skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Abolish all, software should be covered under copyright rather than patent as the expression of an idea.
I think patents can be (and have been) distorted to be used as weapons, but their real purpose is to help innovation as I described.

The argument you're making is basically that the system right now is broken, so we should just throw it out. I do agree that it's broken, but I argue that fixing the system is a better solution than throwing it out.
FatSecret would be nice too
http://platform.fatsecret.com/api/
I actually don't agree with these points. I like the design and didn't have any negative sentiments towards it.

I didn't seem to have performance issues.

I thought it was quite intuitive and I quite liked the Save Workout page.

I enjoyed the activity stream and seeing what other routines and weights people we're doing.

I like that the site seemed to have dedicated knowledgeable people as opposed to out of shape geeks.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=facebook+like+trademark

From the first result: "Facebook also has no fewer than 14 applications pending to trademark the word "like.""
Interviewing works. But not for every situation.

Do we really believe that the big consulting companies or banks don't know how to filter for the better candidates given how much their business depends purely on having the smartest people?

Consultancies like interviewing because they are looking for clay candidates. Workloads are inconsistent and variable; the skills required are generally learned on the job in real-time, so optimum candidates are those who are adaptable and can be molded into many shapes. Optimum employees can look smart while work long hours in small teams, so the hiring criteria are simple: 1) a good GPA 2) whether your interviewer likes you or not. These are factors you can get from an interview (or five).

However a lot of companies are looking for diamond candidates. Diamond candidates are functional hires; those who are very good at what they do, Erlang Ninjas or Ruby Rockstars. These companies are trying to find a specific skill set or a 'brilliant mind' which will complete/compliment their current working profile. Interviewing diamond candidates is useless.

I'd guess that the vast majority of firings are not due to incompetence. They are due to disconnects; cultural, vision, personality, whatever. A diamond candidate is tough to interview for these disconnects. By virtue of their technical ability, their fit is usually downplayed or compromised in an attempt to nab 'the best programming team' or the 'most visionary CEO'. This is why so many companies think that interviewing sucks. They're just looking for the wrong things.

tl;dr Interviews work for hiring people, not functions.
As Debt Limit Reached, Agreement Still Far Off
Good on you for refusing to participate. Is this company still around? Did you say anything in your refusal besides, "No?" How did they react to your refusal?
Time(line) for Plexus
> Disruption of currency will NEVER be an achievement for humanity on the scale of ending the suffering of a gender or a race.

Modern day fractional reserve currency is THE main tool being used to enforce our current servitude, a servitude that most people are unaware that they're in. Running into our fourth or fifth generation of inherited servitude makes it difficult for people to recognize their condition.

What is it said by Goethe?:

"None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free."
Good point... if I really trust the source or care about the material I'll use my main email. If it's a service that I feel may be spammy I'll use a generic email address I keep around for that.

When I REALLY don't want to put an email in and have to, it's the typical "blah@blah.com"
Inflation is one of the worst taxes of all because the government can hide how much of the value of the dollar they take from us!

Further, inflation is an increase in the money supply (ie printing new money). It is NOT an increase in price of goods, although it usually causes price increases as producers and consumers react.
I saw a late model on fly when I was a kid.

I got a ride in the back seat of a P-51 a few years ago. That was a totally awesome experience. I was given a parachute, and told by the pilot "if you see me climbing out, you'd better get out, too."
Ok, all the conclusion seem valid, but I choked on this one:

"I hope the person doesn’t even answer so that I can leave a voice message with the pertinent information and get on with my day"

Why do folks think it is ok to embed important information behind multiple prompts and a dozen key jabs separated by seconds of dead time? Then, its like saying "Here you write this down, slave. I'm to busy to send a freaking text or email, I'll just dictate it to you."

I never listen to voice mail. I delete it unheard. I inform everyone that I do this. I'm not alone.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/26/trademark-face/

They are trying to (see the end of that article). Even though it may be too broad to enforce, a cease-and-desist from a big company like fb often goes far enough in chilling usage.
Even reasonably specific patents often look overly broad if you don't know how to read them, so that it looks like " surely every e-commerce site, app, online grocery list, falls under this patent." This is one of the things that patent lawyers have over most people.
It clear that the overwhelming majority of people here think software shouldn't be patentable. The next question is what to do about it? How can we get software patents out of patent law?
I went looking for material on the matter of interruption in conversation and found some interesting (if not straight forward) information.

http://www.asel.udel.edu/icslp/cdrom/vol3/685/a685.pdf

http://www.eric.ed.gov:80/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.js...
It's not even libertarians. Here's what's happening for those playing along at home:

- Article about Bitcoin appears praising it for being as important as emancipation.

