skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> My general point is that copyright was an interesting idea that has gone much too far; we're not getting our money's worth and we should push back (i.e., make it much shorter).

That's a fair point, and one that I agree with, but it is a compromise: if there were no legal protection for "intellectual property", the only people who could afford to produce it would be independently wealthy "amateurs". I'm not sure that that is an optimal state of affairs either.
Many development groups treat fixing minor exceptions as a once-in-a-blue-moon event. Sometimes it's just a matter of making exceptions more visible to the developers on a day-to-day basis.

Several years ago I inherited an application that averaged ten customer-discovered problems (with only a few hundred customers) and a system outage each quarter. The logging system was set to email all exceptions to the developers (there were a bunch of low-level exceptions every day.) The outgoing lead developer had an outlook rule that funneled all logging email messages to the junk mail folder; she suggested I do the same. I never did and the annoyance of all those messages in my inbox did wonders for my motivation. After two years, the system virtually never went down and we had almost no customer complaints.
Some Iowa cafe owner, dubbed his creamy chicken salad as the Santorum Salad. Apparently without irony.
Maybe that would be the case in other professions...but as a coder, I would LOVE to have more people involved in it. I think programming is one of those areas in which a rising tide lifts all boats.

I find that most of my time is either dumbing things down (i.e. printing the output of a relational database into a flat spreadsheet or worse, a PDF) for those who barely understand basic Excel or attempting to parse such dumbed-down information from other systems. If it were status quo in this world to understand the concept of delimitation and meta-data, my ability to create even more compelling applications, visualizations, and analyses would be greatly multiplied.
Microsoft ready for its Droid moment, will spend $100M on marketing WP 7
That's what I was coming to say. At FogCreek basically the entire company is on commission (profit sharing), which is how it should be.
setTimeout(fn, 0);
I find it really surprising that the article doesn't once use the words 'hedging' or 'liquidity', since an understanding of those very basic concepts would have made the second paragraph either useful or redundant.
By the way, (warning a shameless plug): I created an HTML5 game loosely based on my best memory of the Sabotage game. The graphics are only marginally better and I couldn't really capture the game play, but it can be tried here(works best on Chrome):
http://carbwars.tapjs.com/
You did an excellent job, Alexis. Thank you for being out there. I hope that other big media outlets are calling!
I think you nailed it perfectly, I think Foursquare is being used mostly as a game. It's fun, and addicting, but it's a "game" it's a "social game", but what it is not is a tie in with all my friends like Facebook, nor a restaurant guide like Yelp. Which is a good thing, as long as Foursquare can recognize how it is being used, and how to capitalize on it before they go belly up. And if it does, oh well, didn't the founders already make $100mil selling their first location based company to Google?
In value-at-risk terms, Starbucks' hedging requires a negative amount of capital: they need more cash on hand if they refuse to hedge. With a given capital structure and no coffee hedging, there's a possible coffee price X that would wipe them out. With hedging, they can place an offestting bet that coffee will rise; then they're indifferent to that price fluctuation. That's one less way for them to unexpectedly lose money, so their results in the aggregate would be less aggregate.

Plus, the buckets of money thing is a canard; Goldman has to earn a percentage on their capital, just like anyone else. If they have 10X as much equity as Starbucks, they need to earn 10X as much net profit to get the same return. And ceteris paribus, that means taking 10X as much risk.
Tcl And Cloud Computing Automation
Notice the blatant verbal blunder the reporter makes in the first few minutes, she says: "SOPA would allow the government and private companies to shut down websites enabling copyright infringement..."

Is there a word missing there perhaps? A word that we've become accustomed to in its routine presence in the media?

When members of the media talk about crimes the word "alleged" might as well be "uh" given the frequency it drops from their mouths. But not here.

Even a news outlet as savvy as Bloomberg is utterly clueless about the pitfalls of erasing the presumption of innocence and due process for the online world.
I had no problem with click-to-run enabled in Chrome.
Why is the internet so afraid of ethical behavior?

