skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What patents supposedly exist for does not match the net effect they have. (And remember, we only care about "stimulating inventors" because it gives the general public a net benefit, just like copyright theoretically exists to encourage the writing of more creative works.) People have this theoretical vision of patents protecting small inventors/businesses from some other company building the same product better/cheaper and putting "the little guy"/"the underdog" out of business. That romantic notion needs revision, because it doesn't work anymore, if it ever did. Patents today (and software patents in particular) tend to fall in three major cases:

- Small company gets a patent, thinks it will protect them, and either never uses it or quickly learns that their one patent will not protect them from the thousands held by whoever they want protection from. They also don't have the time or money to waste on litigation rather than just building a product.

- Large company gets a patent, adds it to the war chest, uses it as a giant stick to force anyone working in the same general area to pay up. Small companies have to pay up, and Free and Open Source Software gets excluded entirely (or just publishes their code anyway and says "screw patents", which works nicely for people not worth suing but makes anyone else using their code a target).

- Patent trolls, who write or more commonly acquire patents, wave them around like a stick, and extort money from people actually being productive.

One of these cases derives no benefit from software patents, and the other two turn software patents into net losses for the public. So, tell me again how software patents represent a useful tradeoff for the general public, and why we should grant an artificial monopoly that would not otherwise exist?
It depends entirely on where your bottlenecks are. If the bottleneck is entirely within your node, then this isn't going to be compelling. If you're doing something that's very light on the resources within your node (serving static content, etc) and your bottleneck is some other system somewhere else, then these sorts of machines could be compelling purely from a space/power POV.
Agree it's no joke. I thought everyone already knew this. Certainly whoever is in charge of sales should.
Wow. Not quite 80, but still an order of magnitude more than I would have expected. Interesting they learn Swing before loops. For me, the first thing I learned was printing, then goto, then for-loop. Maybe just a function of language you learn with.
London, UK - Full time - Rangespan

Founded by ex-Amazon executives and engineers, Rangespan is an ambitious e-commerce software company that makes it easy for retailers to offer deep product selection. Our values (http://www.rangespan.com/about/values/) summarise the way we work.

We make heavy use Python, Django, MongoDB and AWS to solve complex problems with huge data sets. We take an agile approach to development and are looking for more great developers to join our team. You will have a broad, hands-on role developing extremely high-scale systems and web services for retailers and suppliers.

For more information, please see http://www.rangespan.com/jobs/ or email jobs@rangespan.com.
s/machine shops/nanoassemblers/ then, if you like; software still has a much smaller barrier to entry. And for the record, I don't necessarily believe in mechanical engineering patents either, but as a software professional I primarily care about abolishing software patents, because they hurt me personally.
Email me anyway. My iMac is idle 20 hours a day. teyc@cognoware.com
Wait, does gaming mean a thriving community of hackers spreading faster than gossip? Ahh, caught. Detective Graham ... To the zzZZZZzz
GitHub Enterprise charging 20x rate of competitor Bitbucket
Ask HN: Anyone have Google Reader's old stylesheets and JS cached somewhere?
Like many people, I am dissatisfied with Google Reader's new user interface. But rather than whine about it, I want to use a browser plugin to inject different CSS, and maybe some Javascript, into the page.

Unfortunately, the old version of Google Reader is no longer available, so I don't know where to get its stylesheet, its scripts, or samples of the old DOM. Does anyone have cached copies of these resources? Or a way to access the old reader app, even if only temporarily and not backed by the main database? It would be much easier to revert the unwanted changes given access to the original.

(I realize that there are also behavior changes, but Idon't use care about thos. The problems I have with the new Google Reader are all with the stylesheet - symptoms of the fact that it was made by a colorblind person and never tested on a computer. I have no other explanation for the new color scheme, which completely fails to delineate the content from its surroundings, or the gigantic wasteful padding, which makes some sense on tablets but doesn't make sense at all on a laptop.)
I'd prefer a "stop pretending like you care about these petitions" petition.