- I disagree with that comparison, strongly, including a personal "fuck you" to the author for being so obtuse.

- Community reviles me as an enemy of change and liberty.

It's clearly a logical progression, is it not? Obviously, I hate BitCoin due to my position. I had better agree with everything said about BitCoin or I am standing in the way of freedom.
Regardless of whether or not it is feasible to have 6,000 patent examiners perform this process, it still seems remarkably subjective: a given patent examiner, with all of his/her individual strengths, weaknesses, imperfections and idiosyncrasies, determines if s/he alone can solve the proposed problem and, if not, essentially says, "Aw shucks, this is patentable!"

And to me that is one of the many problems with (software) patents: it relies on an inherently biased, subjective process to determine whether this objective, rigorous piece of thought is worthy of a monopoly.
There's too much room for error, if you let there be a line between what is and isn't patentable with respect to software. Better to leave it open and let the cards fall where they may. Software patents actively restrict technological development.
Unexpected state revenue leaps to $6.6 billion
Is the Lean Startup movement here to stay?
We have gone through similar situation and my first piece of advise is,if team members are ready to keep aside their ego's then put your efforts with them else as startup weekend idea's are open, go ahead and work with people you know better.
Secondly, give people proper roles and set expectation right on front else if at all you grow it creates problem. Lastly before registering company as per roles and involvement decide on equity.

Idea's are worthless, implementation are priceless.
I was born in 1969. The US went off the gold standard when I was about two years old. I remember news reports of the rate of inflation going above 15%. I remember the economy being one of the reasons Carter lost the Presidency. I remember the rate being brought down, not by going back on the gold standard, but by the Federal Reserve following the standard Keynesian prescription, i.e., cranking up interest rates and causing a recession that brought unemployment up to about 10%.

I think I was more politically aware than the average ten-year-old, but somehow I missed anything comparable to mass graves.
The Secret Sharer
The currency of pirates and hackers
Any PaaS or IaaS providers come up in seconds, bill per minute?
In practice EC2 instances take a few minutes to come up all the way, and bill per hour - partial hours included.

I have a very parallel workload that needs a large amount of capacity to come up in seconds, and then go away after a few minutes - paying for partial EC2 hours when I'm using the instance for ten minutes or less just doesn't make sense.

Can anyone recommend a PaaS or IaaS provider that might better suit my needs?
> You are hedging your entire startup on the government not getting involved and freezing your accounts...

Bitcoin accounts can't be frozen. Do you understand how bitcoin works?
Almost everybody in the eng organization is a "software engineer". When I started, my boss's boss, responsible for all search features, was titled "software engineer". He's since been promoted to "Google Fellow", but his LinkedIn still says "software engineer".

It's sort of the opposite of a bank. At a bank, typically anyone who's been there 5+ years is titled "VP", even if they're basically a branch manager responsible for half a dozen reports. At Google, the people who do VP-level work are often still titled "software engineer". (Considering many of them started back into 1999 and got a good chunk of Google stock for pennies, they probably out-earn those bank VPs by about 1000:1.)
Doesn't look like criticism to me, but more of an account of an interaction.
I use Netbeans, it has really good JavaScript support, all the standard stuff you would expect, plus it reconizes most of the JS libraries and will do auto complete for them. They used to have in IDE Javascript debugging in 6.7 but 6.9 and 7 do not have the plugin, they say it is coming back at some point. It was really nice to set break points in the IDE run the browser and be able to step through the code in the IDE. You could step through the front end, to the back end, to the database, and back again.
IPhone share of phone market: 5% volumes, 20% revenues, 55% profit
Your points might be interesting if they weren't the basic talking points for every whacko "banks are the problem" BitCoin discussion that seems to be coming up.

You are not going to find much sympathy in a community of people that society is rewarding well for programming ability. I hardly consider what I like to do at a healthy salary servitude, but if you want humanity to revert to hunter-gatherers in chaos, knock yourself out.
I wouldn't say lists should be replaced with trees, but adding a rich set of tree-based data structures to Lisp improves it substantially, in my view. To see what I mean, have a look at my FSet functional collections package, which does exactly that:

http://common-lisp.net/project/fset/

Unlike what the OP is suggesting, FSet doesn't expose the internal structure of its trees. Instead it wraps them in a rich set-theoretic interface.
Open Source CNC Torch Table: First Fire
USD accounts can, and his startup will need those to operate and pay salaries. Apply a miniscule amount of logic instead of considering me an outright moron.

If you read my original post (good to see you didn't!), I mined Bitcoins for a while. How do you feel about that? I participated in the community you are defending and grasp its potential. Your binary "everyone who speaks out against Bitcoin has clearly never used it and doesn't know what he's talking about" attitude is hilariously stupid.
Most Important Questions that Modern Science need to solve
Meh. I agree with you that so far BitCoin hasn't changed squat, but even so, I'm not particularly interested in hearing you spout about how incensed you are.

