skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Treating the intangible as property was long established in common law

Allowing copyright and patent monopoly was allowed, yes. That's not the same thing as "property," which is the point I'm making here.

clause in the Constitution about granting exclusive rights was not creating something brand new, but just assigning the power to do it to the federal government

It was not new, agreed. It went beyond just naming who had the power to do it, however. The Bill of Rights laid ground rules for laws Congress could make. There was a lot of debate about the Copyright Clause in particular -- Thomas Jefferson in particular had a lot to say about it, including serious concerns about attempts to treat the knowledge in someone's head as "property". (Yes, he actually addressed that particular issue.)
Start-ups storm the Net - deja vu?
Jason: don't take this as a personal attack, but proofreading is your friend. I know you're a busy person, but it seems like more often than not I have to reread your copy because you didn't.
It's just a diary - the author probably just didn't think of linking to the mail, or read it elsewhere. It shouldn't be too hard to find.

I was totally thinking it would be fun to do this as open source, though. Giving propaganda tools to the common man!
Your first two sources are interesting, though somewhat tangential to the question I was asking.

Of the key findings of the first, most provide little insight on the question I'm asking: why women are less willing than men to work gratis?

Claims 1.2.3 and 1.2.4 simply suggest women are less skilled than men, which should also preclude them from working for pay. 1.2.5 is no explanation at all - many corporate environments with plenty of women are considerably more hostile than open source communities. 1.2.6 is an incorrect stereotype - see my link to the ATUS.

1.2.1 is interesting - it suggests women strongly prefer a collectivist environment to an individualist one. As a person who's done little more than fix typos, it's worth asking: is wikipedia also a more individualist environment than Demand Media [1]? Is OSS more individualist than the typical corporate environment?

1.2.2 seems to contradict other parts of the report - women both get a "high level of attention" and are unable to get attention (further in the report.) Not sure what to make of this one. [2]

The second report strongly suggests women can't cut it in software - they lack the dedication (claim 1), are unwilling to work with mentors who are different from them (claim 2), they can't handle a text interface (claim 4), they can't handle competition (claim 6), and other women won't help them (claim 7). But the problem is, all of these claims apply equally well to for-pay software [3]. (Claim 5 is actually not a cause, but a result.) Only claim 3 suggests an actual difference between gratis software production and for-pay production - the use of gendered pronouns. (I'll hypothesize that HR does search and replace to eliminate these in big companies.)

So near as I can tell, the only relevant claims made by these reports are that either gendered pronouns or an individualist environment lead women to be unwilling to contribute. It wouldn't surprise me at all if there is an individualism/collectivism gap between OSS and for-pay software. That's an interesting hypothesis.

Another testable implication of that theory: women would be less likely than men to work as individual (i.e., non-accenture) contractors or work for startups, preferring instead the collectivist environments of big companies. Is this true?

[1] I recall reading that most Demand Media workers are women. Would love it if someone with more knowledge could confirm/deny this.

[2] Also finding the methodology of this report weak. To determine attention received, why take a poll rather than just running an experiment? I.e., post some newbie questions on mailing lists with male and female names, and measure the results.

[3] Maybe there is a gap caused by corporate use of Visual Studio as opposed to OSS use of emacs/vi?
How The Real World Taught Me Higher Education Needs A Reality Check
There are more Android phones than iPhones. Which market do you think Apple has a monopoly over? They have a quarter or something of the US smart phone market and less world wide.
My First Side Project | Silicon Hills
If they're worried about this level of sockpuppetry, wait until the sockpuppets get automated. It's this kind of lapping-up-against-the-Singularity stuff that will make H. sapiens obsolete in the end.
People continuing to use my product are now a source of profit, that's why I'm ecstatic.

One of the things we've done, for various reasons, is to not spend any money or effort on ongoing marketing or advertising. We run experiments to see if we can find customers cost effectively, but so far none of them have worked.

Therefore, literally, everybody using our product came to it because Apple connected us. Apple does do marketing for quality apps on the appstore. I'm not talking about "Featured apps" and he "Design awards" and all, that but cross selling via genius, etc.
In terms of what makes me feel like we're in a pattern that is similar to '97-'00 it isn't just the very large valuation companies, in fact that isn't much of it at all to me.

It seems to be across the entire spectrum - VC's showing up to initial meetings with term sheets, higher initial valuations, very young companies being sold for high amounts, lots of rather underwhelming products/models, accelerating valuation increases and a public and press fascination with the sector.

I'm not saying that's conclusive proof at all, but many behaviors seem very familiar.
Hint, just because something is used in the enterprise doesn't mean it's better.

