skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Right, and yet courts affirm patents where the only novel component is something that can be expressed in software. The reason they do, in my non-expert opinion, is that they see the slippery slope - every invention can be decomposed into logical steps (the algorithm) and simple physical processes carrying out those steps that aren't novel enough to be patented on their own. And for many or most inventions, the combination of the physical processes isn't even enough to be novel -- the algorithm is key. Consider, for example, synthesizing a chemical. You could have a chemical plant that's able to perform hundreds of basic processes, and the key component is the algorithm that describes which steps to perform in which order. Not allowing patents on these processes just because the important parts of them can be described with an algorithm would be a radical departure from the functioning of our patent system - much more radical than not following the reasoning in some past case to the letter.

So courts have allowed this kind of patent on algorithms, but in my opinion have gotten the logic of it wrong. What I think they should do is distinguish between algorithms that are really mathematical in nature (as in, would be of interest to computer scientists or mathematicians) and algorithms that really just encode a physical process. This wouldn't be that radical of a departure from the cases you mention - they'd just need to refine what those cases meant by 'algorithm'.

The problem with the way courts have ruled to date is that it actually affords less protection to the real mathematical algorithms that the clause was meant to protect, because everyone just slaps "on a machine" to the end of their patent and bam, you've got patentable subject matter. Linked lists on a machine. I'd much rather see the courts look at the crux of the algorithm being suggested (linked lists) and decide that it's too abstract for a patent.
Thanks, but it actually worked out for the best :)
It has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread that Microsoft has already had their platform-two-dot-oh epiphany, which was .Net: managed languages with automatic garbage collection, and so on. If this evolves into a big win for programmers, Apple will be forced to follow suit.

Timing is everything. That epiphany has not yet lead to what it promised originally: a consumer OS in managed code, with major applications in C#.

I do not think that will happen soon, either. => Apple will probably be fine with a OS written in C with some added functionality, especially if they manage to build one or more managed environments on top of it. That way, companies can build their in-house stuff in managed languages, while the core stuff remains finely tuned C.

I do not think that is the most beautiful solution, but it may well be the pragmatic approach that wins the race.
Exactly, and many users install node into ~/local so root privileges are never needed.
Yes, but what happens when development on this closed source editor dries up?

It looks like a great app, but I'm still leery of basing something as important as my editor on a closed code base again.

There are also some great alternatives out there, notably Redcar, which is both open and full of Textmate like features.
First impressions are extremely positive. Is there a mailing list or anything yet? I would love to provide feedback and in return be able to follow the development progress.
> This is gold...

More like Fool's gold.
Looks great. Any chance we can get it to understand our .vimrc files? Maybe even (some) plugins?
EC2 instances don't have high-end graphics cards, and the payout from CPU-mining is not usually cost effective.

It would be far cheaper to buy bitcoins over an exchange than spend money mining them on a EC2 instance.

There's also a limit to how many coins you can generate per day. Even if your grid of EC2 instances accounted for say, a quarter of all Bitcoin processing power, you'd still only make 15 coins an hour.
While I agree that striving for happiness is a totally acceptable goal in live, I think it's a bit egoistic. I would not teach my children to seek power or riches, but to work to "better themselves and the rest of humanity". If the can't leave their own footprints, they can at least try to help others in doing that.

I want humans to achieve cool things -- build AIs, end disease and death, and settle on other planets. If everybody sought their own happiness I fear that progress would be much slower.
Cell phone radios are purpose built to save space, expense, licensing, and energy. They can only communicate using the specific frequencies and technologies (GSM, CDMA, WiFi, etc) that they were designed for.
Multiple identities make this almost impossible to track. You can have a separate wallet for every transaction and then pass the bitcoins through http://doubletrouble.bitcoinbet.com/ if you want to be paranoid. If you verify your bitcoin history, you should be pretty safe from IRS-like companies.
San Francisco, CA - VigLink, Product Manager, Senior Java Developer

VigLink is a content monetization company, assisting publishers to make more money from their site by capturing the value of outbound traffic from their site.

