skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure your comparison with food safety is completely apt; This cookie law is the equalivant of being asked "Do you consent to the use of sodium benzoate in your food" before entering any restaurant. Most people will have no idea what to make of that, and will probably hate being asked every time.

It would be different if tracking was such a problem that it was outlawed all together (like dangerous food additives are), as that would be clear to everyone how to proceed.
I write real-time avionics software for my day job. It's done almost entierly in Ada95.....I don't work on the F-22's.
People will defend their self-inflicted misery.

This is a big part of the dynamic of alcoholism, drug addiction, bad relationships, and stupid dogmatic ideologies.

I've always thought that hell would be a place where everyone burns for eternity, but there's a way to turn off the flames. They never do because they are afraid of change, and because burning for eternity is a part of their self-identity.
No Linq (at least in the VS Express editions).
You said the conventions aren't quite to your tastes.. what specifically? I'd love to correct it.
If the world were a village of 100 people
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I've thought this for a long time.

It's not the haves vs. the have-nots. It's the connecteds vs. the connected-nots.
Amazon isn't just anyone.
How does a boycott even work in the context of a patent troll who isn't producing anything?
I'm not seeing anything in the thread that verifies the title of this submission. Am I missing something?

It looks to be people discussing the iOS episodes and patent trolls in general.

Edit - Yup my fault, I zeroed in on the responses.
> So, nobody's got a valid claim.

Under the previous guy's reasoning, that if you go back in time far enough "you'll find a corpse" and that this makes the property claim illegitimate, this is true. It's not reasoning I agree with, but I thought it was worth pointing out that if one accepts his reasoning, it contradicts his prior point that the Soviet people deserved compensation.

> If you think about it you can see why private ownership of resources is ridiculous.

I've thought about it and I think private ownership is perfectly reasonable in most cases.

It's true that in the past, faction A took land or materials from faction B, who took them from faction C, and it's turtles all the way down. But within the context of faction A, I am the legitimate owner of certain items, and you are the legitimate owner of certain items, many of which we either created ourselves or received in exchange for other things we created. Since we have to start somewhere, "I am the present owner, and I paid for this in a legally binding manner" is as good a starting point as any. Trying to account for whether my ancestors paid for your share, or even how many shares we're entitled to based on the size of our family trees, is a waste of time.
You know what else takes jobs away? Free. Free apps. Free website. Free TV shows. Free movies. Free music. Free video games. The customers start to be conditioned to the word 'free', and slowly refuses to pay for anything in those categories. The cumulative market shrinks as result, leading to more companies shutting down and more layoffs.

Oh, but there's advertising, one say. And there's the unlimited amount of venture capital funding these 'free' companies. Well, if we keep losing jobs in valuable sectors because we keep giving things away for free, how will people pay for products that will sustain advertising budgets in those companies? Will we just keep selling advertising to each other? And at a certain point in the economy, consumer is more conscious about price than brand (like now), in which case advertising will start to falter.

So the next time you give away products for free, you should think about whether or not it'll cause you to lose your company/job in the future.
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I was advised (heh) to get some "strategic" people on board as advisers, never got around doing it, and never had any regrets. YMMV, but I suspect you are overthinking the situation.
Visualize this, software bugs as coloured dots
Some developers, many many issues. How does it look?
The graph shows how developers are connected to the various issues as they are submitted in a bug tracking system. The issues and the developers are colour coded.
No, it's not all code, but glorified shell script call-outs from vim, etc. have to walk the entire thing far too often for my liking. (Unless something has recently changed, tags files have to be rebuilt in their entirety after a svn up - Eclipse just reindexes the changes.)

As for "not realizing what a good editor can do"--remind me how I get context-sensitive renaming or method extraction in emacs or vim? These features are critical when you're dealing with sufficiently gigantic amounts of code (especially the crufty kind), and if I really wanted I could get a full set of vim keybindings for Visual Studio (albeit the Eclipse ones aren't quite as accurate).

(And can we lay this holier-than-thou claim about "good editors" to rest already? The idea that editors that don't require six fingers on each hand or a modal personality are "not good editors" is patently silly and I have no interest in stooping to that level. You don't like them. That does not make them "not good," it means you don't like them. I grew out of that sort of thing when I was 15 or so, and am pretty much identically productive, in terms of just writing text, in emacs or a standard editor; I'm close in vim, but I only picked vim up a few months ago. When you stop identifying yourself based on your text editor of all things it stops being a material factor in your ability to get things done.)
Agreed. These short-term business acquisitions, while exciting to read about, are not common. Most businesses take years to build and if you're not in it for the long run you're going to get bored or bankrupt.