That said, source control is a must, start there.
Python as a language does not lend itself to the same syntatic abuses as either Scala or C++ (or, for that matter, Perl). While you can certainly do some sketchy things, there's a pretty strong Python tradition of there being one standard way to do something, which is one of the language's strengths in my opinion, especially as you scale it up to larger projects. I'd also suggest that 100k is not a particularly large project; it's reasonably on the order of what a good developer can more or less be familiar with, and the real problems with expressive abuse come into play an order of magnitude or so above that that level, where it's impossible to be familiar with everything. Hence why the article was talking about the problems with bringing Scala into an existing, large project; if your code base is 10k LOC it's not nearly as problematic as if you have 1MM LOC, because with 10k you can reasonably remember anything (and obviously 100k is somewhere along the continuum).

If you'd said you worked on a 1MM LOC C++, Scala, or Perl project where you didn't have to establish strict coding standards to avoid the code base descending into madness, I'd be pretty shocked.
There are more Android phones sold than iOS devices every month. Apple doesn't have a monopoly on anything, however they do control/own their app store and they can refuse to sell whatever they want in it. If you don't like it then don't support Apple by buying Apple products, sell your apps on Android. Actions speak louder than words.

Also, Jaaron was much more condescending that I was: I'm tired of seeing Zach's comment reposted as if it's some sort of inspired gospel.
There seems to be an assumption here that most of the business ideas during the bubble were bad ideas. That's not true at all. In fact many of the earlier bubble ideas have since been recycled. They were simply before their time is all.

Now there certainly were a lot of bad ideas that got funding, but that was after the gold rush was already established. They were a symptom of the enthusiasm and optimism, and the lack of other high return investments.

I actually think this is a bubble, and it's much worse than the last one. Valuations are insane. There's very little investment competition from other verticals. Making it as shiny, if not shinier than it's ever been to a potential investor... which can only lead to...
Firebug Tip: using command line within an iframe
Servers, embedded devices and PCs are totally different markets.
As long as we're indulging in English pedantry,

> There is no credible linguist that will argue...

who will argue ;)
The interesting bit is that the best "math theory" we have for describing the behavior of this system is not much better than just running the simulation. In theory, the system should be "simple" in the sense that it has a low information entropy, as evidenced by its simple rules. And yet, we can't yet derive high-order epiphenomena from the low-order description without the rather brutish, informal, and inexact tactic of cranking through the rules and watching what happens. In short, it's interesting because it does look like it could "describable with some math theory" but so far said math theory has not been found.
[Citation needed] We've seen some headlines about exploitative sales practices, but fundamentally, Groupon is an advertising company, and tons of small businesses are signing up and willingly paying the prices they charge. Whether or not it's a good decision for each company, it seems a bit harsh to say categorically that it's harmful.

How many businesses have blown big dollars on traditional ads with low ROI? Does that make traditional advertising harmful?
Indeed, simply scrolling this demo page in Chrome 9 feels very laggy. Edit: OS X, late 2009 MBP, BUT with the BetterHN tab/iframe on top (other pages are smooth though).
Ask Arianna Huffington. Politely.
I don't think this is aimed at people applying for Google. Plenty of office jobs still do stuff with paper.
This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/churchill.html
Would love to attend but can't afford the flight. Man, I really need to move where the action is.
As with anything in a good market, something of value will prevail while something that adds little value will be popped. If your product is useful your fine. If not be weary.
I've been reading jwz since the link to his blog was embedded in Netscape, and it's interesting and relevant to HN to watch how a small business grows, but this title aggrandizes what's actually happening. The pizza shop next to DNA has, as I understood it, had a friendly relationship with DNA for years. Now apparently the owners want to sell it off. This is the kind of transaction that occurs tens or hundreds of times a day in the real world. Good on Zawinski for growing his business (at times over the last 5 years, I've half-expected to see the post where he announces he's walking away from DNA, and not just because of the permitting drama) like thousands of other small business owners.
By his argument, Ruby is really bad for large-scale projects, due to its "language flexibility". (Lisp is just as bad, and Python not much better.)

All I can say is that this hasn't been my experience. It's not just that Rails makes good use of Ruby to define and use several internal DSLs (for validations, associations, etc.), or that many plugins do the same for other purposes (HAML for markup). The large rails app I use at work also has a few special-purpose internal DSLs of its own (for instance, to express permissioning restrictions), and they've made some things a whole lot easier to deal with.

These are features that can make a real mess, if abused, but bad programmers can make a mess in any language. The only real cure for that is to have programmers who have good enough judgment to avoid mistakes most of the time, and code review processes solid enough to catch the mistakes they make on their inevitable off days.

