skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's also convergent evolution. Why should there be a patent for, say, swiping a phone to unlock it, or having a context-dependent touch keyboard? Even if they are actually innovative (which I'd argue aren't, but whatevs), if you've got a good design team, even if other teams copy you after you release, you still have half a year on them where your design team is pounding away on the next greatest thing. If If I got a patent on using color screens on mobile communication devices back in the 90s, should I be able to sue Samsung and Apple off the market unless they go to monochrome or pay me a bajillion dollars?

Also, Google and Apple have been doing this back and forth? Really? Cite, please.
RPN FTW! I was never able to lend my calculator out because it took too long to explain how it works.

I got (and still have) a copy of the Advanced Programmer's Manual for the HP 48G. Great environment for someone to learn programming while you're bored at school.
Interesting. One can argue that equity valuations are too high but these firms should be able to survive a downturn. They have profits and are not too dependent on other startups as customers. This is a big departure from 2000. Most of the 11 listed could survive years with a depressed NASDAQ even if IPOs dry up.
sciurus did say modern which XP is most definitely not.
Sell yourself, but be honest, in case someone calls your shit. The dirt selling guy is pretty honest, I don't think he was yelling.

It really does help to have good communication skills for anything, be it speaking to that interviewer, discussing costs with some sales rep, selling your product etc...maybe even being a little bit aggressive, but not in a bad way, you know?
Did you read the article, out of interest?

If you haven't been in a McDonald's lately, you might assume that the company simply has been the beneficiary of the struggling economy in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world, and that cost-conscious consumers are flocking to fast-food eateries instead of sit-down restaurants. But to post the kind of impressive numbers McDonald's has -- and to weather the current turmoil -- Skinner has had to find ways to attract new diners while retaining the hard-core Big Mac-and-fries crowd. And so today, along with burgers and shakes, you can stroll into a McDonald's and pick up a snack wrap or a fruit smoothie or a decent latte (much to Starbucks' chagrin), all of which translates into higher sales per location.
agreed. web developers have been dealing with different sized monitors for years. yes, it's a pain, but they manage. mobile is no different. coming from a web dev background, it was natural for me to consider varying screen sizes, but i guess some mobile devs haven't quite gotten the hang of it yet.

IMO, this article leaves out the most important aspect of android fragmentation - manufacturer customizations. HTC's Sense and Motorola's Blur are the top two sources of headaches for my app, Unlock With WiFi. manufacturers like to change the way lockscreens work, and in the process they introduce bugs that i have to work around. for me, android fragmentation wouldn't be half as bad if all phones ran vanilla android.
That is a very good question, but I think we differ on the answer. The moral of the article doesn't seem like he should have cared more about marketing, usability, business relationships or all the other cruft involved in forming a business, but that his idea, sadly, didn't have traction. So really it was more likely the product. If the minimum viable product is built and doesn't have traction it is entirely possible the idea may not have enough traction.
Are you saying that the fact that this issue doesn't effect many people means that it's not a serious security problem?
StumbleUpon users spend 7 hours on site per month
Apple Lobbies Obama For Tax Holiday, Wants To Bring Its Riches Home
I think being too strongly tied to any one language/platform is really limiting your horizons.

Staying in your comfort zone (while obviously comfortable) can make programming seem very tedious as you kind of end up banging out the same old code over & over.

Try a totally different language for a while & when you come back to your particular Blub you might find your style has changed for the better.
Promising NYC startup BankSimple moves HQ to Portland
Problem is with UI design q&a site is if there is a demand for it, it wont be long before StackExchange puts competition up. It would take minimal effort on their part, that's your main risk.
You can probably find it with a google search, but I'm almost 30.

I would hardly call it a "daily affair". It's the sort of thing you do when you look for a job. That being said, that sentence is somewhat vague. I was referring to the consulting component of the job. Almost all of the jobs I've ever held were salaried jobs where my fit for it was a no-brainer, and all I had to do was convince them that I was better than the next yokel, which was at time difficult. However, the job description was always very well described, and the type of person they were looking for was always pretty clear-cut.

