skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There may be some idolizing, but I think it's more about premature eulogizing of a man who's made huge contributions to technology, whether you buy Apple products or not. Ballmer isn't even in the same realm.

Personally, I'm interested in his life beyond Apple. He was an out-of-the-box thinker who went through many serious failures and successes. How could he NOT be interesting? I feel I could learn a lot from him. I certainly learned a lot from his now-classic Stanford(?) speech.

We all really do hope for the best for his health, but we all have this unspoken belief that his days are very numbered.

I suspect that like me, many others feel the need to thank him for what he's accomplished, and reviewing and celebrating his life is the next best thing to shaking his hand.
Apple Loses another pre-release iPhone
HP's confounding call to build more TouchPads likely due to obligations
I suppose it would be a good start, but the self-interest in this proposal stinks a bit. What's the distribution of employee numbers in companies in which Y Combinator has a stake?
Amazing Examples of Architecture Renderings
Today we are presenting you some of our favorite examples of Digital Conceptual Architecture found on the Behance Network.
Ah, excellent. I went for the pull request method.
Outlook with hosted Exchange or Office 365 is a solution which suits some people. However, there are many for whom the Gmail, Calendar and Docs combo works better. Consider money, sharing and other factors and you'll see why the "been around for nigh on 10-15 years" doesn't mean much.
''The patent pledge is in effect a narrower but open source "Don't be evil."''

I get 'narrower' but what does 'but open source' mean here?
Why The Undead $99 TouchPad Might Portend The iPad's Doom
AlexBlox asks in an earlier comment: "does publicly stating this pledge bust any opportunity to double back (i.e. it is more legally binding than just a pledge?)"

A court might well hold a company to such a pledge, on a theory of "equitable estoppel." This type of defense to an infringement charge is always highly fact-specific; here's an example of a case in which the defense succeeded:

A patent owner accused a manufacturer of eyeglass frames---which it had previously sued for infringement---of infringing other patents. After back-and-forth correspondence---in which the manufacturer denied infringement---the patent owner went silent for three years. In the meantime, the eyeglass manufacturer expanded its marketing efforts for the products in question.

The trial court held that the manufacturer was not liable for infringement, on grounds that the patent owner's actions, in view of all the circumstances, had misled the manufacturer into thinking it would not be sued. The appeals court found no error in this holding [1]; it explained that:

"In the context of patent infringement, the three elements of equitable estoppel that must be established are:

(1) the patentee, through misleading conduct, led the alleged infringer to reasonably believe that the patentee did not intend to enforce its patent against the infringer;

(2) the alleged infringer relied on that conduct; and

(3) due to its reliance, the alleged infringer would be materially prejudiced if the patentee were permitted to proceed with its charge of infringement."

[1] Aspex Eyewear, Inc. v. Clariti Eyewear, Inc., 605 F. 3d 1305 (Fed. Cir. 2010) (affirming summary judgment in favor of accused infringer), http://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/images/stories/opinions-orders/...
Ask HN: Windows alternative to the Mac app store?
I operate a micro ISV and sell Windows and Mac versions of the same software application.
The Windows version can be purchased from my own website ( http://hartcw.com ) using paypal/fastspring, but the Mac version is also available on the Apple Mac app store.

Sales from the Mac app store make up the large majority, as its so easy for a mac user to browse and search for apps directly from their desktop. Especially now with Lion, because the Mac app store is installed on every machine sold!
This makes me think I must be missing a large market of PC users, who just do not get exposed to such software catalogues and hence never see the app.

What are the alternatives for listing/marketing Windows applications?
When someone loses a patent suit without a finding of willful infringement, none of your three points apply. The 'teachings' of the patent clearly weren't involved in the majority of instances of patent infringement. Almost invariably the infringer had no clue they were infringing.

By filing a patent, you're telling the world how to do something (allegedly) new. In 20 years, (or longer/shorter, depending on the country) everyone is freely able to use the idea.

