skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do you find it profitable to sue people over projects?

If a lawsuit over a project would be substantial enough to be a credible threat and justify the legal expense, I would argue you shouldn't be outsourcing whatever it is at all--it's too critical if you're in the smaller end of the business world. If you use rentacoder, I think the risk is on your head, and the agreement is clear--they don't get paid if they fail--I don't think you can sue the coder successfully, but maybe I'm wrong.

If you're saying you will get better results with a US coder, that may be true for other reasons (greater loyalty, common culture and language, fear you'll drive across country and find them).
Thanks - OCaml looks interesting, and would be a little further from Ruby than Lisp because of its static typing, right?

Any frameworks (or good libraries) for web apps? I enjoy digging into languages on their own, but I also want to get things done, which is usually easier with decent libraries for data persistence and user interface.
The funny thing is that once I considered learning Chinese because, at the time, I was in the middle of a hardware project where we had to deal with motherboard and other component suppliers located in China and our communications were constantly breaking down because we couldn't agree on a common subset of English.

So, if you really have to spend time with people who don't speak your first (or second, or third) language, it's always a good idea to invest some time learning their first one.

And it also shows you care.
Ack! Best of luck deflecting the lawsuit. Hopefully it won't be too hard, as there are so many other defendants. Lawsuits like this make me glad I'm a law student, so I can graduate and fight against them.

voo2do is a great service; I used it quite extensively two years ago.
Another subtopic: What's CI's potential return on investment in this round of lawsuits? What is the cost of filing a patent? What is the cost of bringing a patent lawsuit? What percentage of small companies settle? And for how much?

I look at a company like Remember The Milk and wonder how much they could possibly afford to pay. A quick back of the envelope calculation based on compete.com, 170k visitors/month. Let's say that 80k are customers and 8k are paying customers ($25/year), and that their yearly revenue is $200k. They have three or four full time people and increasing traffic.

I guess a company like that could afford to pay $10-20k/annual for a license. That might even be considered a good business decision given that with their current revenue they probably don't have a lot of money in the bank to fight a legal battle now, but that with their growth they have future profits that should make this a minor annoyance.
blah blah blah. this is barely a step up from the meta-blogging about blogging about blogging that gets posted every day. although very good writers, I'm getting sort of sick of the general platitudes coupled with anecdotes that I read from guys like pavlina, godin, et al.
I'd recommend a good CMS that has support for both fixed taxonomies and free tagging. Since it sounds like you'll also want to maintain some sort of a database of the products you're reviewing, Drupal sounds like it would be a good solution for you, as it'll give you both the CMS and DB creation in one package (which you can then extend further as needed.) One caveat, though, customizing Drupal well takes some time to learn. Once you get the hang of it, though, it's pretty powerful.

If you want to go simple, WordPress is a pretty good option and can be extended as needed. But you'd probably have to do a lot of work on your own to build in the product database part of things, since WP is really more of a blogging / simple CMS platform. I hear Joomla is also a good bet, and more powerful, but I haven't yet tried it myself.
A patent is much more valuable if it's upheld in court. I thought that was the idea behind patent trolling: get a bullshit patent, go after a bunch of little guys, try some kind of divide and conquer strategy with them, hope you win and get your bullshit patent upheld. Your patent is now much stronger and more dangerous. Congratulations, you're a litigious douchebag.
Ask HN: How do you read RSS feeds?
How do you read RSS feeds?

How many feeds are you subscribed to? How do you read them: Skim all posts? Read selectively? Read everything? Why do you read feeds the way you do? If you don't, why do you choose not to?
One possibility, and this is just speculation, and I am not a lawyer, is that CI is targeting a number of small players in the hope that we will settle or lose, thereby providing some precedent that their patent has succeeded in litigation. They could then point at our pile of bodies when threatening companies that actually have money.
oDesk works well for this and they have great PM tools baked in. Stay away from firms, only hire freelancers, be quick to fire and quick to giving raises to good developers.
I second Bogleheads. Also second the "Intelligent Investor," but that one might be a little too much depth for what you're after.
Thanks, man! I don't think they can win a royalty on kind words, which has been my biggest payoff from Voo2do.
Looks like sometimes that 140 character limit is a problem.
Shimon, sorry to hear this. As soon as you find a good lawyer, I wouldn't worry about it psychologically. This "patent" is total bullshit; the absence of big players such as eBay and Amazon leads me to believe that they are going after easier targets in order to establish a legal precedence so that they may go after the big guys later.

You're also in good company. I would take pride in that at the very least.
50 megapixel digital camera
a friend of mine has a site on that list. perhaps there's a way you can all band together and use a single attorney. plus the eff is a great resource.

i'm sure amazon will want to help somehow as they most certainly have prior art. and didn't they set up a website years ago to help people discover prior art?
Some type terminology:

Statically typed: This variable will always hold a 16-bit int.
vs.
Dynamically typed: The value in this variable happens to be a 16-bit int right now.

