skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a great point. I know it sounds shallow but its a really really good point.

This is the reason that even though lots of shops think they are agile, in essence their processes are really just granular waterfall.

I had one pm who wouldnt know what "agile" was if you asked him but he ran his product more agile than I've seen anyone else do.

We would sit every 3 days, with his excel sheet. He would then pick the next important task to do. No priortities, no color coding, no gantt chart - just linear list of what needs to be done and what could be done in the next week.

He stored the things we couldnt do on a "backlog" excel sheet.

Every meeting we would pull out the main excel sheet and he would decide whether he needed something brand new to be built or something from his "backlog" excel sheet. I never had to look at the backlog at all.

We would keep releasing the software weekly and delivering features. It was the best business relationship I've ever had in my life.
Nothing in that video invalidates the patent in question. If you're going to claim that the patent is bogus, you should read the patent first, understand what is actually being claimed, and then if you want to show prior art, specifically show which claims are being undermined.

Near as I can tell, you guys think that anything that vaguely resembles the representation of what the patent covers (which usually isn't correct in the first place-- Amazon didn't patent a "one click" at all) -- counts as prior art. Someone once told me that the movie 2001 is prior art! (If you know anything about patents, you know that a movie can never be prior art, except maybe about a movie technique. A movie is a fictional representation of an idea, not an invention that has been reduced to practice.)
What does "caught playing pirated games on Steam" even mean? Cracked versions of Steam games typically have the Steam portion stripped out, so one would not play them "on Steam" at all.
What else do you want to know? This is a multi-part series so I can go into more detail.
See also an early scheme by Microsoft. "The Tree of Evil Bears Bitter Fruit" - there are differing versions of what was actually happening.

(http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=OC8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA8&#...)
Mac Software Bundle | Apple Software Download | Mac SuperBundle
Slick Web Tool to Compare Real-Life Sizes of Smartphones
Tim Berners-Lee Confirms The Exact Location Where the Web Was Invented: France
How does your startup find early adopters?
I was wondering what strategies you guys use to find early adopters. How does the process usually go for you?
The inventor of HitTail is very sharp - we're in touch every week or two as he continues to have insights into this space.
Do the faxes get sent straight to a computer or printed out? If the former, I wouldn't expect anyone to care, but the latter, en masse, could surely cause some disruption. No?
Right, Apple has taken actions that are clearly in the consumers best interests, and you're choosing to see it in a light which allows you to characterize Apple as evil. That's the facts, Jack.
First open source Enyo app jumping to other platforms
I'm a new arrival in the tech industry; used to work in the content industry. I have NO love for corporations - none at all - it's just that I have really gotten to know the people on both sides and find it frustrating that the fight ends up being about which sides corporations can win - not how we can all win. I might add, as an aside, that we've seen with Google's recent turn that no corporation can be trusted to 'not be evil'.

I would certainly agree that the people that make up the content side of the tech industry - programmers, devs, designers, etc . - really do take open and shared contribution seriously, to an impressive extent.

But that's true in Hollywood too - forget about the business structure - the real work happens across thousands of small disparate shops with groups of people working together on the things they love. This is true from development all the way to post-production. It's an open and creative environment.

I do see a clear way that copyright can be reformed to create a win-win scenario. It's a lengthy idea and if I can find the time to put it on paper, I'll happily post it here.
Speech recognition has been displacing Indian call centers for 10+ years. Tellme Networks and Nuance have been leading this space... Siri has done nothing in the call center sector.
They are not more important; without the sounds there wouldn't be the intervals of silence.
U.S. Dept of Labor Predicts Decline in Programming Jobs
Birdman Bets $5 Million on Super Bowl
Chart: Who Pays The Most In Silicon Valley
For those who are curious:

£31.80 in 1872 corresponds to about £227,995.08 in 2009.[1] Which is about £242,587.00 in December 2011, or €125.29.[2]
As of today, €125.29 is about $162.15.[3]

1. http://www.cracantu.it/servizi/on_line/vari/valorelira.php

2. http://rivaluta.istat.it/Rivaluta/

3. http://www.x-rates.com/calculator.html
I wouldn't say it's a BIG red flag, because it's certainly the case that there are good engineers out there who don't have an online presence for various reasons, and excluding them for this prima facie reason seems like a poor practice.