Consulting is a completely different beast. They had a task they wanted to have completed, and they were looking for someone - anyone - who could do it as best as humanly possible. I'm competing against everyone who knows how to do it. The job description is "able to do this job", which to me makes the application process that much more difficult; you have to be able to describe not only why you're qualified, but also why you're the best.

Maybe it's the same thing, but it sure felt different when going through the motions.
> as a final wonderful touch, implemented as dirty great lumps of ulta-conditional VBScript.

Sounds like the people implementing them don't deserve £200/day, never mind £2,000! :-)

Seriously, though, nothing you wrote there sounds particularly impressive when you look at what plenty of very smart, very skilled, very well trained contractors do for daily rates in three figures.

I'd guess that in the UK today, the middle of the bell curve for software contracting rates is probably in the £30-£50/hour or £250-400/day region. With specialist skills/relevant experience you can get higher, and in London you generally shift everything upwards a bit as well, so for something like banking in the City you might be looking at £600-800/day. Even in London, in a generally high-paid industry, with specialist skills and experience, you're still an outlier if you're approach £1,000/day though.

I know absolutely nothing about Hyperion HFM rules, but I find it hard to believe anything could be so difficult to learn and work with that you couldn't get someone capable of doing those other jobs to learn it and do it for half the rate we're talking about. Is there some sort of artificial barrier that stops otherwise capable software contractors from moving into the field?

[Edit: The PCG's benchmark report from June this year had the middle of the curve around £300-500/day or £60k-100k turnover, with the middle of the respondents curve around ages 35-55 and IT making up the majority of responses and fitting the turnover curve pretty well when isolated. That's based on self-selected respondents who are members of a professional organisation, and certainly tending to the more experienced age ranges, so I think it's fairly consistent with my guess above. They did indicate a small number of responses with turnover above £200k, and even some with turnover in the £300k-500k range. There is no way to tell whether those correspond to the respondents whose businesses had more than one fee earner (10% of the total).]
Don't understand why Peter Higgs was so upset about Hawking's wager. Hawking is a notorious loser of bets.
Russian Soyuz Rocket on Way to ISS Crashes in Siberia
Delete it from people's mailboxes on Exchange? Some people maybe don't check their email frequently...
I say software programming is a support profession.

Isn't medicine also a support profession? A good doctor will proactively prevent sickness and death, while most will deal with it as it happens.
Other people must be thinking this as well, but it seems likely/obvious that the graphing calculator will go extinct, replaced by an app on a touchscreen device (not an emulated ti-82, but a better more intuitive graphing calc). Sounds like a pretty promising start-up. That the TI-82 is still $70 is unbelievable.
Delete it from people's mailboxes on Exchange? Some people maybe don't check their email frequently...

I'm not saying it isn't a stupid comment but there's probably a bit of a reason for why they said that.
His challenge to informed readers is interesting: "If you are an economist and believe that you have detected any erroneous assumptions above, please write to me here. If your comments are significant, I will be happy to publish our exchange on this website."
(Lots of great comments in this thread, on all sides of the issue. Bravo, HN!)

One thing to keep in mind when comparing programming to law and medicine: a high-school dropout can be an adequate programmer and earn a good living writing Rails (between 65k and 90k at start, depending on location). Most other high-end white collar jobs require extensive education. A physician has to put himself through college, pre-med, medical school, residency, possibly a fellowship, and only then commands a high income. A 30-year old orthopedic surgery resident making 45k probably isn't thrilled that he has another five years of indentured servitude before he can claim a serious income and start paying off 250k of medical school debt. Law school is similar. Using an MBA to switch careers into finance is similar.

