skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Did 4800 baud modems even exist in volume?

I just checked wikipedia and there's indeed a protocol for them, but I've never seen one in the wild. In my day it was 300, 1200, 2400, 9600, 14400, 16800, 19200, 28800, 33600, 56k ...

So, back on topic, wouldn't it be more likely he was channel bonding two 2400 baud modems?
Hiring a programmer? $50,000.00 . Getting rid of one that doesn't work for cultural reasons? Priceless.
Keep working on real projects and experimenting. Only so much knowledge can come from reading. You should also try dissecting some open source projects.
Definitely true, I was actually surprised the field wasn't originally the majority female since I remember reading that the original programmers were nearly all women.
I'm still not sure what the value proposition is supposed to be for me, as a consumer. In one pocket I have my credit and debit cards. In the other pocket I have my mobile phone. Unlike my phone, my credit and debit cards never run out of batteries. Why do I want to replace one with the other?
I remember once seeing a list of top X popular searches which included the term 'www.hotmail.com'. While I've no doubt it'd work, the level of understanding necessary to even attempt it is somewhat scary.
The problem with this statement is that he's looking at the end result, instead of the human activities that lead up to it. Patents exist to promote progress (according to the US Constitution). They motivate activities that would otherwise be neglected. The activities that produce software require less motivation than the activities that produce hardware. They may produce equivalent end products, but that's not what should determine patent protection.
isostick copes with ISOs >4GB by splitting them, YUMI doesn't.
altavista just redirects to yahoo when you search.
Would've been awesome in 1980 on a timesharing system. Now I've got as much control of all my personal devices as I want and I don't want any more control of devices at work than what I need to do my job (with control comes responsibility).
No, we would be about 1/4th as up in arms as we are now.
http://duckduckgo.com/?q=search

http://gigablast.com/search?q=search
Seems pretty quick to me. I checked a few times, and the median was about 200ms, though I did see the occasional 2s.
Well, something has to fill that giant hole on Techmeme that I now notice. The mobile site http://techmeme.com/m/ doesn't have room for the sidebar.
Or, dumb people reduce functionality for the rest of us because work has to go into handling their mistakes rather than coding the better product the devs really wanted to make.
I would be. Is this really common? My own story is the common one of highshool dropout who dropped about because he was bored in school and this is something I hear about in many of my peers.
You lied. You said something that turned out to be a lie (an inaccurate or false statement) and although people have trouble hearing the word, it doesn't make it any less true. You do not fit a few of the definitions of "lie" but you fit at least one.

edit: to all the downvoters, pick up a dictionary
Dude, I have more cash on hand than the US Government.
Makes you wonder about identifying similar government grants/reimbursements and building apps to fill a related need. Would make for a very easy sales pitch and maybe give a new venture a bit of a running start.
Key emails from original Android team could help Oracle's case
It has some features that are fairly unique and I appreciate their experimentation. For example, Unite makes it very easy for your average person to share music, files, a streaming webcam, or whatever from within their browser. It's a great way to do something like let a friend listen to a cool album you just discovered without either of you ever leaving the browser. I still prefer Chrome on the desktop but I respect the developers and what they're trying to do.

On the other hand, I do use Opera on my phone. I find tab switching to be much more natural than it is with the default Android browser and I also appreciate the option of proxying traffic through their servers where it is compressed and stripped down to a mobile format. It cuts down on bandwidth and cpu usage which I like, particularly if the data connection is being spotty.
It's neither, it's an honest question as to why you feel your decisions and actions (or lack thereof) are beyond reproach.
New OAuth Toolkit from Layer 7 Technologies
Google, Orange spread SMS services across Africa
Well, I can't edit my comment, but I wrote it from estimates in my head, and there are some serious problems. The first is something I knew, and that you can't raise chickens on corn, but rather soy, which are substitutable, but soy has a much lower yield per acre. Feeding corn to animals just makes them fat, which is not what you want.