As much as I don't like to drink the 37Signals juice, they have a strong belief and commitment to their business. This is a lot different than being an employee where you should always be moving around every few years (unless you have a piece of the pie). However, if you're the owner, be proud of what you're building and who you're building it for.*

* Could be for investors, but hopefully it's yourself.
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Is Snippet Compiler stuck at .net 3.5 though? I'm looking here:

http://www.sliver.com/dotnet/SnippetCompiler/

I tried it with default parameters and it looks like no go.
"People develop those bad attitudes, viewpoints, or whatever, in large part because they are poor. The contagion aspect, if it exists, is secondary."

I think this is the official leftist dogma, but I actually fail to see any obvious causality.

I think it assumes that structural lack of opportunity (ie you qualified to be a surgeon, but the y only job you can get is shoeshine boy because you are black) leads to resentment leads to bad behavior. And that there is no feedback from bad behavior to lack of opportunity. And that cultural diffusion just doesn't exist or doesn't matter.

Am I getting this right? Not a sarcastic question, I think there are massive amounts of assumption that creep in unnoticed in all these discussions, by me as much as anyone.

And just for the record, (1) I didn't downvote you, even though I think you are wrong, and wrong in a way that is holding the USA back, and (2) I would consider myself a socialist.

I just think socialism should get away from "fight the rich! bad rich people!" to working on how to enculturate and change the poor so the rich just go poof and disappear; OF COURSE there is the danger we go too far in this, and there is also the fact that we need to make careful and tentative value judgements about good versus bad behavior, something the left is, reasonably given history, loathe to do. (ramble, ramble, ... sorry...)
You provide no evidence for the last statement: "that story will take a lot more than statistical learning to write."

The existing evidence overwhelming suggests that a computer that can "learn to produce infinite, novel, contextual, and meaningful grammatical utterances" will be based on probabilistic models. In fact it's hard to imagine how it could possibly be otherwise.

The computer is observing noisy sensory input and is trying to make inferences about how to communicate with some future reader. Mathematically, there is only one way to write this problem: probability. It's true that the learned model may have amazing structure to it, but this will almost certainly be learned via probabilistic models rather than being hand-coded by some future Chomsky.

That fact does not imply we will understand language systems or the human mind. The Chomsky route may be better suited for that task.
It's true there are no end-to-end 100% drive-by-wire cars. But there are certain drive-by-wire systems in many modern cars. Electronic throttle control[1] is widespread (or universal?) and brake-by-wire[2] is already used by Mercedes and Toyota.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_throttle_control
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brake-by-wire
Artists not Hackers
Very first comment:

"We recently implemented in-app purchases for our
Android application and several weeks later we received a letter from Lodsys, claiming that we infringed on their patents."
The original poster recieved a letter after adding in-app purchases in his Android app.
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I know a homeless person who says that he would not work for less than x money/day, where x is more than what the average person earns here in Hungary. (He used to earn a lot. He used to be a baker.)
From the first post in the thread:

"We recently implemented in-app purchases for our
Android application and several weeks later we received a letter from Lodsys, claiming that we infringed on their patents."

So, I suppose it is a just a sample of one, at this point - but I think it is enough to show that it is not strictly limited to iOS developers at this point.

This is the first time I've heard of them coming after an Android developer for in-app purchases.
It will get Google and Apple's attention.
I completely agree it's very easy for them to do that.

But no you definitely need proof, especially when there's evidence disproving you. For example: Knol/Wikipedia.
Patent extortion is a valid business model.
The page of "not doing anything notable or material, but talking up a storm"? I mean, what else can be drawn from submitting 70 lines of broken code to HN?

To be honest, you'd be better off writing that msbuild file mentioned upthread instead of trying to jump on some silly "STFU and code" bandwagon. Unlike this, you can do useful stuff even with a very trivial msbuild file. And you only have to write it once.

And it'll actually work.
B&N mentioned this during the recent lawsuit with Microsoft on Android.
If you're not infringing the patent he can't sue you. But greater then that, these in-app purchase systems are generating revenues for the App Store vendors (Apple and Google). The hope is to get the weight of those companies (and their legal teams) behind these small developers. Lodsys is trying very hard to pick off the weak. They don't want to get in a fight with Apple and Google though its very quickly heading that way.
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Dirt 3 is a 3rd edition of Dirt series. It is a stylish racing game developed and published by Codemasters. Dirt 3 is available on three different platforms.
I wonder what the actual profit is? It cost MS a fair amount of money to sue HTC, but not nearly as much as it cost them to develop WP7 I would guess. So the profit margin is probably even wider.
I meant making assembly references. I tried it with System.Drawing and csc complained about not being able to find it.