In essence, programming jobs can trade off relatively high income early on for an income which maxes out in the late 20s or early 30s. Law and medicine start with much higher requirements, take much longer to spin up, but have much better-defined career paths leading to higher income.

Entry-level Wall Street jobs (I mean real Wall Street jobs, not IT) work a little differently, in that they do offer excellent income up front and a lucrative career path, but require a degree and high GPA from a top school to get in. So they aren't really representative of an opportunity which most people have.
Mar's Soil Suitable for Life
Sublime Text 2 goes VIM
Best SEM, TEM, DualBeam, and FIB images
Agreed. That could be a dev board (seems pretty dishonest though). I was thinking it might be advertising. Lots of devboard companies do this - sell advertising space on the silkscreen to supplement their income on each unit (see digilentinc.com who does this a TON).

the $25 price point is out of the question unless:
A) They sell at or VERY near cost
B) They sell advertising on the PCB
C) They are subsidized by a tech vendor selling them parts at a discount
D) They are subsidized by a charity or an angel
E) They are planning on making 100,000 units in one shot.

At least SEVERAL of the above have to be true, or the $25 is just made-up nonsense.
He's saying that since the issue doesn't affect many people it didn't get found right away. It is a serious security problem for businesses that use Mac OS X with LDAP. However, it's not a serious security problem for me.
Portland? WTF? Why? It's a hipster dump. Rains 9 months a year, has 12% perpetual unemployment, plus the USA's largest resident homeless population, which isn't terribly shocking given the awful job market. But, if you can actually get a job the salary will be circa 1994 and yet the property and rent prices are in fantasy land stuck in the 2006 housing bubble. Oh, plus the city has one of the highest suicide rates in the nation. Great place to live if you like being wet, underemployed, and depressed.

Glad I got out of that dump, if you want to have a future you need to be in Boston, NYC, or The Valley.
Doesn't work for me.. I live at a University in a building development designed for reduced car usage and I get 43. My parent's place in the worst kind of suburbia hell gets 53.
I concur with this sentiment. When I meet new people, and they ask me what I do and I say I 'make and market websites' they stop - chin drops - and they say 'wait... you MAKE websites?! Like you MAKE them? Give me your number'.

Sure, moms don't romanticize their kids becoming a programmer. However by people who understand what value you can bring, you are greatly respected - almost as if you are a magical being capable of things beyond mere mortals.
$1 million for advertising unlicensed pharmacies, $499 million for treating the government like a paying customer when it complained.

I'm joking, but only a wee bit.
I didn't know people reimplemented these for phones.. I just grabbed Droid48 for my Android tablet, and will probably be trying it later.

Thanks for the heads up!
Hm... might be fun to build a web server cluster (with servers for caching, db, memcached, load balancing etc) out of these. I don't know how usable it would be but it would be a great learning experience for a few hundred dollars.
I think you are missing the point that the gp is making; any enterprise that this would affect should not be provisioning it to the servers/clients until they test it on a smaller scale. This issue would be found during the normal testing channels of enterprise adoption.
Scala is Child's Play
Slide to unlock was not found to be a violation.
Duke Nukem Forever, you mean that established product with nearly half a million customers?
Another rule that is assumed, but not mentioned is this is the following:

Rule 0: If you don't believe in your product or respect the people you're selling to, the deal is already broken.

I'm sure when the author was selling steak knives, he believed that those knives were the absolute best available, and that he was legitimately providing a huge value to the people he spoke with. That formula should be true in any sales or marketing engagement you're involved with; you need to believe that your startup's service solves a large problem to the customer, and that your startup is absolutely the best player in the market to assist them in meeting their needs.

Sales/Marketing isn't about conning people out money, it's about helping people via a product.
There is nothing stopping MIT graduates from having government positions. The PM of Israel, Binyamin Netanyahu, is a graduate of MIT.
So does anyone know if Samsung's decision to bring Cyanogenmod aboard was prompted by the events leading up to this? Any links/reading/conjecture on the matter?
Seconded. Perhaps alternate wording with a more positive emotion attached to it like 'Favorite Grandma Cookies' or 'Grandma Approved Cookies', something that will make you think about warm cookies coming out of the oven and visiting your site to trigger that feeling.

