skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>You've fallen into the trap of assuming things need to have copyright.

It's not a trap. In a capitalist society it's inevitable that copyright protection be required to ensure things run smoothly. Artists, content creators, IMO deserve to earn a living in return for the richness they add to life. Without art and literature my life would certainly be poorer.

Of course artistic works (as defined in copyright law) don't necessarily require copyright in order to be made. But what of those who write or paint or sculpt, or what have you, when there is no protection. Yes they can "get a job like the rest of us" but for some this will greatly limit their ability to create (for others the converse may be true I'll accept).

But, I hear someone splutter, "a painter will get paid!", "a writer will get paid!" for the work they do ...

Suppose as a writer I release a new novel. It took me 2 years to write, many hours of work. The novel takes a slow start but the initial print run sells after a month or two and less editor costs and print costs I'm only slightly in debt for the project. I send for a second run. Thing is the print house gets my order and refuses to print for me. See they're selling my novel now, altered the author, rewrote some of the autobiographical parts to put me off claiming it as my own. Oh well, there goes the house to pay off my debts. The print house of course rings some book sellers to pass on the book, "no thanks we don't want it" they say; next day they're selling the ebook on their website.

What loss though? That book is pennies now when it was pounds before. The question is will the author still write? Will they have time to devote to writing without reward. Some will but I think we'll all come out of such a situation worse off.

Is copyright perfect? Not by a long shot. Should we ditch it bathwater, baby and all? Definitely not.
Another important 'hardware' that doesn't get enough attention is the chair & desk. I believe that having an ergonomically designed and adjustable chair and desk is as important as the PC specs to programmer productivity. In my current job I have a bad chair/table and it is breaking my back. Probably this issue also gets worse with age. Investing in good furniture might also save the company on health care costs. From personal experience I have spent quite a bit on fixing my back.
For many years now, more and more code has been moving to the client side. At this point, for me, PHP is just the glue between the database and the client side code. There's nothing left to hate. Move on already.
How did you decide which feature(s) to go with and which to leave out?
Could someone explain what "result |= x ^ y" does? Better yet, can someone point me to a search engine that lets me search for symbols?

http://www.google.com/search?q=python+|%3D
If you're working in an in-house IT dept. then giving the staff of a cost-centre better equipment than the "people who make all the money" is a big issue.

If you're working in a big company then central IT probably have a standard PC supply agreement and standard image and will oppose allowing anything non-standard on the network until someone signs off on 2 or 3 extra support engineers to "support" this non standard stuff.

If your company isn't making much money, any capital expenditure like this is hard to justify.

So, you really want to work for a small software company that's making lots of money.
It's a cute pair of stories, but the only lesson I can take away from them is that an eight-time startup founder with an ex-VC/Harvard professor partner can get away with things that most people can't.

Oh, and personal relationships are often more important than anything else, including preparation and well thought-out ideas.
Ha, I have 4 (actually 5 but I don't remember the twilio one) ... do you want to give me the end digits for confirmation purposes, last 4 digits should be enough.
I think about what the Old Masters programmed with just a single 80x25 green-screen terminal, and I weep for programmers today.
Yes and no.

The good news: if you're in your 20s now, you have 60 or 70 years of life left, and scientific advances being what they are, they'll probably be mostly good years. That's a lot of time. Also, the common trope about poets and mathematicians peaking at 20 is the exception, not the rule, and doesn't apply to modern times anyway (mathematics is so specialized that modern mathematicians are just getting started at 25-30). The actual cognitive peak is somewhere around 50, and the drop-off after that is health-related rather than hard-coded, so if you stay healthy, even into your 80s the decline will be slight to nonexistent. Using vocabulary as an example, you probably won't gain many words from 50 to 80, but if you're healthy, you won't lose many either. So yes, if you're 25 or even 50, you have a hell of a lot of time left.

The bad news: society is incredibly ageist, and as you get older, the amount you need to have achieved in order to be taken seriously ratchets up. Do you think Mark Zuckerberg (who is as much a VC invention as most celebrities are Hollywood inventions) would have gotten the support, mentoring, and funding that he did if he were 36 instead of 20? Almost impossible. Being young is a hard-to-tap (if you're not perceived as being exceptional, you'll be typecast as a "young pup" and not taken seriously) but extremely powerful asset in business: the "boy wonder" archetype. Perhaps it's utterly moronic that it works, but it is very powerful when it hits.

This is even worse in the big-box corporate world than in technology, where your age and job title define who you are as a person. In big-box corporate, VP at 35 means you're serious, whereas VP at 50 is a consolation prize. This is why people in that world bump their college degrees up 5 years and pay for plastic surgery, the latter being an investment that pays itself off immensely. It's not just that people want to appear younger; it's that they benefit immensely by the appearance of being in their current position at a younger age.