The world would be a far better place if people spent less time being offended.
Agreed! In fact, since many wrong things have been posted to HN, only people who don't post on HN should be permitted to post to HN. Except when they have been proven wrong too!
No, trees are multidimensional lists. Lists are one-dimensional lists, which are degenerate trees and a simple primitive for the more general (always a loaded term) structure.
I think there's a fair chance that Assassination Markets are a libertarian construction that underestimates humanity's inherent valuing of life.

As a thought experiment it is interesting, and I'd encourage anyone to read the actual essay (http://jya.com/ap.htm) but, and feel free to call me optimistic, pessimistic, closed minded, soft, or whatever your world view leads you to think of my opinion, the idea reeks of an academic exercise that would just not be accepted universally enough to work.
In my opinion one of the main advantages of Diaspora over alternatives is marketing and the hype around it.

From a pure engineering standpoint I think that products such as http://onesocialweb.org/ are a much better solution.
How can someone logically say they support freedom for some causes but not others... Sensationalism aside, you are not a supporter of freedom if you pick and choose which issues you think people should be free to choose for themselves.

Even someone disagreeing and not wanting to use bitcoin should at least support other's freedom to use it.
I don't understand contract to hire. I get it from the employer perspective, but why do employees agree to it?

If I was willing to work contracts (e.g. had a wife I could get health insurance and maybe some income-in-case-of-layoff security from), why wouldn't I just always only contract so that I could make more and get paid for my overtime?

If I wasn't willing to work contracts, wouldn't requiring me to contract up front take me out of the running?

Or does this whole thing assume people will just go without health care for a while? I could understand that if there weren't other choices, but given that other full time employment is readily available, who does this?
As a co founder of a Gamification Platform startup, I'd love to chat about your experience creating the achievement system itself. Mind if I shoot you an email?
Vint Cerf: “Engineering is about turning science fiction into reality”
what you talking about is exactly the black hole entropy - the maximum entropy achiveable, which is suprisingly not that _big_, i.e. it happens to be proportional to the surface area, not to the volume - the "Bekenstein-Hawking" limit :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_thermodynamics#Black...
So they've patented surveys.
I guess the author has never met a deaf person.
Google's Go language is being ported to the .NET CLI by open-source contributors
Yes, but I think you'd agree that replacing the sentence in the story - a bit of dialog spoken to a 10 year old - with your paragraph would not be an improvement.
That's good advice. Simplicity is often hard to achieve though with conflicting requirements to make it useful enough.
I miss boo-box too http://boo-box.com/
Sue them for what? It's not like a fistfight, where you can jus punch the other guy. Lawsuits need to have legal grounds.
Wow, didn't really realize you were issuing a personal F-bomb. I think you should stick to the issues, as have I (this is the author).
Why I use git and puppet to manage my dotfiles
The capability of modelling a physical system with math does not mean that physical systems are math.

On the other hand, the numerous proofs that software is math are fairly trivial for anyone with a modest background in mathematics.
This. The point of the evolutionary fallacy is that when evolving, creating new forms is not better (necessarily) than improving the existing forms. E. coli today are probably nothing like E. coli 2 billion years ago, but they have been continually improving in their own niche while other organisms have gone off trying to find new niches. Similarly, emacs and vim of today are nothing like emacs and vim of even 10 years ago, but instead of creating new devices they continually improve on a proven model.
See http://www.bitcoin.org/wiki/doku.php?id=inflation_controls
...it was in my original post. To which you replied that you know more about the topic than I do - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2553572

How is that sticking to the issues again? Does that only apply to those disagreeing with you and not you?
The article suggests that people who can't afford to take time off from their regular job instead contract on a project that can be done nights and weekends. He's not suggesting you quit your current job before the new job makes you a firm offer.

He doesn't delve into the ambiguous IP ownership of the resulting contract at work - I know that if I did that, my current employer would likely own the rights to anything I did for the prospective employer. But I suppose the prospective employer can get around that by simply throwing out anything the contractor does for them. It's a pretty big cost, to eat 3 weeks or so of wages of a highly-paid contractor, but it's probably cheaper than an IP lawsuit or a bad hire.
Fukushima groundwater has been contaminated since at least 1st April

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/making...
If subjectiveness in judging is your concern, I think there are bigger fish to fry than patents.

And also recall with patents you are guaranteed another appeal to a different body if ever sued, the courts, where you can invalidate a patent. And if MS wins the i4i case the burden of proof will be even lower. And note, there is legislation going through congress right now to make it harder to win a suit, and also expands patent reexamination.