If it's a good idea, someone else -- perhaps the very next person who confronts the same problem -- will almost certainly reinvent it independently. The idea of paying monopoly rents on ideas should make no sense to anyone but a lawyer.
Content Delivery Market Growing Rapidly
I'm not sure I buy it. I've met plenty of wealthy people who were happy to come home to a pretty normal family because their jobs are a constant source of novelty, stress and challenges. If one feels the need to stick out as part of one's identity, great, but it's just one way of living. I kind of like sticking out as a foreigner over here in Italy sometimes; it has its positive aspects. I certainly chose a road less traveled, but whatever, to each his own. For other things I'm happy to be pretty ordinary: I have a wife and two fantastic children and live in what passes for burbs over here.

Also, being a bit of a skeptic and contrarian, perhaps some of these people had other good reasons to say no to his plans. Without knowing their point of view, more about his proposals, and other particulars, maybe their inaction was sensible.
From the http://thepatentpledge.org/ website -

---

These companies have agreed to be the first to publicly renounce aggressive use of software patents on small companies. Please join them!

A Thinking Ape,
Airbnb,
Bump,
CarWoo,
DailyBooth,
Disqus,
DotCloud,
Greplin,
Hipmunk,
Justin.tv,
Loopt,
Songkick,
Stripe,
Weebly,
Wepay

----

I think the whole YC gang is going to promote this aggressively, which means a strong network effect. Remains to been seen what happens outside this network.
Cannot give Varnish enough praise, it can tubo charge even the most expensive / slowest loading pages and uses minimal resources.
Everyone will game the IP tax by valuing it at pennies -- after all, they may not directly be using it may not have a fair market value before they take someone to court.

As a real-life example of people gaming these types of taxes, people buy expensive (>100K USD) cars in europe directly (i.e. taking delivery in stuttgart) to save on the sales tax: driving it around for a bit ensures that the car is technically "used" when brought back here, circumventing new car taxes.
This is a nitpick but I think the pledge should read "No first use of software patents against companies with fewer than 25 people," since people are countable:

http://englishplus.com/grammar/00000214.htm
Amazon's new interface
It's not immediately clear to me whether this solves any part of the current problem. But on reflection, I believe I understand the motivation here.

Big companies that use patents as a revenue stream (MSFT, IBM, etc.) typically bide their time and bring a patent lawsuit once a new company is established and there is blood to drain. It's the threat of such a lawsuit in the future that can negatively impact investment in a startup, as the right collection of patents could conceivably capture much of the economic surplus of a new venture. Alternatively, a big company might use the threat of a patent lawsuit, now or in the future, to push a young company to agree to an early acquisition.

The pledge doesn't seem to have much impact on these scenarios, even if a big company were to follow it rigorously.

Most of us, I believe, would prefer to see companies make a stronger commitment: "No first use of software patents" [period]. Google hasn't made this pledge, but to the best of my knowledge, they've acted in this way so far. It does seem in line with "don't be evil."

That said, I think I see what PG is going for here. He wants companies to make a pledge that, at a minimum, allows a new product or service to be tested on the market. That way, if it gathers traction, it will attract investment despite the threat of patents, and the new company will be able to mount a reasonable defense.

Perhaps more importantly, though, by allowing the product to succeed first, even in a modest way, it makes the offensive use of patents worse PR for the big company. Killing a successful product with patents is no longer an abstract issue. It takes away from customers and the market something very real.
Patent trolling big companies is just as unethical as trolling small ones.

PG: Red Hat, a multibillion dollar business, already has a working patent pledge - they won't use patents except defensively against people who attack them first. Copy that and use it.
We can't get patent reform through Congress, so let's try to get a new tax through Congress? DOA.
My personal pledge is that as a programmer I refuse to work for any company that goes on the attack with software patents, this obviously includes Apple and Microsoft. I also refuse to participate if asked by my company to help create a patent, I am willing to be fired over this.

