too.

Perhaps, if we're lucky, this situation might just invert, and if total surveillance becomes dirt cheap, then it also means we can watch the watchers. Imagine a Facebook for watching every LE agent in real time across the entire country.

The devices for this are already pretty cheap as well (zoombak I believe?), probably illegal to track a LEO as well though.
This confuses me, because python strings use str.lower() to return a lowercase copy of str, leaving str unchanged. I prefer the Ruby idiom of naming the mutating versions with a !.
1) The very first thing you need to do is keep working like the aquisition is not going to happen because these things more often fall apart than go through and it can really screw up your start-up if you start planning for it going through.

2) Next, you need to decide if you want to stop working on your own thing and start working for someone else and figure out the minimum price you would do that for. If you would accept one dollar less that is not a minimum price.

3) Next, you need to find out if this company will meet that price.

4) If they will meet that price, only then should you get a lawyer.

Getting a lawyer as a first step is terrible advice that will cost you a lot of money and a lot of time on something that 1) you many not be interested in 2) may not actually happen.

We were in a similar situation a month ago and this was basically the advice we compiled from angels, people at YC and pervious YC companies that were bought.

We ended up mostly ignoring the acquisition talks because we weren't that interested in being acquired and (as people told us would likely be the case) they did not go through. It would have been a huge waste of time and money if we got a lawyer like some people on HN suggested, before actually figuring out steps 1-3.
I think a big part of the reason underlying why I can't afford it is that it uses amazon for the storage, and that is already quite a fee for large amounts of data even before the tarsnap markup.

The security is of lesser consideration for me, the convenience was the main selling point.
Khosla invests in startup that boosts efficiency by 30% with supercritical fuel
by being incented to take bigger risks than they need to, or to over-commit to things

But that would increase their own value as well. YC and WePay are in this together, there's never really a situation where something is good/bad for one and not for the other.
Typically, an "About Us" page contains a company description - "here's what we do" - and company mission - "here's why we do it.

If the visitor does not realise what you do or why you do it before they arrive at the about us page then it is unlikely a genuine visitor, unlike a journalist, would hang around that long to visit the about us page or even think about visiting it.

To answer the question, my about us page deals with legal stuff, such as copyrights.
One of the last sentences: "This is not a true story but similar things have all happened to me or to my colleagues. "
I think by Liberal he meant to say Libertarian
A rather superficial status symbol, I'd say: owning a book does not equate to knowing or understanding its contents.

I purchased my copies individually (back when I was a student and I could ill afford them) and, ignoring Knuth's suggesting algorithm for reading the series, read the "interesting" sections quite carefully. I still use them for reference and occasionally find time to re-read parts of it.
Do you know about Sphere Online Judge? (http://www.spoj.pl/) It supports a lot of languages. It still contains mostly algorithmic problems though, making it a superset of the kinds of problems at Project Euler but still a tiny subset of general programming.
Toughness is only a partial order. There are plenty of people who would have no problem being in a fistfight, but would be terrified at the thought of e.g. having to perform surgery, or give a speech in front of a large audience.

I've seen plenty of people who are very tough on the axes you mention but were unable to deal with the stress of starting a startup.
And makes it more laughable that he framed his letter as "an apology"
I was planning on doing that, but how do you go about attracting the right crowd (or any crowd at all for that matter)?
Blogspam for this 5 day old teaser video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTOASwRl3bY
The class library, not the VM. And, as importantly, Oracle hasn't sued the Apache Foundation.
I wonder why Conde Nast even bought reddit in the first place.

It's cool that they let them run the web site as an independent entity more or less, but it really seems like they don't like supporting them (see Reddit Gold).
you only need to start with a handful of people. find one or two other people interested who will commit, and you can get it started regardless of who else shows up.

make sure you don't make it necessarily very CS-specific, either. business and art people might want to get involved, too, and would be quite useful. random other people might get a good learning experience on the entire process if they walk in with "a great idea".
Not quite. Mozilla was one of those pushing for the HTML5 spec to require support for Ogg Theora. Fortunately, saner minds prevailed and explained what a stupid thing it would be for a spec with an expected lifetime of a decade or so to mandate a 2009-era (when this first started being an issue) codec.
It reminds me of this scene from Madmen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suRDUFpsHus, on How to pitch a product.
If you attack an open-source project (which the pertinent parts are) with general software patents, how is that not an attack on open source? What Oracle is doing is absolutely no different than what SCO was engaged in.

Note that Oracle's general patents on rudimentary VM and runtime characteristics could be applied against any number of non-Java targets. There just aren't many with the pockets as deep as Google.
>This was a decision made at the highest levels of Conde Nast.

Doesn't this put the lie to their "we're our own business and don't have anything to do with Conde Nast, that's why we need your charity" line?
There's a big difference between "requirement" and "taken into consideration". Some companies will refuse to hire people without degrees (so I hear at least), but Google has no such strict rule. They do consider your transcript as part of the hiring process because it does have some non-zero amount of signal in it.
if need a similar site, try omegle.com