(Besides which, even raw Java isn't entirely free of "undesirable" flexibility these days. There are lots of setups these days in which annotations are used to augment or alter core language semantics, with the aid of runtime bytecode generation. I happen to think that's a good thing for their users. But I suppose one could disagree.)
I don't think the solution to this is to make hunt and peck typing impossible, whether by removing the labels on the keys, making the keyboard invisible, or what have you. People won't learn touch typing as a result, most will instead just not use the tool at all, instead of using it sub optimally. "Gee, my life would be a lot better if I tried this e-mail thing instead of calling people all the time. Oh, it's too hard for me to type, because I can't hunt and peck?" Give up
Not on Windows...
Again, with respect to your second point, the court had no choice but to pursue what you believe was "ridiculous", because it is required by section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act:

The threshold element of a § 2 monopolization offense being "the possession of monopoly power in the relevant market,"...the Court must first ascertain the boundaries of the commercial activity that can be termed the "relevant market."

...and it was germane to the standards regarding product tying relevant to section 1 of the same act:

Proceeding in line with the Supreme Court cases, which are indisputably controlling, this Court first concludes that Microsoft possessed "appreciable economic power in the tying market," Eastman Kodak, 504 U.S. at 464...Because this Court has already found that Microsoft possesses monopoly power in the worldwide market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems (i.e., the tying product market), Findings ¶¶ 18-67, the threshold element of "appreciable economic power" is a fortiori met.

(Both of those excerpts are from the same Conclusions of Law document, of course.)

It's very easy for you to say that "the same argument could be extended into many fields to show that many other products have a monopoly." It's quite another thing to frame your argument in terms of section 1 & 2 violations such that the way you have defined your "relevant market" actually pertains to product tying and preservation of monopoly power through anticompetitive acts. In other words, it's not enough that an anticompetitive act happened: it must also have been used to preserve power — and not just any power but monopoly power, and not just any monopoly power but monopoly power in a market relevant to the anticompetitive claims. And even if you manage to frame it this way, it still must pass through the crucible of the court, as it did in MS v DOJ.

In my mind, they will always be anti-competitive practices, whatever the letter of the law says.

Anticompetitive acts are not illegal in and of themselves. They are illegal for establishment or maintenance of monopoly power, however — and one can't apply that test via hand-waving. The Sherman act is very specific.
i like to NOT copy edit and leave in errors on purpose so folksknow it's reallly me.
I actually did email Tim and Arianna
We could be seeing an aftershock from the last one. It seems like a lot of VCs either are or are working with people who cashed out near the high point of the boom.
In summary: the buzzer.

You could pretty clearly see this if you were watching the game. Ken looked pretty bummed out every time he clearly knew the answer, but missed buzzing in by a few milliseconds or so.

Out of curiosity, how does Jeopardy work? Can you buzz in as soon as you know the answer, or do you have to wait for the host to finish?
There's a sort of valuation = real dollars group-think problem I'm noticing in the conversation here.

Consider: what are the economic consequences of a $1 investment in 3x preferred stock for Facebook at a One Trillion Dollar valuation?

How about a One Hundred Trillion Dollar Valuation (cue Doctor Evil Music). OMG! HUGE TECH BUBBLE!

Answer: the same; the investor will make 3 bucks. Or, if FB goes totally under, she will lose $1.

During the dotcom bubble, companies like Zefer had $100 Million SERIES A rounds. <<--- No revenues. This is not happening right now, in any way, shape or form.

Are valuations off for early stage companies? Hard to say. Right now, with the YC class returns, they are certainly not off, if you believe a VC firm should earn on average no more than 25% return a year. Of course, that's short term.

Long-term, of course, I don't know. But, there are a number of factors that say this is very different than the late 1990s: 4-10x lower cost (time, cash) to deploy technologies, far more tech savvy investors, and a more investor-friendly "this cash is going to let you upgrade from ramen to peanut butter" vibe for early funding rounds. These are significantly different dynamics for the tech world.

Finally, if there is currently a 'valuation' bubble, it is most certainly not an 'economic' bubble. The total dollars floating around for these transactions is quite small compared to what happened during the dotcom crash. However much we like doing our startups, almost none of us are materially impacting the US economy. In fact, because the startups are so job-efficient, we are impacting far less per-startup than the last group, ex all of the public IPOs which took grandmother's money.
TechShop SF open house for DIYers
Isolation levels in Relational Databases (how they affect scalability)
I agree that the investors are making that gamble. A better way to look at Google though is as a company that made major breakthroughs in two segments (search, advertising) and then executed brilliantly for years while benefitting greatly from its rivals' (Yahoo and Micro) sustained incompetence. Which of the new group has breakthroughs in two segements? Which is on track for years of sustained brilliant execution? Which will be lucky enough to have incompetent rivals?
Is WebOS Just Helping Microsoft Build a Better Version of Windows?
There are a lot of small, detailed things you probably need to know to become a "rounded" development professional and they are only really learned "in the trenches" so to speak.