Strongly typed: This is a 16-bit int, nothing else.
vs.
Weakly typed: This is bits in memory, we could try using it as a number. (Things like: "the" * 3 probably result in "thethethe" or a crash, rather than a warning or error from the compiler/interpreter.)

(Warning -- there are disagreements about subtleties in these definitions, much like what "Object-Oriented" actually means. I'm trying to summarize things enough to be useful here.)

Lisp is strongly, dynamically typed by default, e.g., the value in a variable is definitely a specific type, but could be replaced with a completely different thing. The type is associated with the value, not its container. (You can declare something to be only a specific type for optimization, though, and some of the better compilers also try to infer types, I think.)

C is strongly, statically typed, but the type system is full of holes, since you can recast anything as a void ptr and then something else. The type system is there for efficiency's sake, but it's easy to lie to, and it crashes hard if you aren't careful.

OCaml doesn't let you do this; it also automatically infers the types of things based on their usage, and gives you an error when it's ambiguous. If you want to do something that could take an int or a string, you would use a union type, e.g. " type int_or_string = I of int | S of string " and handle either possibility.

As for web apps, I don't have much experience there yet, sorry.
I'd recommend using WordPress and writing a custom plugin. You can write reviews as normal posts and just include your custom code in the review, e.g. "[software iSaber] iSaber is great because it lets me embrace my inner Jedi." The [software Saber] then gets parsed by your custom plugin, which converts it to whatever link/representation you want to use to software. For example of this in action (with books), see http://learningtheworld.eu/2007/amazon-machine-tags/

You can also use WordPress's categories and tags as navigation, and WP offers a whole host of plugins that you can use to quickly add functionality (e.g. ratings, see: http://www.lesterchan.net/wordpress/readme/wp-postratings.ht...). Since all of WP's plugins are open source, you can customize anything you use to your hearts desire.

I find the biggest advantage of WP is that it lets you focus on what's unique to your project and lets you iterate very quickly -- you get something working right away, and build up on it, with a lot of features built in from the getgo. The biggest disadvantage is that you have to work with the way WP works, which may not be appropriate for your particular application. Here, you want to do reviews and WP does a great job of dealing with blog posts, which are blocks of content just like reviews. I'd say it's a pretty good match.

If you don't like WP and want to write something from scratch, you can use Django or CakePHP or Rails, depending on your language of choice.

Best of luck!
Food trends to make you smart
I find this almost profound. Zen-like, even.

Google has been a comfort to me because the gap between simple interface and complex back-end is so incredibly huge.

Their success reminds me every day that hard is not the same as impossible when shooting for simplicity. And, when you achieve this (Google-like) level of elegance and simplicity it can be orders of magnitude better (than a complex solution).
MYOB Search Engine
1 in 5 UK MPs mentally ill
So these lawsuits are still part of the investment in douchebaggery and the return comes later. Interesting.
How Obama owned the YouTube primary
Joomla's website does a wicked good job marketing itself. If it really does what it claims.. Has anyone used it to create something close to what we're thinking?
I just hope to high heaven that we see more responses like the following:

http://www.audioholics.com/news/industry-news/blue-jeans-str...
Invest all of it in my startup. :)

Now for real advice:

First, consider getting an online savings account from ING Direct(3%), or putting your money into PayPal(2.5%)...Better than less than 1%.

Second, jon_dahl's advice is spot on. The 2 tricks are to diversify and to dollar cost average(invest your money each month instead of dumping it into the market all at once)....Index funds are the way to go. Vanguard's are great...You might also want to read "Fooled by Randomness" which will make you feel confident that this is the right investment approach, and anything else is pretty much gambling.
I'd recommend Python, so that you can play with Djgano.
I'd say that sounds like accurate speculation, but IANAL.
It was a joke. Soon after followed by a serious comment.

I would agree with what you said, had the comment been completely devoid of content, but as it is, I think you're being way too harsh.
Perhaps you are asking the wrong question here. Instead of learning a new programming language for web apps, maybe you ought to try programming a type of application that is new for you. I think that taking a go at something like a client-server, embedded, mobile, or desktop application would help broaden your perspective and abilities more than simply learning a new language would.
i don't use feeds. I like visiting actual sites. In firefox, i have a bookmarks folder called "daily read" and i open its contents in tabs.
Tragically Well Known
Dollars talking to each other... the universe talking to us (in great detail, no less)... psychics charging $395/hr. over the phone...