Since good programmers are a scarce resource if enough of us took this pledge it could really start having an effect.
Fototime was threatened by a NPE (aka troll); I can't imagine this pledge could have helped them.
Funny that the CWA touts that the deal "will create" 96,000 jobs, not mentioning that that number is the high side estimate resulting from a promise by AT&T to invest $8B in infrastructure. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to estimate how much of that would become reality.
> Please join them!

Paul, there is a major oversight here. The site http://thepatentpledge.org/ doesn't even have a contact form. Also, you may want to make the links nofollow.
Actually, the NoDB approach that Fowler describes handles consistency much more simply: mutations are executed serially. If all your data is hot in RAM, then changes to the data are very quick. Thus, there's no locking, no concurrent writes, and no need to worry about transaction isolation. If you're a Java user, the Prevayler framework he mentions provides this in a couple thousand lines of code.
I'm in DC as well and I find Verizon to be absolutely horrible. I had T-Mobile until last year and I regret switching.
YC’s Patent Pledge Asks Tech Companies To Grant Startups Patent Immunity
I've done the same thing. Even though I knew he wasn't dead, everyone is talking about him as though he is. And now we're supposed to be surprised by the fact that he's a normal person, just like you and me?
British Expatriate Network - Britnet
I think this is a great idea and that it will prevent pledging companies from engaging in patent abuse, but I wonder how many large companies will bother to sign up for it. I imagine that if Apple/Google/MS all just take a pass that they won't catch much flak for doing so.

I wonder though if we could make the whole thing more effective by also adding an underlying threat to the pledge:

That any company, patent pledging or not, who violates the <25 rule will have their talent actively recruited away by those companies that have pledged.
Yeah I noticed the same thing. Should the companies email pg directly?
I feel like Microsoft is putting a really nice hardwood tabletop on a wobbly, mismatched set of legs.

$5 says that when Windows 8 comes out, if you want to change your personal path, you still have to go Start | Computer | Properties | Advanced System Properties | Environmental Variables. And if you go to Advanced Appearance Settings to set a different title bar color for inactive windows, it will still be ignored by Aero.
Yeah it would, good catch.

So to be more accurate, he was comparing explicit static typing with dynamic typing.
I've never had a problem using pip on windows for packages written in pure python. For packages with C components, http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/ almost always has the latest up to date version. But yea I agree, they should fix it so that it's easier to compile C based packages on Windows.
Actually most of the value of our portfolio consists of companies with over 25 employees.
First: congratulations! This must be an exciting time for you.

I've got a web app that I've put some time into (won't link it, as this is your celebratory post :D). It solves what I consider to be an interesting problem, but I'm not sure whether to push forward with it or leave it as a pet project.

How do you decide whether to take your projects from hobby to company? What are the right moves someone needs to make to take their hobby project to the next level?
> 1) Make all information freely accessible to anyone. This is the one we'd all like everyone to do. However, there's very little (economic) incentive to innovate when you do all of the heavy thinking and anyone else can just come along and beat you to the implementation.

Indeed. Economic incentives to innovate don't always produce the best products for the users anyways. Examples:

Encarta : Wikipedia

Windows NT : Unix/Linux

IIS : Apache

The products on the left aren't "bad", but in my opinion, the ones on the right are generally more accepted and used because they're superior. There was minimal economic incentive to create the products on the right for the developers.

My opinion: people try harder to make their innovations of the highest quality when the incentives aren't monetary.
There was a case of a startup shoe sales site with a really elegant interface for selecting the exact type of shoe you wanted. Basically, it allowed you to see many very similar styles on one page to be able to compare similar offerings from different labels. I wish I could remember the name, but a recently VC-funded startup used a patent to go after the first startup, and they ended up closing shop.
I have been doing some interviewing lately, and only just received my first "prototyping" test, based off a short user scenario. It was almost scarily broad, given the 3 days I had to complete it, but I think that's the point -- show initiative, build something cool, be prepared to defend your decisions.

