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While patents may provide a "stumbling block to innovation and progress", it's wrong to say they inhibit "the free exchange of ideas, and restrict[] our knowledge of how things work." Patents do just the opposite: to obtain one, you must describe in detail how a process works. This means that when you're granted a patent, you disclose to the whole world how your novel invention or process works. (The argument that the USPTO is granting frivolous patents on non-novel things is a separate argument.)

The alternative (though not really applicable to software or mechanical processes that get shipped in a product) is to keep everything secret. Had Coca Cola patented their formula, everyone would have known how to make the drink 20 years later.
Keep an eye on Notts Tuesday as mentioned and pop along to one of the meetups at Antenna in town, a lot of startups attend.
Those 20 apps are better reserved for the ones that do live updates, although I agree the app drawer can get a little crowded(there's alphabetical search in Mango to mitigate that a little).

But wasn't there a study showing how many apps people use on average? I believe it was far less than 20. Someone made a concept app to add folders to the UI(need to be dev unlocked or jailbroken to use it) http://www.engadget.com/2011/10/25/want-folders-on-your-wind...
College does not qualify as ten thousand hours of practice of anything, except maybe note-taking or socializing, and this is probably why most people are not great at anything when they graduate. With all the “general requirements” and electives students take, they don’t spend anywhere near ten thousand hours practicing the field they major in, unless they’re practicing outside of classes. You can’t rely on college to give you the ten thousand hours and automatically push you to the top of your field. It can help to an extent, but, like you said, people like Gates succeed without college because they practice on their own, and there is no replacement for that.
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When I expressed the opinion the other day that patents were stupid, my boss said my position was "radical". I just laughed and said it wasn't in the software industry.

"Oh, well, software patents are bad, but...". He's a mechanical engineer by education.

I didn't bother bringing up the threatening letter we got from a patent troll a couple months ago :)
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Perl 6 changes this syntax to @src[$src], effectively admitting that the way sigils worked through Perl 5 was a failed experiment.
BEGIN is a hook that gets executed when you first load the file, before any other code in that file.

From http://perldoc.perl.org/perlvar.html ...

$^P |= 0x10 ... debugging support,
keeps info about source
lines on which a subroutine is defined

The third line of code is a workaround for a bug, documented in the comment above it.

If you were Chinese, would you complain that English words have no meaning to you?

The 'look at the xyz CPAN modules!' argument
doesn't really cut it for me.

The libraries available are the most important asset of a language, more important than the language itself.

Example: I just chose Ruby instead of Python for a project and I just discovered that there's nothing like PIL for doing image processing in Ruby. The alternatives are so bad that I'm thinking about rewriting the whole thing in Python.

As far as CPAN is concerned, it's a really big (maybe the biggest), really comprehensive, centralized repository of libraries.

CPAN also has something that RubyGems / the Python Index or the Maven repositories do not ... http://cpantesters.org/
I generally use Java and Scala for my own personal projects. Scala less than I'd like because there's no really good solution for web development aside from Lift (and Lift, while comprised of fantastic code, doesn't map well to my mental model of web development), but moving more and more towards it over time.

Some Python too, but that's more for one-offs.
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Yeah, the sigils indicate a sort of namespace (@ for array, $ for scalar, & for function), but that breaks down because when dereferencing an array, the @ becomes $. I have a fair amount of experience with Perl and I still had to read your explanation to remember how that could be valid.

In the company I worked for that used Perl extensively, there were coding standards. In fact, you don't even need that, you just need to remind everyone that cleverness is not a goal in writing maintainable software, even if cleverness is what Perl's best at.
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Touche.

Still, I think you can do better on the name. :)
This story is not proven. There exists counter evidence from the thermostats guy himself.
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I visited The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park last November with a small group from my University. Tony Sale, who lead the team that rebuilt Colossus, gave a talk about how the Tunny machine worked as well as Colossus and the rebuilding process. We also got a demo of Colossus in action, it was really pretty incredible.

If you live in the UK you should totally visit, they've got some really unique hardware running and everyone is so enthusiastic and wants to teach the visitors about computing.

http://www.tnmoc.org
I have been using Backbone for a while and love it. It is lightweight, is as flexible as you want and helps to organize code.

