skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't like to call another person's work spam unless there is a big reason to do so. As far as I can tell, he's an honest developer trying to get by. FYI, I have what I would call a thriving app business on iPhone/Android, much bigger than the OP. However, I don't think my work makes his work any less meaningful.

If you want to go rag on some spammers, there are plenty of people actually spamming people with their websites and email campaigns. I don't see how a broken screen app is comparable to stealing an email address and sending viagra spam. Or even on the same level as Honestly.com, which tricks users into giving over contact info.
Wow, talk about shooting yourself (Lodsys) in the foot -

As above, in the notice letters we have seen, Lodsys uses screenshots that expressly identify the App Store as the entity that purportedly collects and manages the results of these user interactions at a central location.

Thus, the technology that is targeted in your notice letters is technology that Apple is expressly licensed under the Lodsys patents to offer to Apple’s App Makers. These licensed products and services enable Apple’s App Makers to communicate with end users through the use of Apple’s own licensed hardware, software, APIs, memory, servers, and interfaces, including Apple’s App Store. Because Apple is licensed under Lodsys’ patents to offer such technology to its App Makers, the App Makers are entitled to use this technology free from any infringement claims by Lodsys.

This is an interesting side-effect of Apple's end-to-end control of the iOS environment. This defense may not have worked for Android as you could argue that some of the equipment (non-google-produced handsets) does not fall under the licensing umbrella of the company (Apple in this case).

The response should be interesting.

edited for clarity
Not down for me.

The essence of the article, if you can't get it from the cache, is this chart: (sorry, can't seem to make it look

Language/core style | Lambda calculus core | Machine memory core
--------------------+----------------------+----------------
language as given | Haskell | C
language as medium | Common Lisp | Forth

I've dropped it in Pastie here: http://pastebin.com/AdJEz2Hk
It's a good exercise and fun to take share your ideas for redesigning a popular site. What's silly is when people arrogantly and sophomorically proclaim their designs to be far superior to the existing site.
How Rapportive (YC S10) Designed Their New UI
Not really, I'm not sure what I would even classify as "good UX info". There are things that work, and things that don't. Things that look good and things that don't. Things that feel good and things that don't. Things that communicate themselves well and things that don't. UX is supposedly looking for the intersection of all of those axes but they're all very subjective.

If you want to be good at UX, never ever ever go to sites like useit, you won't learn anything helpful, and you'll probably learn something harmful. You just need to get out there and experience what's available and think very hard about what's right and wrong with it. There are no rules, no laws, and the lessons you learn are difficult to translate to anything universal. The moment you start thinking about "85% of ipad users like blue buttons" or "People can only remember 7 things" you lose. Tomorrow's successful UI is going to break today's rules.

EDIT: I should clarify, I don't mean to say that I don't peruse portfolio sites and have a number of blog subscriptions, but none of them I'd feel confident recommending. The quality of such sites varies widely over time so you kind of have to just let it all meld together and draw your own conclusions.
that.is.not.true.
It's just text, so here's an extra (and permanent) mirror: http://pastebin.com/MWA7s9z6
Don't forget, though, that this is unlikely to be the end. Lodsys clearly disagrees with this, given that they sent the letters to the developers, and will probably take Apple to court over whether the license applies to the app makers or not.
They're disrupting cash register manufacturers, not card issuers.
Substance use: America’s number one health behavior problem
What I meant on the German and US systems is that they're both pay-in-get-something out. Germans pay about double for social security, so it's not a huge surprise that the benefits are higher. My point was not that Germans do not get more benefits, but that's it's not a large factor in contrasting wages. (i.e. if American professionals put the money into a 401k that would go into the required German pension funding, then the benefits would probably work out to being roughly comparable).

For unemployment the housing costs that are reimbursed are "reasonable" costs, not "whatever your costs are", i.e. they're capped per region. The 60% you're seeing there is for those who have paid for "Arbeitslosengeld I", which is only available to those who have been full-time employed and are terminated (though if you quit on your own, you're eligible after 3 months). Freelancers, recent grads, business owners, etc. are not eligible for "ALG I". There's also a time limit on how long you can receive it.
| λ calculus | machine memory
---------------------+---------------+------------------
language as given | Haskell | C
---------------------+---------------o------------------
language as medium | Common Lisp | Forth
| |
One doesn't need to have headed a company to understand the impact this has on culture and engineering hiring. The author of the article, I believe, is fresh out of college and hasn't actually _worked_ in an engineering role in many companies herself. That's fine, indeed Facebook (also founded by an inexperienced CEO, this isn't really bad in it of itself) has made the same mistake early on: hiring dubious quality contractors. Their status as an "technology brand" didn't come until mid-2007 or so (despite the culture becoming much better and attracting some strong engineers by 2006/early 2007) due to mistakes like this.
How is the iPad a revolutionary educational tool?
A local private high school has recently made iPads a requirement for upperclassman to own and use.
My question is what is the primary benefit or usage for iPads in schools that laptops or books cannot provide.
If your having several instances load-balanced, you can easily update your site, one instance after another. No server runs mono-process. What do you think?
No. Square has built it's own iPad-based POS software.
On a related note, where does this put the developers who got the letter? I can't imagine that this letter just makes everything all hunky dory. How do they respond now that Apple has issued a statement?
Or you could be a contract developer in the US, make 2x US employee salary and take vacation whenever you don't have an active project (months if you want).
Square lets you record cash purchases, so you don't need the machine: http://d.pr/dGVT

