skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hacker News often contains interesting bits about and around.

Sometimes I search HN for front page items because I remember that discussion about them contains interesting opinions and links. I cannot find them directly because do not remember what are they.
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Memo to GOP: Think less about corporate America, more about startups
All the examples from these series of articles can be done on a Linux box with gcc 4.5 and up.
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Is there any reason the algorithm couldn't remain a trade secret? And is there any possible scenario where the long term good that comes from this patent will outweigh the long term good that will come from untethered innovation?
You know bitcoin has gone mainstream when spammers accept it for fake viagra.
free trials aren't free to the consumer.

pretty frequently I sign up for free trials for programming tools and never get around to evaluating them in the allotted time. i'm just too busy doing other things.
Posted this not as a political article, but as a leading indicator that perhaps the discussion in the US is moving away from large corporations as drivers of job growth and more towards startups. At least I hope so. I'm certainly not looking to provoke comments on which party is more for job creation, and of course there are those in both parties pushing for startups. I'm just happy to see more and more folks talking about us.
I believe, PG spammed more than what the two ladies did in CL.
Reddit, we need to talk...
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Ask HN: Best way to display MP4 video on LCD without laptop?
Looking for the best solution to present a video in MP4 format on an LCD TV without a computer or access to the internet. Was originally considering a Roku XDS with a USB drive, but it appears to require internet connectivity even if you aren't using internet content. Looking for something super small and portable, as it will become part of a trade show package.
Here's another data point: when Zed went off on Debian, he was either really mistaken or simply imagining things that have no connection with reality.

> This is what Debian maintainers are doing, but there's a very specific reason why they do this and it's not a "culture clash". It's embrace and extend which they probably learned from Microsoft. You see, if you have to adapt your software and processes to their weird layout and packages, then you can't get off their platform. It is sadly pure business and has nothing to do with open source, quality, or culture.

> It's simply a tactic to make sure that you are stuck on Debian.

Whether you like Debian and agree with their technical decisions, or not, it's a non-profit completely based on open-source code. There is no business, and there is no motivation to lock you in to Debian, and there is no desire to do so, either. Complaining about Debian in technical terms is fine; making stuff up about the project is beyond the pale.

After that episode, I became much more inclined to take what Zed has to say with a large grain of salt.
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Not to mention that the shady practices are obfuscated by properly sterilized language, as in many other organizations. One does not "threaten small developers with expensive lawsuits", one merely "extracts value from investments".
No, the character set is "Unicode". UTF-8, UTF-16, UCS-4, etc. are the character encoding.

A character encoding is an algorithm for reading/writing characters from/to octet streams. A character set is ... a set of characters.

(Unicode has additional semantics; collation, etc.)

As to why you'd waste space with a 32-bit character representation: algorithmic efficiency. UTF-8 is efficient in storage, but it's not efficient for string operations: splitting a string is O(n), finding the nth character is O(n), determining the length of the string is O(n), etc. When each character takes the same amount of memory, though, these operations become constant time.

Finally, nulls don't cause problems because these are character arrays, not null-terminated octet arrays ("c strings"). Most big C apps don't use null-terminated octet arrays anymore; they use something like bstrings, or std::string, or their own homegrown implementation (SVPV in perl, etc.).
Or we should all learn a trick or two from Anon about being the digital equivalent of a pitchfork wielding, angry mob.
No, I wouldn't. Mongo is easy to setup, configure and monitor.
True, that is one of my concerns. My mitigation of that risk is that one of the walls (to the left of the monitors) is nothing but cloth - in an emergency, I just pull the staples out and walk right out.
I don't think so. Erlang combines powers of Scala and Node and adds some of its own - selective receive, for example.
I think the issue that most people have is that people who coincidentally develop an algorithm that serves the same functionality or operates in a similar way as your algorithm will be sued to hell, even though they'd never even heard of the work you'd done. A bigger issue is with people that patent every single idea they've ever had, never fully develop anything, then sue any person that's made a profit with a similar idea.

You have the right to keep your code confidential and protect it from theft, but people who are capable of making something similar with their own abilities shouldn't be punished.
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People tend to forget just how long tablets have been around. The first boom of pen driven tablet computing was in the very early 1990's – twenty years ago.

