skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with there being a huge problem of it becoming vastly too easy to do. And there does seem to be a huge discrepancy on the internet, between what people feel is important enough to cause such a ruckus and what's not worthy. Ranging from real human rights issues to he said she said pointless crap. Perhaps it would mean more if you had to sit there hitting the refresh button in unison with a group, instead of just running a script to do it for you. You no longer need to be a charismatic leader to rally the troops, just infect computers with a botnet. Such singular power executed through such forceful means does seem more like tyranny than justice.
I wonder what a better equivalent to such traditional means of the public showing disapproval would be online?
I concur. Fantastic post! I encourage everyone to read the pdf of the published work which is linked on the page.
Still my favorite: "A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages"

http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-m...
Awesome analysis, but [Citation Wanted]. (I also sent this user an email.) Hopefully he'll also add it here.
I don't think the anti-geek attitude is as universal as you think. All through high school, I was the stuttering genius (I am pretty convinced that's how everyone saw me) who was terrible in gym and everyone loved me. I helped bring home academic challenge (quiz bowl) trophies and nobody ever picked on me. (I was class of 2002. Maybe it's generational?)

(I also had a younger brother who'd beat on people who might otherwise have picked on me. Nobody told me at the time, though. Whole situation was kinda weird.)
Your comment has a lot more relevance to copyright law than patent law, in my opinion.
Perhaps some browsers are particularly hard to use and you need to use those extra IQ points figuring out how to get them installed or running. In other words, this might be a dubious accomplishment.
Is this fucking Scientology, where we replace the meaning of words with their opposites?! The fact that Apple is the only provider of FaceTime software and it's only available on Mac and iOS means it's proprietary. Jobs said they're going make it an open standard. They didn't. There's no third party client, there's no FaceTime for Windows or Android.
The difficult task to get this technology to people- Telecom Monopolies and the complex Taxes
I'm curious what it would look like.
Obligatory xkcd link: http://xkcd.com/927/
Perhaps someone at that house was having trouble connecting to PayPal (because of the DDoS) and left a ping running, but forgot to hit ^C to stop it.
You are basically saying that people cannot write good code in Java. You are generalizing and that makes you sound like and troll even though I know that is not your intention. You can write good or bad code in Java. I personally have never really had an issue with Java so I don't really understand the hate.

Yes, there are sucky frameworks out there but you do know that you don't have to use them? Either I'm writing really simple code that Java never gets in the way, Java is not really a problem, or I'm a super programmer. I don't think I writing simple code, I don't think I'm a super programming, so it has to be that Java is not really a problem for me. And I write similar code in Objective-C, C++/C, JavaScript and even had to write a lot of code in VBA. Had even to write code in PL-SQL several years ago.

Every language has its own nuances, you just find the best way to work with them, ignore the junk, and adapt. Which is why I really don't get where all this hate is coming from. You never hear this for C++ and it can also be a pain in the ass but you do hear it for Java.

Is almost like it is cool to hate on Java.
Good stuff -- the simplification of the code is exciting for sure and is bound to encourage more to join to create more problems (it has for me!)

One question/problem/concern: Just for fun I tried out the "Linear equations 1" problem section.

So I just got the problem "Solve for x: 9x = 6". Naturally I could answer 2/3 and would expect a happy face, however I decided to answer 6/9, also a true answer, to try the system out. I was received with a sad face (incorrect answer). But, why? The solution is actually true -- it's just missing the artificial target the website has set. The site doesn't explain that it wants the lowest denominator (just "Solve for x"). I would think this to be misleading -- what do you think? How could the proper lesson be enforced here? How and why should students assume 2/3 is right and not 6/9? There's a danger here of students looking for the answer the system wants (extrinsic motivator) rather of what they have found to be right and then denied the satisfaction.