System.dll isn't enough to really stand up anything that isn't very trivial.
Editor of HTML5 says jab at Twitter just a joke
IMO, "tl;dr" is a misnomer. Or at least, I don't value such a thing as an alternative to reading the post. There's no way that one line captures the whole article, it captures that one person's main takeaway. Rather than assuming that such a thing tells me everything I need to know, or thinking it can help me understand the nuänces of the discussion, I take it as one reader's executive summary which will help me decide whether to read the entire post.

In this case, I read it as "A good read if you want to know how/why/whether to use Emacs-23 as a distraction-free writing environment."

The post has other value, of course, and I wouldn't object if someone else were to write something like:

tl;dr: Emacs continues to evolve, e.g. It's now as good a tool for writers as Scrivener or dedicated distraction-free editors.

That would give me another reason to read the post if I wasn't persuaded by the first. Summaries (including the title, natch) provide some value that a simple upvote score does not capture.
From helpdesk to data center: A lateral career move or step up?
It's really minor things like the src and bin directories. I could come to like it that way but if it really is a small chunk of code I'd probably keep the .cs and .exe in the same directory. But that is really minor. The other thing (which people might really not like) that I'd use is copying in a main.cs when doing "stfu new" that has some boiler plate code in there. I'd also display the command options when no input is specified.

I do like the idea in practice -- it's simple but useful. It is also short enough that tweaking it to meet my own needs couldn't be simpler. I'll play with it some more.
Some developers, many many issues. How does it look?
The graph shows how developers are connected to the various issues as they are submitted in a bug tracking system.
The issues and the developers are colour coded.
at the same time, you're describing an economy generating a whole lot of wellbeing and welfare. Unemployment and redundancy are dirty words, but if part of a stable economy generating what we need, perhaps we should reconceptualise redundancy as a good thing? Individuals have always wanted robots doing our chores so they have more time with our families. Can't society think the same way?
Like a new feature in an application. In regard to 37signals, that may be something like a a new view for managing your account. More of a generalization than anything.
I think Norvig acknowledges the point you are making here, namely that the statistical approach does not explain the cognitive systems behind language. However (if I understand correctly) he implies that those systems might be too complex to be adequately explained, let alone emulated and we can achieve more by observing them as black boxes, analyzing their outputs, i.e. language as it is used.

"if a computer could - like humans - learn to produce infinite, novel, contextual, and meaningful grammatical utterances"

To perfectly achieve this goal, you might have to simulate 4 billion years of evolution under the same conditions as it happened on Earth, and a few thousand years of cultural evolution as it led to our languages and our cultural context. Language is incredibly complex and changing, many of its details might be incidental, i.e. results of random events, so it seems unreasonable to pretend that we can deduce it all from some elegant first principles. At least that is my reading of Norvig's argument.
You're right, but what does it say about Germans when they have to borrow the word "small talk"?
http://www.linqpad.net/ is fairly useful to test c# snippets, if a bit bloated.

There is also the F# interactive window if you're poking into the BCL while in Visual Studio.
This is a good point they make. However, it can backfire if you are doing client work.

Not all people get that these are unfinished prototypes. This is why designing with something like say balsamiq is so useful. Clients and co-workers will talk about how something works, not choice of color/font/placement. Once you know how something should work, then you can argue over style.

Good design is more about how something works than how it looks.

The iPod scroll wheel was about improving the way you interact with the device. The overall design can very easily fall into place once you have the interaction nailed.
People upvote so that the link to the cached copy will be at the top.
The best part of small talk is all those inspected objects can come with live execution stacks wrapped around them, so if you fix your code bug you can re-invoke from a test example easily.
Funny you should mention that. I'm definitely buying more electronic books (Kindle app for iPad). Somehow I feel better paying less for the electronic version. But I still prefer a hard copy for the classics. :-)
Thanks for the feedback, exactly the point of releasing early and often no? :) STFU is in its experimental infancy so I look forward to how it affects the workflows of those who use it.

The next step is to get it to test itself so I can start resolving quality issues within it and then beyond that to get it to build tiny WPF apps.

Being able to quickly add references and usings is something I miss when using this tool and I am looking for collaborators to help me brain storm on how to address this. Fork it and let me know what you come up with! :)
I don't get it.

