skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is really good advice. I'm worried about not only what my coworkers and bosses will think and what that will do to our friendship, but also what my parents will think. If those weren't an issues I'm pretty sure I would quit without hesitation. The money is an issue, but ultimately I'm confident I'd be able to find a job if it were clear neither of my start ups were going to work out.
Don't use any rollover images in your project or you will certainly become a target of a patent infringement lawsuit.
An area for estimated economic damage in the incident reports (broken out by legal costs, code changes, abandoned projects, etc.) would help reporters and politicians find some jaw-dropping stats to quote.
Stanford pre-dated Harvard by 5 years:

Stanford Freshman `Facebook' Photos Safe

http://articles.sfgate.com/1999-09-25/news/17699278_1_facebo...
It would be counter-producive.

Then again, harrassment, on the lines of what Anonymous did against ACS:Law, might help.
Live and Breathe Your Ideals
I can think of a ton of ways to make money with a time machine that don't involve selling it.
"Second, fashion survives without patents because names matter. People will buy Louis Vuitton whether it's good or not, simply because it has his name on it. Louis Vuitton has no need for patents because it's not the bag design, but his name that matters."

How do you know this is cause and not effect? The adaptation of the system to not having government monopolies may have been to go to a name-based reputation system.

It certainly seems to me this would work for software, probably even better than it does for fashion. Arguably it already does.

" What incentive is there for a couple guys to build a time machine in their garage when, as soon as they try to mass produce their invention, any number of larger companies better equipped to manufacture things at scale will just make their invention and sell it for less?"

Yes, this is the standard argument. Do you have any evidence that it actually works that way? I don't see a lot of small companies making it big on a patented product where they get a lot of protection that works; I do see a lot of companies of all sizes being stomped on.

Goals aren't results. You've stated the goals of the system, but really, who cares what the goals are? What matters are the effects. The effects in reality do not seem to be a net positive for the "little guys", who can't afford the patent process in the first place, especially now that turnaround time is measured in years. In fact the horrible outcome you describe in a world without patents seems rather similar to what actually happens in this one.... the little guys won't be able to afford the lawyers, and everybody in the system knows it.
Hi sir, big fan here.

Was just wondering when you'll be coming out with a mapper for everything else on craigslist ?
Django et al won't do a whole lot for you in terms of complex UI - server-side frameworks are mostly for keeping development organized. They will usually include (or allow you to include) javascript libraries like jQuery to ease the UI development, though.

The choice of framework/library on the client-side depends on what you need to do. If your UI is really heavy on complicated form elements, Ext.js might just do the trick. For things that require very complex drawing, you might want to look at Raphael. If you want an all-purpose middle-ground library, jQuery and its ecosystem are a good choice.
switch among windows:

command + ~

when you get that going with the command tab switching you can fly!
The good news for those who were otherwise disappointed in the Supreme Court's recent upholding of process patents in the Bilski case: courts are using that decision to be more vigilant in striking down more and more flaky patents on the ground that they represent nothing more than attempts to gain a monopoly on abstract ideas (for a recent discussion of this trend, see http://ipspotlight.com/2010/08/19/district-court-rules-inter...). This gives hope that companies like Novartis, who have chosen to fight (and particularly to be proactive in launching the fight in Delaware as opposed to getting sucked into the Eastern District of Texas), may be well-positioned to get this sort of patent invalidated.

The bad news: Litigation abuses are today all too common and these are not likely to go away any time soon. In this sense, modern litigation actively encourages many forms of shake-down lawsuits, as every public company is painfully aware and as even many startups discover to their dismay as they begin to grow into larger ventures. Patent trolling is a particularly malevolent form of this vice and certainly makes you want to scream and, indeed, hope that some form cosmic justice will one day punish those who practice that particular art.
I tried to but because this account is recently created it does not seem that I have that capability.
So she was expecting Verizon to take care of her interests. She bought the device for use in Canada and didn't even ask for the price.

http://www.google.com/search?q=verizon+data+roaming+canada+r...
On the other hand, your internal censor has a way of making things more constrained and mediocre. You probably eliminate a lot of the bad and trollish comments, but you probably also cut out a lot of the good comments.

