skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
presumably it may be less because the bundle will contain less patents but that wouldn't be an unreasonable position to take, you are right.
If this would have come around 6 months ago, then I would have used it. Now, I'm satisfied with GitHub and its code-review facilities. We already ditched SVN.
A Quick jQuery Primer
"Lower cost-of-living, we have our family's health care taken care of while we work on your start-up, and our subsidized universities churn out a steady stream of new grads."

Cost of living really depends. There's lots of inexpensive places with tons of techies in the States - cost of living in Montreal is about the same as Austin, and more expensive than Portland. Vancouver and Calgary are both really expensive - maybe just slightly less than SF.

Provincial health insurance doesn't cover dental or eyeglasses.

All the really good guys in my graduating CS class (University of Calgary) went to work or grad school in Silicon Valley or NYC. I was the only one that came back, and the only reason I'm sticking around is because I like Montreal and want to go get an MBA here while it's still subsidized - I'm going to start this September, and will be in the last class before the Quebec provincial tuition subsidies are lifted in 2012. Canadian education will get a lot more expensive in the next few years.
I'm pretty sure we would be the oldest

FWIW, I'm 37 (turn 38 in July) and I'm looking forward to possibly applying to YC in the future. So yeah, there are a few of us older guys out there still dreaming the startup dream. I wouldn't worry about the age thing if I were you. It's just a number.
Free At&t Rollover Minutes
I know photoshop really well but not from the interface design perspective (Fine Arts major in college concentrating on Photography so I know Camera RAW and the associated photo related tools really well). It always amazes me how many features it has and how useable it is with all of those features (I have been using it since 5.5 which has, as far as I can recall, has a very similar interface for a number of the primary photo type tools -curves, layers, etc.)
Even a combination of both would be nice. Videos/lectures have value, but I'm more likely to use a "tangible" electronic document like an e-book or a white paper.
Taskforce takes on apple
I've always just told them I'm from Canada (which I am) and that normally just gets a pass.
Sometimes the checkout person can be quite forceful and require me to tell them my 'zip code', ok, V5J 021. There systems only accept numbers, so not alot of good that is going to do them.

The only place this is annoying is at gas stations where I have to go inside and give them my cc card to hold while I fill up. Hopefully this new law means that gas stations can't do that anymore.
Maybe there were compelling technical reasons and good licensing terms that lead Nokia to choose WP7 over Android.

But if a person is leading a company, they might perhaps consider the psychological impact of their decisions along side with technical and market factors. I mean, his job is to make money - not to make decisions that "would have worked if it hadn't been for those pesky workers" (unless the intent was to gut the company from the get-go - though I doubt that would leave more money in the end either).

Desperate measures were needed. But I don't think I'm alone in feeling depressed that the desperate measures seem involve a move back toward proprietary systems (even if my only involvement with Nokia has been using the excellent QT library).

If, assuming, your aim to get some value out of a company - get some value out of the technical teams that exist in the company, one assumes that one needs to keep the morale of that company at a certain level. And giving the impression that you're gutting everything the company stood-for seems like a not-terribly-effective approach here even if Nokia's internal process was broken.

If you're the underdog, being able to claim you are "fighting for good" is psychologically useful. If Nokia had gone with android, one might be able to believe they'd bring some open source "chops" to the table.

Again, my experience is programmers are willing to work to fix a broken - if they feel like the company if offering them loyalty. Obviously, today's announcement didn't make Nokia's workers feel that was happening.

Nokia's stock dropped a bit after this, btw.

Better link to the story also: http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Microsoft-is-the-p...
yes but MS-DOS was followed up by windows 3.1 and then windows 95 both of which were a huge success. What followed up symbian was not. I think this is very sensible for them to focus on hardware while let somebody else do the software. Though I must agree their choice of MSFT is startling. I expected them to fragment Android even further. Glad that didn't happen.
Still, I think NBC deserves some credit for continuing to somehow be around despite their constant apparent lack of competence.
Informal director photography
Nokia sells LOTS of phones. You've got to remember than not everyone lives in the Bay Area and has a Twitter account... People living in Sub-saharan Africa and central Asia still need cell phones and the majority can't afford some flashing thing with a touch-screen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_pho...
That makes me wonder though - he and many other rulers (I'm guessing) have amassed billions but are hush about it, so there's no telling who is funneling money and how much of it. It would be nice if Forbes added these rulers to their wealthiest people in the world lists.
Merchants eye mobile phones to transact card payments
Hear hear. An open O/S for my phone named the same as a Lovecraftian monster...

I was starting to read the Qt docs, Gnome/Mac user and all. :-(
QT is great. Even if Nokia simply bought it, they've so far done a good job enhancing it.
They were terrible at software, but managed to make some really good phones despite it.
As a parent, I think this is a great idea. I have trouble sharing photos with family members, not all who are on Facebook (my default sharing method). Plus Facebook's privacy settings are confusing, and their business model runs against keeping my photos private, which is somewhat unsettling.

