skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem PHP tried to fix (and largely succeeded) had very little to do with the language, and a lot to do with the deployment of products written in that language, as I understand it.
Read Bilski people. Overall it was 5-4, but if you read the majority and the dissent, it was 9-0 on this sub-point: that State Street (not a Supreme Court decision) is bad precedent, and Benson, Flook and Diehr are good precedent.

Diehr is only muddied because people choose to muddy it. I'm working on an essay that details this now.
Your analogy isn't quite accurate.

Suppose your wife is less prone to accusations (admittedly you know her better than I). Instead of calling you a liar straight off, she simply reminds you, "You didn't take the trash out."

You ignore her.

She then asks, "Are you still planning to take the trash out?"

You ignore her.

She starts getting irritated. "Look, you said you were going to take the trash out. Obviously, you lied. And I'm really upset you won't talk to me about it."

You could try to say that you just hadn't gotten around to it yet, or that you had better things to do than explain this to your wife.

But you're still probably spending the night on the couch.
We're really pushing for Mac compatibility. Mac firmware is very picky, for sure, it seems to have very strict requirements for SCSI command support on optical drives.

Resetting the USB controller and such are no problem for isostick, it will come right back up in the same state it was left in.

Excellent point that modern OSes don't need the optical drive functionality. I still use my isostick to carry around lots of OSes and switch between them with ease, though.

Best Regards - Eric Agan, Elegant Invention
Then why did he wrote his own language for his product? Oh right, because languages do matter.

Sure, what makes one a great programmer is language independent, but that doesn't mean you can have the same code quality in every language. There's a reason why professionals in every field buy top quality tools and not cheap disposable crap.
If I stand up in front of millions of people and tell them I'm going to take the trash out tonight, and then I don't take the trash out tonight... I'm not trustworthy. It's not lying. I don't know if he used the word "promise" so maybe he broke a promise or maybe he didn't. The bottom line is that he can't be trusted.
the point is: There is good marketing and good advertisements and then there are plain lies and false promises.
Investors And Incubators Need To Look At Pre-Incubation
> here is more info about Joda Time for Java 8

JSR 310 is not Joda for Java 8 (or 7). It's by Joda's author and uses a very similar API, but it's a cleanroom implementation and not compatible with Joda: over time, Stephen Colebourne (Joda lead dev) found core issues in Joda, and JSR-310 is the occasion to use the lessons learned from Joda.
Sorry, I obviously wasn’t clear. I never intended to say that I was "embarrassed by my gender" as Michael seemed to believe and I don’t think that the guys in that classroom were participating in offensive sexist behavior (most of the time they weren’t.)
And women of course rate other women and men, both sexually and just with stereotypes. However, all that doesn’t change that slight feeling of intrusion, and isolation. I’ve worked in various companies now, and on every team I’ve been on (even teams as large 30 developers) I was the only woman, so it was good practice walking into that classroom in the university. Sometimes, it is still a little lonely.

But here I am coding at a prestigious gaming company, and I agree, a lot of other women could do the same. But, if I wasn’t so determined– if during university I didn’t think that programming starcraft was the definition of cool – I might have decided it wasn’t worth it to go into that room every day. I could have gone to study biology or architecture or psychology and not felt the least bit awkward. And I had girl friends who I would convince that programming is “dead useful” by automating something for them. I would try to convince them they should sign up to some programming class and they would say “nah, too much testosterone.”

I’m really not trying to make men into “villains” or “creeps” with this monolog. In fact, I’m trying to say that before we get to the sexist creeps who assume I can’t code because “you’re a girl” or that I won’t be able to understand what they are talking about because I’m not the type who can do math… Before all that, you have to walk into a room where you are different and alone. I realize that this is what it feels like to be a minority. As a white woman it isn’t something I’m used to feeling, but every time I stepped into a CS classroom I definitely did. Obviously none of these are obstacles that are impossible to overcome, and if women had no choice in the university – I’m sure most of them would be perfectly capable of walking into a room full of guys and getting a degree in CS. Some of them might even enjoy it.