I don't think it's unreasonable to ask everyone to submit a code sample, and in fact I think it's a stellar idea. Provided that you make sure that they actually wrote the code and didn't appropriate it somehow, it's a really good way to ensure that they know what they say they know. However, I wouldn't hold it against anyone if they didn't have something prepared. I'd just tell them to write a relatively simple app and submit it in a relatively short timeframe (maybe a week).

That said, I'd make sure that if you're looking for something in particular, you mention it when you ask for a sample. I've been in interviews where they specifically asked for a code sample that ignored persistence and display, and later been asked to give a sample that showed I knew SQL and a UI technology. That was frustrating.
Minimalist Multi-Touch Glass Keyboard & Mouse
Interesting idea with the tutorial walk-through... hadn't thought of that.
The Soviet Union killed 100m of its own citizens. Now what doesn't look so bad?
21 Pieces of Start-Up Advice from a Bike Racing Entrepreneur
J. C. Penney's Transformation Plans Revealed
Interesting, I feel like HitTail's previous condition is a bit like a site of mine that has kind of been accumulating technical debt for a while: http://bitbuffet.com/

There are users, they pay my rent, they use the service. Its just... flat. A few bugs, various problems not worth the effort to rectify as a quick 1 minute Django admin tweak solves the problem.

Maybe its time to finally visit Flippa or suck it up and revamp the damn thing, any advice on going down this route?
Intercom lands $1M
Hacking menggunakan Google Chrome ~ ZakiR HackeR
To be clear, I'm not suggesting they need to have an online presence at all. I'm just talking sample code. They can email a zip file even.

Seems like good practice to specify UI/non-ui. I'll keep that in mind. At this point, I'm just asking for any code as a basic sanity check before we meet up. Deeper dives could come later...
I get an antivurus warning on the demo page:

HTML/Crypted.Gen
Without the silence, you wouldn't have a melody.

We can go on discussing about how painting is about adding to a canvas, while sculpting is about taking away the parts you don't need.

Such discussions are pointless.
Not directly. Most studies look at it as automation making up for declining birth rates. There are a lot of studies that say birth rates go down with increased education, surplus goods and increased leisure time so it might be a chicken and egg thing.
Your "results oriented" is what everyone else means by "declarative". It is true that functional and logic programming are not fully declarative because you end up having to worry about the way your declarations will be evaluated, but the same issue will apply to your language. That's what you swept under the rug in your remark along the lines of "if we're careful what constraints we choose, we can get a good running time."
Thanks for the tips! Will get the modern perl book and the new camel book when the new edition is published!

=)
That is my idea. Thanks! =)
Also this falls into the "pie fallacy" of view of wealth. Total wealth in the world is not a static function that doesn't change overtime. If people decide to exchange some of their wealth and "time" to make them feel happy and satisfied and just their state of happiness make them produce more stuffs/services/quality of life because they are much happier than they were before exchange. Is that a negative thing?
Expiring copyright and open-sourcing are not the same thing - but they can have the same result. That's a point I think tech-people don't think about enough. If my business is the creative work I've done, what right does an expiring copyright have to put me out of business? By placing my work in the public domain?

Open-sourcing code - though different from an expiring copyright - would create the same result in a business based on the ownership and public non-availability of that code.

Regarding the 'simple contract': contracts mean very little - leverage means everything. Granting very short-term copyrights removes all leverage from the owner of the work. His commercialization window grows very small and he is dependent on organized outside entities to 'make it happen' for him.

Patent coverage isn't even as short as a ten-year term mentioned in the OP. And patents are usually produced by it integrated firms that already have a huge commercialization apparatus running 24/7.
Rational people always seem like religious zealots to religious zealots like you.

The sad thing is, for the past two decades, Apple customers have been just sitting there doing their thing, happy with their products.

Yet whenever Apple is mentioned, the religious zealots come out of the wood work to bash Apple and to bash these people.

This thread is a good example, in fact HN is overrun with threads whose sole purpose is to bash Apple, because HN is overrun with religious zealots who hate Apple.

When Apple was the small fry, this was really curious. I mean, what was it about Apple that caused religious zealots -- who are not Apple customers-- to seek out Apple customers and bash them? Why feel so threatened that a company near bankruptcy dares to make something different?

Finally I came to understand why. The reason is that deep down, you know Apple products are better. IF you didn't' think that, why would you be threatened by people who think different?

