skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did that to 'acacia', they took a walk when they found out that I could probably invalidate their patent. (and I probably really could, and would).

It's like the mafia, they like to pick on the weak, the slightly stronger they'll go after in court if they think they can win. But they're cowards at heart and they will avoid a confrontation if the other party might damage them.

And if the stakes are high enough and they've been successful in the past with their shakedown they'll sue big companies that are not going to be able to invalidate their patent directly (that's what's happening here, after all Novartis is not exactly a software development company, even though they have plenty of IT).

Think about all the parties you could sue if you had a patent on the hyperlink.
When we started Webvanta (a hosted CMS), we spent quite a bit of time talking with small business owners, understanding their web needs, and trying to figure out if we could provide them with a "do it yourself" solution.

Our conclusion was that, for the vast majority of small business people, there is no such thing as a do-it-yourself solution that is going to yield a quality site. They need help with their writing, marketing strategy, and approach, even if all the technical issues go away. And most of them need help with email marketing, social media, and so forth.

For the $200 customer, they're just going to have to figure it out on their own, using something like Wix, or Weebly, or -- if they have a little budget -- SquareSpace, GoDaddy Website Tonight, or Intuit Sites, or something like that.

For anyone who wants a quality site, and wants to have an effective Internet marketing strategy, they should hire someone to help them. That someone typically goes by the name "web designer", but a good one is as much a marketing consultant as a designer.

Typically, this is going to cost at least 10 times the $200 figure, but that's life. Most business people undervalue design and undervalue the web, and that's what needs to change if they are going to use it effectively.

So with the Webvanta hosted CMS (www.webvanta.com), we have focused on serving professional web designers, to give them a powerful tool they can use to deliver great sites to their clients. We did not attempt to make it easy for a business owner to create their own site; instead, we made it easy for a designer to create a great site, and for the business owner to then be able to add content and maintain the site.
Melanomas are the result of industrialisation right? I can certainly accept cancer might be more common now due to various factors, but 'purely man made' is hyperbolic.
Back in the days I worked at Netscape and Infoseek, two startups where early employees were raking millions in vested options sales. I just started working then and I got in a little too late into the game. My options never made me a dime there or at any of the 4 or 5 other companies that gave me options.

So to the great disappointment of recruiters I started negotiating compensation at my next jobs by always asking to trade some of the options in the package for more cold hard salary cash. I wouldn't say no to options but unless you join a startup very early, they usually are a very risky bet to make up for, say, a pay cut from your previous position. It's served me well. I am not Cresus and I don't drive an expensive sports car but I do have enough in the bank for a few rainy days and I feel safe to be able to take the risks I now take as an entrepreneur myself.

So never forget, short of being lucky, only business owners, stockholders (not option holders) are really poised to make the big bucks if a company makes it to the top. As an employee your options were always planned by the company CFO and its lawyers to be sufficient in numbers to just bring you the equivalent of a nice fat bonus if the company fares well. Not more. If you are an employee, freelancer, or contractor, try to get paid for what you do. Don't say no to options but make sure you don't rely on them to heavily.
I have read a number of interviews with Sculley over the years, and it seems he has the wisdom to understand that he will be remembered as "the guy who fired Steve Jobs", and this has brought about a certain humility not seen in most ex-CEOs from major companies.

And contrary to the usual simplified narrative, Apple was quite successful with Scully running it:

+ they built the Mac from a toy computer into a real platform

+ the "sales and marketing" was top-notch with brand-loyalty singlehandedly kept the company alive for years

+ the company did some great R&D producing huge wins like QuickTime

+ he correctly understood that Apple was locked-out of the broader PC market, but had a shot at dominating handhelds