Here is a good HN post on Backbone and Sproutcore, with a great comment by the creator of Backbone: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119704
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'it was much better when most stock market decisions were mostly based on "fundamentals"'

I don't recall such a period. Is there a particular interval you're thinking of?
This is an insult to actual slaves.
That's sensical-- I guess my response would be that if we can conceptualize different severities of murder, rape, theft et al., we're probably intelligent enough to perceive appropriate gradations to the statement "If you stop working you will die."
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Actually, I would pay up to 25%... for the first (6 mo or less) contract. They got me that, how ever they did it. But I got me the extension so why do they expect more than just a payrolling fee for the extentions?
The problem is that Siri has the drawbacks of the CLI, without many of its features. Don't get me wrong: as I said previously, Siri gets me excited like no other iPhone feature does.

But the reality is that, like CLIs, Siri has an unforgivably precise syntax, but unlike CLIs it lacks contextual help (tab completion), easy ways to string commands together and encapsulate them as one (pipes and scripts), job control, etc.

Right now, Siri is a poor voice based CLI, yes. But I think in the future -when natural language processing improves- these types of applications will be less and less of a CLI, becoming their own UI paradigm.
I do think that's somewhat true in software, but I think games are more of a mix of art and software, and in art it's much less common to find consistent winners outside of the mediocre category--- Thomas Kinkade makes consistent nice-looking paintings, but Picasso produced a lot of crap amidst his masterpieces. I'm not sure it's possible to take risks on game design and not end up with a reasonable number of duds, even if you're solid and professional on implementation.

It is true that most game-industry positions aren't really for designers, but these days a large number do involve some amount of design, especially if you want the game to be unique in some way. For example, AI programmers are in an odd position of doing "just implementation", but implementing a system that deeply impacts what kind of gameplay and design is possible (in some cases they quite literally write the tools that the designers will use to do things like write NPC behavior).
It's funny how people now call Meego a great OS, but if Nokia had gone with Meego, everyone would be saying "where are the apps?" "This would be better with Android on it". "The same icon based UI sucks". And it probably wouldn't sell well.
> So it's desirable to eventually converge PHP and JavaScript?

PHP has always been about making coding easy and fun. Since more people are doing JavaScript, it only makes sense to make things familiar.

> Why then have PHP at all?

That's a question that will have to be answered soon.

For now, the answer that I'm coming up with, is that with PHP-FPM you can make PHP properly threaded. All of the server-side JavaScript implementations are event driven. The threaded model has advantages when jobs are cpu or io heavy.

Right now, I'm working on an implementation where Node.js is receiving calls via websockets and handing that off to PHP-FPM via FastCGI for processing. A hybrid system like that has advantages of both the event model and the thread model.
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While I think it's a bit extreme to say they didn't have much choice, it seems to me making data more open is becoming somewhat trendy and this sort of peer pressure may have certainly played a role in the Royal Society's decision. Anyways, the inertia of the status quo shouldn't be underestimated and although things are really not that fair, it will probably take quite a bit of time before we see widespread democratization of data.
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I've found that folders suffer the same fate as the all-purpose drawer of apps - simply having to do the extra app discourages usage of anything in the folder.
The problem is that very few would develop for Meego, even in the absence of WP7. As Nokia's CEO said, the smartphone game has changed from a battle of devices into a war of ecosystems.
In this particular case it is also google's fault for turning up results of such dubious freshness( blekko for examople gives perl.org as first result - which looks better to me)

So as weird as it sounds, Google shares the blame for the poor perl code being written.
This article is more about how multiple sets of parameters can fit the same data equally well. This is why economists draw a distinction between calibration and estimation. If a parameter is "identified" in some estimation procedure, they mean they have an experiment or quasi-experiment that gives them a credible CI for the true parameter.
Before patents we had the guild system, essentially secret societies that wouldn't share their skills, designs, or processes, and intentionally obfuscated their work. Patents were part of a program of reform that in part led to the industrial revolution. If instead of patenting the early steam engine designs each inventor had formed a secretive guild, worked in isolation, and produced intentionally convoluted designs, where would we be now?

Patents are a lottery system that rewards some inventors for publishing their designs, but has the effect of encouraging everyone to publish their designs in the hope of winning the lottery.

The problem with our IP law is that it is maladapted for the information age. Copyright, in particular, is the wrong kind of protection for software (which is machinery) especially since it is used to protect binaries and not source code (which is instead kept secret, meaning that copyright has the negative impact of creating monopolies without the offsetting positive impact of creating public goods).