(For the record, I use my real name as you can tell. But there are times where I've wished I could be anonymous and say what I really feel.)
how did you get that setup working?
Pretty much as soon as an implementation takes off, that becomes the de-facto spec, and it mutates from there.
I'm not sure how much I've "learned" but I can talk. You wouldn't be going to Startup School, would you?
I hope he is correct. This group smells like a bad cancer, though. I have a feeling we are going to hear from them until they are stopped.
We may be in violent agreement. Large swaths of the kernel can be portable, and you should code them as such. Of course architecture specific parts of the kernel will not be portable.
Clang's C++ support is considered to be production quality as of 2.8.
Yes, while this username obviously isn't my real name it's easily linked to my real identity.
But Tech Meetup has its own peculiar etiquette, which is that there are certain questions that you simply do not ask. One, apparently, is "How will you reach a critical mass of users?"

Really? That's a perfectly legit question. I'm biased though...that is the first question I shoot out because I expect the founder to have some creative ideas about getting traction.

If you are building a site that requires critical mass and you have put in no serious thought to how you'll get users you are pretty doomed.

Kevin Rose depended on shilling his site on his show. Zuck had the freakin email address of everybody at school, I think. MySpace guys pushed myspace across the parent company's sites and at LA clubs.
A decent point. Google uses the pointer-ness or const-reference-ness of a parameter to signal what the parameter is going to be used for [1]. But at the end of the day reference modification is the kind of basic language feature that you should expect to see people using.

[1] http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.x...
http://www.marginalrevolution.com is brilliant. Also try Delicious.com, Popurl.com and Slashdot.
>The AppStore restrictions are top-down decisions for commercial reasons.
>Whereas the web ecosystem has evolved this way.
>It's like being cross about how few air-breathing fish there are, and writing to HN to complain.

It was a rant about how things turned out. I'm not expecting anyone to go out and build something I'd like better. But it does surprise that most people think it's OK that an increasingly more important environment is limited to a single language. I was attacking Javascript as a single choice more than Javascript as a language, but I should have probably have made that more explicit as there were plenty of comments about how this was just me not knowing enough Javascript.

>You can write code that compiles to bytecode to run on a browser -- applets, Flash, Silverlight -- but for various evolutionary reasons, none of them have become dominant over JS.

All of those are ways to run code inside a box inside a webpage. None really replace Javascript as a DOM manipulator with a bytecode. I don't think there has ever been any portable option besides Javascript (or emitting Javascript from something else) to do scripting on a page that isn't constrained inside Flash/Applet.
I guess this is the aspect I don't understand. With a lifetime of twenty years, most software patents (a lot of hardware patents for that matter) cover the entire viable commercial lifetime of the product.

In our brief experience of commercial software (what has it been? 40 years? Note: that's 2 patent terms) I can't think of very many software technologies that have lasted as a commercially viable product for 10 years let alone 20.

To my limited understanding of how patents work and how the software market works I would think a patent term in the range of 1-5 years would be a lot more reasonable. It would allow for the patent holder to gain a competitively advantageous foothold in the market (the point of having a patent) and it would destroy the incentive of inventors to sell their patents rather than creating business from them.

I'd be interested to hear from people with more knowledge of these subjects than me as to why this isn't the way software patents are maintained.
Preliminary Study Shows Meditating Turns off Stress-Related Genes
I think the main benefit of the "Hello, World!" programs isn't the action it accomplishes, but the infrastructure needed to get it up and running. It's the minimum viable program which produces something that the beginner can tell "it worked".