PS thanks thricedotted for explaining the intruder/invisible feeling better
I tried out Ubuntu One when it had just started, and was unimpressed. There were lots of bugs and it didn't seem feature complete. I went back to Dropbox.

Unfortunately I think Canonical has garnered a bit of a reputation for pushing alpha- and beta-quality software as stable to unwitting end users--PulseAudio, Unity (and the latest Compiz), etc.--and Ubuntu One was no exception. I would never, ever trust that kind of release mentality with my mission-critical files. I'm sticking with Dropbox all the way. Though congrats to their reaching 1 million despite that!
Feds Giving Engineers and Scientists $50K to Learn to Start Companies
Defaults are very powerful. You won't get a button in the middle of a call that takes you directly into Google Talk on an iPhone.
maybe it was "haha, that was a great joke...oh look a woman speaker, awesome...dude i have a similar joke for you"
SPINN - Secure Personal Information Notification Network Hacked By Inj3ct0r
Not true. Diehr did not start the mess. The Diehr opinion said exactly the same thing Flook did. More to come in an essay I'm working on now.
There is something VERY cheap looking about that device. I'd be very surprised if that was Apple's new flagship iPhone.
I know why he gets downvoted: There's a lot of kids on hacker news that only use ruby and/or javascript and they really don't want to hear about them being bad at something. hell they wrote a WEB APPLICATION. Now ain't that something.
I'm sorry, but are you seriously implying that because Shopify uses gradients, rounded corners and shades of green that no other website can use those styles?
Yes, it is harder to come up with the actual design, architecture, algorithms, testing of your program than the actual coding. You should definitely use what makes you more comfortable but criticizing/hating a language because it is not adding whatever is currently hot under the Sun is also obnoxious and arrogant. C++ is a lot older than Java and can be also a pain to write programs in and yet for whatever reason people love to hate Java because it is not keeping up with the times. There really is not much you can do to Java at this point. The tools on the other hand, do make a huge difference. Eclipse is a really time saver and actually makes you a more efficient coder.
That's why I like the "if you want, we'll email you and then you can log in" approach to return visitors which works nicely for occasional use sites.

If the user creates a "new" account with the same email, it'll silently use the same account and not show them their history until they validate.
Dropbox trademark application being challenged (filesanywhere) by 3 rivals.
> I like being a pedantic programmer.

Try Scala! (So do I ;)
To be fair the names on the list will probably be the bottom feeding script kiddies rather than the hackers at the top of Anomymous's greasy pole

Isn't it likely to not even be script kiddies, but machines that are part of a botnet owned by script kiddies?
My family uses it a lot, but only between family, and mostly at home. It's a more personal form of communication, so I feel like it's more likely to be used in a private space.
This is very consultant-y code. It's great billable time to have another reason to take 1 line of code with a predicate and "refactor" it into a broccoli floret of mock classes and exception handlers. But really, nothing insulates a competent programmer from needing to know what a library is going to return.
Wait, so it's possible to not have to bow the knee to Oracle and still use Java? I am very pleased by this and feel as though my best language hasn't been lost forever by them.
When I first looked at Haskell, the 'Maybe' concept was new to me and seemed like a useful concept for other languages. http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/6.12.2/html/libraries/base-4.2.0...
Interesting search shows how filesanywhere uses the name "Dropbox":

http://goo.gl/imygS
A program is pure math - the fact that a computer takes certain actions on the basis of the math doesn't change that. In a sense, all possible computer programs for a given architecture are implied in that architecture, even if they haven't been written yet - just like all possible novels are implied by the letters of the alphabet, even if they haven't been written yet. Like novels, programs should be copywritable but not patentable.
I wonder what would happen if patents had to be renewed each year, and the renewal fee doubled each year?
This is absolutely correct. The best Supreme court could do is decide on a case-by-case basis and settle against the patents (as they did in Bilski case). They would never ever set a precedent that can potentially go as far as invalidating something that is billions of dollars worth.