I was personally happy to spend my time doing it, because it was a direct reflection my abilities, and I controlled the result.

I also recently spent a short 2-day stint working with another startup team that was also very instructive. There's no substitute for seeing a team in action, how they approach decisions, collaborate, etc.

I contrast this with the full-day onsite interview I did at one of the old guard dotcoms, which was disorganized, confused, and muddled -- basically, a huge waste of everyone's time. And to cap it off, after I'd had numerous phone calls, in-person meetings, the onsite interview, and bought an SVP lunch (forgot his new bankcard PIN), I got a quick impersonal phone call from HR saying they weren't going to move forward. Needless to say, I agreed.
Actually the RFS has changed a bit for winter 2012. There are new categories like "New Paths Through Product Space" and "Ephemeralization Apps"

See Link - http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html
How to build a LEGO Speedcuber in under 5 minutes using ARM Powered devices
Facebook Developers - A Stable Platform
Speaking of patents, (although this is a month old now) I recommend everyone listen to the show This American Life did covering patent trolling: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/w...
Hah! Hard to believe an acquisition like this would create jobs, especially as AT&T sells it as a "bandwidth/infrastructure acquisition."
This comment is completely out of line. Trashing something pretty decent on its launch day is not a sign of elevated or discerning taste, it's a sign of someone who does not understand how hard it is to ship something.

Having some kind of offline Gmail (and Docs and Calendar!) is indeed a VERY big win, even if it doesn't have every conceivable feature on day one. It makes Chromebooks that much more appealing.

Ok, the UI and launcher are different. That's not "massive failure", that's minimum viable product. Yeah, even Google does that.
In an event-based system, especially a large distributed one, ROLLBACK as a single command to revoke all previous attempts at state mutation becomes impossible to support. Instead of supporting distributed transactions you have to change to a tentative model. The paper Life beyond Distributed Transactions: an Apostate's Opinion (Available here: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~cs223/papers/cidr07p15.pdf ) describes this well.

Basically instead of making a transaction between 2 entities, you send a message to the first reserving some data, a message to the second reserving the data and once you get confirmation from both (or however many entities are involved in the transaction) you send a commit to them.

These reservations can be revoked though. Your rollback has to be managed by an "activity".

Ex: Bank transfers. You have the activity called BankTransfer. It manages the communication between entities and the overall workflow. It starts by sending messages to entities Account#1 with 100$ in it and Account#2 also with 100$. To #1 it says debit 500$. To #2 it says credit 500$. #2 responds first and says Done. #1 responds second and says Insufficient Funds. BankTransfer sends another message to #2 saying Cancel event id 100 (the crediting).

Other activities that want to read the state of number 1 will see 100$ in it but the transfer (as yet unconfirmed) had been of 50 rather than 500$ and another debit of 75$ comes in it would respond insufficient funds. At this point it's the activity's job to decide what to do. Wait and try again? Fail entirely and notify any other entities relevant to the workflow? That's up to the business rules. Also, since the credit has not yet been confirmed, reading the balance on #2 would still say 100, not 600$.

Of course, depending on your use case you may want the read to return the balance with unconfirmed transactions. That's entirely up to the application code and business rules but the example should be explanatory as to how rollback is implemented.

Eventual consistency is the only scalable way to go for very large systems.
the difference is this in browser vs. being an installed application. it is web apps catching up to native apps.
Oh, I absolutely don't deny that Apple is getting more useful feedback in other ways. I just miss the totally random, occasionally useful, and controversial questions. It was just another thing now gone that made WWDC feel like more of a community of developers together rather than a bunch of separate individuals when someone would get up and rant about something a bunch of people were angry about (but of course Apple isn't going to do much about). Now it's all focused on the individual, and the extent of one's "OMG x is getting deprecated!"/"there's a big problem here!" rants is "I'm angry too" posts on devforums, filing radars blindly, and complaining on twitter.