I would expect a happy face with 6/9. It seems to me that the problem should allow multiple answers -- or for the goals of the lesson to be more detailed (and perhaps include an explanation/recommendation after the fact of what the problem is really asking for).
That's an interesting line from pg, but I think it's a little overbroad. There are a whole host of reasons a company might start fighting over IP. Sometimes it's a bad sign, but not always by any means.
I'm glad someone put this up here, after the press we've had the last couple of days I think I need advice from all you guys on how to manage this.

Since Make posted about it on Saturday we've had over 45k unique views, and over a thousand people have signed up. I'm the only developer on this and am struggling to keep up with everything that's going on. In a few days when all the noise dies down I'm going to have to do a post-mortem, and I think then I'll really be looking for advise from people here on how to proceed on such a large project alone without funding.

@eugenejen - I'd love to do circuit simulation with it, but that is all a bit beyond me mathematically though I'm sure there are good resources out there to work from. We're definitely aiming to do meta tags, and hopefully since we parse the schematics into XML documents we can search within schematics as well for components.
The secrecy section is interesting. The new web vanguard (thinking of Google and Facebook primarily) is motivated to shrug off, if not outright undermine, the patent system precisely because many of their most valuable assets are hidden and very difficult to reverse engineer, let alone patent. Their main assets aren't user-facing features or UI conventions - they're distinguished by hidden stores of data and advanced algorithms and tools for which few of their employees have complete source code access.
I can't disagree. Perhaps it's all the Netflix, Dropbox and Youtubes that are way ahead of what wireless infrastructure can currently support. And frankly, it is those cloud services that steal the spotlight not the ISPs.

Although, having unlimited 56kb connection and downloading non-stop for a month (maximum utilization on customer's end with whooping 3kbyte/s) would result in roughly 7.5 Gbytes of downloaded data per month. Which is still 4x the standard 2Gb limit set by cellular phone companies. Not to mention cheaper.
> Nil should accept any method and return nil.

That sounds a bit like the Maybe monad in Haskell.
Empire & State Game //New//
I don't think patents protect the little guy as much as you think. Yes, in theory it sounds nice and perfect, but I don't think that's how it works in reality.

Look at Zynga for example, how they've ripped off many other smaller developers, and they haven't really "paid" for it. The other commenters are right. Small developers can't afford a big lawsuit either way.

But I think copying each other leads to higher quality products, even if it's done by the big companies. How small companies can stay ahead is with "disruptive innovation". The way disruptive innovation works in general is that the big companies don't want to copy you, because it means dramatic changes to their company and the way they do business.

It also usually means lower revenue (per unit) which they don't like because they think it can't sustain their much higher cost structures. Adopting the new disruptive innovation that is cheaper also means cutting into their own profits from their more expensive products.

Take Intel for example. It's not that they can't build ARM chips or don't realize the potential of ARM chips. It's that they really don't want to do it. They've tried it before and it presented them with a huge conflict of interest and it gave them revenues they didn't think were appropriate for a company like theirs. So they'd rather continue to try building an x86 chip to compete with the ARM chips, which is Atom, even though they keep failing coming up with a good alternative. I don't think Atom will ever be able to keep pace with ARM chips in all 3 of these factors: performance, energy efficiency and price, or by the time they do it, it will be too late.
Computers aren't mathematical constructs. They're simply devices, like a water bottle. But what they can compute, at least as best we understand it, is bound by what is computable by mathematical constructs, such as the lambda calculus.

But with things such as DNA computers and nanotechnology, could one argue that the universe is a computer? Can everything just be described as a construction of objects in the real world with stimuli applied to it?

To me it just feels like a really slippery slope. Just say "medical drugs" and leave it at that.
> its growth takes up a lot of water

I'm sure there are a few places that irrigate corn, but here in Ohio the water that grows the corn falls from the sky.
andand doesn't seem any different than using try(:method), which is defined in Rails 2.3+ for the Object class:

> nil.try(:name) #==> nil
> User.first.try(:name) #==>"john doe"
> nil.try(:name).try(:upcase) #==> nil
> User.first.try(:name).try(:upcase) #==>"JOHN DOE"
If you use the Google library [1], this becomes a bit more convenient that the built-in Java way:

List<String> people = ImmutableList.of("Frank", "Mary", "Bob");

There's also ImmutableSet and many other goodies, to say the least. For instantiation of these generic types, you can do:

List<String> people = Lists.newArrayList();
Map<String,Integer> scores = Maps.newHashMap();

and so on.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/
Thankyou, sir, for misspelling Rupert Murdoch's name, and treating us all to this delicious dose of irony.
But Google comes before Bing in the search results.
A CNAME points a name to another name. In the case of Cloudflare, Google, or others, they need to know what CNAME you are using (say, www.example.com CNAME some.proxyservice.com) so they can map the request to your content.
Lockers for work
At Total Locker Service in the uk you can buy lockers such as laptop lockers, workplace locker, school lockers, steel lockers and leisure lockers.
I assume if you succeed you'll be loaded. what is the potential cashout if you suceed? $10M? $100M? $1B? 6% of of 1B is not really drastically different than 10%. I think what matters most is the idea.
...and stop the software cost by transactions/servers/CPU's.
Seriously, you've got it very wrong. A model is not 'a representation of an object/data'. It's the whole business domain. MVC is about separation of the UI from the domain and the controllers' the intermediary.

Not sure which pattern you're thinking of, but it's not MVC.
GNU Emacs and GNU Screen do not compile. What?
In certain situations, professional carpenters have found nail guns more effective.

They require more resources to run, but they tend to get the job done a lot faster.
New novel by Neal Stephenson, titled Reamde, is coming this September
"Dogpile.com makes searching the Web easy, because it has all the best search engines piled into one."

My brain just exploded.
AWS regions and what Google is using are common to many service providers. These are typical peering locations. Google does have the benefit of having caches local to various ISPs.
I didn't go through all of their links, but I found their first, the Benjamin Franklin NYT post, quite interesting.
Well, as far as my bank is concerned, nobody got laid off during the recent recession (I don't work in the US, mind you). There was just a hiring freeze and smaller bonuses at the end of the year. We really weren't hit that hard.
Why couldn't you reserve a tiny fraction of the bandwidth of the system (or some other but related spectra) for this sort of "calling transmitter #92" broadcast? Yeah, it'd impact everyone, but only finitely.
I've been spending too much time on Reddit - I used the phrase without a second thought.
So Yahoo is the fixed point of search engines.
Or they just want to test that they can reduce a fraction? This was a common requirement when I was in primary school.
There are plenty of (insert absolutely any apple product here)-killers that are loudly touted by the manufacturer, and any apple-hater that we have never heard of since. Do we whinge that there hasn't been more proof that the iphone/etc are best? Silence isn't incriminating, it's silence.

How open is Honeycomb, or Ice Cream?
> Ethanol is destroying small engines (generators, lawn mowers, etc) and most definitely reduces mpg by 10%

Yes it does. I took a trip cross country (florida to california) this past may. Ethanol infested gas killed MPG by at best 10%, at worst 20%. It wasn't even that much cheaper, too.
Gotcha. I think if you take the avg fund size divided by # of partners the avg partners gets $30-40mm of a fund. So management fees alone are in the millions for showing up to work. Seems a bit high with no track record. Maybe a better model for LPs would be 1.5-2% for yrs 0-5 (when most investments are usually made) and then 0-0.5%. What do I know...
This will never happen.

Consider a mechanical timer in a washing machine. A timer that produces a novel washing cycle is certainly patentable.

Consider a chain of electromechanical relays that produces the same cycle. Clearly it is just as patentable, and could be covered by a well-written version of the preceding patent.

Consider the transistorized version of the preceding, with the relays replaced by transistors. Patentability: ditto.

Consider a mask-programmed processor that produces the same cycle. (Mask-programmed means the program is hardwired into a metal pattern.) Patentability: ditto.

Consider a flash-programmed version of the preceding that produces the same cycle. Patentability: ditto.

Consider a volatile memory version of the preceding that produces the same cycle. Patentability: ditto.

Why does this matter? Because in the coming age of nanomachines, "software" will frequently be embodied in custom mechanical machines, chemical reactions, interference patterns of light, and so forth. If software is unpatentable, then neither can you patent the special sauce that turns dirt into nanomachines.
Years back Perl mustn't have had functioning unicode, because I recall programmers working with Japanese text having to use JPerl, a funkily patched version, instead.
HKUST Professors Prove Single Photons Do Not Exceed the Speed of Light
Regarding my initial point, I think software falls under copyright solely because its written - I don't know if that's the argument now, but I imagine that was at least the initial reason for granting copyrights. Personally, I can find no meaningful difference between designing software and designing a mechanical device. For that reason, I don't like that argument.

Your main point is interesting, but I'm not sure if I can completely go along with it. Consider, say, a mechanical latch. The design schematics for it fall under copyright. The latch itself falls under patent. The process for making the latch is to look at its design, and change your tools around to produce something of that design. Looking at it this way, I can see how software could be considered its own design schematic - yes, I'm aware that external documentation exists, so it's not a perfect analogy. But with software, there's no separation between "thing used to describe what should happen" and "thing that happens."

I want to agree with your argument because it would provide a clean solution to the problem, but I don't think I can. Rather, I think the solution to the problem may require a results-oriented approach. That is, it may require us (as a society) to say, "The current patent scheme regarding software is harming innovation. We are going to change how patents apply to software to avoid this harm."
$170 Nintendo 3DS Is Still Too Expensive
ECC excites me - no need to have to ship BouncyCastle anymore.
32 hours on the road with Bing vs Google maps
A difference between software patents and other patents that pg is missing, is that a piece of software is always a composition of thousands of (patentable) ideas. A non-software product is typically a composition of 0-10 (patentable) ideas.

That means that the odds of any hardware product of accidentally hitting or being encumbered by a patent are nearly nil. The odds of a software project of not hitting any patent are nearly nil.

This difference is circumstantial and not a fundamental property of things -- but a very important one.
I wonder what a better equivalent to such traditional means of the public showing disapproval would be online?

Easy. Write something. Put forward a rational, logical and coherent argument about why you disapprove of X, and publish it somewhere. Instead of just inconveniencing others with your temper tantrum, you might convince them to come around to your point of view.

One person with a sensible argument is far more powerful than a hundred thousand people with a poorly thought out chant.
Yeah they do give off more of a riot like atmosphere, with the breaking and entering tactics. For this to be more equivalent, they'd need a permit to take up so much traffic on public roadways, or in this case, internet connections.
Plus there is no clear cut description of what is causing the disruption. If a building was surrounded by protesters, there would be plenty of signs, clearly stating what the group of people felt was so terrible that they needed to protest about. The way it is now, average person thinks the website is having technical difficulties, and knows no different, until the news informs them. Which gives the media all the power in framing what the protest was about.
Still regardless of this particular incident, I wonder if it is a tactic that could be used to any sort of degree of effectiveness, as a means for people to express their displeasure in the virtual world of the internet. We the People are powerful only as a group. People doing evil things, might not always respond to a PR attack through Twitter or Facebook.
Without the definitions (especially of "Commercial Features", this doesn't really mean much. I'm sure restrictions and rules on distribution have always existed, since we ran into issues with redistributing tools.jar back in 1999/2000.
I seem to recall pretty much every webhosting company using a similar layout of different plans they offer since the early 2000s. I'm sure it was used other places before that as well.
True, that's actually quite a tricky bug. However, that's also a flaw in Cocoa, I think. NSOrderedSame should not evaluate to a falsy value. Rather, the enum should start at 1.
Google is first on google.com.au
My understanding of the situation has been that most of the FaceTime technology is indeed in the open just because they mostly used already existing technology. What is not in the open is the cryptographic key that is used to sign all the FaceTime client keys. So technically you could create a FaceTime compatible client by following open specifications and filling the gaps by reverse engineering, but Apple devices wouldn't want to talk to it without Steve's cryptographic signature.
Look at the badges on the front page, it's kinda hard to argue that they weren't copying the design.
Honestly, I didn't read the whole thing, I only vaguely skimmed it. Can you summarize his argument? It seemed to boil down to "This is the right thing to do, because we're right, and the other guys are wrong"
I completely agree -- and I could easily understand that someone would assume that's what is being asked, but would a child assume that (never being told that is the goal)? Should they have to assume that? I don't see why -- that seems to only "schoolify" them. Giving students incorrect answers only in order to conform them to the workings of the system is potentially damaging.
There are also interpreters for Haskell. Like hugs. And Maybe stays useful.
I originally wrote "merman", I should have stuck with that. Yes, if you want to look at boobies then learning swimming from a mermaid is a good idea, but if you want to learn to swim it's non-ideal.

"OK, now thrash your tail"

"I don't have a tail!"

"Oh... uhhh, so do those leg things move independently or what?"
That really doesn't protect the device from an infected system - it can just remount it rw. You need a hardware write blocker to protect against a malicious system.
You'd be amazed by how many entrepreneurs have PhDs.
How much of that time was spent actually programming? Would say doing other (related) things such as reading HN have had a large impact on your programming ability?
Except very broken without the static analysis.
I've tried this many times in my life, and all I have found, is that there are people out there, who absolutely refuse to do anything about the problem. No matter how well the argument is laid out, how evil they have been acting, the only thing they will respond to, is force, because at that point, it is not up to them to change.
I think they would assume that if they had watched the lectures. I can't recall a single one where the final answer wasn't reduced.
This is a great point and I've seen it in action many times among clients - calculating whether to apply for a patent on a new idea or to protect it as a trade secret. In cases where the value is mainly in inaccessible firmware or a manufacturing process where it would be hard for someone to reverse engineer, and even harder to detect if someone did manage to copy it, they typically set up procedures to keep it as a trade secret.

The other side to this, that I've seen among clients, is they really do often make decisions whether to devote money to developing a technology based on the expectation of whether they'll be able to patent it.
Don't knock it, in the late 90s every search engine sucked in its own special way. Dogpile was great back then, and IIRC that's how I first encountered Google.
Thanks Wes - If I understand correctly, it's the density of end-points within range that would determine whether the economics are favorable.

Wondering then, what is the use case for this new standard? Only very rural areas?
Redis Documentation Fiesta 2
As a software programmer I don't agree with this view that software patents are wrong in principle. There I said it!

Software just as much as hardware can be used to "express" something new. I.e. to invent something.

An patentable invention is a novel "solution to a problem which is NON-OBVIOUS to someone skilled in the art".

The real issue with software patents is that they are granted far too easily. The test that seems to be applied by the patent examiners is "is that new?". However, they should be asking "given the problem the inventor is trying to solve
is the solution (the invention) really non-obvious to some one skilled in the art?".

However, even though I think that software patents, with the proper examination standards are just as valid as hardware patents I think there is a case for limiting (or even banning) ALL patents - NOT just software patents.

One idea would be the requirement that a working prototype has to be produced and seen to be working. That, along with a proper non-obviousness test, would limit companies going for patent "land grabs".
It has nothing to do with compilation. It has to do with static typing -- that, before ever evaluating something, you typecheck it. It is perfectly feasible to interpret a statically typed language -- SML/NJ for example, includes an interpreter for SML. However, statically typed languages are generally easier to fully compile than dynamic languages; SML/NJ also includes a compiler for SML.