skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I guess there are a few kinds of arguments about the right approach. Legal, economic and religious.

At lest the religious argument are the one I value most. One concept is that ideas should be free. Another is that ideas are property which should be respected.

The legal argument is that it is difficult to create independently many kinds of software without infringing some patent. This implies that patents are being granted on things that are obvious to those skilled in the art. I.e. most patents are probably not valid. An alternatively the legal argument is that software is mathematics and mathematics is not legally patentable.

And the economic argument is that these monopolies are used by established players to stifle innovation, for example the history of flight in Europe and the US, where the Wright brothers patents killed innovation.

I think it is a really hard issue, because I don't think it can be determined well with any system of governance that we have. The voters are not well informed so democracy won't work. Lobbyist and experts represent established monopolies which are not innovative, so other systems won't either.
I think it's also because people really want to be in the game business.

It's not quite the same, but when I worked at a porn company most of the non-programmers and non-essential production people got paid really low wages because a) there are a lot of parties and other perks you wouldn't get at most "normal" jobs (such as being able to say you work at a porn studio), and b) most of the non-programmers and non-essential production people see no way that they'd be able to get a job elsewhere after working at a porn company.

The senior programmers and top production people got paid very nicely, though.
OTRS? http://otrs.org

I think it has all these features but I only ran a quick search on the site, you may want to ask them for specifics.

Open source, free, you can even get it in vm appliance form: http://www.turnkeylinux.org/otrs
I usually do the second way, but put a space between the emoticon and parenthesis (like so :) )
i loved Google Reader until i started using feedly which is how reader _should_ have been implemented. i've been cycling through 15K+ items per month on reader for several years now and don't ever see myself not using rss for content discovery
His position is bizarre because on one hand he says, "I think there’s a legitimate complaint if crunch time is never-ending." but he defends Bondi even though there seems to be a wealth of information out that there shows that the conditions at Bondi (and Rockstar for both this project and Rockstar San Diego) were very much in line with "never-ending."

Perhaps there will be some sort of bonus for those who stayed on (especially after this negative publicity) but what about everyone else who left over the years during this massively delayed project?
Notes Toward An Open Digital Bookcase
What Colors Mean in Different Cultures [Infographic]
It looks like a popular sentiment that developing apps for the App store is sharecropping. This pops up every time there is a negative wave of news about the App store.

Consider Amazon's Kindle app. I buy books from Amazon and read them on my iPhone and iPad. I don't own a Kindle nor other dedicated e-readers. When I get a Kindle, I'll be able to read my Amazon ebooks on it. I'll be happy. And I can continue to read my books on my iOS devices. I can continue to purchase Kindle books through the website which I always did. I am and will remain a happy customer (except I found out last week that their iPhone app truncates text depending on my font setting).

How is this sharecropping?
Sorry, that wasn't supposed to be there. I'm scared by Eclipse itself, not it's popularity. ;P
I'll give it a go. I'm in the process of setting up a large number of feeds to help filter content for our product websites.
i would definitely pay to manage my rss feeds via its UI or at least through an API
Las consecuencias vergonzosas de la borrachera
"When you come to an interview with IndexTank, bring your laptop. Be ready to sit down and create working code" - How is that much different from writing code on the white board, maybe I missed the point.
Wow, that's unexpected. I'd have thought the HN crowd would be keen not to depend on Google for too many services. Especially when there's a lot of open source alternatives and when it appears that Reader does not even support something as basic and important as offline reading: https://www.google.com/support/forum/p/reader/thread?tid=5fc...

Personally I use Akregator(http://userbase.kde.org/Akregator/fr)

What's so great about Reader?
You Know What's Sexy: This Profitable Company
Based on the text of the indictment, the establishment of his intent with the documents is the one claim that doesn't appear to established with any mention of supporting evidence. This stands in stark contrast to the meticulously detailed accounts of MAC address changes, computer purchase history and surveillance video describing his actions.

The question that this hinges on is whether there is hard evidence of his intent; either there exists a clear statement from Swartz of his intention (e.g., say, a chat log from an informant where he expressed his intent, or an actual upload) and they didn't feel the need to share this info to get the indictment, or they're just trying to make up some circumstantial case (oooh, look, he had a BitTorrent client on a laptop we seized) to justify the harassment.

I would guess that it must be something very weak, ambiguous and circumstantial which is why they didn't feel the need to substantiate the claim. But then again, given the long time frame (many months) and the rashness of some of the behavior Swartz displayed, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that someone got him to say something via electronic means that could be construed as an intent to P2P the documents.
well if you had used a proper IDE in the last decade you'd realize that Eclipse is not perfectly acceptable.
okay this just got a lot better.