During that first boom, several operating systems were developed which were intended for exclusive pen or touch use. These include PenPoint OS, Magic Cap and Newton OS. Apple fans tend to remember Newton, but the other two are long forgotten.
I went to uni in Exeter; my brother in Plymouth. Never got into any trouble in Exeter apart from phoning the police on what could have been an attempted kidnap, could have been a couple having a barney. There always seemed to be some shit going down in Plymouth though.
Assuming they are available and deployable at that time. It's like arguing against climate change mitigation because a technological solution will present itself: you might be right, but why gamble?
I would say approximately 99% of the people on Twitter and Facebook are so self-involved and full of themselves that they'd wet themselves at the proposition of even a virtual "museum" of themselves. I've said it many times - you can't go wrong catering to people's self-centeredness.
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The school I'm attending now, University of Cincinnati, has a compulsory co-op program for the majority of technical degrees. I'm going into my last year of school having around a year and a half of work experience already. I've learned just as many things while working as I have from taking classes.
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Mostly agree, except:

Second, Lodsys didn't even "invent" the idea. They purchased the patent and are now using it like a cluster bomb on the entire mobile app developer community.

The fact that Lodsys bought the patent and didn't invent the idea themselves seems entirely irrelevant to this dilemma. Unless you also think that if you acquire someone else's software, you don't have the right to sell it.
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according to wiki, Dijkstra's algorithm was published in 1959. If he had a patent on it for 15 years and made enough money to cover his troubles, then I don't really see it as a bad thing. Now a days, you might say that 15 years is too long and maybe that's true, but sometimes it takes people a very long time to monetize their ideas (due to technical problems, bad business partners, time needed to develop connections in the business etc.)
They shipped the product while i was sleeping
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You don't think what? If it's not clear, I am saying that I think Erlang's runtime and API are superior to callback spaghetti.

What we may not agree on is whether Node and Scala are going to surpass Erlang in terms of popularity. I think it's only a matter of time. Those two systems are based on languages/runtimes that are orders of magnitude more popular than Erlang and are thus far more accessible. Being far more recent systems, as well, they also avoid some of the strange warts that Erlang must keep around because it's widely deployed enough that it can't be easily changed.
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This has been discussed to death all over the place, but I think the take home is not to be too clever rather than not to use regexes. I tend to look for 'something at something dot something':

.+@.+\..+

I believe this allows all valid addresses (as well as lots of invalid ones, obviously). But I'm sure someone will let us know if not. :)
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This has always bugged me - as owner of a product, YOU are ultimately responsible for its availability. If you chose a bad service provider, sure, you'll have outages. But accept accountability, say you are working on it, and fix it.
No, you can ask for more permissions at any time, but this way the app only has to ask once, and most people probably just click "allow" anyway since they want to see the app.
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yep or http://searchhackernews.com/
Having a mentor is a very different thing to going to a library (or the internet, the greatest library that ever existed) and reading everything.
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I don't know about the Erlang trolls, but the C++ trolls are out writing shitty internal corporate apps for Windows, leaving no source and forcing a company to use the buggy app in perpetuity.

Real trolls ship.
But my argument is: if not only Dijkstra but a huge part of the comp sci community would have decided to patent their inventions it will be impossible to move forward in the field. Only the legal costs of "swimming" on this system will be prohibitive for the developers community.
If I understand the GOP correctly, I don't think they care. A few months ago there was a saying along the lines of "While you're in the womb, you're the most important person in the world to the Republicans, once you're out they don't care". Maybe they care when you have influence, but not before then.
Maemo/MeeGo does, which means that a fair few Nokia phones and tablets do. I believe Sony's upcoming NGP will use Telepathy as well but I can't find a reference right now.

Regardless, my point was that the API has since been reproduced and is in wide use on non-mobile platforms, not that every mobile phone supports it.
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Maybe somebody needs to move this issue to someplace more visible.

I'd like to introduce the concept of Movie Patents. I'd register a patent for the plot device of having the bad guy be the main character's best friend, with additional clauses for being his boss, advisor, or partner. I wouldn't ever make any movies. I'd just sit back and collect royalties from everybody who used my idea.

