skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I support complete abolishment of the entire patent system, not just software patents. I believe that - in practice - patents do more to inhibit innovation than to encourage it, and I also find the idea that the government will use force to prevent you from using an idea - that you may have developed independently - to be immoral.
I'd love to be sold on a new language, but using it by showing me ridiculous examples of a language I know reduces the credibility of the seller. It's an otherwise good looking article but when I see this:

public boolean hasUpperCase(String word) {
if (word == null) {
return false;
}
int len = word.length();
for (int i = 0; i < len; i++) {
if (Character.isUpperCase(word.charAt(i))) {
return true;
}
}
return false;
}

Where it should be this:

public boolean hasUpperCase(String word) {
return word != null && word.matches(".*[A-Z]+.*");
}

It casts doubt on the other examples. I'm not saying Java isn't a verbose language that can get tedious, but let's use some decent examples.
That guy having six fictional relationships with men, he's a real trooper.
Python, A Game Developers Best Friend. Bots, custom file types, and more.
Your reductio ad absurdum does not accurately represent what I'm saying. I'm saying that you could possibly make software in a few minutes that could violate a patent. This is extremely unlikely with hardware of significant complexity to earn a patent.
A Plan to Make NYC the Nation's Leading Digital City
No. Abolish all software patents, limit all other forms and liberate knowledge towards the evolution of humanity.
Only $30B? Right now NOK's market cap is $32B.

Assuming 90% of Nokia is mobile-related.
But mobile is: 45% ($14.4B) handsets + 45% ($14.4B) networks. Then $30B for NOK handset business is more than 100% premium to market.

Ericsson sold their handset business to SONY and still has large networks business.
That idea's been around for a good while now, and it's been partly implemented in things like the OIN http://www.openinventionnetwork.com/about.php . Eben Moglen talks about the situation in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3QJB81rfbs (skip to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3QJB81rfbs#t=6m44s if you want).
I'm looking for Rails work now and I've been offered substantially low salaries compared to what I make now. I was thinking maybe I need to adjust my expectations but your post makes me think twice. Thanks!
Paypal, credit cards, etc. have dispute resolution services. They don't just allow the buyer to renege arbitrarily. To be useful, it seems to me that an escrow service needs to offer a more robust dispute resolution mechanism, which will cost money.
Not only Buscapé, but PagosOnline too.
I don't understand. How do you connect your last sentence to what you wrote before?

You seem to say that there are situations where video calls would be appropriate, there are, however, problems that make video chat not quite as good as face to face communication.

Voilá, we just found the perfect niche for video chat: all those situations where face to face communication would be desirable but is impossible or too expensive.

The technology is cheap and by now built into everything, let me just share this little anecdote: We regularly present the status of our bachelor's thesis to our Prof and one student couldn't attend in person so she just used video chat. The university didn't have to buy expensive equipment, we just used the projector that's standard in every meeting room and the Prof's old laptop with camera. It was not as good presenting face to face but far better than nothing at all or a telephone call.

Nobody thought of video chat when building the infrastructure but now it's there and can be used at a moment's notice.

This additional mode of communication crept up on us but now it's available and I think there are quite a few situations where its use is appropriate. (By far the minority but that's not really so important.)
The author says the person is paid "a reasonable contractor fee for the work", which I would hope is equal to or greater than the current salary. If not, it really doesn't make sense, as you say.

I would be curious to know what happens before this 5 day test. Do people just walk in with resume in hand and sit down to work for 5 days? Probably not. There would have to be some sort of discussions-that-aren't-an-interview which would lead to a yea-nay decision on the work term. What sort of funnel is there?

I agree there is a big commitment on both sides to do this 1-2 week work stage. There has to be more to the events leading up to the stage than what's in the article.
Are these the definitive docs: http://code.google.com/closure/compiler/docs/js-for-compiler...

Because I don't see square brackets for optional in there.
How would you prove an "independent" invention was really developed independently of the patent? You can't prove that someone didn't read something.
LOL. I wish the writers of South Park read this... This is material for a very hilarious episode...(Cartman would be the interviewer :)
EWDs (Dijkstra essays) every day via Twitter
So, you just won Startup Weekend. Now what?
We are a team of guys (and a gal) randomly thrown together in a prolonged tech hack bender known as Charlotte’s Startup Weekend. This event is part of a larger nationwide Startup Weekend group which promotes this idea. The concept is to see what happens when you put entrepreneurial minded people together for a short defined amount of time and say “go”.

One of the goals for me was to meet some cool guys that might want to hack with me, perhaps even one that wanted to hack with one of my many partially finished ideas. I really wasn’t expecting to have something pretty much finished by Sunday night, which is just due to the relentless of our team.

