skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It has to be novel (though that's in the eye of the beholder), non-obvious (subjective), and it has to be useful for something (again, subjective).

Patents are examined by people who are educated, but not necessarily business-minded. They get paid the same whether they grant every patent or grant no patent, but they catch hell when they grant a patent that shouldn't have gotten through, so this puts them on the conservative side.

I'd guess the non-patents you cited were on the "obviousness" grounds, though I'd posit that up until 5 years ago it was more a matter of getting a lax examiner and being good at negotiating than how obvious such things were or not.

Patents aren't as ironclad as some would like, anyway. Even if they had gotten those patents, a judge with the equivalent of a 1950's high school education would be making the decision on their technical merit, and whether X infringes upon Y. Good stuff gets struck down and bad stuff stays up all the time.

While waving your patents in front of the competition in order to get them to back down, sometimes it's like you have the US army behind you, and sometimes it's like you have the salvation army behind you, in terms of how much threat your patents actually pose from a legal perspective.
I didn't realize solr had clustering. One difference might be the ability to pass in scoring, include, and dynamic tagging functions at clustering time. Does carrot cluster on arbitrary document fields?
Doh! Not an instance of folly :(
All the usual ones. You could very well hose your image. The nice thing, though, is that you could just kill your process, restart the image, and recover all of your code changes.

You could also have a Smalltalk "Process" (or green thread) starve the other ones. Lots of Smalltalks are single-threaded. VisualWorks is too, but has tricks for calling out to DLLs with a separate thread.
There were several other things the author mentioned--though I will admit I found that first part of the first reason somewhat silly.

The thing is, you really ought to expose yourself and at least play around in other languages. No language (except, perhaps, APL, assembly, Forth, Lisp, or Prolog [not that there exists a standard variant of the last two]) is perfect.

Every language does some things really well, other things really poorly, and muddles through the rest. Being familiar with other helps you know when your language of choice might need to call out to something better suited to your problem domain.
> Oracle isn't losing money because of Android as far as I am concerned. There might be profit lost due to licensing

From an Oracle shareholder's point of view (which I'm not), lost licensing fees == losing money.
I know a few people who are concerned about the lack of men in primary education (UK - ages 4 to 11) or in nursing and other work.
YC doesn't care about how much revenue you are bringing in, they care about how big you can get. They probably didn't feel the idea could get that big (scale)... from their perspective.
Nice stuff, thanks for the round up, this vast amount of packages coming out get out of hand or go by unnoticed easily. Got some work coming up that I may well do with node, so. Thanks.
not the site I was thinking of but still cool ;)
I love it. It's all Dustin Curtis' doing and design. http://dcurt.is/. He created the SVBTL blog network I'm a part of.
I wish website developers would stop using UA sniffing. WTH do you care whether it's a Tablet or a phone? Don't you frecking care for the resolution instead?

What the heck are you going to do on a Galaxy Note? Are you serving the same site on a Wildfire S as you are serving a Galaxy Nexus?

9 times out of 10, whenever a webdev tries to be "smart" and serves up a mobile version of a website, I don't want it because it's a crippled, badly working knockoff of the real thing. Chrome and Firefox on Android are real browsers and can display the full site, so stop feeding them this crap.

I heard there's a room in hell where you are forced to use various Android browsers on various mobile devices all day.
Apple Job Posting Hints At 3D Maps In iOS
Retro-anniversaries for OS/2 and Windows 3.1
Do there exist heuristics for decentralized traffic handling that this is able to support, but cannot be implemented through traditional approaches?
Thanks! I didn't realize that exchanges need to route orders to any other exchange with a better published price. That's a great rule. I assume that most ATS's are located within a short distance of each other.

Really helpful post. Thanks for the information.
He's using it as a litmus test. When people are in fast-paced or stressful situations on the job, the mental "PC filter" can begin to break down, and people may say things they wouldn't have. You can condemn this, but it can happen to the best of us. When it does, it's nice to have a group of people whom the occasional uncouth or unthinking comment rolls off their back like water on ducks.
I think Google+ are doing the right thing by not allowing write access yet. Facebook has taught us that. The main reason I've seen people wanting write access is so the can "automatically post to G+ when they post to twitter or facebook" - um, no thanks.

However, I would like to see them improve their API by supporting some realtime notifications like PubSubHubBub (for stream items and comments).

For purely selfish reasons, I'd like to see them consider allowing write access to comments.

