skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How I cache and minify assets with Rails 3
By "replacing" lists with trees, am I supposed to understand that working with trees will be natural and easy, and lists will feel like second-class citizens? I thought we were beyond thinking like that. Building languages around a favorite data structure was never the right thing to do; it was always tunnel vision and bad design. Different data structures have different features and different performance characteristics. There's no reason for a language designer to pick a favorite data structure and force anyone who has to use a different one to deal with warts and second-class library and language support.
You could find eyes on the face of the speaker and alter the image of them to look like he looks directly at the camera.

This should be interesting task especially when algorithm does not do this 100% perfect.
Diaspora - Moving Forward
Just added a link to a slightly verbose blog post above: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2553098
your first point wrongfully assumes that the patent system is the dominant mechanism for spreading inventions. it may have been intended to work this way, but this is not how it works in real life.

if you have ever worked for a software company that has a competent legal department, you know that you must stay away from patents. under no circumstances are you allowed to communicate that you have looked at any given patent or even acknowledge the existence of a patent.

patents are treated with more fear than toxic waste in IPR sensitive businesses.

besides, if you don't publish and you do something clever, how long do you think it would take for the competition to figure out what you were doing? or for people in academia to publish something on it? or for some independent blogger with too much time on his or her hands?

I wish people would consider reality rather than some make-believe world that does not exist when thinking about patents. so much time, money and intellectual energy is wasted on this nonsense. not to mention that it is clogging up the courts with absolutely pointless legal battles.

we, as a society, have better things to do.
More competition needed in education
Seems like it. Screenshot: http://yfrog.com/z/gzmxx8p

Notice how you can't vote on it, flag it, or discuss it.
The current state of patent disclosure is such that your arguement makes little sense. Virtually nothing in software patent disclosures informs people about "how to do it". Almost all of the disclosures are vague and unspecific. If you, as a programmer, hear the title of a patent, you basically know how to do it.
No, that niche is already occupied by Blackberry.
You have 10 years. Write me a patent for something that improves upon H.264 by 30%.
I would definitely tell the user beforehand exactly what they can expect, whichever way you go. To be honest, I still appreciate seeing "we will never sell or use your email for any purposes than login information" (or the likes,) on sites.
Maybe title should read, "Zombie Stephen Hawking, bad from the dead to tell us all about it"

He can only rely on his mental speculation and sense perception which are not sufficient to deal in matters beyond this life.
the patented thing should not be obvious to one skilled in the art

It's a big world and there are a lot of smart people in it. History is full of examples of multiple people independently inventing/discovering the same thing.
And one of the tests in trademark law is if a reasonable person would be confused between the original and the imposter. So you only have to have 'reasonable' knowledge of other brands in your industry.
Do you think he was back-peddling or trying to clarify his statement?
It doesn't matter if you believe in God. What matters is if God believes in you.
In theory that shouldn't be patentable. What John Carmack is describing is something that is obvious to a craftsperson in the field.

OTOH it does still preclude John from being presented with a problem and then doing someone quite ingenious to do a great solution that seems actually quite "novel", to learn that someone else did it years before.

But for patents, if you follow logical steps from a given problem then you shouldn't be granted a patent.

In fact the way patents should work is that the patent officer spends a week trying to solve said problem themselves. And only after that attempt, read the actual patent. If they're struck with, "Ahh... yes, good idea, wouldn't have thought of it mysefl" then its potentially patentable. But if the patent officer says, "Yeah, that was my second attempt." or "that's largely derivative of my general line of logic in my other attempts" then it shoudln't be patentable.
Free place to stay in Silicon Valley if you code..
Question Everything: A New Processor For Big Data
I hate software patents, and would personally love to see them abolished.

I have a question though: how important are patents to startups? Aren't software patents one of the tangible assets they point to to justify their valuation?
I predict, based on the skype and nokia licensing deal (and this of course, if it's true) that MS will remove skype from the IOS and Android platforms, forcing anybody who wants mobile skype onto MS phones. This would cause a large reason for customers who are on the fence to choose MS phones.

I suspect desktop skype will stay free and unchanged, but IOS and Android skype will be gone soon.
Finding great talent is hard but identifying talent is not difficult. Yet, finding and identifying talent is just half of the story. The other half is determining if the person can focus in what you need, be motivated, take the initiative, and deliver great work. That's the difficult part. More often than not, very talented individuals have a lot of stuff in their heads, such that mundane but essential work ranks low in their platonic priority list, and that affects their capacity to concentrate and deliver.
And those things aren't supposed to be patentable. How you get from "not supposed to be patentable" to "does not exist" is beyond me.