Yes, if you need a much more complicated system then you'll need to pay more, but many people don't. There's no way I could afford, or would want to use, most POS systems out there.
Don't you need to specifically sign up for AWS as well for that?
If my algebra is correct, Square's fee is lower for purchases under approximately $23. In your scenario where your average sale is higher than $23, you do end up paying more with Square. The article suggests that they're targeting coffee houses, casual restaurants, and other places where their average sale is below that threshold. That benefit is in addition to the lower cost of terminals and the added features supplied by their apps.
Working on several teams before going into consulting helps a lot. Most of the work I've gotten has just been word of mouth. People I've worked for/with in the past have come across a project they needed help on, and immediately contacted me to do the work. All because I've worked with them before and they liked what I did.
Architectures of the most popular services in the world (Russian site)
I currently have a BSIT with a concentration in Web Applications (SQL, PHP, etc) and minored in Management. I am already involved with a startup and I'm narrowing down my choices on whether or not to go back to school and learn.
Learn Linux Project
We're not idealizing: European take home less pay and pay more in taxes -- but get huge social benefits. If you're honestly trying to argue an equivalence in US and Europe in terms of such benefits, you're crazy. Europe is a big word as each country varies. That said...

In Germany and many European countries, you pay for healthcare and it costs a lot

But, from the studies I've seen, Europeans on average spend about half in terms of healthcare.

New York and San Francisco, also have quite good public transit

No, they simply have public transit -- it's not great by any means. You often have to supplement with taxi in both places. (The rates are high there because costs of living are very high in both places.)

Unemployment compensation in most European countries is vastly better. Free university systems? That's nice. My point is that we know it's not all rainbows and unicorns in Europe but you can't argue that you don't get a whole lot for those taxes.
This is fantastic news for small coffeeshops etc everywhere.. This makes for a very compelling use case. It is now far cheaper than a merchant account or verifone for smaller merchants, when factoring in that you get a free POS system. Hopefully this will stop the insanity of some payment processors giving out "free pos" systems but raping merchants on the credit card processing. We've seen restaurants paying as much as an effective rate of 7%! because they were going with the company that gave them a "free" POS system.

relevant: http://feefighters.com/square-calculator - a reminder of how good Square's pricing is (relative to a merchant account) for coffeshops, etc.
I'm all for merit badges, but I can't shake the feeling that github is already gamified pretty damn well. As in, the rewards you get for being a good "player" are super tangible and awesome.

Few things feel as rewarding as getting a pull request accepted. Even filing a bug with enough detail that the project owner is able to take action feels great.

But, that's how software developers are wired; I get a rush when I make something work. I suppose the challenge is drawing more people into that cycle of participation and reward, but it's an angle of the game I'm not sure this project addresses.
There was an article suggesting that Apple should purchase a carrier, like Sprint. Wrong. Square is the company they should really focus on buying.
Disqus is hiring engineers to build loved products at tremendous scale
My Profile - Foodbuzz
I think you will find that total market share of FireFox, Chrome and safari now exceed IE
Make it like the tweetdeck of Social Networking. So if I have 15 profiles on 15 different social networks, give me 1 user name and password, through your site, that gives me a window into all my profiles, kind of like tabs on a web browser or something, I can tab through each network through your site. So your site is the only place I go to check all my profiles. You shift from being a discovery tool to a profile management console = major recurrence.
From the article...

Evernote shard their 9.5 million total users across 90 shards, where each shard is represented by two of the four or four drives in a mirrored RAID.

Also, they are using Ehcache as their object-caching layer, which we can assume is their alternative to memcached. The choice between the two probably coming down to sticking to their Java stack.

I'm sure we'll here more in the promise of future articles focusing more on individual subsystems, as the article is pretty shallow in connecting the dots.
I'm very sorry to hear that. That must have been very traumatic.