This is the problem with how these bills are named.

SOPA stands for "Stop Piracy Online Act". I.e., how can you be against something that stops theft?

It would have a completely different mainstream reaction if it were called the "Censor the Internet Act" or "Stop Free Speech Online Act".
Ruby strings are mutable, so you need to be able to free s->data without freeing the RString itself.
What do you mean 'hides' downvotes? You mean you aren't allowed to downvote, or that it doesn't tell you who downvoted you?

As for the former, downvoting is a privilege for those who earn it. The bar for insightfulness is deliberately high, and by putting it there, I believe the goal is to encourage everyone to strive for more meaningful commentary.

Looking through your comment history, it seems that you have some valuable opinions, otherwise I wouldn't be pointing any of this out. That said, it doesn't appear as though you put much effort in your posts either.

The hardest thing for me to learn about HN years ago was that it's often easier to just not say anything. I try to reserve my comments to where they either add value, or when my opinion was solicited. I'm not always able to avoid disagreement, but I try to always do so with respect and civility.

Simply put, it's a different place, and even though you shouldn't worry about, karma doesn't just drop in your lap. It's there to be earned. Earning karma takes effort. Effort in abiding the rules, effort in maintaining civility, effort in knowing whether your comment is worth posting or not.

HN is definitely not a groupthink, in my opinion, and some of the best chats on here are about arguments from high-profile users. In many of those arguments, there is resolution, where either one party has convinced the other that they are right, or they are able to come to terms with each others' opinions.

I think if you look at your comments in this thread honestly, with the criteria laid out here, you'll realize that they weren't exactly crafted with love. They aren't deserving of karma. Even if your opinion was unpopular, but presented well and thoughtfully, you'd see that you got karma in the process.

If anything though, karma is a long con. Don't worry about the karma on any given post, but try to keep the long-term average high.
That was one of the most rational discussions about the SOPA debate that I have seen. There is far too much vitriolic debate over the extremes of this type of legislation, it was nice to see you avoid that entirely. Your reference to Louis C.K. managed to subtlety communicate why SOPA is more about power than preventing piracy, a focal point that is often missed. Well done.
Yeah lots of people don't want to talk much about their work outside of work. I think it comes down to whether someone is passionate about it or it is just a pay check. Of course some could love their work but just get sick of talking about it.

As you say I am interested in how other industries solve problems, particular how technology is being applied to help (or hinder) their workflow. Often people who work in other industries just accept workflow processes for how they are and aren't really interested in thinking about how they could be improved. Not that someone working at a big company really has the power to enact these kinds of changes but they are interesting to discuss.
No I do not want to pay to read this article
This is similar to what they did on halloween. I wouldn't go so far as to say they were taking advantage of their customers, but one would think that UberCab users would only be willing to pay up to x20 the rate of a yellowcab when they're intoxicated in the middle of the night New Years Eve. Kind of like when you pay $15 for a beer at that hip after hours bar. If you're potential customers weren't drunk people out partying, it'd seem like an absurd pricing mechanism.
> we're talking about salespeople hired to scale up a proven business model, not entrepreneurs exploring different ways to make money.

I don't think it was intended, but that's a condescending statement. That's like saying "I'm looking for developers to just write some code, not find ways to do it better." A good salesperson should be looking for different ways to make money for their client, their company, and effectively (profit sharing) themselves.