I don't see a mark folder as read shortcut (did I miss it). I can context click on the river of news icon, but I'd love a button (and shortcut) next to the "Next Unread" in the dividing bar. I wouldn't text an icon button would do to save space (maybe a preference shut off text in toolbars)

real nice.
Thanks for the input, will definitely be in touch.
That was exactly Nokia's problem, they tried to cram whole computer in a phone. They even called their smartphones 'multimedia computers' and primarily targeted them for geeks. They never had a real idea why smartphones are useful. That strategy led them to huge amounts of code bloat and features without usability and made the development of updates horribly slow.
Hacker News made on geocities
Anybody here developing in C++ with Qt + QDevelop + Necessitas ?
In theory it seems like it should though doesn't it?

Maybe if we did something to fix the problems it wouldn't be so bad. Right now it's hard for little guys to get patents, partly because it costs a lot of money and time (lawyers are expensive). It's also too easy to patent trivial things so big companies can patent the simplest things at a relatively minuscule cost for them.
Google On The Nortel Loss, Patents As Government-Granted Monopolies
Yes, but indirectly. I use the awesome Reeder app for iOS and OS X. Which grabs stuff from my Google Reader account.
Yes, but via Feedly.
Build first, plan later: ex-Google CIO
Don't know about CouchDB well, but personally recommend to go to more popular one (cassandra, mongo, hbase, riak etc) so you may find better documentations and more data points　as far as nosql is concerned.
In theory, theory seems like practice. In practice, it isn't.
> scrub photos

You mean 'delete' or did you mean 'scrape?'
The problem with analogies is that in practice, what they tested was 10% reasoning, and 90% "has this student seen SAT-style analogy questions before." A student from a mediocre school would be at a severe disadvantage because they would have to spend a non-trivial amount of their limited time figuring out what the question was even asking and getting used to the notation, while someone who went to a good school could skip straight to the reasoning. SAT prep classes also focused heavily on analogy questions, which created the perception (dunno how accurate) that analogies in particular were a better measure of your parents' wallet than your own brain. That the analogy questions were poorly explained on the test is probably a solvable problem (ditch the : :: : notation!), but they still require non-trivial explanation, which will inevitably give an advantage to students familiar with the format.
Your calculations are out by several orders of magnitude (don't forget that 1 km^2 = 1,000,000 m^2).

200MW at 10% efficiency and 800W/m insolation is 2.5 km^2 (I believe their claimed efficiency is considerably lower than that, though).
Bing Becomes a Distraction for Microsoft
I've been to China many times, and I've never seen a Mexican restaurant there.
From a strictly pragmatic perspective, I would argue that the loss of some desert habitat in an ecosystem that is not significantly linked with those used by humans for habitation, carbon sequestration, or agriculture is acceptable compared to the damage to higher-value ecosystems caused by air pollution from coal power. This assumes that environmental damage that causes long-term consequences for humans is considered more egregious than environmental damage that has no negative consequences for humans.

Personally, I think a thorium nuclear power plant in an isolated desert is a much more environmentally preferable approach than most renewable power sources.
People that want to be anonymous will be anonymous. Using a real sounding name does not mean that it is the real name of the user.
It was smacked down by the courts, though I could see Federal prosecutors trying such a tactic over and over until they set a precedent.
Coding on the whiteboard is something that you never do in real life (unless you're a CS teacher, in which case you're not really making it up). It can throw people for a loop.

Back in the 80s I couldn't write code without a copy of the programming language manual handy. Today I can't code without an internet connection. Asking people to code on the board requires dumbing down the questions to the point that it introduces way too much noise; you can't wait forever while someone tests their code.

If I tell you something like: here's the Twitter API, here's the twitter Ruby gem. Given a Twitter user, give me the most common word in their last 100 tweets. 15 minutes, show me what you got. That tells me much more about your abilities to do something useful than reversing a linked list on the board.
If the questions are so frequently asked, shouldn't they be answered within the copy of a website, or the usual workflow of an app?

The web design community has spent years campaigning against separate FAQ pages and this will be seen as a step in the wrong direction.

Providing a way for users to seek or offer help is great but that's what support apps like GetSatisfaction or TenderSupport are for.

I find the domain name clever and funny but a joke is not a business and there's no way any of the brands we work with would want to associate themselves with it.

Tips: change the name, drop all references to "FAQ" and ensure it's obvious how your app can be used by web professionals with content strategy experience (e.g. to provide user support or collect questions that need to be answered within the content of a website or an app).
Someone already did that for us, it's called an IDE. I continue to be horrified by engineering re-write code that already exists.
I switched to IntelliJ from Eclipse. The biggest frustration for me was waiting for auto-complete to populate on Eclipse, blocking anything else I wanted to do.

After using IntelliJ for a while, there i no going back. It's more responsive all round.
In a way, it does make sense. Once software/game is made, the developers are no longer needed. So it gives a little incentive to force the completion of software. This should give an idea that the investors care more of money.