This supreme court is one of the most conservative of all time in terms of interpreting the law and limitation of its own power.

The solution can only come from the congress. The present supreme court will shy from setting a strong precedent. I don't think this is a bad thing. Relying on court to change the law is a sign of an unhealthy society who cannot control its elected representatives.
Ask HN: Finding the right startup job for me?
Looking for some general advice from the crowd.

I'm thinking about holding off my entrepreneurial ideas and getting some experience working for a start-up before going off on my own again after a few years there.

My biggest problem is I'm a super generalist and I don't have major super-specialized skills. I'm no master RoR/PHP/etc hacker nor am I that great with puzzles which the job ad's seem to want. I have the skills to probably use any language (as long as they are based on a machine that uses modern computer architecture) but I'm no super expert. I've also spent quite a lot of time learning human psychology & politics if that helps in any way during the hiring process.

Most my knowledge of my current language, C#, came from watching Anders videos as well as general personal experience which teaches me the pitfalls of the theory. This makes me more of a big picture person who stares at the blueprints from above and plans my attacks from there. Because of this, it will take some time for me to catch up to the status quo of the organization. In a way, if I get hired, I'll probably be the dumbest person in the organization since well, that's how I work.

Sure, I could send my resume out to all of them but that feels like shooting ducks hoping I will hit a geese. There's got to be a better way.

What do you think the best way to find a startup job where someone like me would be useful in some way for them?
The .equals() still shouldn't be much of a problem. If you've got a bunch of constants like you gave, they will probably all have different hashcodes so you don't have to compare against all of them.

I checked what happens when you use an enum, and it generates some funky code. It creates an anonymous inner class with a static initializer for an array of ints. It uses the ordinal value to assign a sequential number starting with one. Then the switch statement is on intArray[theEnum.ordinal()], and the case statements start with 1. Here's the code:

class Test2{
public static void main(String[] args) {
MyEnum en = MyEnum.ONE;
switch (en) {
case ONE:
System.out.println("one"); break;
case TWO:
System.out.println("two"); break;
default:
System.out.println("default");
}
}
}

enum MyEnum {
ONE, TWO, THREE;
}

Decompiled (after being compiled with jdk1.7.0):

public static void main(String args[])
{
MyEnum myenum = MyEnum.ONE;
static class _cls1
{

static final int $SwitchMap$MyEnum[];

static
{
$SwitchMap$MyEnum = new int[MyEnum.values().length];
try
{
$SwitchMap$MyEnum[MyEnum.ONE.ordinal()] = 1;
}
catch(NoSuchFieldError nosuchfielderror) { }
try
{
$SwitchMap$MyEnum[MyEnum.TWO.ordinal()] = 2;
}
catch(NoSuchFieldError nosuchfielderror1) { }
}
}

switch(_cls1.$SwitchMap$MyEnum[myenum.ordinal()])
{
case 1: // '\001'
System.out.println("one");
break;

case 2: // '\002'
System.out.println("two");
break;

default:
System.out.println("default");
break;
}
}

I wonder why it doesn't just switch on the ordinal directly. It's also worth noting that it has to make an array for MyEnum.values().length. This means if you have an enum with a lot of values, you're wasting a lot of memory (especially since it creates this array every class you use a switch in).
I tried with an enum with 40 values, and it didn't switch to a map. Maybe there's some higher threshold where it would switch to a map instead (but again, I don't understand why it wouldn't switch on ordinal() directly).
'The Global Recovery Is Over': Siemens CEO
Consider this quote from Scalia:

'You really can't judge judges unless you know the materials that they're working with. You can't say, "Oh, this is a good decision and this was a good Court," simply because you like the result. It seems to you that the person, who deserved to win, won. That's not the business judges are in.

We don't sit here to make the law, to decide who ought to win. We decide who wins under the law that the people have adopted. And very often, if you're a good judge, you don't really like the result you're reaching. You would rather that the other side had won, and it seems to you a foolish law.