May I also observe it isn't me making a normative claim that such things that are easily re-constructed by anyone should not be patented. It is descriptive, right in the legal definition of patent; it should be not obvious to one skilled in the art. Again, the very fact such a clause is necessary is evidence that there is a set of things obvious to one skilled in the art that exists, or why bring it up?
Ask HN: Which TLDs are safe to run questionable sites?
Particularly, after all these recent domain seizures, I am looking to buy more or less safe domain in some TLD zone for my https://betco.in project.

Which TLDs are known to be not cooperating with US government in such things?
These two data points are impressive predictions indeed.

Still, to me his track record also includes numerous cases where he was plain wrong and/or heavily biased - e.g. he was well known for trashing iPhone/iPad and praising Nokia until some time ago when he suddenly changed camps and now does the complete opposite thing.
JavaScript development environment?
What do folks use for JavaScript dev environment?

I am trying to setup new extjs based system and so far I like everything I see, except I can't figure out how to properly develop the thing. I am very much Eclipse person (last 8+ years) and while I am willing to move away from Eclipse I would like to have things like refactoring, type browsing, class hierarchies and integrated debugging.

Do this exists either as a standalone product or an Eclipse plugin?

Many thanks for the insight and suggestions
That's not how it works. If you're familiar with the area, you might come up with an idea that improves it by 3%. If you have 9 of those ideas, you might get a 30% improvement. Where the ideas come from is serendipity combined with fertile ground.

It might be by analogy, a technique from a different domain, from similarity with something you did with lego blocks when you were 9 years old, from a mishearing when discussing something with a fellow developer, from ignorance of the known techniques in a particular area and trying to solve it from first principles, etc. You do need some familiarity and experience in the domain in order to recognize the utility of the novel technique. It might happen once to you, but it's unlikely to happen 9 times.

More importantly, it's also probably going to occur to someone else, sooner or later. New discoveries tend to be repeated, that's a common theme in the history of scientific and mathematical development. By advocating patents for these things, you suggest the mere chance of coming first means you get a government-granted right to extort from other people.
(1) Patents should be analyzed for level of difficulty in coming up with solution. If I had a website like amazon, more than 50% chances that I would have come up with single click idea. But since I didn't had problem, I could not have solution. so such patent should be allow only "acknowledge" status <- that means, a software that is using such patent must "acknowledge" the original creator somewhere , but it can use the patent freely. (2) if patent is used, it is liable for max 5000$ ( for e.g. ) charge. or (3) 500 Million $ charge. It all depend and subjective. current system is go and no go. patents should analyze for level of ingenuity too.
Put simply, video is superfluous to my communication needs in a one-to-one conversation.

Our company is spread out over two states and three cities, so one would think that we're a prime candidate for video calling. There are subtleties that can be expressed by seeing each other that are simply not there when communicating through voice only. However, these subtleties are superfluous to most conversations.

Interestingly, I find video chat most useful in scenarios where it is least available.

One of the most challenging aspects of communication is interruption. Most people consider it rude to interrupt the speaker, but we do it all the time. It's part of our natural flow of conversation. It keeps us from wasting time, and helps refine the conversation.

With one-to-one communication, interruption is simple. You interject audibly, and the speaker will either pause, giving you the go ahead to take the floor, or will continue to finish their thought. This interplay sets the tone for the conversation. There's a subtle play for dominance in any conversation where there are opposing viewpoints.

With many-to-many communication, interruption is complex. Anyone who has ever been on a conference call knows that it is easiest to just keep your mouth shut and let everyone drone on for as long as they need to. In my experience, this is a major contributor to the unnecessary length of conference calls.

It's difficult to interject on a conference call, because too many people are trying to get a word in, and speakers continue too long on a string of points. By the time you can get the speaker's attention, the interjection irrelevant to the current topic.

Video calling among a group has the benefit of allowing participants to use body language to interrupt the speaker. A speaker, seeing a participant visibly uncomfortable, is more likely to pause and allow them to interject.

Unfortunately, group video chat over the most popular medium, Skype, is clumsy (requires Skype 5; can only be initiated from a computer, not mobile) and expensive (not free).
Generate Expense Reports With A Snapshot
Glad this launch wasn't scrubbed too.
So you can breed it with your male cattle and create a super-cow (with 2x more muscle).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW54_vM9SF0
And they could file for the patent after you have done the work. You then have the hassle and expense of proving that your work came first and even then such cases often don't go the way they should.
We grew up with the idea of it. Not the widespread install base and ability to actually use it -- or as this suggests, to choose not use it very much at all.
I upvoted the word "snip." Retracting a comment that does not contribute to the discussion is commendable. Thanks!
New York Reveals Plan To Become America’s Next Top Digital City
It's not just impractical. It's a complete nonstarter in any competitive job market (like the bay area).

First, contract to hire is a pure negative for the employee. People can "try a company" out just fine with a full time offer and then quit if it's not a good fit.