Patents would be almost perfect for software if the patent required provision of working source code -- the ridiculous language of patent law exists because expressing the precise workings of machinery in words is difficult -- not so with software.

If software patents included source code, it would accomplish the goal of patents (making public goods) and make identifying infringement less arbitrary (and probably even establish stronger arguments for obviousness and prior art). "oh this algorithm is provably isomorphic to this trivial lisp expression, so yeah it's obvious."
I don't really understand comments like this. No, his time is not free, but his 'salary' is the 200k he made while doing this.

You wouldn't say to someone who is making 200k with a cushy corporate salary and ask "but what's your time worth?" - it's redundant.
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This has been posted here before, but some people might not have seen it yet:

Parasites.

I'm proud that there is "a relative dearth of patent applications for the video game industry, especially considering how technology-dependent the video game industry is, and given its size in terms of annual sales."

Before issuing a condemnation, I try hard to think about it from their point of view -- the laws of the land set the rules of the game, and lawyers are deeply confused at why some of us aren't using all the tools that the game gives us.

Patents are usually discussed in the context of someone "stealing" an idea from the long suffering lone inventor that devoted his life to creating this one brilliant idea, blah blah blah.

But in the majority of cases in software, patents effect independent invention. Get a dozen sharp programmers together, give them all a hard problem to work on, and a bunch of them will come up with solutions that would probably be patentable, and be similar enough that the first programmer to file the patent could sue the others for patent infringement.

Why should society reward that? What benefit does it bring? It doesn't help bring more, better, or cheaper products to market. Those all come from competition, not arbitrary monopolies. The programmer that filed the patent didn't work any harder because a patent might be available, solving the problem was his job and he had to do it anyway. Getting a patent is uncorrelated to any positive attributes, and just serves to allow either money or wasted effort to be extorted from generally unsuspecting and innocent people or companies.

Yes, it is a legal tool that may help you against your competitors, but I'll have no part of it. Its basically mugging someone.

I could waste hours going on about this. I really need to just write a position paper some day that I can cut and paste when this topic comes up.

John Carmack

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=151312&cid=12701745
Sering this, I think the same thing I did when I first saw quadrotors on Youtube: So, when do things like this replace cameras and helicopters as high tech policing tools?

Just place charging stations around the city that they can land in (in this car, or affix to in the case of quadrotors,) and you've got an extra pair of eyes on the street able to cover far more ground than a patrolman. (Though, you'd stol need someone to pilot them. For now.)
Does you admin know that about cloud virtualization?
Sounds like a great way to give your game a reputation as a bug-ridden piece of shit.

Sounds like the same knee-jerk reaction. (Which usually shows you haven't really understood what I'm proposing.) If the consequences are greatly separated in time from detection, and there is strong bias towards false negatives, then the result will be to give the cracked copies a reputation as an incomplete, half-baked piece of crap.

In any case, DRM should never manifest as anything resembling a bug in the game. It should only manifest as a failure of the pirates to do their job and reduced access to online and downloadable content. Remember, guerrilla warfare is about the long term and not the short term. In the short term, there are defeats and retreats for the smaller force, but in the long term, the larger force is persuaded that the effort is no longer worth the reward.

Absolute containment is the essential failed strategy of regular armies taking on the guerrillas. It's also the source of everything you find objectionable about DRM. (Analogy: the armed force that's unpopular with the local population.)
There is a strong political movement in America, where we do not have what the civilized world would think of as a proper social security system, that believes that bums deserve to die.

Just sayin'.
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Although Redis can be used as a cache they're using it a primary store instead.
Developing for the platform is definitely trivial, as you mentioned (disclaimer: I worked at MSFT for years, but I've done an iOS app with over 1M downloads, so I've seen both).

Owning the device is a pain, though.

1) Lack of apps. No Pandora. No Bump. No Uber. That trendy new mobile startup? Nope. I sincerely believe that nobody in any YC startup doing mobile even _has_ a Windows VM, except on the test team.

2) Quality of the non-Live experience. It's easy to hook up your gmail account, but then every time you add a contact, it nags you about which to add it to. Plus, when I was just using Live mail (experiment), I'd get ~20 hours of battery life out and about; with gmail, I get max 5. I'm not sure what's going on there, but 5 is not quite enough.

Still, there's always hope. But I'd more heavily consider developing for it than using it as your One True Device.
I think the key to terminology here is to make the statement in a negative fashion: knowledge is always limited so we can never be certain there is no relation.