I think part of how it all came together was dumb luck. I had no idea how good our developers, UX, and business guys were. Just putting myself in the situation where something like this could happen was a (very) good decision in hind sight.

So, a bit about what we built. (elevator door opening) When a person needs help from a savvy professional, they can connect through talkible.com and schedule an immediate/future call via Twilio with an expert. When that call takes place there is a one time charge paid by the consumer. All the billing and backend stuff to make the connection happen is taken care of as well. That’s it. Talkible. Knowledge when you need it.

We’ve all thrown around lots of different numbers about how big or small this thing could get. The youtube billion dollar buyout and others have been quoted throughout the weekend. I think it’s human nature to think what you are building is going to work. It will be interesting and telling to see what happens when what we’ve done doesn’t work exactly as planned.

We are envisioning to start small and learn from local developers (our first vertical). Try and answer questions like do people really want this? If so, what kinds of people like this idea more than others? What kind of % are professionals willing to pay for this (easier) way to connect to consumers (aka “monetize your downtime”)?

But maybe even more basic questions need answering now, like where do we go from here? We were just a group of people thrown together for a weekend long hack-a-thon. What are the things that we haven’t thought of, that are sitting around the corner ready to derail our happy train of optimism and enthusiasm?

On a personal note, I’d like to say that this weekend was a remarkable experience. I spend a shit ton of time hacking stuff together, all pretty much by myself. The idea that we’ve (almost) already created something that people REALLY want to buy, is hard to explain in words. My sincere appreciation and gratitude goes out not only to my team but to everyone that made startup weekend possible.
For the contrary MSFT will install Skype to every mobile device possible (maybe even feature phones).

Then MSFT will use Skype for extortion.

It will threaten cellular operators to pay them to disable Skype or make it WiFi-only.
.. which is a good thing.
The dead simple, done right, distributed file system. (Redis-based)
The established wisdom is that the Internet remembers everything. Nope.
I think he did neither really - I think he just expounded upon his logic and to me, it made a lot of sense.

The reason I like Gary is because he made his money using the tactics he's teaching (with a small portion of his business mind you), which is the exact opposite of what many SM pro's do, which is to use their "consulting" to make money. They're like affiliate marketers teaching people to get rich before they actually get rich.
Number Line
Sass/SCSS and CoffeeScript with one click in ASP.NET MVC
Something Old, Something New
Lessons From Jim Collins On Becoming Great
This story made my day. I've been in similar situations where the questions are bizarre and inappropriate. Suddenly I feel like walking out.
When I started learning Lisp, I tried using Emacs with viper and vimpulse.

Although it did make using Emacs less painful, it still required way too much knowledge of Emacs to use effectively and configure than I had time to dedicate to learning it.

Emacs+SLIME+vimpulse+viper might be good enough for someone who already knows Emacs or who hasn't invested a lot of time in learning vim. But for someone fluent in vim, I just don't think huge time investment in learning Emacs well is worth it.
Your discussion of "Tribe Signalling" is interesting. It reminds me of all the stuff that Desmond Morris was talking about in "the Human Animal" (and more recently http://www.exactitudes.com/). By wearing certain clothes you're sending a signal to others about political POV, likes dislikes, interests etc... It helps you find other like minded individuals.

Maybe you're right that being against software patents is generally a tribal signal that says "I'm a hacker" or "computer-type".

When I logged into the comment thread, I was thinking the exact same sort of thing. "Well Duh"

The Hacker News audience is somewhere near 100% the exact demographic that you'd expect to be generally against software patents.

It's like logging on to a Twilight fan-board and asking "Are vampires Awesome?"
According to David Wallace Foster: http://www.martin-brown.net/downloads/DavidFosterWallace-Inf... (PDF)

:)
If you want real disruption, you're not likely to find funding for it.
For those who may be asking, it is a simple Python script which automatically publish every day (via a cron job) a link to every PDF of the essays (EWDs) of Dijkstra.
We can then follow the ideas of this great mind with (a little) delay.
Ask HN: How would you market this information business?
http://www.deedeemicrowaves.com/

I met this woman randomly the other day. I found out she specializes in giving seminars on how to effectively microwave food and has been doing so for 28 years. She's one of the best in this really niche market. I think she's really got something but her website is horrible and clearly she isn't that tech savvy, she tends to make all her sales of her dvd in person by giving seminars and asking people to buy her dvd.

I would like to help her out to bring the business online. If you were to advise her on how to promote her business online, what would be the right angle? Revamp the site, write guest blog posts and attempt to sell her dvd series online?