But would even you, who's gone through such trauma, find it very difficult to name someone even less fortunate than yourself, someone who's gone through an even worse ordeal?
but at least the legal burden then falls on Apple and not mom & pop app dev. Worst case scenario I'd expect Apple pays Lodsys an undisclosed sum to license the tech for the devs.
Though the two are related in that almost all of the employees that cannot be terminated at the employer's will are unionized. Even in the right-to-work states, almost all of the employees of governments and universities cannot be fired at will.
I can't speak for other books, but by design the Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial book is robust against this kind of change. The trick is to use explicit gem version numbers for everything. (I learned this lesson the hard way by watching my first book, RailsSpace, quickly go out of date.) Moreover, the differences between Rails 3.1 and Rails 3.0 are relatively minor, especially when considering how applications are structured. The Rails 3.0 knowledge you learn is still 100% useful.

That being said, I'm currently working on a Rails 3.1 version of the book. Stay tuned to http://news.railstutorial.org/ to get an announcement when it's ready.
I've heard that Medicare + Medicaid actually cost a bigger part of your national budget than in Europe, yet it ends up creating a weaker coverage health service coverage for only part of your people, compared to covering everyone in most of the European countries. There's differences between countries here obviously, but US healthcare seems to be less efficient than the European systems.
I wish more people would let their interns experiment & work on production code instead of forcing training periods of X months forcing them to read books and shudders answer tests.
On my hobby site, aroundthecapitol.com, you can post comments about the bill using disqus and facebook. It's a quick way to alert your friends about this bill and its impact on your business. I'm an education lobbyist, but have been working to make legislative information more accessible and actionable.

http://www.aroundthecapitol.com/Bills/SB_234/20112012/
It's not reasonable. But this is the way the market evolved. The public uses "The Browser" and they expect their apps to be there. They don't want Windows apps and won't pay for them.

Basically what happened is Windows sucked and the public figured this out over time. So consumers switched to a new OS called "Internet Explorer" which sucks in a lot of ways but at least it doesn't break their computer while costing them a fortune.

"Internet Explorer" also came with a really good online app store, and most of the apps were free to boot. You could just click a "link" and the app would automatically download and run. Hands down a better operating system than Windows.
According to this source, the average number of paid vacation days in Korea (presumably South Korea) is 25 days:

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0922052.html

I'm actually kind of surprised at how good the Canadian number is compared to the US (I'm in Canada). But now that I think about it, I do get 3 weeks plus stat holidays (about 1 week) and a December company shutdown (another 4 days or so). I haven't been shy about asking for unpaid days off either.
Hi, just wanted to make clear that my main point is that most people consider the risks of smoking and getting cancer to be a real concern. So I find it disingenuous for the author to claim that "Hey 10%! That's pretty unlikely!"

Probably should have added something like that to the original post, my pardon.
I really love that concept, but hate that theres no good deployed one for your own use. [i.e. not committing]
so none of your advice applies to the inevitable majority of replaceable workers
On my Mac this page pops up a big full-page ad for some kind of "Clean My Mac!" software. I'm invited to press a "Try it Now" button.

If this is legit software it is marketed by someone who doesn't mind that their ad looks and smells exactly like a trojan.

[EDIT: Or, as suggested below, someone has exploited a JS vulnerability.]

EDIT: Modding up the "Macworld" link below.

[MORE EDIT: Removed suggestion that this thing might be malware; I'm choosing to trust the research of my fellow HN reader, below, who claims it is legit. Thanks for taking the time.]
If it works like this, it's a great feature.
But what's happening when in an update the database structures are changed?
This is exactly how updates should be done. Usually, I'm not that big of a fan of things that Google does, but this is a great achievement. Hats off to those who contributed to this. I hope all update systems eventually work this way.
Not many people are needed to test _specific_ problems with _specific_ environments/programs/features. 24 of 26 people not being able to figure out how to sign up for hacker news would be a clearly identified problem. Drawing overarching conclusions about the entire ipad ecosystem from 16 out of 50 million users on 26 apps out of ~100,000 and providing no methodology, no data? That's not enough to distill into "ipad usability" for an entire year.

He'd have far more credibility if he simply said "I don't like this feature, and after asking several people, I know I'm not the only one. Here's why I don't like it, and here's what I think can be done about it."
Redis for a flat URL hierarchy
The SHA2 digest approach in the Rails Tutorial book is still the standard in many applications and authentication plugins, and is fine for most applications. The basic techniques you'll learn in the current 3.0 version are still useful. That said, I am working on a new version of the book that uses bcrypt.
xnerdr: all of your comments are being automatically deaded. you account has been quitely blacklisted or something..

xnerdr 2 hours ago | link | parent [dead] | on: Why is America the 'no-vacation nation'?

and this is why i'm amazed programmers have not yet formed a union.
Thanks, fixed. Turns out memcached keys can't have spaces in them. At least using python-memcached:

for char in key:
if ord(char) < 33 or ord(char) == 127:
raise Client.MemcachedKeyCharacterError(
"Control characters not allowed") ...
No it won't, for one good reason.