Second, it's far easier to find good people by poaching from other companies than it is by traditional means. No one is going to quit their job for a 3 week contract even if they're really unhappy at their current job. So, with this approach, you've just removed the biggest pool of talented prospects there is.
Perkins - HTML5/CSS3 Framework For Rapid Development
As so often happens on the Internet, there has been a rush to judgment here. I emailed the guy who posted that question, asking him if a YC co had made him an offer of the sort he described, and here's what he said:

"No company has made me an offer along these lines. I was trying to second guess them from a conversation I had. I thought I'd ask that question so I was properly armed should they come back with this kind of offer."
It takes significantly less effort to create a piece of hardware from scratch if you have a reference design to crib from.

However, if I independently develop a piece of software or an algorithm, there is a very strong chance that it took me the exact same amount of time and effort as the person who originally solved it.

In the former case, it makes sense to enforce a patent, as copying their design directly eases my ability to go to market with something.

In the latter case, it doesn't make sense, as I now have to pay someone else, despite having done the work.

Note that I see copyright, intellectual property, and patents as completely different things. If I'm using someone else's code/libs, then obviously, I feel it is worth the ability to enforce. However, that already exists without the patent system.
And not only you might accidentally break patents - you might not even be able to figure out if you break patents at all without paying a lawyer to translate the patent specifications. Maybe it's just because I'm no native english speaker, but I often don't get patent texts. Coding around patents is like walking blindfolded through a minefield.
The power of back references and Python
A negotiated settlement
I hope you will find someone to back your daring innovations. Godspeed!
All that post really said was: "We're still alive."

Edit: I expected some insight into where it's going, given the headline.
Interview with Jeff Clavier, Founder of SoftTech VC
I'm not sure what you mean. Did you really intend to reply to me?
Fixing your problem would only need the current system to be modified such that independent invention is not infringing. One way, for example, is to make it permissible for independent invention to be considered evidence that the patent is obvious to those skilled in the art and thus not patentable. A patent already granted would be repealed under these circumstances.

Would you still be in favour of abolishment, and if so why?
"Basically it's just a multi-modal keystroke catcher/dispatcher running transparently in the background. The upshot is that most of the commands work transparently in my IDE, in notepad, and even this little textbox I'm typing in right now!"

This sounds very interesting.

I've long wanted vim integration with Opera, so I'm not stuck with its relatively primitive editing features when I'm filling out a text input box. Unfortunately, vim does not integrate with other apps very easily.[1] So something along the lines you're working on would be very welcome, even if it is primitive compared to vim.

One thing I hope it can do is have an easy way to activate and deactivate it, so it doesn't interfere with editing in vim itself.

[1] http://www.freehackers.org/VimIntegration
Thanks for the link! It contains links to a few Norwegian startups, which is at least something.

I was actually hoping to hear from actual people on HN in Norway about their startup plans, though.
To clarify: the fact that his prediction about iPhone future were wrong doesn't tell much - many industry observers were predicting that it's going to fail.

What matters to me is good vs bad journalism - ability to acknowledge one's mistakes, checking one's sources, not trashing one's opponents, etc. etc.
But being a fairweather fanboy and knowing insider info aren't mutually exclusive. In fact they quite often go together -- think Gruber.
I suspect that they wouldn't be that stupid. That would alienate sizable parts of the Skype userbase. Microsoft is stupid, but not that stupid. This seems like pure paranoia to me.
Also, is distracted from school work by outside projects.

If you add that then you have me right now. I don't care enough to crank out a 4.0; I'd rather work on my projects that interest and push me further than assignments ever will.
There is an infinite version of Ramsey's theorem.

Suppose you consider the collection of pairs of positive whole numbers, and each pair is colored either red or blue. Then there is an infinite set S of positive whole numbers such that any pair of items from S are the same color.

In symbols:

P = { (a,b) : a in N, b in N }

C : P -> {0,1}

There exists S an infinite subset of N and c in {0,1} such that for all a in S and b in S, C(a,b)=c.

The proof is quite simple, I use it regularly to boggle 13 and 14 year olds.
The PageRank algorithm  and application on searching  of academic papers
I doubt they will remove Skype from iOS and Android. That would be incredibly shortsighted, limiting the total amount of people who could potentially use Skype. Those who use Skype currently would switch to Facetime/Google Voice/some new service.