I mean, it's neither practical nor desirable to have the White House do whatever someone can persuade 0.01% of the population to sign a petition for 'em to do. You can rustle up a hundred thousand people to agree with pretty much any stupid idea, nowadays. We'd be legalizing gay marriage one day, banning homosexuality the next, officially declaring that aliens exist on the third day, and adding a narwhal to the US flag on the fourth.
Kutcher told a great story and had a great point. Tell me what's actionable from the Palantir speech or Dropbox speech. They were bragging for the most part.
Thanks for the thoughts everyone. I will let you know where we come out!
i just want folks to work on the existing solutions, especially on the popular ones like gnome and kde.
"Real artists ship, dabblers create concept products" -- http://counternotions.com/2008/08/12/concept-products/
Google came out with this "Dynamic Styles" thing for Blogger a few weeks ago, which completely broke Blogger blogs for mobile devices, with no way to disable it.
Curious then.. Do you run the obfuscator in production as well?
It's more cynical than that. Like the vast majority of online petitions, they exist primarily to harvest email addresses.
But physical manufacturing outside of freestanding factories has never been a significant part of an industrial economy. It more or less amounts to "arts and crafts".

This changed with computers. You could never start a car factory in a garage, but there was a golden age where you could start a high-tech electronics company like HP or Apple.

Today you can start a web-based or software company on a laptop in a coffee shop or library. This is a big deal, let's not kill it.

Software patents have to go away or we're going to be stuck in the industrial age, which would be bad because we've already sold off most of our factories.
Really? Send me a link once ready...
But if Carl were as blind as a bat, how could he see the city he indirectly developed from... a blimp?
If they fix the black menu back to what it is now nice easy to read white background then I'll be glad to switch.
JQuery plugin - styleJSON
StyleJSON is a work-in-progress attempt at "styling" an arbitrary JSON object as simply and comfortably as possible with HTML and CSS.
Good luck fellow central Indiana person.
I'm not really familiar with what an application server is (even less what makes it enterprise-grade).

What is the typical use-case for this or TorqueBox?
What I use the most is [j]/[k] to move between email from the inbox while using [x] to select some messages which i [shift]+[i] to mark them as read and the [e] to archive. I think I easily do that with half of my emails for which reading the subject (and sometimes also the little preview) is enough to know that I don't have to read them.

This is what makes Gmail very powerful for me.
Each time Google updates Gmail, there is another hit on accessibility for visually impaired users. With each new version, zooming makes the content area smaller and smaller, while making the (significantly less useful) editing elements and other mostly uninteresting things larger and larger. Adding more padding and reducing contrast is completely at odds with accessibility (and, potentially, a good desktop mail experience). I think I can still get by with Gmail at high zoom, but one or two more changes and I’ll have no choice but to jump ship to something else (or go fulltime with Outlook, which is overkill for personal mail).

It makes me really sad to see that accessibility is getting worse at Google, not better. The problem isn't limited to Gmail, it's also now in core search and probably just about everything else since the G+ wave of updates. :(
SEEKING WORK - Perth, Australia, remote ok

$50/hr, list of work and buzzwords at paimoe.com. I'll discuss what you want, then get access to a git repo and get started.

Mainly PHP, MYSQL, jQuery, HTML/CSS, Django/Python (less so). Built both large sites and side projects.

Contact hi @ above domain.
About Gmail's new look
Splunk is a great product - I'd recommend it highly.

(Also , this dev portal looks pretty good)
I guess you can use the VMWare one to get it to an AMI importable format.
Makes sense. Saccharine is a sugar alternative, and I don't expect saccharine to replace sugar.
Yep, me too. Of course, that was in BASIC around 1983.
I don't think I fully understand what you mean by locked in either. I'm assuming one meaning here:

There are a number of ways you can switch email addresses. You can set up a forwarder from the gmail address to wherever you want--over time this should rectify itself and in the case it doesn't, you're not really losing out on anything. Receive via Gmail, respond via your new email.

I used to use Gmail for the interface. When I received my invite, I'd never experienced anything like that in the browser. It was refreshing, cool and it worked extremely well. I'm not 'locked' into those addresses in any sense of the word and never have been.
I'm not a programmer - my biggest issue with all the tutorials that I've seen for Python, Ruby and even js on codeademy.com is that none of them actually teach you how to do things within a web environment.