I can buy a Cash Register for around $50, whereas iPads start from $500
Angry Birds at Chrome Store, 1mm or 6mm?  What gives?
Watch SLLConf Live (Startup Lessons Learned) and chat
10 companies hiring Ruby on Rails ninjas, and why you want to work for them.
Is it just me or does the CrunchBase entry for Square read like it came straight from their PR team?
From an business uptime perspective, forced "downtime" of employees through vacation is actually a good way to force the creation of backup systems for business process.

Or, when combined with a minimal vacation time bucket, forced vacation makes sure your employees will be there when you want them to be.

I know an auditor at a Big 4 accounting firm. The employees in her office are forced to take some vacation time during the slow time of the year. That way it burns down vacation time that they could otherwise be using during crunch time and causing short-staffing.
Do they have an affiliate program? Or can I become and outside sales rep in another country?
>I see no reason (unless contractually specified) why a company should pay me for not working.

Because you probably do not get a charge out of getting something for nothing -- but many do.
Didn't mean to imply it was, but in the US, it seems to be more permissive (ie. no matter how stupid and outrageous, you can say it) than in France. That's a general attitude about what is "allowed" to be said in the public sphere (a bit of a generalisation, but mostly confirmed on my biased sample of people I know on both countries).

eg. when Chomsky said that Faurisson had the right to write whatever crap he wanted (ie. pro freedom of speech), it was widely understood in France as a support of Faurisson's theories (Haulocaust denial)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faurisson_affair

Which is rather ironic in a country where Voltaire is said to have written "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it".
The font of the headers looks a bit jagged for me for some reason. Not sure why but it really stands out. You may want to look into that.
Thanks Scott, I was actually using your site for some of this research as well :)
Section 2.5 of the license agreement seemingly covers developers in this case:

---

2.5 Ownership Apple retains all rights, title, and interest in and to the Apple Software and any Updates it may make available to You under this Agreement. You agree to cooperate with Apple to maintain Apple's ownership of the Apple Software, and, to the extent that You become aware of any claims relating to the Apple Software, You agree to use reasonable efforts to promptly provide notice of any such claims to Apple. The parties acknowledge that this Agreement does not give Apple any ownership interest in Your Applications

---

IANAL, but they seem to have followed Apple's instructions and are, seemingly, in the clear with this response.
Interesting but the main point seems to be that tufte shouldn't be making so much money off of his work anymore. Ok, but why not? What am I missing?

He did the research, wrote the books, and on the first one took a big financial risk self publishing. Seems to me that he's provided a lot of value and has rightly reaped the benefits. No?
I would hope it means Apple's going to tear them a new one if they continue moving against the developers, and it certainly seems like that's the next step if Lodsys continues.
Series on the culture of hacker programmers - Part 1
If Lodsys doesn't respond by retracting their letters/complaints, Apple will likely seek an injunction, preventing Lodsys from moving ahead with third-party lawsuits until the status of Apple's current license is determined in court. That's going to take time, however; and there's no guarantee that a judge will grant the injuction.

If I were a developer sitting in the hot seat, I'd feel inclined to delay as long as possible, forcing Lodsys to fight an expensive legal battle with a much larger opponent. Ducking service, while often unfavorable in the court's view, would be a virtually free method of prolonging Lodsys' engagement with indie developers, and would cost them only inconvenience.
How much does this all cost a month?

I just have Linode and Astraweb :\
The legal burden will fall on both apple and the mom & pops.

They aren't going to withdraw their suits just because apple threatens them.
No.

It used to be pretty common here in Sweden that factories shut off for three weeks in the middle of the summer and everyone had vacation.

The practice is getting increasingly uncommon nowadays though since factory jobs is a smaller part of the total employment force.
Now this whole thing has officially passed beyond the ability of the average internet commenter to reasonably comment upon.
I'm not sure if you're trying to imply that this is bad gamification. With bad gamification, I feel like I'm slaving away in order to achieve something stupid. Like - Hooray, my orc is level 50! Well, so what?

With coderwall, there's no way I'm going to alter my behavior in order to get badges on it. But it's fun - very fun - to see what badges appear, and to compare myself to other people. Coding is something that's already super personal, it's something people do for fun already, and thus I find it very unlikely that someone's going to come away from coderwall feeling something like, "I just slaved away on this code that was exciting to create and all I got was this stupid badge. Damn you coderwall! Damn you for manipulating me into doing something I'm proud of!"

My experience with coderwall was that it was very amusing to see the badges I'd gotten, and the fact that I had more than some people I know provided me with data for gloating. But will it send me on a downward spiral, making me grind away at programming so that I can get the "Forked 500" badge while I increasingly lose contact with reality? Will it make me feel like I've been gamed when I do someday create a project that's been forked 500 times? I doubt it.

Then again that is a pretty awesome looking badge.
Twitpic makes deal with news agency to sell users' uploaded photos