FYI, Ash Maurya built CloudFire to solve this problem, but since he's moved on to being a "lean startup" guy, the product seems to have been abandoned. There are probably valuable lessons in the history of that product.

Finally, I have to admit I'm getting tired of the landing page gambit. Maybe it's just early-adopter-itis, but if I'm interested in your product, I want to touch it, play with it, right now.

A landing page doesn't solve my problem. And there are so many "landing page" products in existence now, that I question whether the strategy is beginning to turn people off.

Having to wait for a product that on average never actually ships is annoying. Don't bother me until you have something to show. YMMV. :)
Microsoft Buys Nokia for $0
Y Combinator does (or at least did in the past) ask for the founders' ages on their application, so it must be incorporated into their decision making process somehow (not saying negative or positive, but if it didn't matter, they wouldn't ask).
Apps are clearly not important to another large portion of the market.
We pride ourselves on delivering fully buzzword-compliant solutions.
No doubt there is plenty of MS hatred...

I guess my question is maybe a little different, if Nokia is in that much trouble, then isn't WP7 a gamble? Its not just flying off the shelf where Android on the other hand is. Two losers don't usually make a winner. I don't know, seems like Google is all in with Android, they've got a pipeline, they've established themselves and proven themselves and they are legitimately competing with iPhone.

Now if they think WP7 is the future and it's going to take the market away from iPhone and Android then it makes sense, but I don't know that anyone really thinks that, it might carve out a niche but it's not going to beat the other guys. There are now iPhone, Android, RIM, WebOS and WP7 in the smart phone market, seems like a lot to me.
A tv journalist's job is to give information, not express own emotions. People are only people, and mistakes in moments of strong emotion can happen, but that's why they were reprimended. I know pure objectivity is technically impossible to achieve, but I turn on to the news hoping I will get information on the subject, not some journalists' feelings, because I really don't care - they're the medium, not the subject.

When journalists want to show some emotional aspect of an event, they can interview citizens on the streets, that's their job; expressing it themselves is not pro and surely not trustworthy.

> Al Jazeera, which is accused of having copied the style of fox news if not the substance

Huh? Who said that? AJE is BBC's school, not Fox. I've heard their local channels are more expressive in their orientation, but AJE is another league.
I have used versions of Photoshop in the distant past, but now use GIMP. As a general rule, if it doesn't run on Linux I'm not all that interested.
I would answer that implementing this strategy can't be a short term plan. This will take time to put in place meanwhile a lot of executives can change. Is it wise to rely on a relationship between one executive and another company as a long term strategy ?
The Windows Phone does this. It also integrates those contacts with the status updates, contact details and pictures from your Facebook, Hotmail, YMail & Exchange accounts
I should have split my comment - I didn't really mean to imply that the reason his time was quite short was because I don't think he performed at the same level of Sinofsky.

To be clear (and fair to Elop), whether or not he was effective at his role wasn't very clear to me. What I can say is this:

* His time at Microsoft was quite short. While he may have a monetary incentive for this deal, I doubt he has any cultural ties to "go Microsoft"

* His impact on MS was (to me, anyway) minimal. He seemed to be in charge of keeping the ship going in a straight line, without the pressure of changing direction. There definitely wasn't anything like what is going on at Nokia to "test his mettle", so to speak.

Contrast this to something that Sinofsky did: http://www.cornell.edu/about/wired/
I have a question. How does IncPy keep track of data dependency coming from IO layer e.g. sockets. Say I want to write a simple web crawler. The function crawls a website, spits out the HTML in raw string, sleeps for 5 seconds and then crawls the site again. Will IncPy not memoize the function at all, knows that the data coming from the network layer has not changed and return the memoized string immediately, and/or smart enough to detect when input (the website) has changed and expires the cache automatically?
Joe O'Brien on Passionate Programming, OSS, Starting a Business
yeah but costco generally gets very good deals in place; i've cross checked it numerous times.

once groupon management catches wind of this it will be fixed; they can't afford the damage to their brand
Wouldn't it take you more time to read a topic in a book than view a 5 minute video?
The fact that Groupon has to engage in such tactictss goes to show that they are hitting the limits.

IMO they were idiots not to take the GOOG offer. It was a huge one and I doubt they will ever reach that valuation again. Discounts like gropon never work I don't know many people who have give n the business a consistenty repeat busiinessafter going there first using a groupon.

The growth is staggering but not sustainable.
Rietveld has been open source for years.
In your analogy, instead of burning the books they could just dump them in big trash heaps in Egypt, or in jars in Palestine, which correspond to bittorrenting quite nicely.
While I don't your tool has to be Photoshop, knowing design is somewhat significant in web development.