Now that Apple is successful-- because its products are better-- the bashing has changed from "Apple's nothing they have %2 market share!" (When they actually had %25 market share in PCs) to "Apple's evil! They want to control everything, they're worse than Microsoft!" (which is kinda hilarious coming from google loving zealots-- google has betrayed people's trust, google is genuinely evil, while Apple has never cheated or lied to anyone that I'm aware of.)

And of course, because you're completely out of your mind irrational with hatred, you can't accept the fact that it is you who has a problem-- you who is seeking out peaceful apple customers minding their own business.

No, you must project your pathology onto them, and start calling them "cultists" and "religious zealots" and all manner of pejoratives like that.

Because, lying about Apple products, bashing Apple the company, spiting on Steve Jobs' grave-- these are not enough. No, you must attack the people who dared to choose to be customers of Apple as well.

All those people you think are religious zealots-- if you look at what they say, and try real hard to be honest about it-- you'll recognize that all they're doing is correcting myths, misinformation and outright lies. That's it.

You don't see us posting threads to HN for the sole purpose of bashing google or linux zealots.
There's been a couple of these types of articles on here lately. All of them break down into "Programming is broken because I can't just say to a computer what I want and have it created for me". We have to specify the process gets something done because it takes a hell of a lot of smarts to do this. Even things that seem very easy and straightforward to say out loud are filled with unknowns, assumptions and inconsistencies. Maybe all these "programmers" can stop whining about how programming is broken when we've created an AI that will understand what they want and just write the program for them. And as for constraint satisfaction programming - if you've ever actually programmed in prolog you'd realize that properly defining the problem such that you get a proper answer back is a hell of a lot of work. Prolog has it's place, but if it saved a huge amount of work and was easy to use people would be using it more often.
time to switch to Bing
"Clearly" claim isn't convincing here. Apple says those bans are in consumers interest. Others say they are really in Apple's interest. You can probably find arguments for both. I personally see it as a second case, because it's against me as a consumer who wants to use other browsers for example.
If I intercepted the message...

I would try to change the location in the key to use. Especially to one that had already been used.

I would try to replace the message, salt, and hash entirely.

I would try to fiddle bits.

I would compile all of the messages, looking for when the pad had been re-used.

I would try to decipher messages, I would try to corrupt messages, I would try to inject my own messages, I would try to use a denial-of-service to prevent you from communicating at all, I would try to force you to consume your entire key to transmit your first message. I would re-transmit old messages, and see how you behaved. I would send cleartext messages telling you that the sender had been abducted, and that you couldn't trust any further messages, sending it as a "trusted associate," or sister, or parent. I would try to gain physical access to the hard drive, and copy it. Having gained access, I could inject all of my own messages, and deny you the ability to communicate at all.

I really, honestly, don't think that my proposed system is any more or less secure than any communication system that would rely upon quantum entanglement to deliver a supposedly secure keystream to both ends.

But it would cost many orders of magnitude less.
All other facts aside, I sort of assume google analyzes their statistics to find out what works and what doesn't... whether an extra quarter second of search results matter or not, and so on.

I don't like the confusing mess it's become either... I use a bunch of products, and I kept them compartmentalized for my reasons, mostly just simplicity. Now it's this big mess that I could go ranting about.....

That said - just because people say they don't/won't like something doesn't mean it won't be liked/loved, and used by everyone. The end users actions speak louder than their words, and on the internet, this is easy to watch.

As a 20 year veteran of the internet and all that crap? Sure.
Am I frustrated by Google's current direction? Yup...

Will I stop using it? I haven't yet - we'll see, but if I do, it will only be because I naturally move to something else because google stops being as useful.... and that's how the majority of people react to things.
(Then I wonder, if I find it confusing, how will my mom find it?)
Good Guy Angel Investor
And when you want to learn more about snakes or her more about programming, it will be that much harder to get good results because google's bias will be working against you.

It also increases the effect of grouping people into only social groups of the same philosophy and reducing exposure to other points of view. Not good for society. So even if I could fix it for myself, it is bad in general.
Was I blaming Apple? No. I was just pointing out that from a consumer perspective, Apple have got all bases covered and every decision is pretty cleverly put together. I admire it, but the questioner seemed not to see it that far hence I made the point.