We use technologies like Hadoop, Cassandra, Nutch and Lucene. We're looking for full-stack developers ready to jump in on a high-volume low-latency bidding engine. Experience with real-time auctions, NLP and data mining are all pluses.

Work is in SF, looking for both interns and full time.

More info: http://www.viglink.com

Job descriptions:

http://www.viglink.com/jobs#/product-manager
http://www.viglink.com/jobs#/senior-java-dev

Email me directly (oroup@) and please put "HN Job Post" in the title.
How Happy Are You? In a Boston Suburb, It’s a Census Question
Yea. I don't see anything wrong with being alone when the right person is not there. Settling is not better than being alone. What I did was worse than that. I had something great and turned my back on it.
Agree 100%. Design is art with a goal.

"Clean" is not a goal, nor is "messy". Given how many articles on lean startups and testing are posted here on HN, I'm surprised how many readers are swallowing the author's advice without questioning WHY "clean" is better or necessary. The author himself said here in this thread that he isn't interested in testing at all. That, to me, shows a fundamental misunderstanding, and frankly disrespect, for great design.

The parrot secrets ebook is a classic example of great design that is definitely not "clean". Yet it is successful.

Never confuse your personal aesthetic with design.

There are great books to learn from, and everyone should take all these book recommendations to heart. But take the time to absorb the professional advice, and try and synthesize it into rules you can work with and apply properly.
Do you think the 11 year old boys parents should have handled the situation before it happened or do you think it was unstoppable and purely hormonal?
San Francisco, CA - HotPads.com has full time and internship openings for software engineers and web developers. We're a small team looking for driven individuals who want make a big impact on the way people search for housing: http://hotpads.com/pages/jobs.htm

Follow the instructions on the page or email me at dpeters@hotpads.com
Seattle, WA - Datasphere http://bit.ly/ifL25z

We are a fast growing company who just opened it's second office in AZ (http://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/news/2011/04/18/dataspher...) that is in the hyperlocal news market. On the web/tech side we are looking to hire .Net, JAVA, NoSQL, UX, PM's & Drupal people. On the non web/tech side we have a wide range of jobs.
Cease-and-Desist Against iPad News Aggregator Zite
http://forums.mydigitallife.info/archive/index.php/t-9213.ht...

448675 2011-05-01 Dell.Service.Tag.Editor.iso.rar
initial scan seems ok on opensuse LINUX.
http://www.coreboot.org/SeaBIOS

backup BIOS first

call warantee service.
IE is frozen with 100% cpu.
install anti-virus??
then get rid of the compu ERASE or lojack
problem - then, go to warantteee.

do it at the beginning before your important
pictures are on the computer and been sent to
outsource india for compu ERASE
MacRuby has disproven that assertion pretty well. It benchmarks remarkably close to Obj-C.
With that much money, they will likely have a huge burn rate and flame out much more quickly that expected. I've seen first hand multiple times what too much money can do to a startup. It's not pretty!

Personally, I'm expecting Color to have a similar fate to Cuil. I hope I'm wrong, though, just because being a winning cynic isn't fun.
Notting Hill, London, UK - PHP developers, interns welcome, needs to be on-site - http://www.made.com

made.com are looking for inventive and inquisitive PHP coders to come and help us build cool stuff on top of Magento PE. In the pipeline: native multivariate testing, bespoke tracking and user segmenting, performance enhancements, integration with OpenERP. Possible experimentation with node.js for real-time stuff coming up, and any experience with cloud based infrastructures will help a lot! Scrum, XP, TDD, Selenium - if these things make you happy, we'd love to speak to you

Apply to andy@made.com
You can use the standard vim commands to create split panes with different files.

:e <some file>

:vsp <another file> " for vertical split

:sp <yet another file> " for horizontal split
SEEKING FREELANCER (remote
Infographic designer for
http://feefighters.com

Here's what we've done. We absolutely hate the most recent one (hired the wrong guy)
http://feefighters.com/blog/infographics/

Job description:
http://feefighters.com/jobs/infographic-designer/
You're having a laugh. £23k for a "rockstar developer" with 2+ years of Rails experience? In London?