Additionally, most sales managers are promoted sales people, not necessarily cunning business people. A "known process" rarely exists.

ps, I'm a big fan of your blog and contribution here, so please go easy on me.
It seems like the length is stored inside RString's RBasic->flags:

#define RSTRING_EMBED_LEN(str) \
(long)((RBASIC(str)->flags >> RSTRING_EMBED_LEN_SHIFT) & \
(RSTRING_EMBED_LEN_MASK >> RSTRING_EMBED_LEN_SHIFT))
I recall a Halloween night in SF where I and my SO waited over two hours and had to share a cab with two other partygoers who did not live particularly close to us. I would have killed (ok, maimed) for the chance to use Uber.
I think the one weakness was using the phrase 'user-generated website' out of context, because understanding what this means is really the key to getting people to understand the implications of the bill. I think most people probably have a vague idea of what user generated content is, but I'm not sure they would have connected all the dots from just this phrase, in terms of understanding why exactly the bill would cause sites like reddit, ebay, google, etc. to get shut down. Overall pretty good though, especially considering how insane live TV is.
Scams For The Christmas Season Is I Lost MY Wallet Please Help
You and probably everyone else the first time they encounter unicode / UTF-8. I wonder if it's because both terms start with 'U'.
Interesting comment on the article:

Jay Feldblum on 04 Jan 22:30:
Heroku currently injects configuration code into vendor/plugins to configure your application for the Heroku platform. Other deployment systems do the same. For example, Heroku injects a plugin to disable x_sendfile, and another plugin to set Rails.logger to log to $stdout.

If vendor/plugins is to be phased out, how should Heroku and other deployment systems inject configuration code? An initializer?
2012 is too good to be true
Sooner or later I think a RESTful HTTP or SPDY API will replace IMAP, and (for client-server comms at least) SMTP.

"replace" is a strong word. IMAP (version 4 that most things use these days) has not replaced POP3, but is a much-improved alternative that is well supported on the server-side and client-side. the reason it was able to gain such popularity was that the spec (RFC 2060) came out in 1996. how many different POP3 clients were even around back then? (according to wikipedia, outlook express 1.0 came out in 1996.) a lot of people at that time were probably still reading mbox files in pine through a telnet session or never e-mailed anyone outside of AOL.

The problem with email for most of its life was that there was little competition.

and now e-mail is so prevalent that making changes to the core protocols like SMTP, POP3, and IMAP is nearly impossible. we've been living with SMTP since 1982.

every provider that supports IMAP still has to support POP3: google, yahoo, AOL, MSN, and probably every university and ISP. SPDY will never completely replace HTTP, so sites using it will always have to run both servers in parallel, just like IPv6 will have to run alongside IPv4 for many years to come.

for a new protocol to replace SMTP or even augment it, it would have to be designed, refined, turned into an RFC, then probably debated some more, and then support would have to be added to all of the major MTAs like sendmail, postfix, qmail, and exchange, along with many firewalls, spam filters, and other in-between devices. clients need to support it, so that's outlook express, thunderbird, iphone, android, blackberry, and every other little device and program that speaks it. getting the manufacturers or maintainers to implement support for new things is hard enough, but actually getting all of their customers to switch or upgrade is an even bigger problem (see IE6, DNSSEC, etc.).

maybe it's the rate of change in things like HTML and CSS over the past few years that gives the false impression of being so easy to do.
Here's one source to the counter:

"An application for initial admission, change of status or extension of stay in E-3 classification, however, may not be denied solely on the basis of an approved request for permanent labor certification or a filed or approved immigrant visa preference petition."

That's straight from the horse's mouth: http://www.uscis.gov/files/pressrelease/E3PolGdnc_121505.pdf

So, you can enter the DV lottery, or apply for an employment based green card. But you still have to be able to prove you intend to return to your home country at your next E3 interview which is something you have to do anyway but I guess it would be a bit harder than if you had no GC applications.
Great job, it's really refreshing to hear this sort of interview :) Thanks for doing it.
Why Would a Newspaper Company Launch a Startup Incubator?
> Unfortunately for them, the coffee market fell soon after that leaving Starbucks locked in to paying higher prices than what you can get on the spot market.

Just spin it as FairTrade supreme version?
For most Britons the two words are homophonous, which makes it a great deal less odd.

(Americans also make typos which look odd to Britons, for example "mute point".)
> The 68k supported type tagging by having 24 bit addresses on a 32 bit machine.