No-one would switch to WP7 just for Skype either. I suspect that MS will try to capitalise on the users on other platforms by attempting to up-sell them on other services. Perhaps a premium service for business users.
That's not how software patents work in practice. They are written to be as broad and non-specific as possible, because their purpose is to be legal weapons. They are not about spreading innovation; competition, in functioning markets, is sufficient for that.
Patents are not needed to promote innovation -- their intended benefit for the greater good. Innovation will happen anyway. Instead, they are a drag on innovation and also a tool for those with larger pockets to extort from those who cannot afford to fight back. Get rid of them. We will all be better off!
When I use in a proyect js, I use eclipse with a simple java web proyect and tomcat with the javascript files inside the folder etc, but I only use it for some things, so I think you should use what fit to your needs man :D
Infographic: Internet marketing planner
That's all I remember being asked. I guess they saw themselves as pioneers of creativity, but as they were something of an obscure start-up, this wasn't totally clear to prospective interviewees. So I went in there expecting a serious interview, but got nonsense. It's funny now, but I was pissed at the time. Drove eight hours, booked a hotel, and wore a suit for nothing.
Carpalx keyboard layout optimizer
Being able to recognize a brand is necessary for the market to function. It is how you know what you are buying, and what you base trust on. At the same time, the cost of coming up with a different name for your competing product is trivial.

So while, yes "the same applies", the cost/benefit ratio of the two situations is totally different.
Not paranoia. I don't care. If anything, I want it to happen, as I have a few VOIP ideas that can't compete with a free Skype everywhere.

The reason to buy skype is for it's name, not for it's tech, as everybody agrees it's tech is not worth $8B. The name is only important if it gets you something. It will get you phone sales if you're the only one offering it on a phone.
I agree, using short term contract work to identify good long term employees sounds contradictory.
> I don't understand why these people think this doesn't belong here.

Sorry, I wasn't trying to be rude. I just feel like its a couple of paragraphs long and doesn't have any substance. Like the other guy said, its a fluff piece. And the one thing you specifically pointed out of the article is actually incorrect.

>> because the software is so light on
>> bureaucracy, it is easy to customize and
>> to contribute to.

> Would someone care to refute this?

I would. Emacs was specifically NOT light on bureaucracy. That is specifically why xemacs created.

Anyway, hope you have a good day.
In other words, when complete disorder is achieved, complete order is formed (since that disorder becomes completly homogeneous).
The better argument for software is that secrecy doesn't work.
Show HN: Fitocracy, an RPG for fitness
My cofounder and I have been working on a site called Fitocracy (www.fitocracy.com), which is a social game for fitness. The idea was very much inspired by our experiences growing up as nerds playing video games, later on discovering weightlifting, and drawing the parallel between working out and "leveling yourself up." XKCD has a pretty well known comic to this effect: http://xkcd.com/189/. We find that the metaphor of workout out as leveling up in a video game resonates with quite a few people, so Fitocracy is an attempt to bring that to life.

On Fitocracy, tracking your workouts earns you points/levels, unlocks special achievements, and fulfills "quests", which are basically exercise milestones that aim for workout variety and progression. As you progress in your training, Fitocracy offers more quests, increases the level up requirements, etc. We also try to make the experience as community focused as possible, so the site actively encourages you to follow others with similar fitness approaches, comment on workouts, etc.

We have been in invite-only beta since mid-February and have become fairly popular on Reddit and SomethingAwful. I know there are plenty of folks on HN that are interested in fitness so I hope this will be of interest to some of you.

URL: http://www.fitocracy.com

You can sign up using this invite link: http://ftcy.co/jaBLMa

We're still working through a long list of bugs and features to get out, but do feel free to offer any feedback. Hope you all enjoy!

You can find me on Fitocracy at: http://www.fitocracy.com/profile/xenowang and my cofounder at http://www.fitocracy.com/profile/dicktalens (seriously, the way our usernames may sound to some is purely coincidental)

-Brian

Interesting side note: We started working on this in October 2010 and I had no real prior experience in front-end design at that point. I've basically been cutting my teeth in front-end design (design principles, Photoshop mockups, graphic assets, HTML, CSS) on Fitocracy.
Trisse launches as deal site for artisan food
Clickable invite link: http://ftcy.co/jaBLMa
> This could be supported if define-module internally called macroexpand-1 on unrecognized child forms until it saw either require or file. Then you could define a tested-file macro to extend define-module.

If tested-file expanded to just file, it means that the only thing it can do is have side-effects at compile-time. Those side-effects won't be preserved in compiled files. So tested-file has to expand to something that includes file and the extra code, and define-module has to specify what that expansion can look like and how it will be handled. The design of this protocol can't be automated, because code-walking the expansion of tested-file is potentially Turing-complete.

So now you have two problems:

1. every define-foo macro needs a protocol to specify how it can be customized
2. this only works at compile-time

The need for this kind of customization is where the meta-object protocol arose from. Read up on Gregor Kiczales' work on open implementations (http://www2.parc.com/csl/groups/sda/projects/oi/ieee-softwar...). Putting in the required hooks into the interpreter (object system) using a restricted protocol provides a common system that all customizations can share (no need to design your own define-foo protocol) and is available at all stages (compile and run-time).