You need to have your text file, download & install the compiler, figure out how to compile, and finally execute the output -- all of which are non-trivial steps for a first timer. Once you get the plumbing set up, you can then introduce other things about the language.
What if there was not a team? Just one person.
I have IRC to thank for learning a lot about basic client/server communications and networking back in my early teens.

Certainly not the best protocol ever invented, but I have fond memories of figuring out how it worked.
Yep! I actually have an interview with airbnb sometime next week. I hadn't really considered Cali much before, but as others have said, I'm young, have no attachments, and have endless freedom right now. I'm a pretty damn good front-end developer with a decent understanding of backend rails development, and I keep getting better at what I do every day.
Why It's Hard to Crash the Electric Grid
Yeah, I just recently started looking elsewhere to see what I could come up with. The Bay Area craigslist for internet jobs is ridiculous compared to the Indy one.
Errr, Catholics do not believe they can condemn people to hell any more than they can send people to heaven. Not even the pope can do that :)
I wonder if they could pull off a paid support subscription. You pay like $100 a year or something and get live phone or chat support.
Mozilla Taps SAP Exec As New Chief
Well, my birth-name wasn't "mindcrime" but I make no effort to hide my real identity... my profile contains direct links to my real identity. And I've used this handle online so long and in so many places, that there are probably people who actually DO think my name is "mindcrime."

And yes, I do hear a revolution calling... \m/
I just wanted to tell everyone, thank you for the motivation and encouraging words. I cannot be happier.
I think it's fair to say that any time Windows, Microsoft, or .Net are mentioned here, your unwillingness to consider them is pretty well implied.
Great feedback and certainly something we plan to improve. Thanks for bearing with us!
I figured that Ruby must have similar functionality to Python's dir()

Sounds like you wanted

'x'.methods
=> [:<=>, :==, :===, :eql?, :hash, :casecmp, ... ]

or the more focused

'x'.methods - Object.methods
=> [:casecmp, :+, :*, :%, :[], ... ]

?
Google Code Search anybody? If the answer can be gleaned from source code, you can still Google it. I use GCS often to look for examples of using a particular library or function.
Even then I would approach it with confidence. You can learn things very quickly by doing, especially when highly motivated and especially if you can budget some extra time (perhaps unbilled?) to account for the learning curve.

I would only turn down work for fear that you are not capable if you know it is truly beyond your ability for the forseeable future or if the deadline is too constrained to permit yourself to recover from mistakes or delays from learning.
Managers love Excel. Some of them are really good with it. It's probably the wrong tool for their job, but it is a tool they know how to use. For managers it's the lingua franca of data manipulation. They view it the same way most of us view pipes and the Unix command line tools.
I don't actually think that saving an email or message or whatever makes me untrustworthy.

A scheme where one could send a message to someone and expect to be able to rescind it at any point in the future seems both unworkable and not really the way I expect people, "friends", to relate to me.
Cloudkick (YC W09) hits 1,000,000 servers
not sure about some of your other assumptions about engine efficiency and electrical equivalent mpg's. gas engines are extraordinarily inefficient compared to electric, whatever the source of power (even coal!)
Those are actually very small numbers. Justin.TV's chat system, for comparison, has scaled to half a million concurrents. And I had to significantly diverge from the IRC spec to achieve that level of scale.
The commenters agree mainly on one thing: that the article is poorly researched because it only deals with cancer by direct ionization of DNA.
I really wonder: do they have any power over people except for fear? What if you just say "go screw yourselves." And leave it at that? Would there be serious consequences?
>Second, fashion survives without patents because names matter.

How does this not apply? How about AutoDesk, Apple, HP, Dell, Sony Vaio? All those names create a different and unique mental image and perception. The name matters just as much in software as in fashion. And are you actually referring to the movie Primer as evidence?
Here's an idea:
Get a drummer to play a track. Stream that to other musicians, each of which adds their bit and streams it out to others, and finally to listeners who can hear a real-time concert played by distributed musicians. The upstream musician sadly has no feedback from the other musicians, but the variations on each track could be really fun.
Ask HN: Anyone has a ticket and not going to Startup School 2010?
Not sure whether tickets are transferable though. Can you guys please comment if the ticket has any info on this regard?