Here is some market data http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/ruby%20on%20rails.do Bear in mind that the real "rockstars" are likely to be freelancing.
Just a couple general things I think could be helpful here:

1) In conversation, you should try to listen more than you speak. Remember, everyone loves to talk about something they're interested in, and have other people actually listen. (this is probably the crux of the original article - dorks love talking about their pet topics, as does everyone, but we think our topics are better and therefore its OK to hog a conversation).

From Reddit, I got this gem. When you slip into boring "what do you do for a living?" / "what are you studying in school?" Q/A time, break out of it with "do you like it?"

For example:

You: So what are you studying in school?
Stranger: Chemistry
You: Do you like it?
Stranger: Well, I do, but blah blah blah...

Works shockingly well.

2) Sad moments,bad things have happened - this is a really hard one. I've taken to complete honesty - "that sucks man. I hate that happened to you." Then I shut up, hug them if appropriate, and let them talk more about it if they want to.

In these moments, people want to be heard, but they don't want a solution.

3) Situations where you know you're right, and the other person would be interested in knowing, but you don't want to be a dick -

Start with, "I don't know much about this, but I did read the Wikipedia page the other day...(smile)"

Everyone accepts Wikipedia as correct, and everyone uses it. So it turns the frame from "I'm smarter than you" to "I happened to Google it first".

4) When to say "hi"when people approach

Tough one. What I do is smile all the time and try to make eye contact from 10-15 feet out (I generally try to look up though, so this doesn't seem jarring). Then I say "Hi", continue the big smile and eye contact as we pass. Seems to work well for me, especially if I remember that no one is good at this situation, and they aren't judging me.

5) Making friends - just say "let's hang out." For me, "let's grab a beer" is easy, but I don't see how that wouldn't work for anything else. Sports are fun, you could try inviting a coworker to a baseball game or something.

No need to overthink this one. People are nice, and they like making friends.

6) Accepting compliments - super hard. What works for me is big smile, look down a bit like I'm slightly embarrassed, and say "Wow, you made my day."

7) In general, smile all the time, even if it feels forced. You'll find that your own mood will be so much better, and a good smile can make another person's day better. If you do one thing, just make a point to smile, and you'll see a night and day difference.

Anecdotally, I often have long hair and a beard, so if I don't smile, people think I'm aggressive, standoffish, antisocial, mad, whatever (100% untrue). If I make a point to smile, people see me as accepting, non-judgemental, and friendly - which is what I hope to be.

Best of luck! If you're in Raleigh, I'm always up to hang out with new people.
I thought Paypal had argued strenuously that it is not a bank, so it's, according to them, not just another way of saying checking account.
Very cool. Does it have the equivalent of a .vimrc file so I can modify the leader char and make it more like my MacVim setup?
Overloaded.

Cached link:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
Los Angeles / Santa Monica CA

www.vokle.com

We've got a fun codebase, switching between, Ruby/Rails, Clojure/Java, and Backbone.js. You'll be on a small team (it'll just be you and me) and be able to make a big impact on not just the code base now, but the future direction of our company from an engineering perspective.

We're not so concerned with your background in these specific technologies as we are in your ability to pick them up in the future.

If you're interested, email me at: andrew@vokle.com
Cambridge, MA / New York, NY / Remote.

Statsia (http://www.statsia.com) - Next generation statistical computing and data analysis.

Early stage data-oriented startup looking for statisticians, compiler and language designers, and big data enthusiasts. We are a tiny, high-risk / reward startup coming out of Harvard and are building our core technical team. PhD in computer science, statistics, or related field with speciality in quantitative methods preferred. Deep experience in Bayesian modeling and computation a major plus. Co-founder status is possible given the right candidate.

We are also looking for a UI designer. Strong javascript skills and interest in data analysis and visualization is required.

Email: jobs@statsia.com
Neural Networks making a come-back?
If you are capable of switching editors, what does it matter if it's closed source or not?