The reason behind this is that maybe then people who matter would actually notice how silly this concept is. It's so plainly obvious that it's a bad idea that regular people can finally understand what's going on. Eventually, people with the ability to make changes might actually find themselves forced to make changes.

Software, as big as it is, is just not that big. This issue can piss every single one of us off, and it won't make the NBC Nightly News. It can't piss off the people it needs to piss off in order to get it fixed, so chances are it will stay unfixed indefinitely.
It completely baffles me, too.

I've only met Zed once, it was at EuroDjangoCon in Prague a few years ago. Zed did a keynote speech, and afterwards in the lobby as he sat down near me, I told him how much I enjoyed it, just expecting the usual "thanks, glad you did" or whatever. What actually followed was a nearly two hour conversation, over lunch, on topics from music to education to my dumb startup idea. Zed talked with passion and intelligence on all three, and seemed genuinely interested in what I was doing - and I'm just some dumb schmuck programmer he's never met before.

I see a lot of what is said about Zed online, and I think it's sad, because in real life, he's a fucking stand-up guy.
I don't think that Node or Scala alone will eat Erlang's lunch. Combined - maybe, but highly unlikely anyway.

By the way, Erlang releases often break backward compatibility. And what are those warts you mentioned?
Umm, I have a patent on using software to write the word "cun--." Please redact, or send me $5 ;)
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In this conflict, neither side is truly innocent. I do think it would go a long way if Palastinian leaders would change their stance on Israel's right to exist though.
As I read this, I am reminded of a thought that occurred to me this weekend: work is what you have to do, passion is what you want to do.
Also, I don't think I would claim that anyone who is working 100 hours a week is living. Work to live, not live to work.
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Well, as long as the spammer vaguely regrets it later, it's okay for them to spam me!
Umm.. what?

Bayer holds the trademark for Aspirin (Capital A) in Canada (and others).
The trademark is void in the US (and others)

When Canadians that I know (incluidng me) say "aspirin" we mean very deliberately "Any kind of ASA - and if it's not the generic stuff you're some kind of weirdo who likes to waste money" - but we still call it aspirin.
Brand names don't, of course - they list ASA as an ingredient... but I've never in my life heard someone ask if I had any ASA.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Apple-Digital-AV-Adapter-connector/d... iOS device required.

Superuser?
Thanks for the clarification. In any case, Lodsys' site claims IBM, Cisco and Accenture to be clients. I assume those licensed directly from the troll.
I spent a week vacation with 2 friends who work at the patent office, so w e had time to discuss over beers. They don't believe there is a problem. They rely so heavily on prior art, and have trouble with the very concept that something was too obvious for the first 20 programmers to want to patent it, so prior art is very incomplete. I show them 1 click, they tell me that if it was that obvious someone would have patented it before. They refuse to consider the "skilled in the art" obviousness test because they say it's too easy to believe something is obvious after it's been explained to me.
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The syntax.
Garbage collector death rate: 47/100,000 per year

Roofer death rate: 35/100,000 per year

Lumberjack death rate: 92/100,000 per year

Police death rate: 13/100,000 per year

None of these jobs requires a college degree. The average roofer salary is 36k/year, 42% of the salary of a job with a 63% lower death rate.

http://money.cnn.com/2005/08/26/pf/jobs_jeopardy/

http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/cfoi_rates_2009hb.pdf

http://www.simplyhired.com/a/salary/search/q-roofing
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That's called a copyright.

People have disputed the originality of movie ideas including Matrix [0] and Harry Potter [1].

[0] http://blogcritics.org/video/article/author-sues-matrix-writ...

[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/02/18/entertainment/main...
Of course we should all use Chrome. That way, Google can keep tabs on us! Seriously, more bad advice that plays on Apple's security through obscurity.
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Proprietary doesn't mean secret. There are codebases that are made available to customers for inspection, under NDAs and with all copyrights "reserved" by the owner. Looking at code is not the primary benefit of open or free software.
So... they didn't do the things required to make it legal, but you claim it's legal?