If you're interested in adding your vote to allowing write access, join the others here http://code.google.com/p/google-plus-platform/issues/detail?...
I've never understood this logic.

We fear bureaucracies, if they became efficient, would become efficiently brutal and callous. We don't want them to become good at being brutal and callous. Therefore we should fight against efficient bureaucracies in favor of brutal and callous inefficient bureaucracies. And if their inefficiencies make them seem brutal and callous, that's just all the evidence to know that making them more efficient would lead to even more brutality and callousness.
If nursing and primary education were the glamorous professions where the next generation of billionaires were coming from, there might be more clamoring.
Great idea, great post! Thanks.
Ellison doesn't seem to know a lot these days (and this isn't just snark): his moves to purchase then effectively lose influence over various large aspects of the Sun assets (Jenkins, Open Office, MySQL), his vacillation on whether NoSQL is a threat or not, and this ever churning battle with Google over Java...just shows a very unfocused leadership at the helm.
Maybe they should allow api-posting to pages, and not to users.
Because all the non-technical common users have flooded into g+ and its uncluttered stream.
The worst case scenario is that the court finds, and it is upheld on appeal, that you can copyright the names of API calls, the number of arguments to those API calls, and the types associated with those arguments.

In that scenario Novell would own the copyrights to things like read(int fd, char *buf, int size); and could sue you if you used them without compensation to Novell.

Now that would be hugely disruptive and counter to a lot of existing case law in adjacent areas, perhaps the most directly applicable are Memorex vs IBM in the 70's with regard to making 'plug compatible' storage devices. Memorex made a compatible "DASD" (Direct Access Storage Devices, otherwise known as a hard disk) product and sold it to people who had IBM mainframes. IBM sued, Memorex counter sued, eventually Memorex prevailed and removed the threat of litigation over people whole made 'third party' add-ons.

I don't think this case will try to contravene that case law but you did ask for the 'worst case' :-)
there are actually large national and industry-wide efforts to recruit men into nursing. and, in fact, being a male nurse is a huge boon to one's career. though men are only 6% of the nursing population, far more of them have advanced certifications. we'll probably disagree about the reasons for this, but the result is they are more desirable and paid more.

maybe the female nurses you know are happy to have a job where their opinions are respected by their peers. have you actually asked them or are you just assuming because they've never discussed it with you?
"Summarising from Wikipedia:
Trapezoid: A quadrilateral with no sides parallel."

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapezoid
Oracle pondered buying RIM, Palm in phone move-CEO
I like it. But I have never found a way to monetize what I do. So I am skeptical. Can you make money doing something that adds real value? I would like to think so but my life choices have left me deeply in debt, jobless, homeless and trying to file bankruptcy. No, I don't think I did anything wrong. Like most U.S. bankruptcies, my situation is rooted in expensive health problems. But, at the same time, trying to share what worked for me has brought me personal attacks, not money. Next month my web hosting expires. I am searching my soul, trying to decide what to do. I am very much leaning towards wiping my internet slate clean, not bothering to try to find a means to back it up, and looking for a means to make money rather than continuing to try to make the world a better place.

Best of luck to this company. I hope their ideals pay off for them. My current skepticism is very much a personal matter and not intended as raining on their parade.
World mapped according to Wikipedia articles in 7 different languages
Did he read the "Lighten Up" article that he himself linked to? Because it does a great job explaining why "lighten up" is an awful and often offensive response to sexism in the workplace.

We should always strive to remove sexism/racism/whatever-ism from our lives. Even if it's a little bothersome that you shouldn't be calling people "retarded" (or "gay" or "n-----").
Rejected, got some demo hits, but the demo needs a bit more work. Is it worth sprucing it up and applying again next year?
I would really like to know the answer to this too, I am equally confused by the global write-lock.
I have heard stories of male nurses being repeatedly passed over for promotions. Maybe your closing question was meant to be rhetorical, but the answer just might be "yes".
Apple’s Dream of Appliance Computing is Unobtainable
... I think there's a fine line between newsworthy-news and "here's the link to buy the watch!" that they would rather not cross, and thus err on the side of caution.
3Crowd now XDN Inc, launching Federated CDN
Rejected 2 years ago for what some other guys in Cali launched as Gigwalk last May. I had a PhD and a CS guy on my team (albeit none of us were in the same city). I'm an information professional with a background in media production and ed tech. So since GW launched I've been watching closely and thinking about pivoting only slightly to something aimed at professional journalists, photographers and videographers, worldwide, who want to be able to charge their regular rates and have the option of being completely anonymous.
Warren Buffett has stage 1 prostate cancer
Thanks. Gave me a much better understanding. Now, I want to try it. How does Clojure compare to ClojureScript?
That's more R&D than part of the day-to-day engineering process, though.