I have looked up some of this stuff, and doing the analysis a different way, gives a different answer.

According to wikipedia, a chicken is 33% efficient at turning food protein into meat protein. Soy is the protein used in all commercial animal feeds. So if the vegetarian food has a higher protein acreage yield than 1/3 of soy, then chicken is less efficient.

So soy give 40 bushels per acre, 60 pounds per bushel, and 36% protein. = 950 lbs of protein -> 316 pounds of chicken protein. A better yield for peanuts is probably 2500 lbs per acre, and 25% protein, so 625 lbs of protein. Peanuts and soy are both better than chicken for protein efficiency, though chicken is not all that bad.
Ah, but patents, wonderful things that they are, protect implementations more than they protect features. It's very easy to implement the same feature in different ways, ones that are patent protected if you know how.

Having said that, GPL in theory ensures users and even people making derivatives of Java are protected from patent action by Oracle.
The BSD-style kernel "subsystem" of XNU, Darwin's kernel, is statically linked with Mach and executes in privileged mode. So, while it "has" Mach and some parts of the kernel interact with other parts via Mach port interfaces, XNU isn't really a microkernel as classically defined anymore since it provides all the facilities you'd expect of a non-micro kernel.
OS X was built on Mach 2.x, which was pre-microkernel. And the modern XNU isn't microkernel-like at all.
Let me give you an example: My uncle knows that a cell phone is a computer. How? Well, I told him, and I'm a researcher. How do I know? Well, originally, some professor told me, and he's a professor. How does he know? Well, he or his colleague studied the literature indicating that an ARM processor is Turing-complete... which, at the end of the day, is a totally mathematical consideration, independent of the physical world except perhaps the brains which analyze it.

Actually I don't think its technically "Turing Complete". it doesn't have unbounded tape. In fact any given ARM processor will have a fixed addressable limit. I can certainly compute a class of things in theory that the ARM processor can't compute. There are real HW considerations that you need make when you deal with an actual physical processor that don't exist in the theoretical model.

And this sidesteps questions of complexity.

But this is similar to a patent on a new wing design. You can say it is simply a mathematical model of airflow and such. But the pudding is the creation, not the mathematical model of the wing.
There seems to be some confusion here between the thing that is being patented and the description of the thing that is being patented. The fact that the description is written using the alphabet has no bearing on the patentability of the thing itself. No arrangement of letters in the alphabet can be patented - but that doesn't mean that nothing can be patented.
It does imply at least a spec, however, and there is none available.
Linkbaiting? Harmless.

Also: I’m pretty sure that the author of this article actually believes that Jobs was lying. It’s not linkbaiting if the headline reflects the author’s beliefs.
How Google dominates us
The smallest font
Cancers Might Be Newly Evolved Species
XMPP won. See Facebook, GTalk. The problem is, that you can (ab)use XMPP and disable some of the open parts (federation). The protocol is still the One True IM Protocol imho, but the biggest hosters suck.

I'm less familiar with SIP, but my take here is:

SIP seems to be a good thing, but then you notice that it doesn't do thaaat much and end up in hell afterwards (Okay, we've got a session. Which (open?) codecs are we going to use now?

What I'd have loved to see is jingle taking off. Give me XMPP based voice/video. The problem? For a long time Google fucked that up. There were lots of problems because of differences between the 'standard' and the implementation on GTalk. Til today the clients don't support video or audio conferences (unless you're counting the G+ hangout feature. I wonder why it is possible there, but not elsewhere. Why can't I just video call two of my friends, G+ or not?) and they still fail to support mobile phones.

Android 2.3.4 supports audio and video, but only for a limited set of hardware, because their support is tied to a specific platform. Using a different chipset (although in a powerful phone, with all hardware capabilities and Android 2.3.4? Bad luck).