Plus the the consensus view in ~1998 was that Sculley had failed Apple by not moving MacOS to Intel and licensing it out to PC vendors. I imagine very few people hold that opinion today - as Sculley said, the company ran according to Jobs' basic business plan.
Palm Hires Nokia’s Ari Jaaksi and Samsung’s Victoria Coleman
It's funny you bring this up, because just yesterday I was using HTTParty and was getting strange errors when I was doing POSTs / PUT queries (basically the REST API I was using was giving me 500s and I didn't know why). After looking at your source, I then immediately realized I had to use the :body param instead of the :query param to pass in www-urlencoded values. Whether that reflects on the consistency or documentation of the API is another matter, but it just proves your point about the importance of being able to grok code.
Not all Catholics are good Catholics in their interpretation of scripture (that's why they have priests ;) ) and even though you are enjoined against doing that I'm sure it's been done before.

As for the downvotes, I think your little lecture is setting up some serious cognitive dissonance in peoples heads along the lines of them being unable to cope with being an obviously very smart guy that is also very religious.

As if the one should automatically make it impossible to be the other. I have to consciously remind myself not to fall in to that trap and to recognize that my atheism is as much a result of indoctrination as your Catholicism probably is.

I think you're pretty brave for wearing that religious badge so openly in a place that is clearly biased towards the atheist walk of life, and filled with people who tend to see someones religion as an accident of birth rather than one that was arrived at by the scientific method or the choice of a free will but by indoctrination instead.
Let me start with mine,

FF - 48.52%
Chrome - 36.69%
IE - 7.69%
Safari - 4.14%
Opera - 2.69%
Sorry, I don't get who this is about. OK this guy made money and lost it while getting into al sorts of photo shoots but what's the insight here? Maybe I missed the point.
Strange - I demoed Delicious at the very first NYTM, back when it was in Meetup's offices.
Attack of the monster frames
If they own anything with sufficient second-hand value, a pawn shop would work.
If I had built a working time machine in my garage, I'm pretty sure mass production would not be my next step.
I don't know if it would be just as prevalent, maybe not but I don't think the criminals are going to pass up a proven market opportunity so I think loansharking would increase from where it is now. I do think that for the people who use payday loans today, if they didn't have the option legally, then life for them could be worse overall either by having to deal with loansharks and/or because they end up in some pit that could have been avoided if they had the legal loan option.
Any nightmare stories or pitfalls for making a project open-source?
Anyone have any experience with open-sourcing a project? Generally, looking for things outside that maybe someone else made money on it, or stole the idea, or the code itself.

Things that you wouldn't have thought of that complicated your life, or that made it a bigger hassle than it was worth for such a seemingly benevolent action.
Does anybody have a link to the release notes?
And not to be dissuaded from pushing forward because someone bigger than you claims to be nearing completion of a competing product.

Harvard (FAS) does indeed have a facebook, but it's ugly, slow and has all-or-nothing privacy settings. It's also comically easy to pull data from thousands of people at once from it, but that's another story for another day.

Zuckerberg's Facebook is a far superior solution, and I'm glad that he didn't let vague promises of a soon-to-be-completed tool get in the way of developing his own.
They're not up yet. Everybody is probably busy prepping for the jQuery conference this weekend in Boston.
Yes, but "Have this $500 phone, don't worry, we know you're good for it because we will end your social life if you aren't" still happens with people who couldn't get $500 cash from a bank to save their lives.
"A story about AI which concludes that they are utterly and forever alien" is Charles Stross' Accelerando. It's a novel made of sequential stories that follow a family through the Singularity and well beyond, and the AI in it becomes something utterly inhuman in terms of thought.

I enjoyed it a lot, and it's a free ebook in addition to something you can get at the library.

Many ebook formats:
http://manybooks.net/titles/strosscother05accelerando-txt.ht...