I realize that this is meant to be an "intro to CS" class and not a web dev class, but a product can teach me how to create a simple web app that connects to a popular API, retrieves data and displays the data on a web page is the product that will get my money.
SEEKING WORK (Remote). Location: Porto, Portugal, EU

Backend Python/Frontend Javascript Developer

- Python: Django, Tipfy, Google App Engine [, virtualenv, pip]

- Javascript: Dojo Toolkit (including Dijits), JQuery, Node.js

- Java: Struts, Hibernate, Jboss Seam, Groovy/Grails, Solr; (many beers ago)

- *NIX shell and sysadmin skills

- Source control svn, git, mercurial

- Databases: MySQL, Postgres

- General: Good learner, passionate about the work, experience remote with multi-cultural/timezone/skilled teams

- Hang around on IRC ;-)

References on http://pt.linkedin.com/in/josemoreira
Here's the problem. To be a "Facebook alternative", you need to have the people. It's not an alternative until it's useful as one.

Privacy and data ownership are great features, but they aren't products.
That's what happens when you have brand recognition.

Also, the github offering is an onsite install, whereas the bitbucket is hosted.
San Francisco, CA. Full Time

We're Ravn.com (http://ravn.com) looking for front-end developers.

We want someone that has:

- Great Decision Sense

- Deep understanding in HTML, CSS, JS

- Attention to Detail

- Awesome Personality

- Experience with RoR

- Self Motivated

- Works hard, enjoys startup culture

Bonuses:

- CS Degree or Engineering Degree

- Artistic Ability

- Enjoys the outdoors, new activities

If interested, please send resumes to hello@ravn.com
IIRC the Boundary app cookbook is a pretty big divergence from the Opscode application cookbook due to their reliance on roles, environments and etc. Additionally our cookbook has a far more narrow (I think in a good way) focus. Both have their place, just probably not in the same cookbook.
If your nodes are not bound on some local resource, you can as well just run them in virtualization containers on Xeon. The setup will be even more flexible than with (less powerful) ARMs.
I don't think it does that for keys and values in hashes though. The only int-related optimization it does in the collections is integer sets.
I had a similar issue. It'd be worth expanding the description to be more concrete. What I see there now seems more marketing/management focused than focused at the people who are likely to actually be using it. :)
RAVN is the easiest way to discover and book fun activities. Use invite code HACKERNEWS to get a sneak peak.
Is this the only reason why Stack Exchange has been hit or are there other big factors too?

It'd be interesting to know.
SEEKING FREELANCER

Location: San Francisco, CA or Remote

Skillset: iOS Developer

I'm looking for an expert iOS developer to help our startup, BeCouply, go a little faster on the iPhone app. We've got a fun concept, we're funded by Mitch Kapor et al, and we're about to get some great exposure on a major news channel.

Reach out to me at pius@alum.mit.edu.
This guy makes excelent points. That bright yellow background, on the other hand...
The same reason that most men will never become CEO, perhaps?
Bellevue, WA

ClassifiedAds.com, Inc

http://www.classifiedads.com/

Linux/PHP Software Engineer

We're a small startup but we're one of the largest classified ads websites. Come help us solve interesting challenges in scaling a fast-growing site with over 3 million monthly unique visitors.

Email jobs@classifiedads.com
Pagoda Box moves into GA — PHP PaaS
One of the problems I heard is that people are concerned about what work actually gets done at outsourcing sites.

Odesk's monitoring enables customers to know that work is actually being completed in a distributed environment, while elance doesn't do that.

If that is the case, then it explains ODesk's growth.
Apparently Texas, like Canada, considers software engineering a proper discipline of engineering, subject to the same regulations as other engineering disciplines: http://sce.uhcl.edu/helm/SWEBOK_IEEE/papers/10%20reprint%205...
Email etiquette should be a required course in college. I wish everyone went by guidelines like this!
Bad Google Design (Non-scrollable regions)
Do checkout http://spacialdb.com http://devcenter.spacialdb.com
Its got PostGIS + REST API (GeoJson) Ping me for a private beta account if interested
This goes to prove that java is a pretty bad language to teach pogramming.

in logo this is how you draw a square
forward 100
Right 90
Forward 100
Right 90
Forward 100
Right 90
Forward 100
Right 90

Then in the second lesson you introduce loops
repeat 4
Forward 100
Right 90
End

then you ask kids to draw hexagons octagons etc. and they will never forget what a for loop does.