It's pretty hard to take anything seriously when it's presented as such fluff and reads like it's written for a five-year-old. It leaves me feeling like I'm in a bad dream stuck between my first grade teacher and Rhonda Byrne.
I really hate hearing about jerks like this...

there's something that can help us fight patent trolling: http://www.peertopatent.org/

It's a USPTO pilot project that let's the public review and give feedback to some current patent applications. I'm sure this will help cut some bogus patent claims if people just participate.
Excellent. Thank you both for your in-depth comments. We'd thought of using blog software. I'd never gotten into WordPress much since I'd never needed more functionality besides simple blogging before now (I use Typepad). So we'll take a closer work at how well that solution will work. Thanks!
Investments by Bodie, Kane and Marcus (BKM) is one classic that still has value in this climate.
I agree that the next 12 months will be an education in itself. I wasn't old enough to remember the 91-92 recession so this will be my first. Things don't look good.

But, I'm curious, why would you not recommend investing in stocks/bonds/funds, even if the economy was going down? I mean, where else would you put your money besides 3% savings accounts? Sure, if your investments return 5% and inflation is 7% you are technically losing money, but it's better than the full -7% you would earn if you stayed out of the market.

Maybe I have to read the book, but I'm curious what you have to say.
If you want to stay on the OO path, I would suggest Smalltalk (Squeak), or the simple but powerful Io programming language (http://iolanguage.com/).

C is also an important language to learn if you don't know it already. You could use it to implement a simple database for a very specific task (http://cr.yp.to/cdb.html)
I ask because I currently have about 100 feeds in Google Reader; most of them update fairly infrequently. I try to only subscribe to feeds that have full text, since I dislike excerpts because I have to open a new tab. That said, I try to read all my feeds, but often fall behind (260 unread at the moment). I find catching up takes too long and I just have to press 'Mark All as Read.'

Perhaps I need to adjust my approach to feeds to maximize my information/time; I tend to cycle between subscribing to many feeds and then unsubscribing from many. My biggest trouble is with feeds that are high volume (1 post/day or more) yet have interesting content. These can be enormous timesinks if I'm not careful.
If you want to learn a new language and a new framework, you should try Seaside. It is a very interesting approach to web development.
No Perl fans here?

Shame. :(

I, then, humbly suggest Perl. You might like it, and with your Ruby background it shouldn't be hard to pick up.
Rich Dad, Poor Dad is a truly terrible book full of mostly questionable advice, platitudes, and poor writing.
Not to mention the title...
Throw out that five-year plan, build something now, and don't take any money
Hmm, to get one of these, or to wait until they open up the TLDs?
One-line summary: If people offer you money for doing something you love, and you take it, you can earn money; if you don't take it, you won't earn money; therefore: take the money.
Fooled by Randomness is a great book to keep things in perspective.
Generally? I don't. Until I can get such information via feeds, presented nicely and in an aggregatable way, I will just visit individual sites.
So is Apple required by law to maintain webkit.org with extensive documentation, a frequently updated blog, nightly builds, an active IRC channel with hundreds of users, a public bug tracker, etc? Are they required by law to fund LLVM development?

My point is that Apple does much more than contribute "snippets of code". Perhaps not every aspect of their business lives up to your ideal, but I think most of their involvement in open source projects does.
The statement that stocks out-perform over the long run indicates that now is exactly the right time to be starting your index fund investment. What better way to ensure gains than to be buying when stocks are low. Even if they continue to go down over the next few years as you continue to invest, if you believe they are a good long-term bet then you will be far head 40 years from now exactly because you invested in stocks.
Heheh. What's a metadeveloper? A developer who develops developers?

Also, I'm not surprised that people like PG or Joel get annoyed at the "barbs that get thrown at them". I imagine that writing essays (or blog posts) takes considerable effort; so, then, I would be rather upset if I had been put so much effort and care into something, just to have someone say: "Stop being fanboys! Let me call bullshit on PG this time. Etc Etc Etc." It's just rude, and unpleasant to readers and writers. I try to be a bit more considerate when disagreeing.
I'm not sure you really need to "learn" another language, if you can program in one you can probably get by in another quite easily given a bit of practice and some documentation.

I think it would probably be worth learning new algorithms or trying to tackle problems which are totally out of your area of expertise if you really want to learn something new.

If you really want to learn a new language you could look at VHDL, and start designing some hardware! I did this myself as part of my research degree and its quite interesting to program code that gets implemented on hardware.
The ZFC tattoo would be handy in an exam on set theory.
This makes me want to learn Japanese /that/ much more.
Joint Contact: First Business Tool To Integrate Twitter?
+1 for Bill Bernstein. An excellent book.
Have you been served yet? You will want a lawyer right away, since the time allowed to respond starts ticking at service.

Where are you incorporated, if at all? If you are not incorporated in Delaware, do you have customers in Delaware? If not, did you advertise for customers in Delaware?

I read the filing. The person that filed it is really stretching to get Delaware as the place for all the suits. I don't think that many of these companies will be forced to litigate in Delaware. You are included in that assessment.