This adversity to switching editors is a common trait in programmers I can't quite understand. We programmers learn new things all the time, it's part of what makes us excel in our profession. And yet, adopting a new editor is apparently extremely hard.
The percent of Americans age 25+ who attended college (some college) is 55.6%, so it is clear we are seeing well over half of Americans attend college if you include those under 25.
There's already a price barrier in the form of the Mac OS computer you need to develop iOS apps. An extra $400 for dev tools you think would be "awesome" is a show-stopper?
Trendiction is hiring in Esch-Sur-Alzette (Luxembourg).

Please see http://www.trendiction.com/ or http://www.trendiction.de/

We do distributed crawling, content/article analysis/extraction, and reporting through a multitude of sources (message boards, blogs, news, ...).

Please contact me (Thibaut Britz) t.britz@trendiction.com if you are interested.
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64/which-language-is-best...

Clojure 1.2.0 is already faster than Racket. Version 1.3.0 will probably bring it close to Go territory on those benchmarks.

For my own work I've found that getting Clojure in the Java ballpark is certainly possible.
That's quite interesting, a bit horrifying to anyone learning a new language which I guess shows knowing a language doesn't mean knowing the culture.

I'm always worried about hand gestures now I have to make sure I know the code of the culture.
I don't want to take anything away from Vico (because so far it is pretty rad), but if you stick with MacVim you eventually start using TextMate less and less until you just stop altogether. For me, it took a good 3 months or so. The last holdout was using TextMate for formatting JSON output, but I found a Chrome plugin for that.
Sony Apologizes for PlayStation Network Raid
DIY Healthcare For Startups
Very good point about color blindness.

When designing a site, I recommend that people run it through Vischeck - http://www.vischeck.com/vischeck/vischeckURL.php

Vischeck is both an online and downloadable tool that will show you how your design looks to people with varying types of color blindness.
This is exactly what I meant: I could make due with what I've already found for learning the syntax of Python -- but I haven't yet found the one that teaches me to think in Python.
Leidschendam / NL
http://www.changer.nl

We do Django/Python and .NET/MVC and are looking for a couple of full time developers.

email: jonathan@changer.nl
This is an interesting article with some real solutions for those individuals or startups who might not be able to get in on a group plan. Some of the ideas seem to be relatively low cost while providing at least some form of access to a doctor.

How important is health coverage to you? What has your experience been as far as health coverage in the startup sector?
Http://www.blazevideo.com/hdtv-player/
Be The Best User Of Your Own Product
Am I the only person who thinks that tabs don't scale in editors used for programming? I tend to have a lot of files opened at the same time (currently at 143 in Emacs) and I can quickly switch to any of these with a couple of keystrokes. Most of the Textmate users I've seen don't even care about the tabs in the editor, they just press Cmd-T and type the name of the file.

Is people doing something else with tabs that I'm missing here?
I know C, but haven't used it in years. I had done a couple of projects in assembly language prior to picking up C and I think that really helped as I had no difficulty with the concepts of allocating and freeing memory, pointers, and the like that seem to be pain points for some.
TextMate 2's troubles aren't competitors, but rather that the author is apparently out there thrashing in the weeds. If it does get reeled in and actually released, I bet it will be good enough to consider.
Washington, DC - AKQA

We're looking for iOS developers. http://www.linkedin.com/jobs/jobs-Senior-Creative-Developer-...
Most of the things you've said I imagine don't apply to Racket, I didn't say anything about Scheme in my original post.
Helsinki, Finland

Grey Area is a fast growing company building a location aware multiplayer world for mobile. The game is built on real world locations and includes both, real time combat and asynchronous game play. http://www.shadowcities.com

Looking for:

Web and Mobile Game Developers
Server Engineers
Operations Engineer

http://www.greyarealabs.com/jobs/
Redwood Shores, CA (SF Bay Area) - Engineers and more

EA2D is hiring! We're a new, autonomous studio within EA building cross-platform social games for gamers. We've just launched our first game, Dragon Age Legends:

http://apps.facebook.com/dragonagelegends/

We need help building:

* New features for Dragon Age Legends (big ones: real-time, mobile, etc.)