Edit changed repeat 8 to repeat 4. Thank you.
Take a look at the job title "Data Scientist" if you're interested in analytics and see if there any companies that are doing other things that you could help out with analytics. You might be able to get an internship for next semester, stay in school, and then make a decision in May.

jobs in austin from Indeed: http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=data+scientist&l=austin%2Ct...
Training Bacteria To Grow Consumer Goods
Good point. That's why I am big fan of teaching "Computational Thinking" before any specific programming language. Personally used Scratch (from MIT) to teach my nephews and niece. It worked well to cement their core concepts.

http://scratch.mit.edu/
http://info.scratch.mit.edu/sites/infoscratch.media.mit.edu/...
Sounds like Los Zetas tracing the Anonymi is just coincidentally concurrent to their decision not to release the information. The real reason why they're not releasing it is because the civilians they were intending to expose aren't actually members of Los Zetas, and would just get killed by the cartel if they were to be exposed.
That's so much nicer. I need to trick it into doing that all the time.
As of this past May, only twelve of the Fortune 500 companies were run by women.

So no.
The gist of this whole story is that CNN is a lousy source of information about anything. Most of us have known this for at least five years. Cable journalism is an industry in which a group of people with no specialized knowledge at all, reporters, get to go on TV and pontificate as if things were otherwise. Move on.
Hackers Hit Chemical Makers in 'Nitro' Attack, Symantec Says
We already have a few of these:

https://github.com/raweng/StackScrollView
https://github.com/openfinancedev/stackcordion
卵巣嚢腫の治療方法を大公開！卵巣のう腫改善の秘訣とは？
I don't understand how you can really have a function name that properly says what it does without it being overly long.

In particular, function names seem to focus more on expressing the postcondition but make no mention of preconditions, exceptions, error conditions - all which also need to be known when figuring out what a function does.

In other words, strlen becomes strlen_segfaultifstrnull. You could theoretically encode that in the parameter name, but it becomes even messier when you have functions that raise exceptions. And now instead of long function names, all your functions are using long variable names that serve no purpose other than documenting said error conditions.
I think I'm going to steal this for my Python classes. I usually say "is" or "is now", but "gets" I think is a more adroit phrasing. Cheers.
GPAs tend me mean less in graduate school, but also tend to be very inflated. I would think you would still have issues if your GPA is in the 2.x range in graduate school.
I think if you read the comments here from Khan Academy employees, you'll realise that Sal & Co. are quite aware it's not complete yet. Rome wasn't built in a day.
Very readable for something so dense. Nice work!

One suggestion from the peanut gallery:

In http://code.google.com/p/kivaloo/source/browse/trunk/lib/dat..., at line 178 you have:

if (rehash(H))
goto err0;

That's because rehash returns 0 upon success, and -1 on failure.

To me, that's very confusing, because it reads to be erroring upon success. When I read rehash's body, I learn that 0 means success and -1 means failure.

I'd prefer one of two methods. First, you could return 1 on success, and keep returning something falsy on failure. Then the code would read:

if (!rehash(H))
goto err0;

Which I think is more readable. Perhaps even better would be to use a constant, i.e.,

if (rehash(H) != REHASH_SUCCESS)
goto err0;

although that can easily lead to a mess of redundant constants, or a headache managing them.