I am not a lawyer, but I am a second year law student. If you want more information, post here or feel free to send me an email. I relatively near you in Mass, too.
The threat of lawsuit is more relevant if they were to violate copyright and take work done for hire and resell it, or set up their own site to compete with you on your own codebase; this is especially true if you give them access to your systems as part of the process, rather than bring in an isolated component. I agree that failure to deliver is rarely worth the squabble; but for these more extreme cases, knowing that there's legal recourse can prevent problems from occuring in the first place.
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I'll play devil's advocate for a sec. If some user doesn't care about freedom/price, why should anyone care about him using linux? Linux is free; I don't imagine a higher market share will increase profits much. Seems to me like shuttleworth's doesn't know who his customers are & I wonder how far he'll get running this as a charity.
Exactly. For maximum outsourcing utility you should learn Kannada or Tamil instead.
I would also add that one of the worst aspects of this post is that it encourages people to bug/annoy other people to pay you for things in awkward contexts.
Removing the second 3 gives more interesting words. Symdro.me, mada.me, quickli.me. (Could me made into quickly.me)
I was relieved to see this in the comments...

"Michael Arrington - July 17th, 2008 at 2:33 am PDT
I think literacy needs to become a requirement to get a job at the PTO. Morons."
some backgroud behind #4: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_point_combinator
Are You Getting What You’re Paying For? 25 Online Tools to Test Your Internet Service
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Somewhat ironically, a website created to review websites created with Django is really an example of a simplified version of what we want to create. http://www.djangosites.org/
There are ~300 feeds where I skim all the posts and ~20 that are a must read in a separate bucket on google reader. Feeds are so critical to what I do that I have to keep up with them even after a vacation. Which means ~1000 messages in the "inbox" from time to time. There are ~100 other feeds that I wish I had time to read, but unfortunately their volume is too high for me to keep up.

Really want to change that, so there's no fixed "inbox", but the posts that are critical should bubble up to top, and the rest should only be findable with specific topic searches.
"Taking money from someone else kills more start-ups than anything else does."

Overfunding does kill some startups, but it's an exaggeration to call it the number 1 cause of death. What kills the most startups is building lame products.
Hey there, thanks for the comment. Regarding your last point: I totally agree SaaS is golden, I just don't want to host it myself now, and thus be a slave to having to keep the service up all the time. :)
You can now register .me domain names on GoDaddy
Just went live, I got 10 3 letter domains, and a few 4 letter ones.
Yep. I would learn Objective C and write an iPhone app.

Or I would say to heck with it and learn Lisp.

Why focus on a pragmatic language for web apps? You've got that already.
More updates on how to build a poker bot
try investing with imaginary money. the only way to learn about the market is to be in it, even with imaginary investments. what was written about the market in the past is based on the market of the past. its not all bad or outdated, but a some of it is. for example, buy-and-hold only makes sense in a secular bull. in a secular bear, you need to learn a new strategy.

learn by doing. simulate real investing. you will learn a lot.
I use irssi (CLI Linux IRC client) for a ton of things -- it's basically my dashboard -- and have eventually hit upon the strategy of running an rbot (a Ruby infobot-alike by linuxbrit) and using its RSS plugin to monitor about 60 feeds in a private channel. It sits in a separate irssi window along with IRC, email, AIM, and stocks, and is nice because I can use irssi's controls (or rbot's) to do things like highlighting or ad-hoc scripting.

These I see all day, skim almost all (especially in the morning) and hit quite a few. Keeping it confined to my little dashboard area makes it accessible, while keeping it ignorable/attendable the same way I manage email et al.

I also use mobile Google Reader on my BlackBerry when bored.
This doesn't sound like a charity:

http://www.canonical.com/services

Actual profitability is, of course, another question.
Setting up the TLB and handling the page faults, then doing the interprocess synchronization can be expensive compared a write() for small one-shot transfers (which is what the bulk of X protocol traffic is). A write() is more or less a memcpy() between buffers in the kernel.

Don't get me wrong -- shared memory isn't always slower, but the constant and synchronisation overhead for a write() is smaller than an mmap(), so for small writes it can often be faster than shmem transport. For large writes, shared memory will usually be faster, of course.
Currently I use rojo, although I heard they are undergoing a transformation (new name, etc.). I think theres a lot of room for improvement in the RSS reader space, but they currently offer the best type of reader from what i've seen out there.
Hi Mistone, I am focusing on the plugin version because the margins there are much, much higher. That said, I am definitely working hard to keep customers of my desktop version happy...just look at my blog's posts from the last few days...oh, and Mockups For Desktop 1.1 is coming up on the 21st! :)

Re: ads: I haven't done any AdWord-style advertising yet, just through bloggers and twitter. So far so good.