So - I'd love to see XMPP win. But for now the implementation is mediocre. There's not enough support to push it, from what I can tell.
You want to have a look at the APL / J / K family, where functions like |/0(0|+)\ that compute the maximum-consecutive-sum (honest!) are the norm.
There was some discussion around this recently (e.g. my recent history for a link into it). My Comcast residential rate is approaching that level. Installation fee and lengthy commitment aside, it would make sense for me to switch to their low end business plan.
Can you use this for the uplink also?

Does the base station has to update the clients with the calculated and needed transformations? But still you can't fit that with the data of all the other clients.

Am I missing something?
Why are you reading 'Hacker-Wannabe-Script-Kiddie-Failed-Businessman' News anyway?
Still depends on your boss. I used to work for a bank and my head of department dislike people who goes home before 7pm. Our official working hours is 9am - 6pm. I was called into the room once for going home at 6:15pm.
Hurd is still using Mach? I don't see the point if it's just going to cheat around the IPC problem like OS X did.

And in the past decade, there have been more promising microkernels, like L4. Unless I missed something and there's still a good reason for Hurd to still be using Mach.
I think the same thing. The question is, should we?

I wonder how many people who go on to do Nobel-quality work were in college at the age of 12? My intuition is very few. I think something very important is lost when bored 12-year-olds don't learn how to experiment on their own. Essentially 100% of the pioneer hackers cut their teeth this way.

Of course, I'm probably just jealous that I didn't matriculate early and have 3 BS's by 19.
Top Ten Most Wanted Design Bugs [2005]
http://www.asktog.com/Bughouse/10MostWantedDesignBugs.html
I wonder why they even have the "I am lucky" or even the Google Search button as tyrping even a letter takes me to the results page.
I found a "public" version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFCSp23xl40
It's better when lawyers know both sides of the game well. I would think a lawyer who starts out on the VC side, makes a pile, then goes to work for the startup side would be better.
Yes, it is the most important statement, and I disagree with it.

Software expressions are a form of lambda calculus, i.e., mathematics, and ought to be outside the proper domain of patents, whereas the proper domain of patents is the material. 1+1 is always 2. One drop of water + another drop of water is sometimes one drop of water and sometimes two drops of water and sometimes something else. One ball-bearing + another ball bearing is usually two ball bearings, but one needs to be careful about their environment, or you end up with something that no longer constitutes two ball bearings - and that is the crux of the matter. If your patent is intrinsically implemented by 25 or more Schrödinger modelled actual entities (e.g., just about any molecule larger than H2O) you're now operating in the material world, the old rules apply, and good luck to you. The Platonic 0 and 1 and the finite (though arbitrarily large) operations on them should not be bound by those rules.

And yes, it is a religious belief - in mathematics.
for i in range(1, 1000):
print "Do a project.\n"

I know this is rather rude, but doing projects is the only way to learn.

Take it from me, someone who wasted a lot of time trying making it click by study alone.
Children Play Like Scientists Work
I like the didactic approach of this article, modifying a commonly known imperative language (Java) step by step to become a functional language, translating the usual imperative idioms to their functional style counterparts.

However, the introduction is too long. It is supposedly meant to encourage the reader to keep up reading, but since the introduction is mostly off-topic, I think it actually discourages the casual reader from reading more.

Also, the example code isn't indented properly, making in unnecessarily hard to read. Maybe this is a bug in the blog software?
Ahh you're bringing back memories. I was av.com (altavista) before google, and yahoo.com before that. It's easy to forget how much search engines sucked before google.
Renewed Battle Between Facebook and Google Goes Beyond Services
The risk is definitely from the clinical trial stage through patent expiration -- I'm just saying it isn't at the early research stage.

Marketing could possibly mitigate some of the risk once it's on the market (branded viagra vs. other drugs), especially in a world without the FDA (where you would have anxiety about the safety and efficacy of arbitrary drugs). Pre-launch, but after disclosure, there wouldn't be much of a way to differentiate yourself.