My point? The patent examiner is an important first step, but a patent that clearly has no legs should be defeatable -- if not now, in the near future.
"I don't agree."

The neat part about mathematics is that your approval, or anyones approval for that matter, is not necessary. If the proofs are solid, it holds. If you want to properly "disagree", demonstrated rigorously why the proofs are flawed.

"If it were that simple to overturn software patents it would have happened years ago."

You assume that the people in the position to make decisions are competent.
Ask HN: High Quality iOS Libraries
There are lots of little things I would like to do in iOS (e.g. drawing plots), and I'm sure others have built libraries to do this (e.g. Core Plot, which is a pretty solid library). Are there any high-quality libraries that you would recommend?
Potentially 3 meltdowns occurred, after a 'perfect storm' swamped badly-sited and antiquated reactors.

The end result: a few people with radiation burns, a local shortage of electricity, and a release of radiation that - while significant - doesn't come close to the radiation released by the thousands of atomic bomb tests performed in Nevada this last century. An area will be uninhabitable for a while.

Lessons learned: nuclear power is pretty darn safe, although you shouldn't build 50s-style reactors near the coast in a tsunami zone. If you do, don't live nearby. No surprises there.
You may want to have an explicit note saying it isn't required. People may think it is required because uploading a photo has its own step. Having a note will make the UX feel a bit more friendly.
as a note you can get the digital editions, DRM free, from PragProg @ 40% off.
Paralysed Student 'Walks' Again At Graduation
People will read the TEPCO report and they will process it in a variety of ways.

According to TEPCO (and GE documentation) the containment vessel did in fact contain the core material. Looking at the measurements reported, (both from TEPCO and other agencies) there isn't an indication of either groundwater or watertable contamination.

[update: The TEPCO folks early on said they did see some groundwater contamination with Iodine. They also point out that the plant is 'downstream' of the water table with any nuclides most likely being carried to the ocean rather than to either of the rivers higher in the water table. The engineers will know more when they open things up and start cleaning them out.]

The 'news' is that cleanup will take longer because rather than pulling fuel pins out of the reactor and sending them off to be either re-processed or disposed, the core material at the bottom of the reactor will have to be removed piecemeal by what is probably custom equipment.

This was the same procedure used at TMI to remove material that had migrated to the bottom of the reactor after having melted.

I don't think anyone disputes that this was a tragic event and at seems nearly the worst possible accident (it could have been worse if all reactors were at full power) but it hasn't killed anyone yet, this incident is unlikely to be the principle cause of death for anyone in the forseeable future. And yet tens of thousands of people are dead because they couldn't flee the wall of water, so the tsunami was a disaster, the damage to the nuclear plant was not.

When you see a head-on collision and the person in the car walks away because the airbags went off, we don't argue for banning driving because the car is destroyed, there is $50,000 worth of damage to the guardrail, and hundreds of people lost work because they were caught in the traffic jam. We say, "Isn't it amazing how safe cars are these days! That accident would have killed them even 10 years ago."

We have had a head-on collision between a late model nuclear reactor and an incredibly and extremely unlikely large magnitude double disaster and so far, the safety systems that were built into the reactors and upgraded over the years have kept everyone safe. Slowly, steadily, and with good engineering practices.

The results of that disaster are being addressed and will be cleaned up and repaired. I realize that someone walking away unhurt from what would have been a fatal collision might feel that it was a miracle, but it might just have been good engineering.
Are you sure you understand what "meltdown" means?
Three Miles Island accident involved partial meltdown too.
Sweet, Got the Coffeescript ebook as well as "Continuous testing with Ruby, Rails and Javascript" ebook. Both in Beta

http://pragprog.com/titles/tbcoffee/coffeescript

http://pragprog.com/titles/rcctr/continuous-testing
“The value of the dollar” is a meaningless term. A dollar only has value relative to something else. And in that sense, if I want to know what the value of a dollar is, I just look at what I can buy with it. (I suppose if the government were regulating wages and prices this technique wouldn’t work, but the last President to try such a thing was that famous socialist, Richard M. Nixon.)

Virtually every document that I have seen talking about “inflation”, in the economic sense, defines it as “prices going up”. You can define it as “an increase in the money supply” if that makes you happy. And I could define it as “mint-chocolate-chip ice cream”. Hey, I wish I had some more inflation....
SUMO: animation + sound = 4kB, won 2nd place at Revision 2011
This sounds very much the type of company/guys that I worked for a period of time. I wouldn't be surprised if they were actually the same people. I regret the time deeply.

In the end I didn't even get paid as the company got bankrupt. Of course it didn't come as a surprise to them, and they could have paid me earlier, but they decided to spend the money on their company instead. So, they were dishonest too.

Leave and work for some who know what they are doing.