Certainly no problems with mentioning your departed grandmother and her contributions in the About Us section though.
Seems like extortion.
Nokia did have slide to unlock way before the iPhone: http://netdna.webdesignerdepot.com/uploads/cellphone_design/...

This is a clear case of adding "...on a computer" like that was some great revolutionary advance. It isn't. It's the obvious translation of an existing concept.
Lego does 3d printing now
The dream of the 90's is alive in portland: http://www.hulu.com/watch/205428/portlandia-i-dream-of-the-9...
Sure, they are. That's the way hospitals are managed here nowadays - you make an appointment with a doctor with specialization xyz, and you don't know until you show up who's going to be there. They read through your medical history a few minutes before they call you in, and that's that. Centralized medical history tracking through automation is quickly making being a doctor a lot more routine than most doctors would like it to be.
It's already here. Our company (AppFog) was founded in Portland and we just secured our Series B. We have offices in the same building as JanRain and yet another co-working space. In Old Town or the Pearl District, there are startups on every other block.

Interestingly, our biggest challenge right now is recruiting. If you're considering moving to Portland, we could use you.

http://blog.phpfog.com/2011/06/10/we-are-hiring/
BlackBerry To Get 250,000 Android Apps
If you find a video or documentation about it, please reply here, I'd be interested in finding out about it!
Take a csv file from pivotal tracker and make PDF with story cards
Content is king in SEO. you seem to have lot of activity in /forums. But it doesnt seem to be great quality content.

Your blog (http://www.scirra.com/blog/archive) has very small number of posts. I would recommend writing keyword targetted content in your blogs (use the free Google Keyword tool to get an idea abt high demand keywords in your domain).
What about Forrst.com ?
There's an amount of legal work currently outsourced to India - things that can be legally outsourced, that is. Currently, the class of things that can be legally outsourced is small (research + writing + document review.)

random google survey:

http://www.pangea3.com/
http://sqglobalsolutions.com/
http://www.sunlexis.com/
http://legal-process-outsourcing.com/
http://www.legaleasesolutions.com/

Here's a list last updated in 2008: http://www.prismlegal.com/index.php?option=content&task=...

To me, this is indication that there's a flood being held back by legislation.
Thanks. Considering another hearing was scheduled after the court was informed that evidence was misrepresented I was assuming that it played a significant role in the courts decision. Maybe it's just a formality then...
BTW, in this case it looks like Google (you know, from California) is doing the copying. Samsung is just shipping it.
I still have my TI-83+ from my highschool days. Honestly, I couldn't survive without it. When I have to do hard core matrix algebra or graphing, and I need to be in front of my book, I can't use the PC or tablet -- it just doesn't fit in the zone. The physical nature of the calculator, the portability, and tactile feedback are all necessary.

Also, the TI-83+ takes a beating. ;)
You are profoundly naive if you believe that is what Facebook is for.

FACEBOOK IS A TOOL TO MAKE YOU (the user, their product) MORE MARKETABLE TO ADVERTISERS (the customers).

By knowing everything about you, they can get better rates from advertisers. Everything else, like photo sharing, and the ability to send messages to other people, or check into place, is designed to get more info about you, and to make sure you don't wander off Facebook to their competitors (if you didn't have picture sharing, you'd be using Picasa or Flicker more -- and that might threaten facebook).
Panoramio create/join a photo community based on your interests - By Google
It could be argued that trying the case in Dusseldorf is actually bringing money into the economy. Apple and Samsung are paying the lawyers. I suspect though their main legal counsel isn't in Germany, they are probably working with local lawyers as well. That's a big bill coming to a local firm.