Also, by the time the drug comes to market (after extended trials), the patent is well on its way to expiration. In 2010 they changed this so you get 12 years of exclusivity on the market. There are also lots of lame dirty tricks to refresh patents (slight changes in packaging, marketing, etc.)

Without the FDA/testing, you could possibly keep the drug's composition secret even once it's on the market; you could reveal info under NDA, or reveal trials info without revealing the compound. You could even imagine a situation where possession of the substance is under license, so no one could try to reverse engineer it.

I don't think that is necessarily better than what we have now, but this is a lot of why patents make sense in medicine more so than in software, even if they don't make sense in either or make sense in both.
The main problem with versioning the API is that many of the hardware partners cannot easily update their API interface and this leads to a 'legacy' approach to maintaining the API. Having had a background in enterprise software, I can tell you how frustrating this can be.

If the NetFlix API had versions, you can quickly see how this would proliferate out of control. Devices from each class (assuming the versioning was done on a time release basis) would probably need to be supported for about 10 years (the expected lifetime of the device). This would mean NetFlix would end up supporting over a dozen versions just to keep its hardware partners happy.

Another solution would be to insist that all hardware accessing the API must be capable of being flash updated. This would allow NetFlix to insist on supporting each API version for only a limited amount of time (sufficient for the hardware to be updated just like any other software service).

NetFlix basically has the choice of dealing with the complexity internally or forcing the ecosystem to suck up the pain. Their choice will be driven more by business concerns (who needs who more in the relationship, what are each parties' options) than technical (what can we do given how much money we are willing to throw at the problem).
How is that a game changer? That functionality already exist in modern card terminals.
Finished the essay: http://ourdoings.com/ourdoings-startup/2011-07-28
I think if Boston's VCs would have had their stuff together, its very possible that YC might not have abandoned Boston in the first place.

Doubtful--in the announcement, PG said:

But while Silicon Valley is a better place for startups than Boston, that isn’t why we chose it. If Cambridge seemed a better place to raise kids, we would have stayed there year round instead.
艾尚挺丰胸官网
Shopping for new rims. (Firefox Nightly Movie)
This is what pg said at the time: http://ycombinator.com/ycca.html
You know, I was thinking the same about Java. That's when I posted this question. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2094274 ; It got front page, and one (that's 1) pointer to good Java code.

For whatever reason, whether it is merit or culture, Java programmers tend to write horrible code. I'm sure there's some nice Java code out there, that is not 20 times longer than it should be. But I have not yet seen evidence, even though I've been searching for it for a while.
In the US they also hold it that long so that if you overdraft they can retroactively reorder your transactions largest first so that you will get the maximum number of overdraft fees.
Stolen from Alan Kay: "Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it." --Alan Kay

Stolen from "Joy of Clojure": CLOJURE APHORISM Clojure programmers don’t write their apps in Clojure.
They write the language that they use to write their apps in Clojure. --M. Fogus && C. Houser
Excellent. Now I can convert all of the people I know who still use IE to opera. "SMART PEOPLE USE OPERA, YOU WANT TO BE CONSIDERED SMART, DON'T YOU?!"
It's great that Khan Academy has a 100x engineer even though some have said they don't need one. This can be a 100-year project and having a solid technical foundation will allow it to become one.
Programming is not as ubiquitous as you or I would like to think. In fact, I would say that most people use less than 10% of a computer's capacity at work or home (not to say they don't max out memory or tax the CPU, but that they don't 'unlock' the computer to its potential).

Also, if you can tune engines effectively, you can better influence the cars you drive, and most people use one every day. Shouldn't auto shop be up there with programming?

I don't say that to knock auto shop. I want to reinforce the idea that 'programming' is not as important a skill as reading, writing, and math. Programming is a trade skill that builds on the concepts of reading, writing, and math. It's an advanced skill, not a basic one.
This is the first I've seen in the PAAS space regarding MongoDB and I'm excited to see that it is available and maturing. Our team currently uses MongoDB in some production and evaluation roles for some of our offerings - so efforts in the MongoDB space are every exciting.