But in this job -- it's garbage in, garbage out. If it's a foolish law, you are bound by oath to produce a foolish result because it's not your job to decide what is foolish and what isn't. It's the job of the people across the street.

So don't judge judges unless you really take the trouble to read the opinion and see what provisions of law were at issue and what they were trying to reconcile and whether they did an honest job of reconciling them, and if interpreting the words of the law in a fair fashion. That's what counts. Unless that's what you want your judges to do, you have a judiciary that's not worth much. You have a judiciary that is just making the law instead of being faithful to what the people have decided.'

I know this is a broad generalization but typically a conservative judge goes for strict interpretation and a liberal judge goes for desired outcome.
Law school graduates face flooded job market
Google Launches Hotel Search Tool With Room Price Data
Spotify hotkeys
Ubuntu One does have some extra features -- for one, more than twice the capacity on the free account (5GB), it can sync contacts, Tomboy notes, stream music (though as a paying option), and also comes as a default on an operating system (Ubuntu).

Actually the only downside for me recently was not being able to share a DVD iso image recently due to the size limit on the free account, and looks like they fixed that problem now too. Contacts sync was a bit of a pain to get working but it works fine now.

But to answer your question partially (from Wikipedia):

> As of April 2011[update], Dropbox has more than 25 million users. [20]

I would guess most are not Linux users.

Also for more serious backup options people should probably use something like tarsnap.

EDIT:

Just found on their blog from February, they claim 2% Linux users. So around 0.5M I guess ...

( http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=339 )
See also the work done by the Chasers with their "Ad Road Test" segments.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ad+road+test+cha...
If US Defaults, Stocks Fall 30%, GDP 5%: Credit Suisse
We actually talk about the announcement today on our blog here: http://bit.ly/nLkE9Y

We also do far more than just act as a CDN.
$ cat /etc/fstab

/ /dev/sda2 ext4 ro 1 1
Not really. The court interprets the law as written by the congress. There are always some checks and balances while interpretation but that's not what the court is for.
This is the first time I've ever heard of ads for a "free IQ test" actually leading to the real thing!

The paper uses the word "significant" quite a few times, but never mentions the significance level, or confidence intervals, or any other indication of the statistical quality (or lack thereof) of this data. The large number of subjects (100K) suggests that the results may be valid, but it would be nice to see this quantified.

Also, the author says "the test worked properly in all of the major browsers", but doesn't explain how he established that, which is important to rule out the possibility that a problem with the test in some browsers skewed the results.

Still, the graph at the end (showing distribution of browser usage across IQ percentiles) is entertaining.
But todays Neilsen stats show WinMo/WP7 nearing 9% market share, so does that mean Windows will overtake iOS (phones) in the not-too-distant future??

The problem is that there are often competing nearing 10%s. Audi may be nearing 10% of luxury cars http://www.autospies.com/news/The-BIG-Luxury-Three-Audi-BMW-... , I don't think we'll see them taking a 60% market share.
Sigh, a snarky reply based on a hand chosen definition that is rather irrelevant to the conclusions drawn from this article... An alternative definition that is also commonly accepted, likely listed right next to the one you selected: "an inaccurate or false statement."

It crossed the line when there was no clarification or retraction of the statement. It still stands, and as far as I'm concerned, people making claims on a stage while announcing "visionary" magic, ought to deliver on those commitments, and failure to do so is wrong. Call it lying, call it talking out [his] rear, the point really is the same as far as this discussion is concerned.

Jobs got a lot of positive and excited attention when he said FaceTime was going to be open (with the implication of interoperability). It feels wrong and leaves a bad taste in my mouth. If you want to call it something other than "lying", that's fine.

For example:

http://www.google.com/search?q=facetime+to+be+open+standard

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1411352
We actually have the backend all built for this. It is just a matter of doing just a little bit more testing before releasing it into the wild. We've used a handful of beta testers to help us identify potential problems.
Télécharger Free Studio GRATUITEMENT sur 01net Telecharger.com
ICQ vulnerable to account theft using JavaScripts
That's my point. There are a million different causes I can become a part of. What makes sexism so special that I must pay special attention to it?