I know we're not specifically on the topic of hybrid producers here, but I really believe that a programmer should be able to assemble a design or help create a blended approach to UX while working on a project.

"I'm a coder, not a designer" is a poor argument. I use Photoshop daily as well as my language of choice, IDE, JS/jQuery, etc. and I'm no MENSA candidate by any stretch of the imagination.

I think if you love web development, you want to be involved in the whole process.
I know some people that got jobs contacting companies directly thru linkedln. But I think they are the exceptions.

But I guess that's my best shot !

Thanks for the reply.
It's funny - I went out shopping in the US on black Friday, as a holiday experience when visiting - and bought nothing, because I didn't think anything was a good deal.
Yeah, I had this working pretty well in about 20 minutes with python. Binary search is really pretty quick. I didn't have a 75 gigabyte log handy, so I had to test it on a measly 10 GB log. :(

I had a secondary problem where our logs occasionally put a new line in, so I had to burn a couple fseeks checking for that. I'm not sure how I'd go about truly profiling it, but it returns pretty much instantly.

Though it's not really useful for our logs to look for a per-minute line, because our logs are crap. What useful information do you find looking for that type of specific data?
Well, that spec sounds useful, but I'm less sure about how the patent helps anyone but the lawyers.

I've read a few, admittedly mostly the infamous patents, and have yet to find anything useful. At worst, we have someone patenting doubly-linked lists (What if, instead of one pointer, lists had two pointers... and they could point anywhere! Or maybe they could have N pointers! Genius!) and other obvious dreck (A stick as a dog toy? Defeated only because two other people already had patents!?)

Or sometimes they file wish claims on things none of their products actually do. They don't require code to actually prove that you even could do what you claim to have invented, even though source code would be analogous to requiring blueprints for machines.

Anyhow, my point would be that I've never heard of anyone reading patents to learn anything about computer programming (maybe they do, but I've never heard of anyone learning that way). Maybe patents are a lot more useful with mechanics, I don't know, but the software patents I've seen are not even useless. Half of them read like they were written by the "I just need a typist, err, coder to implement this for me" people. I've even seen people say "you've got a flowchart, what the hell else do you need?"

Human AI Flowchart:
[Evaluate state of world] -> [Think like a human] -> [Act] -> [Repeat]

(The similarity to the evaluate-apply loop in Lisp should be obvious.)
A success by what metric?

As a platform, surely not. The wheels came off by the end of 2008 when S60 5th Edition went touch-only, leaving keyboard devices still shipping with the hopelessly outdated 3rd Edition. Symbian touch devices never gained any platform traction.

Was it a success as a software foundation upon which handset makers could innovate, as had been the original idea behind Symbian? No. Everyone that used Symbian abandoned it for more flexible alternatives. The lack of a unified UI development track didn't lead to the hoped innovation, but merely fragmentation that ultimately doomed Symbian. (It didn't help that the most popular UI layer, Nokia's S60, was so poorly designed and thoroughly mismanaged.)

I actually use a Symbian^3 device, the Nokia N8. It's not bad at all. I love the physical design, and the software works fine for what I do (although the browser is a turd, it's replaceable by the fine Opera).

Still, I can't escape the feeling that this is the OS that Nokia should have had over two years ago. Also, it's a development dead end. Symbian^4 was supposed to be a UI rewrite, but it failed. The promised improvements to S^3 have been slow in coming. (Still no Qt 4.7...!)

How is Symbian a success at this point? What reason would Elop -- or anyone else -- have to believe that the existing software development structure at Nokia could substantially improve this situation?
They already have all the video files in a .torrent on their website. I downloaded part of it the other day to brush up on trig.
Seems like this puts Khan Academy at risk given the idiots at Homeland Security--- guilt by association with BitTorrent
Well, they're making it up to me:

Hi Matthew,

Thanks for your interest in the FTD Groupon.

We try to offer the best deals possible, while also making sure all of the details are up front and easy to understand. The deal’s original terms were that the Groupon could not be combined with other offers and discounts. For sale items on FTD.com, this meant that you were not able to realize both discounts. We understand that is confusing and upsetting to a number of people—especially since you expect a great deal from us every time.

To make this right, we’ve worked together with FTD to make sure that discounts available on FTD.com will now also be available to use with your Groupon. For those of you who already purchased items that were on sale on FTD.com, FTD will automatically issue you a refund on the credit card you used with the difference as additional savings. Please allow 5-7 business days for this to show on your statement.

We’re really sorry for any confusion this deal has caused. This resolution should now ensure that you get the maximum value for your FTD Groupon, even if you’ve already redeemed. We hope this resolution is to your satisfaction.
Alas, I can't find it now, but I recall reading a Foreign Policy article a few months ago which quoted one Egyptian as saying something like 'Mubarak is problem, but the much bigger problem is that this country has a million little Mubaraks, tiny totalitarians who rule their tiny fiefdoms with a tiny (iron) fist'; it seems that getting rid of Mubarak will have been much easier than displacing or reforming all the little Mubaraks.
WTG NFLX! More power to you. You allowed to me stay free of Cable for last one year. Love you.