HTML:
http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/accelerando.charles_stross/toc.ht...
No upvote for posting anonymously and on top of that using the phrase 'The opportunity exists for a team that can execute!'.
YouTube Celebrities Get Even More Famous With AppRats
Great picture. I wonder what kind of liability issues arise when you have a robot taking care of humans ... if something went wrong, would it be the family's fault or the manufacturer's?
Why can't it be automated? I'm not sure a web app couldn't be made that would submit your Android app in all marketplaces, as well as an aggregation app that displayed apps from all (or some) of them...
I think one of the main advantages to GAE is the time to get a site up and running. There's zero server setup, installation, or management. This definitely helps you get out the door fast. You're right though in terms of data mining etc... I work for a keyword intelligence site that definitely couldn't run on app engine. We run on a Microsoft stack like stackoverlow and are extremely lean for what we do. However, if I were to start a web 2.0 type site where most of the value is created by users i.e. facebook, twitter, wikipidia, craigslist, or even stackoverflow, app engine would be the way to go.
Poll: Do you have Javascript disabled when you browse?
I know a few top notch hackers who keep Javascript disabled when they browse. Is it common practice?
Love authlogic; it's such a well-constructed library. Just the other day I borrowed the method they use for getting access to controller functionality like cookies and params. It's the sort of thing I've always done by passing the controller object to the method that needs it, but the authlogic way is just so much cleaner: http://github.com/binarylogic/authlogic/blob/master/lib/auth...
I was in the original beta-trials of Spotify (started second half of 2007), and the info then seemed to indicate that the intended model was ad-financed. A lot of people apparently asked about paying to get rid of the ads.

As for smaller artists, compare it with the situation in commercial radio. A few radio-plays will not get you very much money, but the number of people that listened to your song is actually quite high.
Consider how job A will get you to Job or Place B -> over time, initial effects will be much less important than the kinds of opportunities you gain from the early work.
Bill Warner - How To Build A Life From The Heart
Agree that phrase sounds like cliched. My intent was to emphasize that despite there being seasoned well-funded startup doing something very similar, there is still an opportunity for inexperienced (haven't started any of their own venture yet), early stage team provided it can execute well.
And meanwhile every company outside of the Valley/Startup realm got sick of their employees leaving and developed their own bogus options package, even if they had zero intention of ever selling ownership. When your local urinal cake manufacturer is offering you options on a thousand shares, is there any wonder why the average candidate isn't interested?
Prague Clock tower mapping for 600th year anniversary
A common problem with salaries is that most companies offer you something that's slightly over what you currently draw, not what you truly deserve. In a way, that's like blindly agreeing to someone else's judgement.

Keep that in mind since starting with a lower salary could mean that it might take quite a few years to get back to standard salary levels, no matter how good you are.
This is by far the coolest use of projectors that I have ever seen. It'll be interesting if this becomes common for things like advertising (or maybe it is already?).
Teens Prefer SMS, Hate calling
Despite all of Emacs Lisp's faults, I don't think Haskell is a good substitute.* Haskell's design is centered around a compile phase, for static analysis and warnings. While this has advantages, it compares poorly with what elisp gives you - sure, it's a bad parody of a Lisp, but you can still rebind large portions of the system while working in it, with imperceptible downtime.

* I also don't like Haskell, but wouldn't suggest OCaml either. (Lua seems born for the role, though.) I got burned hard by settling in with XMonad, only to find out that they didn't care about portability ("avoid success at all costs") - BIG waste of my time. I went back to C for my window manager. C was more stable than Haskell!
Yes. I have especially cruel and unusual parents.
Hey, awesome. Thank you. I figured there were some stories like that, but couldn't think of any right off.
> unless you are taking the statement hyper-literally.

The burden to avoid or justify hyperbole is on the author.

There is much more to the startup scene and tech in general than the dime-a-dozen CRUD apps the author is implicitly talking about.
You should try these - Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, Daring Fireball, Slashdot, Coding Horror, Venture Beat, Valleywag, Digg Technology section, ARS Technica, Joel on Software, A List Apart
"It makes no sense at all to try and regulate the profits of payday loans and pawn shops."