Not quite: Having hardware support for type tagging means the machine knows that some bits are reserved for the tag and will therefore do arithmetic in a tag-preserving fashion. The 24-bit pointers in early m68k chips was just saving 8 bits worth of address lines.

The SPARC had tag support in hardware, in the form of special arithmetic opcodes. Further explanation:

http://compilers.iecc.com/comparch/article/91-04-088

> I'm not sure if allowing tagging was intentional when Motorola designed the 68k

Definitely not; it was a cost-saving measure, and a lot of software broke when a later processor made pointers fully 32-bit.

> but Mac OS did store flags in the upper bits of a pointer at some stage.

...and having a 32-bit-clean Finder was a big deal for a while because that meant it could run on the newer hardware.
Chris Williams and Matthew Podwysocki on the Javascript community (podcast)
Having an unusual profession can be an ice breaker to, as long as you don't expect the other person to really grasp what you are doing day to day. I guess you can just simplify it to say you make device x work when a button is pressed or something depending on what you are actually designing.
Thank you. reddit was started and sold from Somerville, MA though ;)

It's going to take much more than a few TV news appearances, though. It's on all of us to motivate our friends & family to educate their representatives about the horrors of these bills. We're on the right side of this, but it's going to take a concerted effort from all of us to win the day.

I may be getting another chance to return to Washington later this month to meet with decision-makers. I'll be back here to solicit feedback on my testimony.

https://plus.google.com/113164038788726940319/posts/ab9eFgmo...

Oh, and be sure to check out http://engineadvocacy.org
How much Do .NET Developers make?
http://bbssh.org for SSH (and, subsequently, vim) on a Blackberry.
I liked a lot all the puzzles because they were really challenging and I didn't expect this kind of questions.
Although, I found the theoretical questions better to prove how experienced I am on the some fields.
It was a quirk due to the number of address lines on the low end models, and it was a massive code smell, as 68020 and up could use 32 bit addresses so any code that did this would fail on machines with the faster CPUs.

Amiga Basic for example, wouldn't run on 68020 up because Microsoft used the upper 8 bits (amongst a whole slew of other horrible bugs and performance problems - it's probably the worst Microsoft product ever in terms of code quality)
One thing to remember when arguing about SOPA in a forum that encompasses a broader audience than Hacker News or Reddit is that not everyone is involved in the internet industry or even primarily a knowledge worker.

Think about how to appeal to someone who is retried or involved in managing a bakery or who runs a flower shop. We don't want to come off as a bunch of elitist nerds. We want them to understand that we're concerned about the future of innovation in this country and the preservation of free speech. We should focus on explaining how SOPA wildly oversteps the bounds of reasonable measures to prevent piracy and causes an enormous amount of collateral damage to the rest of the economy and innovation.

The store analogy was a pretty good start, IMHO.
I know not all accelerators work this way, but some are retroactive for business closed in the period. For example:

25% of 500 = $125 vs 15% of 499 = $75

But in other instances, you're right, and typically the salesperson knows exactly which deal matters the most.
This is key. I solved a problem the other day and a non-programmer co-worker asked me how I knew the answer. I had to explain to him that I didn't know the answer and through research, thinking about the problem, and some good old trial and error I found the answer.

I think most people today think school is suppose to teach them F(x) so that they can just go out in the world and apply F(X) over and over and make a living. They are missing the point that they need to be creating F(x), G(x), etc...
Great question. And fwiw, we love Express too! After building a number of Express applications myself, I quite often ran into organizational issues (such is the loosey goosey way of Sinatra). Matador takes more of a Rails approach to organizing your code; of course, without all the extra cruft that comes with Rails.

We still tack on Express requests and responses onto your controller instances.

Most of all, the router -> controller mapping with request filtering (middleware-like) is where Matador comes in most useful. We have other features we'd like to add, especially in the scaffolding layer, but figured we'd open source early and get developer feedback.