So, you are running out of time, not because of biology, but because of the general shallowness of most people. At age 40, you have one-fifth as many options as you did at 22. It sucks, but that's the way the world works now.
I have an alias set up for this, so all I would have to do is 'gca "hello"'. That's a lot less typing and probably quicker then right clicking and such.
Additionally, there's Chirpy, which seems to be broadly the same set of features, minus intellisense. http://chirpy.codeplex.com/
I would assume it's for on-the-fly generation of links. The example I can think of (which they're not actually using it for) would be for Google Maps, with it's horrible long URLs, give the user a g.co link when they ask for the link to share.

They did actually used to do that (with goo.gl) but apparently have stopped, perhaps it is soon to be brought back under g.co

But yeah, it's essentially the same as Twitter's t.co, except that not only does it have to have been created automatically by Google (like t,co), it also has to link directly to a page on Google's servers (unlike t.co).

Thank God for Google owning YouTube, which ensures morons can still rick roll.
If you could have 10k paid app downloads and ZERO piracy vs 8k paid app downloads and 90k pirated downloads of your app, which would you choose?

The labels and everyone else who is against piracy act as if almost all of the pirated downloads would've been paid for if there was some way of stopping all piracy, when that is ridiculous. At most 10-20% from those pirates would buy the songs if piracy didn't exist. I think they even did a study in EU about a year or 2 ago on this, and that was the result, too.

Thinking that all the pirated songs would've been bought by people if piracy didn't exist, is like saying that if Lady Gaga's songs weren't on Youtube, she would've sold her songs a billion times, or whatever the amount of her total video views (maybe a bit less if you consider each person saw it on average a few times).
please please please GIMP can't still be compared to Photoshop.
Google's Eric Schmidt slams Apple iPhone lawsuits
I feel the same way. I have a Dell Inspiron that cost me something like $500 two years ago, and I have no problem doing Python development on it with vim. If I had a compile step I might feel differently.
For me, long compilation times puts me out of "the zone". If compilation takes too long I'll start reading e-mails or web browsing. When compilation is done my mind is elsewhere and I have to get into the problem solving "zone" again.
My philosophy.

Buy a nice monitor (2 if you can afford it).

Buy whatever hardware is reasonable for ~1k or less. Repeat yearly.

This will always keep the developer with a good machine without spending too much money. With the way HW is nowadays, it's possible to go 2 years on each machine.

The story changes if you need laptops. After using LOTS of laptops over the years, if given a choice I'll only use MBPs now.
Kitten Faces
WordPress Create custom post status messages in admin
On /etc/sysconfig and /etc/default
"Google says it will use the domain in order to create a shortcut for all its products and services using the format g.co/[XYZproduct/service] and that the domain will be live sometime later in the afternoon today." http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/18/google-buys-g-co-to-create-...
"But if you're compiling huge C++ (or even Java) projects then you probably want good I/O (possibly an SSD, preferably in RAID1 config for redundancy), lots of RAM and a good CPU."

For huge builds it makes sense to go with a compile farm. Working on a god box that sits idle 99% of the time is a bit wasteful.
My wife works for bn.com, and I've met a lot of their employees at after-work functions. Slowly but surely they've been hiring strong talent, and based solely on what I hear from my wife and see at events, morale seems high. No one I've talked to seems concerned about bankruptcy.

Given their share of the e-book market, vs. their current $1B market cap, B&N certainly looks undervalued. There's a reason why firms like Liberty Media have been making bids on the company -- they see money to be made there.

Things can always change, but from my (limited) vantage point the two companies aren't on the same path at all.
Markov's Heart of Darkness
A "life lesson" may still have a non-universal set of (common) situations to which it applies.
Firefox already handles things the way the author wants.
One should not assume Firefox functions like Chrome and probably should actually try?

Preferences => Privacy: Clear your recent history
* last hour
* last 2 hours
* last 4 hours
* today

And you can select if you want to clear cache, passwords, etc or everything of course.
I was swimming in a river and picked up a rock. I like it's shape. I must own its copyright! insanity
Cool! Another reason why web/tech startups should focus on doing one thing really well.
What constitutes 'best hardware'?

I have a friend in high finance whose desktop is a (dual?) quad core with 12GB ram which he regularly maxes out. I have a colleague that writes firmware on windows XP, which with his various drivers and Eclipse problems causes a BSOD about once a fortnight. I keep offering him to get a new computer, cards, whatever, and he refuses because of the cost to him in terms of getting his environment set up 'just right' again - he's quite picky (at my previous workplace, a digital circuit designer on six figures didn't want to move from his PIII to a Core 2 for the same reason).