Just my personal preference. Really nice code, thank you for sharing it.
Saying your email address over the phone
Montreal, Canada.
We need a full time MacOS developer.
If you're good in cocoa, and know macos x internals, contact me.
http://jobs.startupnorth.ca/job/programmer-montreal-qc-canad...
I applaud their desire to try and fight the cartel but its extremely dangerous and don't fault them for pulling back.
Speaking truth to powe....what? Oh yes, well then nevermind!
I love GitHub and all, but the whole Enterprise label is kind of a joke. You slap "Enterprise" on a service, make a few nominal features available to the people who buy into the ploy and then charge them out the nose for it.
Suppose further that the government never subsidized the infrastructure to begin with.
I'm in: http://teamwork.io/
As a Black developer, from an under privileged urban area, without a degree (but went to college for CS) I can can say that I agree with Arrington. The reason there aren't more minorities heading to the valley is because they aren't exposed to the possibilities. I know out of all the black developers I know I'm one of the few with aspersions of doing my own thing (NoBadGift.com) let alone know that that's an option.

This is not to say that I haven't experienced racism in my career in technology. Shoot I have people turn me away because I went to college at an HBCU (Historically Black College & University). Yet, I don't think that was because I in this industry just those individuals bias and I know if there were more minorities exposed to the idea of being entrepreneurs then there would be far more in the valley.

Don't worry though I hope to be one of those that help with this problem

SN: for anyone who has never experience racism consider yourself lucky. True story: (mind you I am a well established ,for my age, government contractor.) After exceeding all of a clients expectations on a project I later had a co-worker come and tell me how shocked that a black person could code let alone do it well and that he thought I was only on the team as a ploy by the company to diversify. Then expected me to take that as a compliment lol. Now that's only one of many stories i can tell. Just my 2 cent
Your CS curriculum is much better than my schools! I just started my first year of Computer Engineering and the Java course so far is horrible compared to this.

I'm a bit disappointed to be honest.

I am very glad I already have been coding for years because our teacher and the planned curriculum seems to confuse people even more.

I think I will refer some people to your assignments, if that's okay? Hopefully someone can learn more from this :-)
I went through and found the expected values of the Jackpot and $50k instant win tickets, and found the expected value (excluding the inclusive value of additional credit rewards) to be ~$0.016

By that metric, 1 credit is worth $0.0016, and 10,000 is worth $16.
Very readable for something so dense. Nice work!

Thanks!

you could return 1 on success, and keep returning something falsy on failure

I come from an OS background, so to me 0 is success and non-zero is failure. It doesn't really matter which convention a project uses as long as it's consistent, so I documented this in my /STYLE file: "In general, functions should return (int)(-1) or NULL to indicate error."
Inside the Jewish Bakery
You could do that in Java if you just imported a turtle graphics library. A quick search brings up one such library, http://www.bfoit.org/itp/JavaTurtleGraphics.html. I agree that Java is a hard language to learn with, but its faults are not related to being unable to use turtle graphics as examples.
totally agree. carob is a chocolate alternative, and i don't expect carob to replace chocolate.
While I applaud his effort to help the Aussie's feel that they don't need to move halfway around the world in order to grow their startup, and while it seems that the world for startups is getting flatter, it is very hard for me to believe that Facebook would be what it is today if Zuck and his pals hadn't moved to Silicon Valley.

Just the opinion of a HN newbie who has never actually been to Silicon Valley.
I learned ruby in 2006-2005 as my first programming language. I don't remember loop being all that difficult to learn.
Nope, just in Enterprise.
Repeat 4 (right?)
No, hugh3 is saying that the reason why most women won't be CEO and why most men won't be CEO is the same -- there are a lot of men and women and not a lot of CEOs. Simply by the pigeonhole principle most men and women won't become CEOs.

What the author meant to say (and screwed up) is "Why Most CEOs Won't Be Women."
Did SimpleGeo ever go after the big players?
I think you missed it.

The reason most women will never become a CEO is because there are far less than 3.5 billion CEO positions available for filling. This is also the reason most men will never become a CEO.
Meant Los Altos :-)
hugh3 is pointing out that the title is worded incorrectly. Since CEOs represent a very small portion of people, most people will never become CEOs regardless of their gender.
I had a similar experience at around the same age. In my case it was Douglas Adam's 1990 documentary for the BBC called Hyperland. All about the Internet and the web before I'd even heard of such things. I remember thinking at the time that the stuff in the documentary would never happen in my lifetime.

Luckily it's on Youtube so I can reminisce.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOsPKjbMvxY