skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've also been following some of the discussion on Twitter, and the overrall theme for Nilay seems to be to ask for a citation for any claim he doesn't agree with, e.g. the fairly uncontroversial claim that any non-trivial piece of software will infringe many patents.

What I don't ever see are his citations justifying the underlying claims of patent theory laid out here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent#Rationale

1. Patents encourage R&D. The relevant criticism here is to ask: does this incentive outweight the costs of the patent system as a whole? (These costs are many. They include: any friction on innovation generally; the costs of running the patent office; patent application; patent litigation; defense against patent litigation; patent portfolio acquisition; the opportunity cost of all these people spending all this money, time, energy, and brain power on patents.)

2. Disclosure. Relevant criticism: is it in fact that likely that interested parties wouldn't be able to independently develop a given innovation without the patent system? It seems fairly uncontroversial to say that, as it is, a company will only apply for a patent if they think the patent protection will actually last longer than any protection they would get from trade secrecy. I.e. if a company really thought trade secrecy would keep an innovation out of the hands of their competitors for longer than a patent would, they just wouldn't patent it and keep it as a trade secret instead. So almost by definition this is pretty clearly false.

3. High fixed cost, low marginal cost innovations don't have enough incentive. This seems like the strongest argument for patent on some things, but I have yet to see any strong citations to research that isn't done by or paid for by pharmaceutical companies. It's an empirical claim that needs to be tested, and it seems to me that the burden of proof is on the proponents of patent law, not opponents to disprove it.

4. Designing around patents leads to more innovation. This seems like a fairly obvious case of introducing artificial inefficiency. Sure, you might get some unrelated and unexpected benefits from all of this incidental research that you're forcing, but it seems pretty obvious that this is going to be a net friction on overall innovation.
Recommending RVM for production use is hilarious.

Recommending debian-ruby for production use is bordering on physical injury.
The main use case is for specifying per-application Ruby version dependencies. For example, at 37signals, most of our apps run on REE, but our new apps run on 1.9.x, and we're gradually moving everything to 1.9. When you have multiple people working on multiple apps every day, it's essential that this dependency information is checked into version control. Even more so when certain branches of an app may depend on different versions.

Both rvm and rbenv allow you to specify per-application dependencies (rvm with .rvmrc files, rbenv with .rbenv-version files). The difference is that rbenv does it in a much simpler, less invasive way.
Sorry, should have linked back to that myself. Still, 41 bits, while less than the 44 bits from the XKCD algorithm, is a lot more entropy than most passwords have.
I just bought a giant highdef monitor and stuck it to my wall; this looks like just the thing to display on it.

Now, I'm going to have monitoring status and the like on it as well, so if there was some sort of 'overview' that would take 5"x5" or so on the monitor, that'd be a great feature for those of us with electronic wall displays (I don't remember exactly, but I think it's approaching 40" diag.)
Watch,Senna,online,free,megavideo, 
watch,Senna,online,free,megavideo,
even frosties in the form of French President of the FIA, Jean-Marie Balestre, Bond-villain with his glasses, fingers stabbing stranger
Thanks for the careful review - we'd love your feedback since you've obviously thought a lot about the topic. So glad you like the landing page - our conversion rate is over 33%.
It still seems quite useful to know someone is there, and where they are. There's a big difference between "invisible enemy" and "stranger with a mask".
I'd hate to be in the passenger seat when you break down.
Django compressor has another issue on load balanced environments: the cached key uses the hostname of the machine , which really made it impractical for us. I promised Jannis a clean patch for this, but haven't found the time to do so...

In our case we have a utility machine that compiles media and deployes it but that machine doesn't even run a webserver at all...

https://github.com/jezdez/django_compressor/blob/develop/com...
Yea, I remember when there were sales restrictions on a certain FPS in some country, because it let you play as Terrorists and shoot at US Troops, it was the US soldiers there that were most annoyed because they wanted to play the game! I wish I remembered more about the story, to find a link.
What about out of area?
That's the goal, and that's why rbenv does not perform compilation/installation at all (there's a separate ruby-build project for that: https://github.com/sstephenson/ruby-build).
This is kind of a classic "fast, correct - choose one" debate. If saving time is more important, perhaps you should use RVM in production, if correctness is more important, you probably shouldn't. It comes down to how expensive your mistakes are.
Blitz.io: Scaling out Heroku apps for $1/hour
(You should only have to run this the first time you bundle.)
I just hate sites that won't accept spaces and restrict how long a password can be (usually to something relatively short like 8 or 12 characters). Also, many require you to use mixed case and/or numbers or "special" characters. I usually just use complete sentences.
What If Tim Berners-Lee Had Patented The Web?
Entrepreneurs! Take my money!

Let me publicly say something I've said privately: I will pay up to $1000/year for a subscription to a service that 1) documents the facebook APIs, 2) monitors examples and common usages and lets me know when they stop working, and 3) provides a weather report for the Facebook API servers letting me know when they're slow or sick.

Heck, I might pay more. We waste far too much developer time dealing with the problems Jobu so rightly points out.
> when people are using social media for violence, we need to stop them.

Is this the same Cameron who criticized Libya when they shut off the Internet against what, in their view, were violent protesters?
This seems like an an invaluable opportunity and I hope I can make it.
So inventing a completely new, untested set of storage semantics, and implementing them across browsers, is easier than picking a version of SQLite and forking it if necessary?

Yeah, right.
Ugh. I hope "Myth Busting" articles aren't the new "Top X Reasons" articles..
I just moved to the Bay Area and I'm really looking forward to this.

Out of curiosity, what kind of activities are there going to be to promote ice breaking and networking? I ask because all the best events I've been to always make sure to pay as much attention to promoting networking as they do the speakers.

On top of that, would it be possible to make sure the name tags are really big and easy to read casually at a distance. It's always much easier to strike up a conversation when you can glance at someone's name tag and easily read their name, twitter handle or HN handle without having to lean in and stare.
Ask HN: What happened to "Color"?
What ever happened to that over-hyped, ill-behaved, bloat-sized Android app "Color"? I can't even find it anywhere for download. How was that $42*10^6 VC /spent/??
No they wouldn't there are a lot of procedures that cost more than a 100k (any transplant, open heart, high end implants are more). Really the government and insurance companies would save a fortune if the cure cost between 100k - 200k.
Happen to know where you can find out shortcuts like those? I had no idea it was there.
Assembly provided me with my "there is no spoon" moment on the arduino platform. It's easy to pick up and suddenly, you know kung-Fu.
So does milewise scrape the airline sites for award travel? Does it also integrate with ITA or similar?

I ask because (1) the airline websites tend to be _really_ slow and (2) they tend not to find the cheapest/best flights - an ITA search can often beat them.
Your arguments sound nice in theory.

Yet I don't know a single ruby shop who runs with a distro-packaged ruby, even though REE is available as a .deb.
The big problem that keeps coming up with software patents is the fact that most of them are bogus, because of being trivial or unoriginal. Barring cases of malicious intent by patent examiners, which are a completely separate issue from the viability of the patent system itself, the reason for that is that the patent examiners don't understand what constitutes non-obvious work in software. In fact, I would guess that now there are very few fields in which it's feasible for someone who's not already familiar with the field to make that judgment in any reasonable amount of time. Since the criteria for patent validity are based on how the work would be viewed by average people in the field, maybe we should put patent-granting into the hands of people in each field, who are actually qualified to evaluate such work. Just have the central patent office keep records and oversee devolved organizations for each discipline, who actually control which patents are granted and what the terms of patents in that field are. That way, not only can bogus patents be avoided, but fields with radically different environments won't be hampered by patent terms designed for other areas (e.g. software patents could have a much shorter duration than others).
That notice saying registration is closed, I assume that is for the 2010 bootcamp?
It almost sounds like a cancer vaccine.
But the paper also rightly ends with a further caveat:

While we do control for share price levels and volatility in our empirical work, it remains an open question whether
algorithmic trading and algorithmic liquidity supply are
equally beneficial in more turbulent or declining markets.
I don't quite follow what he is trying to say.