Another colleague runs a quad core on an SSD and complains that his CAD program runs slow... but when we run it through its paces, it doesn't seem to hit any bottlenecks bar the initial load (which isn't his complaint); it just 'feels' slow.

as with all things computery, the answer is: "it depends"
Give each year/month credits to your engineers to buy a new computer and give them a way to 'buy' extra credits. So some of them will wait longer, some will buy a new machine each year.

Give them the liberty to choose!
There were 4 features that are necessary for the app to do anything:
1. Create a poll
2. Pick a number
3. Process SMS msgs
4. Show results

For this first release, I didn't do anything outside of those 4 features. Soon I'll be adding the ability to open and close the poll by SMS, get results by SMS, and many more things, but for now it is "done".
| is bitwise OR
^ is bitwise XOR

so, "result |= x ^ y" will change result to true if x and y are different. since its bitwise, the bits that are different between x and y will be set in result
Crazy webcomic caption contest on FB - win an iPad 2
Well unless you are mentally disabled, remembering that command (and a couple of thousand others) is trivial.

It's hardly trivial. People think and remember in different ways, even those who aren't mentally challenged. Personally, I always feel like I'm speaking a foreign language when using the terminal, even though I've been using it nearly every day for several years now. However, my spatial memory is much stronger. I generally feel familiar with a new GUI pretty quickly, since I can map functionality to locations. Plus there's the visual aspect of any icons.

Shortcut keys are immensely useful once you build strong muscle memory of them, but frustrating if that's your only option. Certain programs, such as Rhino3D, give you full GUI, top menus, and a command line, (and scripting in multiple languages,) and being able to pick the way that works fastest for me for any given operation and my overall workflow is awesome.

Also, being able to just see what possible options are is important. I find it kind of cruel that modern terminals don't have a good way to do this (yeah there's tab, but it's not auto). Shells that have even a basic auto-suggest are almost delightful to use, by comparison (eg Rhino's).
This is a reason why I'm interested in "Bring Your Own Computer" idea.
I mean I still bring my laptop to work anyway.
Normally my personal computer is more powerful than what I have at work anyway.
And if the company would pay or give me some bonus for it I'd be really happy.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/sybase/the-year-of-bring-your-own-...
I found it very odd that Google+ profiles don't have a clean URL. Something like g.co/+nirlevy would be perfect.
Scribd launches Float, an app for the digital bookworm
Why fit people use less heartbeats than couch potatoes
Please refrain from using textese on HN.
I can't comment on the dev activity for any of these tools, but I do have experience with lab.js and require.js.

From what I have seen, the functionality of head.js looks like a subset of lab.js. Lab.js has a richer API with queueing and waiting. Require.js is a whole different beast - it revolves around the definition of modules (module pattern) and the scripts required to pull down to organize modules. There are a lot of tools in require.js that help with ordering the execution of loaded scripts, pulling down files as text (can't do this in lab.js), and optimizing (compiling modules into one big uglified file).

They are all good tools, but different - pick the best one suited for your project.
"clear last x hours" has been replaced for me with Chrome's anonymous tab almost entirely.
And often connected over a 300 baud dial up.
It's easy to be single with this lifestyle, as a professional who can work remotely anywhere. You can't have pets, as well.
Try using words instead, http://www.google.com/search?q=python+pipe+equals
A friend of mine sent this to me a few years ago:

"""My favorite video on bootstrapping/minimum viable product:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zv17lF60OHY

It's well worth watching the whole thing."""
Google isn't not suing because they're more noble or more intent on pure competition, but because they can't sue. They don't have a deep portfolio of patents. Simple as that.
Ask HN:Review my startup - Hadoop map-reduce Job Builder
We've developed a graphical, drag-and-drop interface to create Hadoop map-reduce jobs, execute and schedule them. It is best suited for analysts who couldn't be bothered learning hive or Java to drill into Hadoop-stored data. It can also be very useful for developers to automate routine jobs and use the product as a job store for better management and administration. We've uploaded a demo that demonstrates the product and we'd appreciate the feedback.

http://www.strax-data.com/demo

Thanks!
I agree paper is a significant problem, but books are a really small portion of it, because they tend to be fairly durable goods. The vast majority of paper waste is in disposable things like newspapers, magazines, toilet paper, paper towels, advertisement circulars, etc.

Every week I probably throw out* a half-kilo of ads stuffed into my mailbox, one circular every week from every major grocery and department-store chain in the area. It would only take a few months to accumulate as much paper in grocery-store ads as all the books I've bought in my life.