"Acquit my client, your honour! It wouldn't have been murder if he hadn't have killed them, so he did nothing illegal!"
Another solution would be to create a very inexpensive way to defend against a patent lawsuit. If defending yourself is trivial, the incentive to agree to extortion schemes is dramatically reduced.

A better one could be to make it profitable to defend against frivolous lawsuits like these. If the plaintiff is required to pay the legal bills of the defendant, plus a hefty margin awarded by the judge according to how frivolous the lawsuit was, we would turn the incentive backwards. That would prevent ridiculous patents like these to even reach a court and create a market for lawyers specialized in shooting down stupid lawsuits.
People in general have ceded everything to politicians. If no one is writing letters/e-mails to their representatives, all those representatives have to go by is the cable news viewscreen running in their offices.

We saw this in how quickly the GOP moved away from reducing Medicare to a voucher program when their base started talking to them about it. We need to find a way to kick off that level of voter involvement with other things.
Fred's argument is filled with hypocrisy. It's akin to saying VCs kill innovation because they make it harder for bootstrapping companies to survive.

If Lodsys is a patent troll, then Fred is an equity troll. When Lodsys purchased the patent, the inventor got PAID. When investors purchase stock in a company, the founders (and in the case of an IPO or acquisition, the VC's) get PAID.

This is virtually the same principle.

Besides, Lodsys "is seeking 0.575% of US revenue over for the period of the notice letter to the expiration of the patent, plus applicable past usage." That's hardly enough to kill innovation.
Or use async.js, or step, which already have addressed this issue. They look nice in coffeescript too.
Can you please provide more details on how apprenticeship system worked in your case?
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Never said that :) Just wanted to show some of the techniques that the other side are currently using.
The syntax is tough for newbies, strings/lists being conflated is ... not so nice, macros/include files are ugly. Records - ugly! Command line options make it inconvenient for scripting tasks. Lack of libraries (compare with Scala, which has access to pretty much all of Java), no code repositories, ala rubygems. Also: it's more verbose than languages like Ruby, but not as fast, generally, as things like C or Java, putting it at a bit of an odd place for me.

They're mostly minor nits, and don't prevent me from liking and using the language, but I'm skeptical about it ever being more than a niche language. Yes, obviously other languages have succeeded without having all those things, that's just the laundry list off the top of my head.
How is that relevant? If it's out of a total of 11 professions, that's even worse than if it were out of every single job out there.
I'm just fed up with the stupidity of the status quo. As a number of posts have pointed out, the lawyers, Patent Office, etc. generally don't see this as a problem. People like us who actually want to create new things ... we're the ones who are the losers.

This is another instance where it would have been beneficial if all software professionals belonged to a Guild or union. If we were organized, at least there is some sliver of a chance that we'd be able to have an influence on the legislative process. If that fails, we would just not work to create software patents.
Interesting amount of negative feelings towards AirBnB, and as a disclaimer I am a big proponent of "Do, and ask for forgiveness". This is what startups are all about, using available resources to their advantage and getting out their and hustling (even if it involves bending the rules a bit). Obviously rental owners (their target) were not to upset about being told of another resource to list their site on otherwise they would not have continued this approach. I can see where some of you are coming from in feeling violated/disturbed by this but given that a.) it appears to have worked b.) they informed users of something they wanted c.) no one complained (until now). I this that it was a very effective/creative way to solve their supply problem and it obviously worked.
I already wrote a spam filter. We stop about 4 billion spams a day with it. What are YOU doing to stop spam?
Yup. Problems materialize faster.

Deflation is different -- basically everyone gets scared and stops spending money. As a result, the "velocity" of money slows down and prices drop in a race to the bottom. (The best example of this was the car market in 2009. If you had cash, you could get unbelievable deals on cars.)

With inflation, there is plenty of money out there, but evaluating risk gets difficult. High inflation tends to have a snowball effect, so you don't want people owing you money -- think of it as compounding interest in reverse. So you end up with informal contracts... "Give me a car today, and you get 15 goats or hunks of aluminum in July."

A creditor wants informal contracts, because like in the US, paper money is "Legal Tender for All Debts, Public and Private." But to have informal contracts, you need a personal/trust connection... and that encourages corruption and nepotism.
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