Every example given so far has been rather obvious to recognize as inappropriate behavior. Like any other inappropriate behavior, I'll deal with it as it comes. But I'm certainly not going to champion the cause, and you certainly have no right to criticize me for refusing to do so.
Direct link to the statsd-instrument client library: https://github.com/shopify/statsd-instrument
Officially watching it :D

I'm working on a browsers addon to help with remote support, mostly my mom. Thought about VNC or the like, but that's a bit of an over kill when I can just run JS in the browser.

This works great in letting me see wth she is talking about when some website is broken. This is my play ground for it, bragcollege.com. If you want to log in and play around let me know.
Usually, yeah. In this particular case, however, it was more about political activism and voluntary participation. People organized to use their individual computers to make their collective voice heard.

If this were actually some kind of conspiracy to take down Paypal, the organizers would have created a botnet trojan and encouraged everyone to distribute it and infect others with it.
They should really find some better examples other than 3D models that were just imported into Minecraft... why bother? Why not just print the original 3D models? Show me a 3D printing of someone's original Minecraft lair that they would be proud of.
Have you checked out odesk.com? I prefer that over elance.com, but either one should work. Find something you think you might be able to do, bid a flat fee and then figure out how to do it. Wash - Rinse - Repeat.
This is a simple minded piece. It is so riddled with half digested bs I don't even know where to start with it. I guess I'll just pick on something so blindingly obvious that anyone with more than one braincell (which apparently does not include the author) would already find beyond question.

Copyright protects the expression of an idea. This is an absolutely excellent form of protection when the expression of the idea is a huge part of its value. A piece of music, or a novel IS its expression. If you rewrite James Joyce's Ulysses in your own words you have lost Joyce's expression which is precisely what people value in the reading. Hence a work in which the expression is critical to its value is well protected by copyright.

Software is not such a work. If someone spends years refining an invention and someone else reverse engineers it and yet changes the expression of the work copyright is no protection whatsoever because no-one using the work gives a rat's ass about the underlying expression.

The idea that copyright is a meaningful protection for software is so laughable that anyone daft enough to take the idea seriously is clearly so appallingly badly informed that they don't deserve to be taken seriously.
Window AutoPwn (WINAUTOPWN) - Auto Hacking/shell Gaining Tool
IIRC, there are already companies doing this in the mobile phone space. In essence, they beam steer using slight differences in the arrival time of the signal to actual antennas which in turn causes constructive interference in the desired direction and destructive interference in other locations. For mobile phone networks, this is only for azimuth. For systems like the ones used for AEGIS (the SPY-1 and variants) you get azimuth and elevation beam steering.

Honestly, I can't see this working without stepping on some of the patents owned by companies like ArrayCom and others.
There's a rule 48?
Nose up to slow down: altitude = stored energy
I did a blog post outlining the issue in greater detail here: http://www.spyfoos.com/index.php/2011/07/28/oracle-java-7-an...
You really shouldn't be trusting Dropbox with mission critical files either, but if you want something stable and non-beta, you should be going with LTS releases of Ubuntu. They're very stable and polished, I find.
John (and others working on Khan Academy),

I've known about Khan Academy for 6 months to a year. Recently, however, I've started to become MUCH more interested in it. I'm starting to feel a strong pull towards doing things to help people in my local community - specifically through education. I think there's a lot of potential for Khan Academy to play a significant role in that. I haven't started something concrete yet, but wanted to take this opportunity to thank you and everyone else working on Khan Academy for what you're doing. I think it's extremely important and valuable work.
San Antonio Carpet Cleaning-Service-Cleaners-San Antonio TX
The total number of script-kiddies might go down a bit. Of course there's always going to be some gullible 13-year-olds who run scripts, but the idea is to have less of them. It's more of a statistical argument than an anecdotal one.
He doesn't mention them because they are laughable.