I agreed with you up to that point. Regulating them IS the point of allowing them, as long as the laws aren't draconian this will stop the bulk of these types of arrangements happening on the black market.
Maybe we can make that happen. Ill ping some folks, email me dan@cloudkick.com and Ill keep you updated.
Wouldn't be the first

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100217/1853298215.shtml
I'm all for regulating the businesses - who can own them, the sorts of contracts they can write, where they can operate, just like any other business.

I said I'm against regulating the profits - in other words, let them set their own charges and interest rates.
Everything has dynamic scoping. Emacs 24 has lexical scoping, too.

But honestly, lexical scoping reduces the chance of introducing unwanted binding at the cost of reducing the ease of "accidental" customization. Emacs' "nothing is closed" policy has worked very well for a lot of developers and users over the years. With enforced privacy, we're on the way to Eclipse, which can only be customized by 100 man teams working 18 hour days.

Remember, Emacs is not your backend batch processing app. You are always in front of it, interacting with it -- if it fucks up, you fix the bug right there because you are right there.
I miss Hugs (http://www.haskell.org/hugs/) for this reason. ghci is up to date, yes, but Hugs was much nicer as an environment. I even used to use it as my default calculator :) sigh!
TCO10 - Final algorithm round commentary
The problem with this is that it does not add any realy value to the economy. During the great depression in the US, thousands and thousand wandered the streets selling apples, however this did nothing at all to help the economy. Wouldn't it be better if he paid his workers more, allowing them to spend more money more efficiently and create more useful jobs that way?
I don't know how this project is doing, but it may ease the worry about reliance on Google infrastructure if they can keep it going:

"AppScale is a platform that allows users to deploy and host their own Google App Engine applications. It executes automatically over Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus as well as Xen and KVM. It has been developed and is maintained by the RACELab at UC Santa Barbara. It supports both the Python and Java Google App Engine platforms."

http://code.google.com/p/appscale/
Comparisons with LuaJIT (http://luajit.org/) would be particularly nice.
The Original Microsoft Windows 1.0 Press Release
Okay, I'm on board. I will submit my app for approval to Apple in November. (I've been slacking ever since I put out a test version on a couple of friends' phones a few weeks ago.)
Windows 7 is non-existent in the market.

Learn Android, that's where the future is. The iPhone reigns supreme, at least for 2010, but after that it's an Android world.

iPhone is alright, but it's getting marginalized by Android pretty quickly. The prickly antics of its owner are not helping either. Steve Jobs is a visionary whose vision is just a tad bit too imposing.

You can develop for Android without having a phone handset, from any desktop OS, using any tools you damn like. Best of all, you can sell your software, any kind of software (that's isn't harmful) to users. On top of that, it's Free, and actually beautiful, both in appearance and API; the people working on it are reachable, and very much approachable. Not some corporate head-honchos locked in a lab. It's worked on by hundreds of companies, employing thousands of developers.

Android is the best thing to happen to computing in the last 10+ years; it will have the same impact for mobile computing as "LAMP" for server side, and "GCC" for systems programming.
Asus is shipping 3D laptops
I agree with this sentiment.

No doubt many will disagree - but I'm really surprised how many developers have swallowed the Apple coolaid on this issue - and this despite the horrid issues many have faced with the apple app store approval process.

The less centralization of control of a platform the better in my opinion.
Here's one person's experience using GAE as a backend to a iPhone app:

http://gamesfromwithin.com/life-in-the-top-100-and-the-googl...
It'd be better if startups responded by giving out more equity to employees.
Honestly, I think this applies more to student loans than to payday loans, given there is no way to discharge student loan debt, no matter how bad your life may get.
You can actually accomplish something similar to this on an app that isn't using attr_accessible (will probably work if they are using attr_protected). From the Rails docs for has_many:

collection_singular_ids=ids
Replace the collection with the objects identified by the primary keys in ids

The full attack is still tricky. But if there are roles for users you can send role_ids => [1] to become an admin.
> It’s hard to conceive how he was able to accomplish so much with so little in those days. So for someone to build consumer products in the 1980s beyond what we did with the first Mac was literally impossible.