* New games for big-name IP (we have access to the full EA library)

* An epic social gaming platform (for both internal and external teams)

We're small (30 people) and scrappy. And we're growing fast: 0-200 servers in the past 6 months. Tech stack is primarily AS3/Java backed by MongoDB, but we also use Python, JavaScript, and Ruby. We have a highly automated infrastructure running on AWS (EC2 w/ELBs and ASGs, EMR, SQS, etc., plus more than a few super-secret/unreleased Amazon features). Buzzword potpourri includes Chef, node.js, Google App Engine, Hive, Graphite, Tomcat, GitHub, Pingdom, Loggly, PagerDuty, and continuous deployment. <3 DevOps.

We need platform, game, systems, and mobile engineers. We need data people and people to run day-to-day operations. We need producers, marketing, and designers. Some of our job listings are posted here: http://www.ea2d.com/jobs/, but we have positions we haven't even finished writing descriptions for.

If you're an A player, drop me a line: mikeb@ea2d.com
I think you both are arguing from different sides of "popular". You are stating popular by sheer numbers while he was stating it from a 3rd party developer prospective. I believe he was right in what he said.
So if I'm correct, this is based on the assumption that rarity creates value, correct? (which I am personally not convinced of). You spend energy to create a bitcoin, but you can't take a bitcoin and create energy. This adds value to the energy because it can create bitcoins (assuming bitcoins have any value), but it doesn't do the reverse.

Or is there something about the Bitcoin economy that I missed?
Seeking work - full time PHP/Symfony or PHP/CI
These guys are world-class! They also work out of General Assembly, which is quickly becoming the hub of tech startups in the city.
I don't get it. Just buy the artists' CDs. Why add a layer of management/crap in between?
Tabs are nice if you are programming just a couple files, or several files from different locations. Any more than that, and I agree that they're far too unwieldy. Vico also has an open files dropdown, and, of course, a folder explorer, as well as Cmd-T.
I like this a lot. Simple, VIm keybindings, Python symbol discovery, beautiful mac goodness.
This is also mentioned in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (which I haven't read in a while, so bear with me). When one of his English students complains she's stuck and can't figure out where to start her essay, he tells her to pick a single city to write about. When she returns later with the same problem, he tells her to pick a single building in that city to write about. When she again returns later, he tells her to pick a single brick in that building to write about. When she again returns later, she comes back with dozens of pages.

I recall there being some comments about how she had to narrow her focus, because when you think of a city you can only think of all the things you've ever been told about that city, or ever heard about that city. Even when you think of a building you can only think of what other people have said about that building. When you focus on a single brick, it becomes clear that no one has ever said anything about it; so you clear your mind and think and write your own thoughts...

Point being, limiting yourself can get rid of certain distractions and make it clearer what your task actually is.
Tampa, FL: Web Developer, Embedded/Linux Programmer

We make custom and commercial hardware solutions for industry. We're primarily working on cellular wireless products.

Web Developer:

A big part of our primary product involves a monitoring/remote-control portal. We're wanting to invest more in it. At the start, you'll be responsible for maintaining and updating what we have now. Later, you will be involved in overhauling it. You'll have lots of input over the technologies you use to build it. You want to try MongoDB & NodeJS? Awesome. Want to go with PHP & MySQL? Also fine. You'll be involved in both back and front end development.

Embedded/Linux Programmer:

We use Busybox and Linux for most of our projects, others are bare-metal. Our projects mostly require userspace utilities and shell scripts. We sometimes also have driver work.

The team:

Our team is very enthusiastic but not overbearing. We all have a very broad skill set and love learning new things. The environment is low-pressure but driven to succeed. We're looking forward to growing our team.

Email shawn.goff@accns.com for more information.
Seattle, WA - SEOmoz are hiring 8 positions right now
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/8-open-positions-at-seomoz

Recently named top 10 places to work in Seattle, we're hiring both engineers and online marketing people. We have jobs to fit everyone! :)