Could someone clarify WTF is STFU?
His definition for "ephemeralization" is "doing more with less", which is strange since my academic background in economics teaches me the word for this is nothing more than "efficiency".

So many of his claims supporting his "net destroyer of jobs argument" contain no real analysis are amount to fallacies exposed by the history of economic progress. At almost any point in history you could make an almost identical argument about something else where efficiency improvements reduce the number of jobs in one particular industry. People used to also worry that more women getting into the work force would reduce the jobs "available for men". Classic "lump of labor fallacy":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

Even all this aside, and sweeping away any historical parallels (one of which he mentions - Ford) where the ultimate conclusion flatly contradicts his pessimism, there's a healthy dose of "make work bias" implicit in the entire article. It's still puzzling to me why people focus so much on work as being something desirable to per-sue in it's own right. Work is the price we have to pay for consumption:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter:...

This statement alone completely blows away his credibility to speak on economics: "And for all its vaunted technological prowess, the United States hasn’t outpaced the rest of the world in GDP growth". It's well understood in growth economics that we wouldn't expect advanced economics such as the United States to outpace growth of 3rd world countries playing "catch up". He could do the same analysis against modern, industrialized countries instead and come to a very different conclusion. Even if this statement was accurate, it's a complete non-sequitur in support of his overall claim.

It's funny that the second part of his article back-tracks from his original claims and contains far more sense than the first part. "Ephemeralization [READ: efficiency] itself might eventually give rise to new types of jobs." That's exactly right, and has been true for centuries without fail.

Finally, it's embarrassing that he chooses to quote Tyler Cowen, a respectable economist who would would surely call out this article more forcefully than I.
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It took me 10 seconds to figure it ;) Yes indeed.
Thank you for the link regarding Luna 9; I did not know that.

You originally said, "Use of such is not incompatible with the use of retrorockets. As a matter of fact, the latter are used first."

Just to provide clarity, I was referring to the EDL (Entry, Descent, Landing) profile of Spirit and Opportunity. Their EDL profiles first deploy the airbags, then fire the retrorockets.

http://marsrover.nasa.gov/mission/tl_entry1.html

Step 12: Airbags inflate
Step 13: Retrorockets fire
That's a good way to put it, but technology is still a very important part of any ecommerce business. Be it marketing, acquisition, fulfillment, accounting, CRM. It's just not the shiny object you see up front with Foursquare.

And sure, pretty much all of these components can be provided by third-party, but if you did that, then your goods and customer service need to be amazing to make up for the technology costs.
Empower the People who Touch your Customers
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Much the same thing that it says about English-speakers when they have to borrow the word "entrepreneur".
Yet another absolutely classic example of both the "lump of labor fallacy" and "make work bias".

When are we going to starting teaching more Economics and less Literature in high school?
or

sudo apt-get install emacs23-nox

;-)
Very good points. Success does mean commitment, and definitely if we're really interested in solving the "anti-social" social networking issue.

I like the idea of incorporating as an app, though it brings up some questions around direction/ interaction.

Thanks again for the feedback. If you have any more thoughts, we'd love to hear those; otherwise, we'll circle back here once we've made additional progress.
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I think there's a similar mechanism by which geeks end up "too geeky".

http://www.scottberkun.com/essays/40-why-smart-people-defend...

http://amzn.com/0300090331
Yep, he's great.

Lots more of his talks here: http://preposterousuniverse.com/talks/videos.html
F# has units of measure too.
Plenty of european carriers do this.

If I want to buy a new phone I can either pay full price for an unlocked one, get a small subsidy to lock myself to a carrier for 12 or 24 months, or I can get an even bigger subsidy by paying an increased subscription price for 12 or 24 months.
The business model for charging for operating systems is going to go away thanks to patents. Why try to charge royalties for an OS when you can simply collect rent? Google give Android away because it's in their interest for handset makers to have an OS that isn't distributed by the people who own Bing. But why should Microsoft even bother with Windows 7?
Nor lambdas (in all editions). (Here's why: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jaredpar/archive/2009/08/26/why-no-l...)
A harder problem requires more complex software, no? The complexity of the vehicle itself is actually not a factor.
The $5 per phone report comes from Citi analyst Walter Pritchard: http://goo.gl/QsJrh (Business Insider).

Does anyone know if MS or HTC has confirmed that? Does that include phones sold outside the US as well?
I think you articulated what I was trying to say much better. I agree that this could backfire on client work. Designing in the open seems great for a team building applications, but I could see clients being confused or frustrated with a more open process. This doesn't necessarily apply to all clients, but some clients aren't interested in the process and are more focused on the end result.