I would appreciate any of your thoughts. Thanks in advance.
Nice website and interesting concept that gets to the motivation issues that prevent most fitness regimes from being successful.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2553192
Would love to check it out. Got an internal server error on fitocracy.com/setup after redirect from twitter authorization.
There's one simple phrase I like to keep in mind when thinking about software patents. Its mere existence demonstrates that patents are not serving their intended purpose: "accidental patent infringement"
We who invent things, we who solve problems in new ways, don't do so because we can get a patent. We solve the problem because when you put a problem in front of us, we can't stop ourselves from solving it. It haunts us. We dream about it. And the only way to make it go away is to solve it. That's the nature of Engineers, the nature of Inventors. Engineers don't think about patents when presented with a problem, they think about solutions. Lawyers think about patents and they don't invent anything.

You might have a better idea than the last guy, but chances are your idea overlaps with his a little. If your new idea has some similarities with an exiting patented idea, implementing it could be risky. If engineers did a patent search for every idea they had, they would find some overlap with existing patents every single time. Nothing would ever get created. The true evil of patents is that they actually stifle, rather than promote, innovation. The effect of patents is opposite their intent.
Instapaper-Like Feature Coming to Safari and iOS 5?
Nerdy Nights - A Complete Tutorial Set for Programming the NES
Sure, but a post with some substance would have been better :)
Perhaps it should say:

URLs in comments become links.

I think the document you reference is talking about submissions and comments.

http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
Fukushima Reactor 1 melted down, 2 and 3 may have too
Small Business Success Stories
I like the idea of a "mini-internship" instead of an interview...

An employer could take on a person for say 2 weeks non-paid and let that person prove themselves.
gEdit. Becuase it's simple.
Android 3.1 Honeycomb hands-on
But will they have enough money to buy a mobile network after all this is said and done? Would be pretty interesting to see them buy someone like Sprint.
When a founder moves on
I'm not sure what the OP suggests is feasible in most situations. It's disruptive to the existing team and you have to have "throwaway" projects around for the person to do that won't cause problems if they're late or poorly implemented (and if that's the case, why do them?) Also, you're letting every guy who "interviews" learn about the internals of your systems, code base, security, etc to some degree, which is not something most companies want to do.

Interviewing is hard, but it's clearly not totally broken, given that some companies obviously do a far better job of it than others. 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? Are Apple, Amazon and Google really just more lucky at hiring?

One non-interview thing that I DO like to look at is publicly viewable work like open source contributions, blogging, social media activity, etc. If someone wants to work on web sites, and they're not doing anything web-related outside of their job, I have to wonder how passionate they really are about the domain.
Buzzdata's plans for managing data on a social platform
By #1, do you mean something like the message passing in Erlang? It seems like a reasonable fit for 1 and 3, though its macro support is pretty weak.
Only if people buy the product.
In practical terms, you can fire someone for any reason, just so long as you list an acceptable reason on the paperwork. The power of an employer to fire you at any time is definitely not equal to the average employee having the power to leave at any time, and that's part of why 'employment at will' is a crock.
Nobody who's any good would come work for you for free. Ever.
Create power saving webpages with Online Leaf.
Perhaps.

But it's also the "help" link that is provided when you edit the about section in your profile.
The Great Web-Reality Divide
I would hope it would be easy to show prior art, but stuff like this (http://m.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/21/texas_jury_says_google...) is where it becomes "hard" to prove prior art. Because you have to prove it against a jury of, generally, non-technical people. Here is the primary claim:

* a linked list to store and provide access to records stored in a memory of the system, at least some of the records automatically expiring

a record search means utilizing a search key to access the linked list

the record search means including a means for identifying and removing at least some of the expired ones of the records from the linked list when the linked list is accessed

* a means – utilizing the record search means – for accessing the linked list and, at the same time, removing at least some of the expired ones of the records in the linked list
I'm surprised things like business process patents aren't more widely supported. Especially in the software industry, it's pretty obvious that most applications are the result of somebody developing (or at least, think their developing) a better method for accomplishing an existing task. Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't business process patents enable similar ideas organized differently to equally receive patents? It's truly difficult to lean either way (however, I did vote for the abolishment of all patents). If you're a successful business who is challenged for your innovation, the only protection you really have is a patent. If anything, I feel like those in the software industry should form some sort of agreement and petition the government to enact new rules specifically for this industry. As technology evolves, I shudder at the thought of how the archaic system we have now will all but crumble. There should be a lot more future-proofing taking place.
> In fact the way patents should work is that the patent officer spends a week trying to solve said problem themselves.

Does that really sound at all scalable (or even reasonable) to you?

I imagine that many of the proposals that move through the patent office are highly contextual and may be simple ideas wrapped up in daunting language. It seems reasonable that it would take far more than a week to even get your arms around some of the problems themselves, let alone the solutions.