I would really love to have a ticket for the event. Please email me if you can - skommoori -at- gmail.com

thanks
I'll be there...does it matter if I have no app to show?
Take the job, get intimidated when you realize you are completely out of your league and get fired within 2 months.
In other words; Your worst case scenario is 2 months paid experience learning more.

I know, it IS scary but trust me that will pass.
1. I think everyone here is missing the point of the article... Market now, not later.

2. There is a lot of "code above all" because we are programmers. The sad reality: All aspects of a business are valuable; the ideas, code (IP), marketing, user interface design, customer service, strategy & processes! If you want to be successful, all aspects of your business need to be properly nurtured, provided for & grown.
and what does biology say? and science?
Call me consistent.

There is a deeper reason to that: I like diversity. Windows is about an x86, IBM-PC-based world. Now, with WP7, they, again, try to standardize hardware in order to commoditize it for their software. That's not healthy in the long run.

Consider our PCs compared to their GPUs. PCs are a very standardized platform, with little variation allowed between different models. The average PC of 2010 is only a couple times faster than the average PC of 2005. Now, compare the average GPU of 2005 to the average GPU of 2010. The reason it happens is because GPUs are a widely diverse bunch. A couple years back, we were building number crunchers (we still are) out of x86s. Now, we build them out of GPUs.

The day a GPU standard emerges is the day evolution will be tamed to a much more "market friendly" pace. We all lose.
Well, to be honest, I really don't exactly know what we're talking about anymore. What the parent was saying is that you have to be super careful with the types of pointers and integers because C will let you use them interchangeably. This is obviously not true, despite the rain of inexplicable upvotes. He then has a pointer arithmetic example which is really not so much about typing but about understanding pointer arithmetic.

Of course C will also let you treat pointers as integers and vice versa, especially if you explicitly tell it to, by casts. But in the general case, it will whine and, in fact, reducing unnecessary whining is one of the reasons to not go hog-wild with useless typedefs. I'm not sure how we got here, I think one person here doesn't know C very well and the rest of us got into a little and completely tangential C nerdfest.
Good luck with that; Bob Park has been beating that drum for decades.

As in a disconcerting number of other areas of American life: objective facts don't seem to have any bearing on the discussion.
DE Shaw: Molecular dynamics on custom silicon
I'd like to have been a fly on the wall for these infamous board meetings where Jobs and Sculley began to move apart. There were probably more idiosyncratic lessons there than any of the biographies or interviews lead on.
A well written post. Settings goals is important. However, living with a core set of ideals is even better IMO.
Breaking: different people see different things as bullshit. Film at 11!

I also was completely turned off by the first job offering. I don't want to work for a company that isn't bothered by starting off with a cliche. But then again, maybe neither of us are the kind of person they're trying to hire.

In the rewrite, it's a great opening line if you're shooting for somebody in the YC universe. If not, starting with an acronym that people don't know is a turn off. At least to me, it gives the impression of wanting a utility player (rather than somebody with deep skills at anything in particular) who wants to work in a relaxed programmer-friendly environment (as opposed to somebody who's passionate about whatever it is they'll be working on or is looking to join a business-focused company). If that's what they're looking for, great. Especially in this day and age I probably would move the bit about being profitable to the very front because it establishes legitimacy.

One of the things we did at Qworky was to ask the kind of people we wanted to hire to review our job description. So when we were looking for a system adminstrator candidate we asked several good sysadmins "is this the kind of job you'd apply for? how can we make it a clearer and more appealing job description?" lo and behold our JD got much better in a hurry and we wound up with great candidates.
Manage Google Services from Commond Linux on Linux
>What's the worst that can happen?