However, in reading this press release, I'm not able to ascertain why this acquisition took place. This is the meat of what I read:

We were impressed with MongoMachine’s creativity and innovations and saw early on how well they matched our core values and direction.

But in all seriousness... seriously, what are MongoMachine's "creativity and innovations?" ..and To MongoHQ: what are your "core values and direction?" It would be awesome for you to mention to readers what this actually means.

I've never heard of either of you before, and I am a MongoDB user excited about PAAS offerings, yet this press release tells me nothing about either of you and how this acquisition helps (could help) my business.

I'd love to hear more.
Instead of recursion a jump/goto can explain it better. You don't have a return on the Google page. The back button in the browser is a return but is an additional browser feature.
"My Customers Would Have Asked For a Faster Horse"
These articles always compare Hurd to Linux. I'd love to see a comparison with Minix3 or Genode/L4 instead.
> A program is a tangible, physical arrangement of electrons, atoms, and/or electromagnetic fields.

A tangible program is not what's being patented, only the concept of the program, which is not tangible. Concepts are patented, not code. Code gets copyright protection.

Similar to saying, "Hey! I thought of a cure for cancer. I didn't actually come up with a specific one, only the concept of one. If you actually come up with it, it's my property and I'll sue you if you don't recognize that.

This means that there are trivial concepts out there, that if I implement in software, I owe bank to some company. It's pretty fucked up when you think about it.
But his examples are all physical embodiments that perform a tangible real-world function. There's no continuous progression between those and pure math.
> The more surprising thing is that they seem to genuinely believe they can "block" content.

They can. Or do you mean that the judges think there's no way around the block? If so, do you have a reference for that?
I hadn't thought of that. If the disk can perform some localized remapping, it's possible to get sequential fsynced writes to exceed the rotation speed.
This ignores how the patent statute is written. Congress sets extremely broad principles for what is patentable and leaves it to the courts to work out the details. That process of interpretation inevitably involves making policy judgments.

This isn't unusual. Constitutional concepts like "reasonable search," "cruel and unusual punishment" similarly invite courts to make policy judgments.
Grits teeth...

It's _still_ pointless. There's no chance of displacing Linux or the BSDs in practical terms, and there's no particularly interesting ideas in it. We already know you can build a Unix on top of a microkernel and it will sorta work.

Enough, already. Kill this late-1980s design and build something interesting already. Surely at least one of the things that have happened between 1990-2011 in hardware, software and networking warrants a rethink of OS assumptions rather than this stale rehashing?
Hi there. You should probably read the HN guidelines at http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Gamifying a certain field and building an API, whats it worth?
Just a quick question here, I am looking for opinions of other developers and possibly other freelancers as well.

I have made a name for myself over the past few years as a guy who can get things done with my software, i've built apps for sleeps shops, oil and gas companies, game companies, individuals and medium to large scale business operations ranging from wholesale fence to restaurant POS to bio technology.

In doing this I have almost exclusively declined equity stakes in favor of cash deals.

But recently I was hit up by a friend/acquaintance of mine who I respect and who no doubt has some business acumen. We have been tossing back and forth ideas about a project to work on together, but from the first convo to now the it has grown from a basic facebook app to a full scale web service with a fully functional API and capabilities to scale in a potentially infinite way.

Obviously this puts a little more time and pressure on me while also raising the bar from the original project scope.

Per my request I will be the sole developer on the project unless I deem help necessary at which time I will have discretion over who is hired and for what.

But my real question is, What(in equity) should I expect from a project like this? I have already said that any expenses incurred will have to be picked up by them, but what else should I be looking for here?

a deal that once looked good to me and that could be fun looks like it could turn into a monster of a project.

I would greatly appreciate any thoughts or feedback on this subject and look forward to hearing similar stories with both good and bad outcomes