HNers of course are going to find hacks and work-arounds to my dilemma which is not exactly end-of-the-world anyway.
Yes, I think many people are under the mistaken impression that the upvote/downvote buttons are functionally symmetrical, which is understandable given that they are presented as visually symmetrical. But upvoting serves to avoid redundant 'I agree.' posts, while if users downvote to disagree, it robs the discussion of valuable content (i.e., why they disagree). It would help if the UI were modified to signal this asymmetry.
Or you could use Zemanta: http://www.zemanta.com/
Google Image Search indexes Ookaboo, not the other way around.

All of the images were published under a public domain or creative commons image elsewhere; there is a small probability that this information is incorrect, in which case we remove images as per DMCA
Privoxy works everywhere a proxy will, and can use Adblock filter lists.
Traffic graph looks impressive:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/hittail.com/
USPS needs to not define success as getting more mail sent. The only mail I receive is junk mail, and things from the government.

If I could turn my mailbox off, I would.
Unless pirate players have a significant negative effect on the gameplay experience, which doesn't seem to be the case from what I can see for this game in particular, World Of Goo's makers do not care how many people pirate their game, either in absolute terms or as a percentage. All that really matters is the absolute number of legitimate sales.
Ask HN: Hiring interns. Tips, recos?
For the first time ever, I'm looking to hire summer interns for my startup. What tips, practices, suggestions would you recommend from the perspective of interviewing interns?
I feel like I was just rick rolled.

Please prefix the pundit's name to these links.

As for this particular pundit, he lost me at "invade Iraq". After claiming the earth is flat, you'd think people would have learned to ignore this asshat.
I've always thought photoshop was made intentionally easy to pirate, as an unfair competitive advantage to keep other companies out of the market (companies and serious professionals buy it--everyone else pirates it).

CS5 didn't even require a crack, you just have install the trial version with a fake serial and edit your hosts file to stop it calling home.
How Thoughtful Blog Comments Can Kick Ass (and build real links)
Yeah but social relevance is soon becoming a big part of web relevance and that stuff will be sorted with time when a balance is achieved between social and other signals, the concept is sound it will just have to be subject to iteration to get it right. Until then you can use the toggle to ignore the social stuff (the globe button).
Parse now allows file upload via their REST API
read the comment that started this thread.

the guy has a file that is pure garbage. not encrypted.

the law officers THINK it's encrypted. the judge orders him to give the key. ...there's no key. it's honestly garbage data.

That's what make encryption special. It were a safe, the police could crack it open somehow. with encryption, they can just claim it's too advanced to be cracked and that will be treated like you are lying.
I'm tired of seeing these kinds of socialist comments on HN.

Apple has done far more to make the world a better place than any corporation I've ever heard of. Far more than any government in history ever has. Far more than any charity every has or ever could.

Capitalism benefits people. Every dollar in profit Apple puts in the bank is represented by thousands of dollars of improvement they've done to people's lives.

Capitalism is the cure to poverty-- when socialism is tried the countries quickly become hellholes. When capitalism is allowed-- as it was in the US in the past-- the country went from 3rd world to 1st world in a couple generations. India doubled the standard of living of over a billion people in 20 years simply by reducing red tape, allowing a little more capitalism. China has done even better on that score.

Apple could burn all its money in a big old bonfire, and it still would have had a more positive impact on the world than Bill Gates charities ever will. (In fact, I suspect Bill Gates charity work is actually making people's lives worse due to misallocation and undermining economies in those regions, combined with bad economics, but I haven't studied it closely enough to be sure.)
However, in the context of discussing this article, they also used the subheader "faster than the speed of light" for a paragraph describing how the physicists accelerated the mirror... and didn't go faster than the speed of light.

So it's kinda a poorly written article in general :)
The DVD is dead. USB flash drive restores are here.
We are relying entirely on engagement analytics at this point, focused mostly on social media and organic search - and then facilitating outreach to get feedback from users.
All the rent control in the world doesn't mean a thing if a newcomer to SF can't actually rent such a low-priced unit. Here you go:

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/

Show me where the rent-controlled units I can get are.

They don't exist, because whatever ones are out there are either crappy enough to more-than-make up for their cheapness, or snapped up by well-connected people.

(Btw, love the URL -- at a glance it reads as stfu, lol.)
Honestly my dilemma is a non-issue. As I said above I was making the point from a consumer perspective. I'm too far down the line with the book in this version anyways.