Hastings made the right bet by focusing on the streaming. That's clearly the future and I'm glad they are planning to go ahead with streaming delas with full steam. Hope the studios realize this and partner with them.
An objective view is one where you focus on the facts of reality, without trying to superimpose opinions on them. Trying to equally present all opinions does not necessarily have anything at all to do with the facts, and is not objective reporting. And though our models of reality are necessarily imperfect, we can still try to get them to match reality as well as we can. One of the big hazards to avoid is being emotionally entangled with the news in a way that prevents you from reporting it neutrally.

Al Jazeera derives most of its fame from being the least biased news agency in the Middle East, with satellites that let it broadcast to places that would prefer for their citizens only to have access to the official state-run news.
Vodafone release WebBox - Internet enabled keyboard - for emerging markets
My random assortment of thoughts (subject to revision):

Myths are just that. Some, but not much basis in reality. My
experience based suspicion is that skills are weakly correlated with age, but more dependent on total focused-hrs spent.

A key realization for me was that the benefits of 'deeply focused hours spent' are not linear. While older programmers have more chance of achieving level X skills, the highly focused and motivated 16 year old can do great work. Greatness is a function of getting to the edge and pushing it. Age is becoming less relevant, meaning that great work can be done regardless of age (I hope!).
While your tool doesn't necessarily have to be Photoshop, knowing design is somewhat significant in web development.

I know we're not specifically on the topic of hybrid producers here, but I really believe that a programmer should be able to assemble a design or help create a blended approach to UX while working on a project.

"I'm a coder, not a designer" is a poor argument. I use Photoshop daily as well as my language of choice, IDE, JS/jQuery, etc. and I'm no MENSA candidate by any stretch of the imagination.

I think if you love web development, you want to be involved in the whole process.
I think the market is pricing in an extended transition period that could hit smart phone sales for a couple of quarters.
> The judge also backed off on an order that Hotz “retrieve” the code from anybody who he may have forwarded it to.

Good to see the judge is knowledgeable in this area! I'm sure this will end well.
Not to completely dispute what you've said, since I agree with it for the most part. But my takeaway from the video certainly did not leave me with the impression that the team there was somehow so short on time that they couldn't just do their recruiting themselves (not to mention the tons of free publicity dropbox already gets acting as a useful recruitment tool). In fact, quite the contrary.

I'd be PO'd to find that these guys dropped $50k recruiting a sales VP also. I'd imagine that that custom stone conference table probably ran around $50k (they ain't cheap). I'd probably even be able to make a safe bet that just the "stuff" in their conference room cost somewhere between $100k to $200k.

Everything in the video just didn't give me the impression of being good ways to spend money. I think the number of people in this thread who are acting kinda creeped out about their office lends me some support.

If anything the DB guys should be heads down figuring out their next product. It won't take much for Microsoft or Apple to just build something like this into their next rev of their OSs or in some patch and simply put them out of business. They have a great product and a good revenue stream, time to start figuring out the next step.

If that step is to sell the company? I certainly wouldn't want to think that I'm buying all this crap along with the corporate assets for my purchase price.

All that said, I'm really just bitching, if they are paying the bills and have cash left over for this stuff, more power to them. It really does look like a cool office and it's a fantastically cool company with a brilliant product. Their continued success is something to be praised, that's for sure.
The main reason I'm not a netflix subscriber is that I would never get anything done because I'd be sitting around watching video all day.
Well, the EFF can't really step in to lawsuits between large companies, so it's a bit hard for them to get directly involved.

They've certainly challenged the status quo on copyright law, though.
Balsamiq is very cool. We're starting to use it for mockups and it's really improving our workflow. It's super simple and created nice mockups fast.
Nice.

AT&T though is smart. They realize they won't have to honor any of these free minutes because iPhones can't make a call on their service.

(But I gave it a shot anyways - what the hell I figure).
I wasn't able to pull anything out of this article. Perhaps I read it too quickly. Did anyone get a sense of what sort of re-thinking he has in mind?

Something content-centric, perhaps?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-centric_networking

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z685OF-PS8 (an excellent google tech talk)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Jacobson
Khan Academy's math videos are a fantastic supplement to a textbook and a somewhat dry professor. They have really helped me with my Linear Algebra class. Sal's "think about this way..." teaching method can really illuminate difficult concepts.
That's what I think is scary about the deal. Without a clear date. It's just vapor. And it they don't bring a solid device to the market fairly quickly, it would be a bad deal for both NOK and MSFT.
An item song by Sonakshi Sinha for Joker