Ending up on a pip which ruins your career.
From Mount Sinai to Your Bedroom: A Brief History of Electronic Signatures
This is false. Hear me out.

I think that the notion of cell phones causing cancer is bunk for two reasons, but I recognize that there is a third possibility. First, the reasons why I think cell phones don't cause cancer:

(1) Physics. Microwaves are non-ionizing radiation, so cell phones don't directly lead to strand breakage in your DNA or protein adducts.

(2) Epidemiology. The body of evidence, on balance, does not support the notion that exposure to cell phones increases your risk for cancer. We are getting hugely exposed to this radiation, and if it had an effect, you'd strongly expect to see it. Perhaps we're a few decades away from being able to appreciate any risk since brain tumors more commonly affect those later on in life, but the epidemiology doesn't support the connection at this time.

There. I don't think that cell phones cause cancer, and I have given 2 reasons why I believe that. However, I am willing to acknowledge that biology is nothing if not interesting.

For example, imagine an enzyme that was designed to (a) receive microwave radiation, putting it into a slightly different conformation, which then (b) hydrolyzes ATP in order to (c) cut DNA. Why would this enzyme exist? Who knows; I don't think it does exist. But I am saying that physics cannot tell us that "low energy thing X" cannot do "high energy thing Y." It only tells us that the connection, if any, must be mediated by a third party. In other words, sure, microwaves cannot cause strand breakage, but they could be part of a signalling cascade that ultimately results in strand breakage.

Keep in mind that I don't believe in any of this garbage, but I do believe that it's within the realm of possibility and therefore we actually do still need epidemiology and molecular biology.
"Loser pays" would help.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1792353
I'm not terribly literate in this field, so I'm curious what other ways you're referring to?

I was taught that cancer's caused by transcription errors, which tend to increase with direct ionization of DNA.
Nope, no app required. (Though this is a good chance to re-iterate that anybody with a startup should feel free to demo it, plug it, distribute beta codes, etc.)
Then you get more pressure. You want fit where you are, don't want to let anybody down. And from the inside you get second breathing and try try try, and one day you see that you are far away from your start.
> How does this not apply? How about AutoDesk, Apple, HP, Dell, Sony Vaio? All those names create a different and unique mental image and perception. The name matters just as much in software as in fashion.

And in the world I propose where software patents don't exist, it would matter even more. But the GGP didn't talk about banning software patents, he talked about banning all patents. If you must respond, please try to respond to the actual thrust of my argument.

> And are you actually referring to the movie Primer as evidence?

I made an allusion to it in a fictional example to illustrate a point. You sound like you're itching to argue for some reason.
I agree that Office for Mac 2011 is a large improvement, but it still doesn’t feel quite right to me. Have you seen Apple’s iWork suite?

http://www.apple.com/iwork/

It provides the most commonly used functionality from Word, Excel, and Powerpoint in a simpler interface that I find much easier and pleasant to use (certainly much more Mac-like), at half the price of Microsoft’s Home/Student edition (a 30 day trial is available).
Why not go the other way and make a point that the project violates every patent it lists?
It would be even more informative if the map could be adjusted for population density.

Compare two neighborhoods:
Neighborhood A has a population of 100 and crime rate of 1 per month.
Neighborhood B has a population of 10000 and crime rate of 1 per week.

Assuming the crimes are equal, in neighborhood B you are ~4% as likely to be a victim of a crime as you would in the smaller neighborhood A. But in the current map, neighborhood B would look like it has a bigger crime problem.
How is Cloudkick bootstrapped if they have 2.75 million in funding?
amazon one click?
Screenshot Tour:  Favorite New Features in Ubuntu 10.10
You can supplement that video with Courage Wolf:

http://www.iggdawg.com/pics/misc/chew_it.jpg

This wolf went on to become the alpha pack leader, not unlike Al Franken.
The whole article is a farce for amusement

Try to lighten up