* Well, I recycle it, but afaik the recyclability of glossy/coated paper is fairly poor/inefficient.
Am I the only one who read that as "Blame Minecraft" ?
I'd say you're making the wrong choice there.

Developers productivity doesn't work the way you think it does. 51 developers on crap hardware won't be 2% more productive than 50 developers on good hardware. It won't even be equal.

Somewhere in that stack of 50 developers are a few of those mythical 10X-100X guys, who are currently spending a lot more time than you think arguing politics on Reddit. When you're writing code and your machine bogs for whatever reason, it kicks you out of what you were doing and almost forcibly alt-tabs you over to look at lolcats.

Give those guys good machines that don't piss them off, and you'll find them a lot more productive. And not, like, 2% more productive. More like 2X more productive as a group and 10X productive for some individuals.

Try it yourself one day and let us know how it works out for you.
Window Badges
Horace Dediu's latest article ("A new way to value Apple", http://www.asymco.com/2011/07/18/a-new-way-to-value-apple/) gives some suggestions that Macs, iPhones, and iPads represent upwards of $225 recurring revenue per user to Apple. All iOS users are worth about $150/year/user (http://www.asymco.com/2011/06/30/how-much-is-an-ios-user-wor...).

Finally, his Rawr Chart (http://www.asymco.com/2011/05/18/the-rawr-chart/) shows profit per phone sold. The picture isn't pretty for non-iOS devices. It's not quite answering your question, as it doesn't break out Samsung's "feature" vs Android vs Bada (as an example), but the best example is HTC -- which appears to be just under $60 profit per phone (and IIRC HTC is mostly Android, isn't it) with less volume than Apple (which makes ~$275 per iPhone sold).

EDIT: small clarification. The Rawr chart doesn't break out handset maker profits by phone classification, so only Apple and RIM are the only ones who have profit for smartphones only, and maybe HTC. The others have diluted information because they sell more than just smartphones.
Magento Customization
UK website development provides the custom service for creative magento theme design, magento installation and magento customization. A web 2.0 structure is used by us to make your ecommerce store different from others.
Lower range of hearing is MUCH lower than 30hz. The low E on a std 4 string bass is only 34hz, and most people can here at least an octave below that. 10-12hz is more of an accurate cutoff.
Charlie Sheen, that crazy bastard, is coming back to TV
Speeding up queries by a factor of 100 or more with DB2 Text Search
The manager should ask the team, or himself, if having SSDs, twice the RAM, etc. would give them enough extra time to manage the builds.

OR, if Tom is having trouble with a module, maybe he would feel more comfortable handling CI...
I don't disagree with the article per se, I disagree with this method people seem to have of painting a large and diverse country with a single brush. I am entirely ignorant of Pakistan's inner workings, so I don't have an opinion on the article itself, other than noticing the obvious logical flaw and the fact that this article and its discussion are entirely inappropriate for HN.
Due to all the costs of adding extra developers (management overhead, communications complexity, inertia), spending $20k per person (every year or two) on hardware (desk/chair, home and office setups, laptops, phones, etc.) is still a win, if it lets you have smaller teams for the same overall productivity.

The bigger hassle for me is that upgrading machines causes some downtime, so it's better to buy loaded boxes and replace them slightly less frequently (every 18-24mo) vs. a new machine of lower spec every year.

Tools also are a great place to spend money; having a great build/provisioning/tinderbox/etc. system saves developer time, and doesn't add communications complexity.
MIT, Harvard use nanotechnology to monitor singular cells in real-time
Play Game...Watch Video Ad...get virtual goods
There is no such thing as "intuitive" when it comes to computers. All computer interfaces are different conventions. Now, some conventions are so common and so deeply learned, they seem like intuition. However, suggesting that they are intuition presents a gross misunderstanding of what intuition is.

"The only intuitive interface is the nipple. After that, its all learned." (http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/2002/08/nipple.html)
CFScript is JavaScript (ECMAScript). Which means it actually should be cool at the moment ;)
Since Coda wrote this, Nate Lawson also did a whole Black Hat talk about exploiting timing attacks:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehxjAq59xEw
Napkins: Where Ethernet, Compaq and Facebook's cool data center got their starts
Basically the biggest trouble I have had learning a spoken language is in getting over the awkwardness of never being able to understand the other person or come up with a quick reply. You probably need to get used to sounding like an idiot all the time and constantly misunderstanding what people are trying to say. Then, get used to people switching to English even though that's really not helping your situation. If you have no trouble with that, you're much better off than I am.

Another useful skill that I alluded to is the ability to quickly and accurately simplify your thoughts into words that you know in the language in question. You will learn that a lot of the time in English you are just adding layers and layers of nuance to what you are saying rather than more clearly saying what you are actually thinking.