Either way, I still get the "can't talk about it", "don't know", and "file a radar" responses, so I guess it doesn't matter so much what happens at WWDC for me.
Would you have known if she was wrong?
The roof of your bedroom could fall off on you every night, however, it hasn't so far and you just assume that it won't because not assuming so would make your life horrible by say, making you sleep in the outdoor, which may be even more dangerous. Life is full of compromise, of course the next version of Google Chrome could wipe out your hard drive and post all your photos to 4chan without your consent, but based on a few evidences (Google being a reasonable company whose interest is not to mess with you, past positive experience with chrome etc) we choose to compromise and accept autoupdate because it's convenient and we consider the amount of evidence enough to trust it.
> Most of us, I believe, would prefer to see companies make a stronger commitment: "No first use of software patents" [period].

I don't think PG agrees with this. He seems to be much less anti-patent than the general HN (commenting) community.
> If you just analyze the current piece of code, you will miss out on a lot of potential optimizations.

I didn't say that you only analyze the current piece of code. Type inference is, by nature, a global optimization. However, you don't do it until you've identified the hot spots, and you've established that it's worth investing time into it.

First, however, you get something quick running so that there are no delays, and the cost doesn't matter much to the user.
One line from this essay has me a little worried...

"A clumsy parasite may occasionally kill the host, but that's not its goal"

This came up in a previous discussion on HN where I made essentially the same point. As someone pointed out in response, a parasite can get away with killing off the host as long as there's somewhere else to go next. In fact, a parasite could wipe out an entire species as long as it can make the jump to something more resilient.

it was just a short aside, but here's a link the the thread...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2760148
34 Spots Around Fukishima Top Chernobyl Evacuation Standard
I try to commit when I have made enough changes so that builds and functionality don't break but not everything is 100% done either. My commit comment will describe what I was doing and what I changed. If unit tests pass then I think it's fine to commit (if you aren't writing unit tests than I advise that you should). There are projects I have to share with other developers and projects that I am the only developer on and I keep my rule of committing the same for both.
MailChimp Buys Phil Kaplan’s Tiny Newsletter Start-Up, TinyLetter
The secret weapon of the HP Touchpad: Linux
I don't care. And neither should any other programmer. If ST2 is going to be abandonware a few years down the line like Textmate is right now, that doesn't matter at all to me. $60 for a piece of software that I spend 1500+ hours a year working from is a steal. If it gives me a 5% performance boost, I'll gladly take the afternoon and convert to it, whether it's open source or proprietary.

I currently use vim & MacVim for all my programming needs, because I'm at my peak of programming performance while using them. With the very quick turn-around on ST2's builds, and tons of features coming out every month, I'm strongly reconsidering a switch. Knowing vim is still invaluable knowledge for general sysops, but like I said, I'd gladly give it up in daily usage for something better.
I disagree. Patent trolls often just aim for a comparatively meager payout for licensing from their victims, who are usually too small to be able to afford the much more expensive option of taking it to court (and perhaps winning). Therefore a loophole in justice.
The obvious need in my mind is that if we get down to a single national GSM provider, a lot of people are going to be stuck. The only alternative for T-Mo customers that don't want to use AT&T would be to sell their phone and get a new CDMA phone. The concern for me is mainly over a complete monopoly on national GSM; a duopoly is bad enough.
Money - if you know what you are doing, you get the partner action pack which costs me 259 GBP a year (22GBP/month) and gives me 10 seats of a lot of cheap software including Windows 7 Pro and Office 2010 Professional [1]. Office 365 is 4 GBP per month per user which costs me less than my monthly toilet roll bill.

Sharing - that's the point of exchange and outlook. It works and it supports all the relevant modern interoperability.

Other factors - ?

[1] https://partner.microsoft.com/40112699