It is interesting in this case to try to make the claim that because there is no correlation of cancer to proximity of cell phone use that cell phones probably don't cause cancer in nearby locations in the body. I think we have enough knowledge to make that case, but I might just be arrogant.
There is an interesting balance between keeping the interface very simple and giving pro users the flexibility they require. Possibly in the future we could find a way to make it skinnable (ie upload custom css) without losing simplicity, but we'd be very wary of overcomplicating things.
Redis is like memcached on steroids.
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Lets compare this to airplanes. Air travel used to be limited to those who were able and crazy enough to actually fly planes themselves. Now everyone can use planes for transportation in a very mediated and controlled environment. A pilot flying in an airliner is very much like a programmer using an iPhone: Other engineers did all the hard work and the net result is something somewhat boring and limiting (a commercial airliner will only fly to certain destinations). On the other hand it is also very safe and comparatively cheap. Now flying an aircraft on your own is amazingly fun and an exhilarating experience. But it is also very expensive, quite complicated and somewhat dangerous.

Now the point is, I am both a programmer and a pilot myself. So I can definitely see the appeal of both. But, I happily use an iPhone and commercial air travel. Other people have put in a lot of work to made these very safe and reliable for common purposes and they really work well for crossing the atlantic while listening to a podcast.

The iPhone is not denying anyone access to laptops any more than an Airbus is denying you access to a Cessna. They are not dumbing the population down. They get the job done with as little disturbance as possible. For the crazy ones though, There are real computers and real airplanes!
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Is this really surprising? I would have thought this would be self-evident as these kinds of models would seem to be highly chaotic.

It's really no different than the meteorology simulations in the 60's that first discovered the butterfly effect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect#Origin_of_the_...
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They're using Redis as a primary store rather than a cache.
I've thought there was more opportunity in fundamentals up until Warren Buffet and Ben Graham's the intelligent investor became well known. More people tried to use these methods, thereby increasing demand and decreasing the upside on securities that meet Graham and Buffets criteria. The stock market today is very different from when they got going, although long term I don't know that anything has fundamentally changed, even before robot traders there had always been random and unexplainable noise.
I don't converse on FB. It doesn't seem that people are looking for conversation there. Aside from serving as an address book, I haven't really found any value in FB. Conversations on HN can vary, but are generally pretty good.
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Not necessarily:

Replication is basically just a provision for instant failover. Let's say that by policy the background data store (e.g. MySQL) always has a copy that is at most 10 minutes old. In practice it could probably be much more recent. So in general user data is safe but you want something very simple to prevent data loss and service disruption in the most common failure scenarios.

I believe the best paradigm is a replication buddy system between two given Nodes. Should a Node instance fail, the app can always issue the same request to its "replication buddy" and expect to get the same data. Implementing a replication buddy relationship between two instances should be relatively easy using a persistent connection between them, since Node is all non-blocking but still guaranteed sequentially executed code (=there will be no real consistency problem). Nodes could just notify each other when data changes in the background and they'd both always have the same data state. Granted, there would have to be some code to take care of what happens in different failure modes (probably the most complex aspect of the whole thing), but overall still very doable.

Scaling would be even easier: just put user IDs into different buckets, each bucket is a replicated instance. If this is even necessary.

And the beauty of it is that you have to implement this just once, no matter how many different server-side apps and languages you use. It would be a common piece of infrastructure.
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I'm pretty sure Steam didn't do that; the developer and publisher are responsible for uploading the bundles to Valve for distribution.
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As a Kellogg MBA, the single most important piece of advice I can give is to register for the test. Pick a date and pay the money. You will never be as prepared as you like. You can study indefinitely. Having the date will help you stay on track and focus on the areas you really need to work on.

The second best piece of advice I can offer is to take as many practice tests as you can. As you take each test, identify questions you've guessed on. When you're done with the test, go through every question you got wrong and every question you guessed on and take the time to understand that problem. This will take you a long way.
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Oh the wangst!

What is one supposed to escape to? The world is a bit crowded to support very many hunter-gatherers. I heartily agree with minimizing debt so as not to "become the lender's slave", but as many have pointed out, that is hardly true slavery.

Our house is paid off, and so are our cars, though they are about 10 to 20 years old. In truth, we probably need to shed a few possessions, so it's good to have a reminder, but the melodrama needs to be toned down a bit on this article, so as to better expose the nugget of truth within.