From the manpage for git pull:
git-pull - Fetch from and merge with another repository or a local branch

Git pull is identical to git fetch && git merge $remote_branch. He's saying that it prevents you from learning how branching works. So, if he were explicit, he should say 'Don't use git until you know how branching works at some level.', which is good advice. Not using git pull is a pretty sensational way to get at that nugget.
Agreed. Every advertising agency that works with Facebook would happily pay a subscription fee like that for the number of head hours it would save them.
We actually do both, and then spent a few cycles de-duping etc.

1) Part of our reason for using Node+Socket.IO is to deal with the problem of having a bunch of different sources returning data over a wide spread of time.

2) You'd be surprised about the airline sites. While they don't necessarily have the widest variety of good fares, airline will often reserve their cheapest fares for their own sites (called Last Seat Availability).
On my iPhone, it redirects to a mobile version login page. No option to register, or to see what your app is about.

Now I've got to get off my lazy ass and turn on my PC to even see what the hubbub is about.

Please consider giving mobile visitors an option.

P.S. You better be pretty freakin awesome to make me switch from Nozbe.
If you only have one server and can script most of the install process it's not a problem. When you have more than one server, rvm is not going to save you time.
Ah,

But is it real liquidity or the illusion of liquidity?

Liquidity is, more or less, money ready to be invested.

The question of whether sophisticated strategies really provide this is complex, like the strategies themselves. If you want background, I think Doug Noland's Credit Bubble Bulletin has done a good job of addressing these questions over the years.

At the same time, I think we can see simple things. The big question isn't day-to-day-liquidity but liquidity-when-you-need it. By that measure, when we look at recent and older wild-swings in the market and especially the "flash crash", it seems fairly evident that the spectrum of "sophisticated strategies" don't provide liquidity-when-you-need-it and that is increasingly a problem.
Ask HN: How would you market an online shoe store?
Hello Hackers,

I have an opportunity to market a brand new online shoe site.
A few avenues that I am investigating:
1. Blog about fashion/shoes.
2. Stores on shopify, amazon and ebay.

With Google Adwords, facebook ads out of the question for the category, do you have any suggestions for marketing the ecommerce site?

What kind of budget should I be looking at? Would 1000$ a month get enough visitors to the site? Are there any effective channels that work well for ecommerce sites?

thanks
Forever: cancers are not eradicable unless evolution and mutation and gene expression from adverse environments and ... are all eradicable.

That's a different thing than assessing if a certain instance of cancer is itself curable in a certain afflicted host. Perhaps it is worth hoping for that.
Looks cool.

One thing i noticed: I would maybe put a "Sign up" button at the top with Home, Tour, etc. My first though was to look for it there because i didn't see it down below.
DnD to and from the host OS was what finally got me to abandon Thunderbird for 100% Gmail.

Now if they can just get the clipboard support to work a little better so you can do things like copy a region of the screen and past into an HTML app. It doesn't quite work yet.
That's correct, but the big fix people are talking about was a fragmentation fix.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=666058#c31
When the supply cabinet is locked
Could you elaborate a bit more. Maybe we can gain some insights from your experience. i.e. Why is it harder to find out what is going on in Google+ as opposed to Facebook?
What's your native language? For German, for example, there are the neo layouts. And other languages also have optimized layouts.

Dvorak isn't much faster than qwerty, but it's more comfortable.
i don't agree with Cameron, but CNN's headline is a bit sensationalist.

> "to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality."

he's not saying facebook and twitter should be banned, just that it should be monitored (and potentially block users). again, i disagree with Cameron, but its hardly the same as a ban on social media.
You are aware that you can turn off all e-mails from G+ to your account in your settings, right?
> 1. There is nothing inherent about "software" that suggests you can't create a patentable invention with it, therefore statements like "software patents shouldn’t be allowed" are wrong, or at least equivalent to "patents shouldn't be allowed".

I don't understand, how does that work? Let's get rid of the word "software" for a moment. Say I think that patents involving ducks shouldn't be allowed, for whatever reason. There's nothing inherent about ducks that means you can't make a patentable invention with a duck. But that by no means implies that my stance against duck patents means I'm against patents as a whole.
I wonder if they've ever done any AVR programming. Why do they insist that each register have a 3 to 4 character name?
I have to contradict you (unless I'm misunderstanding you): the debian package named ruby1.9.1 is actually 1.9.2. The 1.9.1 refers to the ruby ABI. Blame the ruby devs for breaking the ABI in a minor version update (1.9.0 -> 1.9.[12]).
Google is supposedly launching a payed version of the translation API: http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/05/spring-cleaning-for-s...
That one at least triggers a "Did you mean...", which the site: version avoids (because Google doesn't try to spell-correct site names).
If you're still bored, what if the alphabet is small (say 26 characters), but string is typically huge (billions of characters) -- and on average the first repeated character is in the middle of the string. How does that change your algorithm?
You appear to be confused. They're not talking about the cancer-destroying t-cells, they're talking about the DRACOs drug suite to kill viruses. Two totally different stories.
Just get two keyboards. I now have a guest keyboard on my computer.
Thanks ... looks like it's time to sign up for MileWise!
Fast and free Speech Recognition with Google's Voice API
Whey they run out of money.
http://jaqque.sbih.org/kplug/apt-pinning.html
The best answer so far is at quora:

http://www.quora.com/How-is-Color-doing-since-launch
I use the Phusion-provided .debs for REE on Ubuntu.
On the one hand, the article can be depressing - each fallout is a dream that died. On the other hand, one of the things that makes the Valley succeed is it's capacity to celebrate failure. A mistake? What did you learn? Now move on!

Companies that facilitate this are part of what makes for such a healthy eco-system.

Compare this to Japan - much of their lost decade(s?) was caused by an inability to accept failure, and shut down unproductive firms.
http://wiki.debian.org/AptPreferences#Pinning
From September of 2010:
Sales of new 'Medal of Honor' video game banned on military bases
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09...

If I recall, the biggest objection came because one could play as "The Taliban" instead of unnamed/ambiguous "terrorists."
I agree completely. One of the key problems with software patents is the very idea that an algorithm is deemed worthy of patent protection simply because it is not obvious to the "average practitioner" of the art. But what skills/level of creativity constitute "average"? What if you have a company, like Google, whose core hiring principle is to find people who have above average skill and creativity? This seems to set up a perverse disincentive to hire smart people because the smarter they are, the more likely they are to rediscover on their own an idea that is already patented and thus violate it.

The fact is that if the idea patented truly is the best way of doing something then a lot of smart and above average developers are likely to unknowingly bump into that idea out of necessity. And this seems to be a problem that is unique to software patents precisely because of the closeness of software to mathematics itself. Some algorithms are provably optimal for a particular problem which means that everybody smart enough that faces that problem will solve it the same way. If you're smart enough to come up with the best way of doing something on your own but can not use it because it was patented then you're forced into a wasteful outlay of creativity just trying to work around the patent. I don't see this as spurring innovation or at least not worthwhile innovation.
so does a CTO need to have coding skills? Or just directing based on his/her technology vision? In my understanding, a CTO needs to know at least some coding and can verify their subordinate code and fix bugs, so forth
>> It's more just an annoyance of the language. Specifically, anonymous functions are must easier in JavaScript, so it was just easier to write read and write maintainable code.

That's pretty specious. You can easily write a function defined inside a function that you can pass by just naming it. "Anonymous" functions are just syntactic sugar. Furthermore, writing a new python named function is easier (fewer chars) to write than a javascript anonymous function, so the "sugar" gained is moot.

Finally, as you build more and bigger systems, you realize that those multi-line anonymous functions you had you actually want to be named (for documentation) and tested. So you'll end up de-anonymizing the complex (multi-line) ones anyway.

As for speed, why not compare a jit (v8) to a jit (pypy) ?
Just a thought, and not exactly on-topic, but you may want to investigate ADD/ADHD. You sound like a typical ADHD person, jumping around a lot, getting very focused on one thing while ignoring other important things, not finishing projects, etc...At least check out what Wikipedia has to say about ADHD and see if it might explain some things in your life.
LinkedIn 'social ads' will stop displaying users' names, photos
From the Hacker News Guidelines[1]:

If the original title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link anyway.

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Makes sense, though I'll stick to RVM until I change my mind - RVM floats my boat, haven't had any serios issues and I live in the shell. Bad short-term (community confusion), good long-term (evolution of initial innovation). I'm very neutral here.

I got a simple solution for all you distro vs RVM people: People who prefer to use RVM - use RVM, people who prefer to use distro - use distro. Until you have proven that a server that runs distro is 2x more valuable in $ - post on HN and we could review it again. Reminding you of that we don't live in a totally symmetric universe.
When the founder does not know everybody in the company by name.
We do - nothing wrong with Debian stable's 1.8.7 and/or 1.9.2.
Disclaimer: I am not an active entrepreneur nor am I engaged in e-commerce. Just a reader, chiming in.

I'm assuming you have a good and working product so I won't talk about "making the best product that fits your clientele." I'd suggest finding forums on which the products you sell are discussed. Don't put up spam posts on the forums. Instead, involve yourself in the discussion of a particular and show that you have knowledge because you sell that item in your (online) store. In other words, don't cram your store into peoples' eyeballs. Show them what you know, how you know, and where to go if they're interested in more.

Blogging is also a good idea. Seems like blogs are almost required for startups these days.

Goodluck.
This is an extremely well-thought-out defense of the value of patents, and it presents the issues as nuanced problems that need to be resolved with careful thought.

I have long thought, as the author does, that a ban on "software patents" is extremely short-sighted, given that pretty much any physical object can be represented by equations or software. I really love his example of a beer bottle with a particular neck shape dictated by fluid mechanics equations.

His thoughts on patent trolls are also very welcome -- if we truly believe that intellectual property has value, then we have to allow it to be bought, sold and asserted. But, it does seem reasonable to tie damages to lost revenue or other actual business costs, which non-practicing entities would not have.
I hope they don't. OAuth is a nightmare (I just tried to make a simple client for IOS, right now I want to beat up the guy who made that standard) and the rest is far more complicated than a simple json based rest api.
I do this for a living, and I've used Debian-packaged Ruby wherever I've gone. I haven't experienced issues.
The Blackberry Shift: From the executive phone to the phone of the urban poor
Monitoring is far worse than banning.
The Man Who Time (Almost) Forgot
Find your co-founder at FounderDating
Only a few days left to find your co-founder before burning man!
Apply now for the next Bay Area FounderDating event.
Info at http://bit.ly/lUYF6N
Want Your Own Cloud? - Nebula wants to "disrupt and democratize" cloud computing
UK Government considers blocking Twitter, Facebook
Eerily reminiscent of actions in the Middle East, the UK government is considering blocking/controlling social media in light of the recent riots.
England riots: Government mulls social media control
Has anyone seen the games? What are they? An iframe, ajax, javascript or sth else?
Nope - selection is on logical text, not on visual text. For tons of "fun" reasons. If you want an afternoon of madness, read the Chrome or WebKit sources relating to BiDi text.

If that's not enough pain, read http://unicode.org/reports/tr9/ (the unicode BiDi algorithm)

If you're still liking it, I know a few people who'd love to hire you :)