Thanks!
Popularity and accessibility itself. Real, normal people have heard of, and use, Github.
Great job with the Louis CK example, highlighting the solution being innovation not castration. Might be good to add how hysterical the music industry was with piracy a few years ago and how the problem was solved legitametly by the innovation provided by Apple's iTunes store.
Brilliant, you can directly go to registration here:

https://www.facebook.com/hackercup/register
Yeah, 1 year work experience > 1 degree IMO
Created Gift Lizard (http://www.giftlizard.com) a tag based gift search/discovery site.
I like both of those. A lot.
111 Motivational Business Quotes
You could take a cab instead of uber and it would be 1/2 as much. Unfortunately, the cabs in sf are crap and the companies run by assholes. I broke an ankle, was on crutches for 6 months, and took cabs daily to get to and from work. Every morning I called the same cab company -- first desoto then yellow. An honest operator once admitted they simply lie about when the cabs will come, and both services randomly gave me > 4 hour waits, from mission at valencia / 23rd, one of the population centers. Lying each and every time I called to ask where my bloody cab was. If they treat a daily customer like that, imagine how they treat randoms.

So what you're really paying for with uber is to get someone who isn't an asshole or a moron who will actually come when they say they will. Alternately, you could get up 3 hours earlier and take a taxi, praying they'd actually come, stressed out the whole time about missing your flight, to save $30.
To be fair to Alexis, this was for BloombergTV so I think his emphasis on the creation of wealth (or lack thereof) and the economic impact of SOPA was appropriate.

It's true indeed that this wouldn't be helpful for your Uncle Art.
The argument that a company might not have started if this law were in effect isn't a valid one, as the fact that a company exists in no way has an impact on whether or not something is good or bad.

Otherwise, I like how you mentioned PIPA at the beginning as well - too many people are forgetting what else is going on behind SOPA.
Agreed. The shoplifting analogy isn't even necessary, just an accurate depiction of what is so scary: "If just one user uploads copyright material to youtube, SOPA allows the government to shut down all of youtube. Even if youtube removes the material as quickly as possible."
Given enough money, you can outsource the error function to mechanical turk. Or to go more meta (and possibly cheaper): Make designing a good error function part of a meta GA-run, and let those functions be judged by comparing their judgements with human judgements.
Programming is as much an art as a science.

It's as much the ability to find the dots as it is being able to connect the dots to make a usable picture.

I think some of the more basic, entry level, spec-based maybe development could become available for the masses, but until we do a better job of training people to engage and develop both heir creative artist and creative scientist, I'm not sure.
Another analogy: "If someone gets pulled over for speeding in their Ford Mustang, Ford is liable for their illegal behavior"
Doesn't seem to have too many updates in the last few weeks, but generally has good content - http://thestartupfoundry.com/
I considered answering that question in my post above, but I thought I'd wait for someone to ask :).

The "in-person" requirement is dropped for the Visa Waiver Program, which applies if you're from a "nice" nation and you want to stay no more than three months and you don't want to work or study and you don't have a criminal record (in any country) and you're not on any secret U.S. lists of "interesting" people.
I definitely understand. I'm just looking at it from a purely economical perspective. Sure, as the mass's technical prowess goes up, my ability to create cool things also goes up, but as the mass's technical prowess goes up, the earning potential in programming goes down.

Any time a resource becomes less scarce, it's value drops.
How many of you tried kickstarter for raising money
Did you find it useful? Did your attorney freaked out? Raised money for your tech project?
Equity would get complicated, quickly. Profit sharing seems to be an easier route.

I'm not sure I agree with sales being in product development. You run the risk of having a sales person champion an idea as the greatest thing on earth, only to find out the market size is exactly 1. The salesperson should, however, be concerned with the customer's satisfaction long after the deal is signed.
Just shared with my friends. looking forward to a good new year
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‘Time cloak’ hid event in experiment, physicists say