On top of that you've got the hotels, restaurants, etc. etc. that are all making some money on the executives who are travelling to Dusseldorf.

Dusseldorf is making use of fixed cost assets (the courts and Judges salaries).

It's a shame that the lawyers are getting so much money while companies fight over stupid lawsuits like this, but I don't think it is costing local tax payers.
Why You May Be Blind to a Good Idea (and What to Do About It)
Conferences burned by PayPal
The place was filthy and dilapidated. Seeing people covered in tattoos and piercings gets old and tiresome for some reason. It's just not the place for me, but awesome for those who fit in there.
I've got a stack of pebbles at home that I've picked up from round the world.

My favourites are some that I picked up walking up a mountain in Torridon - the surrounding sandstone having been eroded away leaving these nice coloured pebbles free after nearly a billion years of being buried.

http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/289168
What do you think of this idea?
I have been doing a bit of brainstorming and came up with this idea.

A website/app where users can upload photos to compete for badges. Its sort of a culmination of Foursquare and Flickr. Users compete within their group of friends with photos that they take of a certain theme or category. The person with the best photo in that theme or category as voted by your friends will receive a badge that represents that category.For example, you might uploaded a picture of your lunch and name it "What's for Lunch". Then you will post it and see if your friends can better it. The person with the best photo wins(as voted by everyone) and will receive the badge of "King of Lunch".

What do you think of this idea? Would users like it? Has it been done before?
Replies appreciated.
Something like this? http://guicheck.com/
I don't know if anyone else noticed this but when I see '==' I think comparison not assignment.
The title should really be: "What Your Old Graphing Calculator Says About Our Education System."
Is 87% of Your Sales Training Investment Wasted?
Yes, but the market does care about long schooling when it is a requirement to practice the profession. That's why it drives up wages in Medicine and Law.
The Voice-Features on the G2 are mixed Google and Vlingo products.
Samsung chose to incorporate Vlingos Technology in addition to Googles since it allows for easier in-car usage of the Phone.

Why do people always compare the Applists? There are not many ways to display a list of icons in a meaningful way.
The Windows Desktop has had a grid of icons for years and there was much else like that beforehand, but in addition the Android handsets offer more useful ways of using the screen when not starting apps(widgets&live backgrounds).

I won't admit that Samsung sure took inspiration from Apple, but that is true for most of the things, if not only because of usability reasons. There are just some design patterns that have proven to work and which people have come to expect. The race should be about who makes the best phone, not who made the first design patents.

Apple didn't have copy and paste on a mobile phone long after windows mobile had it... should microsoft have sued because of that?

I just want the best of all worlds and Samsung delivers there. If they have to stop selling the Galaxies in Europe, i'd import them from Asia.
I've never bought Apple, but I've recommended them to non-tech friends and family that sought my advice. From now on, no more recommendations from me.
Probably the rampant unemployment, underemployment, low paying jobs if you can actually get one, and the huge homeless population which is more a reflection on how abysmal the city and local economy is than those unfortunate enough to be homeless themselves. Don't forget the nonstop rain and suicide hotline numbers posted on every bridge or parking garage higher than 20 feet, since nearly everyone is cranked out on antidepressants or else they'd be leaping into the Willamette river with cement shoes on too.

When I lived there and had visitors from out of the area, everyone commented on how depressing the place was. Not a good place to live or raise a family. If you like the Pacific Northwest, go with Seattle, yes the weather is still crap but the city is vibrant, has real jobs with real wages, and you can actually build a career there.
I have no idea where they are now, but we were neighbors once: http://blog.phpfog.com/2011/07/25/want-to-be-the-next-php-fo...

Before we were at PIE, our company worked at cafes. I guess you could say we scaled from our home offices to a multi-tenant office to dedicated office space.
Portland is basically where San Francisco was at 20 years ago.

In terms of a tech hub, the only thing missing is a stronger university presence.
Which is awesome, please don't change that.