Besides, if patent officers were such able critics, wouldn't they be more useful as engineers?
i think this is a big factor that people tend to overlook. when you're in a convo w/ someone in person, you can look around briefly, pause to think, etc.

i feel like in video chat you have to be very comfortable w/ the person you're talking to or understand that you CAN look away, etc.
My take on this is: Abolish all patents (not only software).

Patent system simply does not serve it's purpose (which ws to motivate inventors to publish they ideas, so they could be later reused) as patents are intentionally written as to be unreadable and uninformative. And this happens not only in "software" or "business method" ones.
Is there something like explore2fs for ext3 and ext4 so that you can access it while in windoze?
They should take a look at how BitTorrent is trying to build a P2P social network. Maybe they could get a few ideas from there and implement them. I'd like to see a social network where a true "global" community can be formed, and by that I don't mean only having people from everywhere, but also having people and communities that don't answer to any one Government, at least related to what they post in that social network. I'd like to see a social network that would make revolutions even easier, and even allow the Chinese to make one if they want to, and for that it needs to be very safe and very decentralized so it can't be stopped.
Developer Skills That Get You Hired or Promoted
Tips for  Research Paper
This article is about a college research paper which provides students tips on how to write their research papers. As most students will find the task of writing a research paper tough, they will be benefited by reading this article and gathering sufficient knowledge.
I struggled reading past the "Netflix is a better librarian" comment. Netflix is not a librarian, it is a library-like PLACE. Netflix probably hires librarians or information professionals trained in librarianship to organize their data and user experience. The public library system is only one of many endpoints for a library trained information-professional. For the past decade library schools have been re-branding as iSchools; producing UX/HCI professionals who go on to work at places like Netflix (hence the "Netflix is a library-like PLACE"). In the interest of full disclosure I am currently getting a PhD at an iSchool so I have a different understanding of the social categories "librarian" and "library." Even so, as every schoolboy knows, a thing cannot be a librarian. IT'S PEOPLE, NETFLIX IS MADE OF PEOPLE.
To me the Skype acquisition is great for the industry but bad for Microsoft. I think they're probably going to just waste it; maybe put Skype buttons in Outlook or rename it Windows Live Chat or something.

It's good for the industry because maybe, finally, it'll be the factor that causes a cross-platform video solution to be adopted by the major players.

Best case scenario for Microsoft is they hold fort and just don't make any money off it. I'd love to hear why you think this is good for them.
You should check out my buddies blog, his community would align well with yours, http://nerdfitness.com/

Maybe send him a message and start working something out?
You'd have to ask the people in the corresponding industries what they think about it. Patents might not have the same effects in other industries. We have on hacker news obviously mostly experiences with software-patents. From what I've read similar patent discussions are indeed also happening in other industries like in pharmaceutical research as advancements there also often blocked by patents, which is just the opposite of what was the original reason for the patent system.
Imagine a Book of Code, like Knuth's Art of Programming, but easier to search and understand.

If you come up with something new, and write it up clearly enough, it can go into The Book. You get royalties for X number of years (maybe 5? idk). Everyone uses this as a resource. Perhaps there's ARIA-like licensing (where a cafe pays a standard rate to play any music they like), for usages based on how many people use it (so a small software shop pays a small annual fee, and google pays huge fees) - or more likely the owner sets the price. Like an app-store for algorithms. After X years, it becomes free.

The patent system is nothing like this. I'm not sure it's even technically possible, though certainly textbooks get written and some of them are excellent (perhaps with financial motivation, you could employ people like David Flanagan writing up algorithms).

Having such a Book would being programming much closer to an engineering discipline. It would also make contributing to the Book a badge of professional honour, and not disparaged as patents are today. Really, anyone who invents a new and useful approach should be lauded - but the patent system has strayed far from this.
How Canada’s YellowAPI is Helping Developers Monetize Their Applications
I do not see democracy as a binary property. If the majority of the population are illiberal and that country has constitutional protections for minorities or free speech then said country is undemocratic about the protection of minorities or freedom of speech but it can still be very democratic when it comes to, say, the tax rate.

(But I'm happy to use your definition, it's just that with your definition, no country in the world would be a democracy. Not even a little bit.)
I only got my first smartphone this year so I am only used to nokia's non-smartphones and they were top-notch for things like reception and menu simplicity.
The truth is no other vendor was taking WP7 seriously. Samsung and HTC merely dipped their toes in, in order to hedge against Android. No one has marketed a WP7 as a top-shelf phone the way HTC Evo or Samsung Galaxy S were promoted.

This could be a confirmation of the rumors that WP7 sales are poor, and they seek to pivot towards a closed arrangement.
Start with Nothing; Greg Gianforte / Bootstrapping RightNow (2002)
Microsoft To Buy Nokia’s Phone Division? Not Likely, Here’s Why.