Which is quite silly as the game needs to be patched. Booting burnt out developers and even not acknowledging them would lower the morale of the others and ruin future attempts to make sequels (Investors puzzled: Why was it so lack lustre?). eg LA Noir credit omissions.
Ask HN: understanding software contractors
I've been burned a couple of times when hiring software consultants, still trying to understand them.

1. What does it mean if somebody has Ok references, years of experience in programming, charges me for learning the code but can't produce anything that works (I always had to correct his seemingly well written code as it was hanging my software - he could see it with a bit of testing).
Could it mean that my software is too bad or too complex? My code to test ratio is higher than average but I was trying to code quickly, in order to show it for initial evaluation.

2. I hired a contractor rejecting a few other candidates. He knew I had time sensitive tasks. Soon after being hired and receiving advance payment he tells me that he is relocating and asks for a week off. Then another week. And another week. After 3 weeks, do I have the right to give him a bad reference online?

3. Are all good programmers taken this summer? I am trying to find one now, but everybody is either too busy or not enough qualified.

Any advice?
These slides might shed some further light on the research models and application domains: http://www.rpi.edu/dept/phys/sicsin2011/NetSci2011_Sameet.pd...
Where is the option for 'hourly'?
I think that's a great set of questions. However I think there are one or two areas where you could use some improvement. You're trying to reduce the time customer service people have to spend on the phone, so ask how much time their people spend on the phone. You're trying to make it so the customer service people don't have to repeat the same set of instructions over and over again. Ask if that is an issue with their company.
No, I use Mixtab for Mac, it's available on the Mac App Store.
Using a popular internet meme, "I don't always code in Java but when I do, I prefer IntelliJ".

Seriously, give IntelliJ IDEA a try. Personally I think it's a lot nicer and snappier than Eclipse. It has a free edition. You might still decide that you don't like it but I think it's definitely worth a try. Also, the last time I checked (which was years ago, admittedly) it worked with Android perfectly.
Haven't read the article, though I don't find it too strange. Anyways, I even find that price too expensive for just 50 +1s. You can find twice that much for half the price at Fiverr: http://fiverr.com/gigs/search?query=google+%2B1

These kind of service ("liking", "digging", and anything that involves "votes" of some kind) has been offered since forever, why would it be any different with Google's +1?
For this technology, but not for the competitors that you'd want to compare them with.
I recommend to devs to take this a little bit farther. If a dev is willing to work overtime "if we have immediate deadlines", management will increase the frequency and urgency of deadlines.

Rather commit to working overtime if the company/team will miss a deadline that you committed to for a reason that you are responsible for. That closes temptation to create deadlines that you never committed to.

An example:
Manager: Dev, we need you to stay extra because we've got to get Facebook Connect integrated by tomorrow!

Dev: I wish we'd talked about if that was a reasonable expectation given the other development priorities we have for this week. Next time we have a feature with a deadline, ask me in advance and I can tell you the earliest date I can guarantee it can be finished by.

Then be reasonable, with a good buffer, about future deadline commitments. If you make a commitment, keep it. If you have a deadline commitment, and a new "urgent" request comes in, you can then ask the manager if they'd rather you delay the new request to honor the first deadline, or if they'd like to push back the deadline of the original request.

Using this I never worked evenings or weekends when I was an employee
And once you configure your own keyboard shortcuts and commit them to muscle memory. I have set

ctrl+] - select to the end of line
ctrl+[ - select to beginning of line
ctrl+d - cut current line
ctrl+k - duplicate current line below
ctrl+; - jump to beginning of line
ctrl+' - jump to end of line
ctrl+tab - switch perspective between debug and editor [1]
ctrl+i - focus on console [2]
ctrl+f - toggle find/replace bar

About the last shortcut; I highly recommend you get a modern find feature and not the window popup eclipse ships with - http://sandipchitale.blogspot.com/2011/04/eclipse-findreplac... -

[1] For me this is pydev, for you could be the Android SDK ide.

[2] I have a pydev python repl running in eclipse for simple checks. Using ctrl+i to focus on this console is really nice.

Bonus if you customize your theme. Mine is a white text on black.
lmkg is correct. The SAT is not a test that tests your knowledge; it's a test that tests how many test prep classes you've taken. It's shaped by money and politics, and not by how to better assess students' knowledge.
There's so much wrong with this article. First of all, two ideas are artificially intertwined: (1) paying for an app server and (2) using an app server. JBoss is open source just like Tomcat. You can pay RedHat for JBoss support, and you can pay SpringSource (and, for that matter, others) for Tomcat support. Given how expensive Weblogic and Websphere are coupled with how incredibly good JBoss is, you would be hard-pressed to justify writing checks to IBM or Oracle. If you want support, use JBoss and write a check for 1/10 as much. Their support actually kicks ass.