Hmm. I guess that Amiga 1000 we bought in 1985 ran on magic until the 90s.
What Does "Free as in Speech" or "Free as in Beer" Really Mean?
Interesting. I always wondered whether my Post-Series A option grant was typical. It was _precisely_ one-tenth of one percent. :-)

And yes, I'm now starting to see (potentially) RSUs in bonus packages. (First time I've seen RSUs in 14 years)
But the smaller screen on mobile devices sets a different constraint. On a PC, you are pretty safe assuming say, a minimum resolution of 800x600, 1024x768 [1], and generally software can just move autoresize to shift UI widgets to make use of additional space.

On the other hand, for mobile devices, with resolution of say 320x480 (iPhone/iPod touch) vs. 1024x768, you need to be much more specific with the UI to make efficient use of the space. E.g you find that good apps running on the iPhone often have different looking counterparts on the iPad.

Add to it things like certain devices having touchscreens, vs. non-touchscreens for Android which affects the entire UI and even nature of the software, it makes handling such variations much more difficult than for the PC market.

[1] Unless you are writing software for very specific purposes that need to utilize the whole screen efficiently, then we are back to the same problem.
Thank you, there is definitely a huge market for this type of an app and I like where you are headed as well. My initial thoughts were to build in a simple mode that would allow anyone to play an APA style match with their friend; and based on the statistics gathered from the match the app would be able to determine an accurate rating for them. It would then let them know if they joined the APA today, this is what they might be ranked based on their performance in the match for fun. This would follow up with a link or short form to submit their name, email and phone number to be contacted by their local APA league rep. This simple mode would allow anyone outside of the APA to benefit from the app and see what it might be like to play using the league rules and format.

Simple apps are definitely effective as well, and would take considerably less time to build compared something like what we are making. A good friend suggested making a basics "drills" app for players who are looking for tools to improve their game. It would have a simple daily practice routine built in, and allow them to easily keep track of their progress and show them an ongoing statistical analysis for each day they use it. Then over an extended period of time it would be able to pinpoint exactly what aspect(s) of their game need work and offer suggestions on other possible drills to practice (specifically to fix that issue). Your thoughts?
I think he's talking about "late founders" -- early engineering hires who have enough personal wealth from early exits (or spousal income, savings, etc.) to potentially be founders on their own, who end up joining. In a lot of cases you give them 83b stock too, instead of options.

Most of what he described is just best practice/common wisdom, although well presented -- the A-A, B-C thing especially, perks like monitors, etc.

The "unique" points he raised, which I agree with, are salary/budget transparency within the organization, not trying to pay engineers as little as possible (but instead having fair compensation ranges without negotiation required), and minimizing commutes.
his alexa rank is not "set to private". what are you talking about???
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/zestcash.com#
didn't check the rest.
prolific invetor
I have the X61s, totally maxed out the 9 cell battery, 1.8Ghz ULV processor, 4GB ram, and a 7200RPM 160GB hard drive. It still feels faster than most other laptops after more than two years. I had to replace the battery, which was okay because they had them at the lenovo outlet for 45 bucks, and so now I get 6+ hours (true) battery life once again.

Way better than my original first-run 13" white macbook. That being said, I started a new job and I'm getting a maxed out 15" macbook pro. I miss Mac OS, and I'll be living in an IDE, so that's why I chose the macbook. Otherwise it'd be a hard choice between a macbook and a T400S.

The x3* series is now discontinued.
When you are going to steal $300 of Yogurt, don't brag about it on Facebook
No, I'm not opposed to references being modified by functions, I'm opposed to the "ampersand" syntax of C++. I am fully in support of just passing a pointer and being straightforward about it.
How to enable JavaScript in your browser
I suppose you got very tired of those "fanboy" posts in the 10 hours you have been a member?
Dont want to start a religious war here, but how does slimv (http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2531) for vim compare ?