Don't overly stress the "process" you are using, if you ask 10 people this question you will probably get 10 different answers, the best process is one that is repeatable and you feel works for you. The process can also change depending on the type of project you are working on, team size and location, tools being used....don't be afraid to try different things out & see what fits.

Down to brass tact's, unit testing I find to be most important when it comes to tests, write the test cases first, then write the features they are to test.

Learn git and setup a repo for every project you develop - even personal side projects. Use github.

Use a good project management, task management tool like pivotaltracker.com

Use to use frameworks e.g. zend and other MVC frameworks correctly, use industry conventions and existing libs, you do not need to reinvent the wheel for everything you need to do.

Learn search and sorting algorithms for a start, then start of popular design patterns - only way to really understand these is to use them.

Finally I would strongly recommend you try and get a junior development job or internship with a good dev shop, this was by far the best thing I did when I was learning how to program for a living. Nothing else will match it in terms of learning & giving you confidence.

Hope this helps in some way.
When I interviewed at Google one of the interviewers asked me for a copy of my resume. I gave them one of the five that I had printed out the night before and placed into my notebook.
Prosionist groups have been making this in Europe, blogs and comenting in newspapers every time they think there are anti Israel news or comments. And it's the same as you say , it's easy to identify them when they try to defend some thing impossible to defend. And sometimes is sad because even when they have a point the things they say discredit what they are defending, they do more harm to Israel than help. That began if i can recall after the operation Cast Lead in Gaza.
Agreed. http://bit.ly/tcangelgate is a good example of pyramid-scheme-like behavior.
I'm not sure that any of this disputes the original post's claim that Apple's bread and butter is vendor lock-in and there are legitimate reasons for users to oppose this.

It's not so much an indictment of Apple---pretty much everyone would like to find ways to keep their customers from jumping ship. In return, Apple has found a way to give their customers value in return for monopoly. By integrating all the parts--itunes (software and service), app store, ibooks, ipods, ipads, iphones, payments, etc---they can build things with a unified user experience that works.

Why I don't like this is that it makes it nearly impossible for Apple users to benefit from non-apple innovation in any of these areas. Would you like to try someone else's tablet or phone? Well I hope you didn't need any of that content from inside the apple ecosystem. Want to try someone elses book or magazine store on your idevice? Well Apple is now in the process of constructing barriers to this as well.

I don't accept your suggestion that people who don't like Apple's policies should "leave apple users alone" and choose an alternative. Problems like this can sometimes be mitigating by shedding light on them through discussion and complaint (i.e., the uproar about developing apps in alternative languages). At the very least, potential Apple customers need to be educated about the system they are buying into.
Steve Yegge had a great tip for non-academic US job applicants on properly spelling CV. See tip #3.

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/09/ten-tips-for-slightl...
In theory, the sandbox should prevent it. In practice, of course, this is not the case.
> The government funds basic research all the time, with a pretty good track record.

Maybe, but this isn't basic research.

> Fascism is telling Volkswagen to make tanks.

This is saying "we'll fund {you} to make {whatever}" when folks spending their own money don't believe in the combination of {you} and {whatever}.

Synfuels anyone?

Which reminds me, what fraction of the US govt-seeded/assisted solar biz haven't moved much of their operations to China?

The decision will be made on a political basis. That's how govt always works.
Ask HN: How should students spend their summer?
I'm a CS student and I've been wondering how to make the most out of this upcoming summer.

Should I apply for internships, travel overseas and experience a different culture, or just stay on campus and enroll in summer classes? What would a successful student do?
A mailbox of the digital era
Dr. Aaron Franklin - Research Staff Member at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center
Measuring age is not necessarily relevant - if a bridge has a lifetime of 50 years, but the average age is 23 years (up from 16), we have a long way to go before it becomes a problem. Your chart is interesting, but hardly conclusive.
tl;dr Contractor develops psyops backend for the cloud. Creates fake persona pool. Uses anonymizer/chameleon for IP obfuscation, vmware/virtualbox instances for each persona, enables deploying to vps around the world. Uses system to age personas via social/email accounts and salt with rss, social & checkin data.

RFP: https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id...
HSTS UI in Chrome
Big time bubble
No, I don't have it backwards. :) There's always two groups of people. The wild-eyed optimists, and the doubting Thomases. There are still tons of wild-eyed optimists right now, but for me, the emergence of a vocal minority of doubting thomases is a clearer sign of a bubble, or at least the late stages of a boom (is there a technical difference?), because it means those closest to the issue are starting to tilt more pessimistic than the investor community at large.
Once Trebek finishes, the buzzers start working.
There's also nothing keeping someone from writing their own versions of these private APIs.
Though I do keep the thought that Apple is effectively nerfing the competition in the back of my mind. Very far back.