"Use Spring, and you don’t need an EJB-compliant container."

Huh? Does JdbcTemplate now count as a suitable replacement for a transacted ORM? Perhaps the author is referring to Spring's wrappers around other ORMs like Hibernate?

" Manageability is super important, but all I want to know is: 1) Is the server up; 2) is my end-user performance acceptable; 3) has my fault-tolerant architecture kicked-in to solve either problem?"

The open source version of tomcat his shitty management features. If you want even reasonable manageability, you'll have to pay for SpringSource's TC server or something similar.

"has my fault-tolerant architecture kicked-in"

What fault-tolerant architecture? Tomcat's clustered session replication?

"I highly recommend elastic caching platforms (ECP) since it is a technology that is independent of the application server and super-fast. "

You know who makes a really good open source one? JBoss :) And, it's transactional! But, you need a transaction manager if you want to do 2PC with your DB. And, guess what doesn't come with a TM? That's right, Tomcat.

"I question even the need for a container. Seriously, why can’t Java web applications just run on the operating system like the containerless Microsoft .NET applications? "

[Note that I don't know a darned thing about .NET, so I'm speculating a bit] Ummmm...in this case, isn't Windows acting as the container? So, if I create a Linux distro with Java/JBoss included, does this satisfy his need?

"The next generation is elastic application platforms (EAP) that are containerless."

What's up with this obsession about "containerless" platforms? Isn't this like saying, "I want a platform, but I don't want it to be a platform"? The whole idea of a platform/container/framework is that someone else handles a bunch of cross-cutting concerns for you so that you can concentrate on the business-y aspects of your app. Servlets are much more convenient than binding to a socket and serving up HTTP by processing incoming byte streams. Furthermore, how can any of these in-the-cloud offerings be containerless?
I think you're contemplating the attack vectors from the wrong direction. We're not necessarily talking machines with open ports on internet facing IP addresses. Think about it from the other direction.

The root of the problem lies at the feet of a few factors:

A) HTTP is a relatively "trusted" protocol, which means you should be very, very careful about running local services over HTTP (on any port) that can do bad things™ to your computer.

B) http://localhost:3000/ isn't difficult to guess. If you know someone is a Rails developer, there is a good chance that embedding requests to that URL will hit a Rails dev environment at some point, and that's where this thing is going to end up running.

C) Eval, in general, is just about the right length of rope to hang yourself with. Use sparingly and with great respect for its ability to completely hose you. Passing anything sent as HTTP params to eval is just asking for it.

Knowing the above, consider an example like Patrick (patio11) outlines above.

Let's say this takes off and people start using it. This means that some percentage of Rails devs have this running. To attack their machines, I need only to trick their machine in to making a request to 'http://localhost:3000/malicious-string-here.

How might I accomplish that? I like Patrick's suggestion of an img tag src attribute. There are plenty of forums that treat img tags as safe, or provide some means of embedding images with arbitrary src attributes.

So let's say I head over to railsnewbforum.com and embed the malicious image in my sig. Then I start happily posting useful information in every thread on the board. Assuming this webconsole takes off, how long until a vulnerable dev hits a page with my malicious signature code and gets pwnd?

Can this be made safe? Probably to some degree, but then it would involve many of the security measures involved with using the Rails console over an ssh session or something similar.

IMO, it's not worth the risk.
Use Eclipse Helios, mainly because my projects span multiple languages, so it just makes it easier to do one stop coding.
No, IP ownership transfers when your contract says it does. If you're a consultant and your contract says you transfer IP upon payment, then sure, that's the case. But if you're a salaried employee, then most likely you've signed something that stipulates that your product is a work-for-hire, and it becomes owned by your employer the moment you type it out.
Emacs for me.

Here's my setup: Emacs, DDMS + JSwat, and ant to build.

I have emacs and a terminal open at all times. To build I switch over to the terminal and use ant. Sometimes I'll write a shell script to build+install+run on a phone.

For directory navigation: nav - http://code.google.com/p/emacs-nav/

For code completion: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/JavaCompletion

Building on the command line is simple. Type ant release or ant debug. Or ant install to build + install on phone.
The Phoenix area has been seeing what strikes me as variants of "start-up porn", with many people and places referring to themselves or their services as in some way related to start-ups. In some cases it's true, but quite a number of these "start ups" are, for example, run-of-the-mill (albeit ambitious) Web design or Web marketing companies.

Now, it's great that people are opting to work for themselves rather than go join some large, likely boring and cumbersome, existing business, but the conflation of "start-up" with "business" makes it hard to really know what's going on here or discuss what people are doing.

Having a reasonably clear and useful definition is valuable.
Quick Online Ohio Health Insurance Quotes