Anything that's going to be secret sauce is going to need a lot of prototyping and experimentation, and might not even yield usable results. Oftentimes, it isn't even possible to make an estimate as to the complexity of what it is you are building -- all you can do is timebox it.

Mixing that in with normal day-to-day development feels, to my brain, like mixing concerns.

Once those prototypes and experiments start to produce tangible benefits, then incorporating them just becomes another story in the sprint.
In education at least, this is usually due to the desire to include strong male role models in childrens' lives, not in a mission for equality.
How is it that Google (et al) does not just fall back on the GPL-licensed OpenJDK? I understand that Oracle has a lot of money to burn on lawyers and other forms of harassment, but why does it seem that the common wisdom (not just this case, but the whole Java community seems generally scared of Oracle) is to completely ignore the generally accepted legal grants of this one specific GPL-licensed project?
This person is ostensibly is in favor of gender equality, but he believes that the problem has been overstated and it will simply solve itself. He believes that the world has become more gender-equal in the past decades not because of the relentless struggle of radical feminists, but because somehow men decided to become more civilized. Power struggles are a concept that's alien to him. He's too young to know about a society just a few decades ago in which women weren't able to go to the banks and receive loans without their husbands' permission. He doesn't realize that Mad Men really takes place in our 60s, that is, two generations ago. He hasn't spent enough time trying to picture how it'd be like to be 1 woman in the company of 10 "brogrammers". He doesn't understand that the "brogrammers" are more likely to hire more "brogrammers" until some exogenous force (like Etsy's initiative) fights against that.

In the end, I think that he doesn't believe that women's oppression is real. It reminds me of that Kurt Vonnegut letter that was in the front page a few weeks ago. And also of the following (taken from a talk by David Graeber):

"Women are always expected to imagine what things look like from a male point of view. Men are almost never expected to reciprocate. So deeply internalized is this pattern of behavior that many men react to the suggestion that they might do otherwise as if it were an act of violence in itself. A popular exercise among High School creative writing teachers in America, for example, is to ask students to imagining they have been transformed, for a day, into someone of the opposite sex, and describe what that day might be like. The results, apparently, are uncannily uniform. The girls all write long and detailed essays that clearly show they have spent a great deal of time thinking about the subject. Half of the boys usually refuse to write the essay entirely. Those who do make it clear they have not the slightest conception what being a teenage girl might be like, and deeply resent having to think about it."
That's useful to know - thanks!
Alternatively, it's good to have people who won't resort to being offensive in tough situations.

I can't think I've ever been so stressed out I started using racial or sexist slurs.
This is a problem. The page you reference says:

... and as a trapezium in English outside North America

In the post I say:

I will here use the British English versions.

Since most of my readership is in the UK I decided to use the British English versions, so I am translating for the purpose of consistency.

I'll add a note to that effect to try to clarify.
I use Tweetdeck (on my phone) and Rockmelt (on desktop) to post to Facebook and Twitter. I don't always post to both at the same time but when I want to... it is easy. I just need to select where it goes before I send it. I would very much LOVE to include G+ in this scenario but I cannot. In the beginning I was really trying to give G+ the shot it deserved. I was making the extra effort to make common posts in my G+ app, too. I even went a couple days where I only posted stuff to G+. But it was too early. Now I check in on my G+ stream maybe once a week to catch up with stuff from a few friends that have made the full jump and I rarely post anything. I would really like an app that can post via an API. I would certainly use G+ more.

On a side note, I kind of like what G+ was thinking with the Circles concept as a way of filtering but I don't really like it in practice... or maybe it was just how my friends were using it. Most of the people I know on G+ created Circles and used them like you might use tags in a blog post. A post from a Mac person about a cool photo app or feature they found in the latest iOS might be visible only to people in their "Mac-heads", "Photog" and "iOS" circles. I'm not a Photog or a Mac/iOS person but still might be interested in content of that nature. I can understand having Circles like "Coworkers" and "Bible Study Group" where there might be discussions that should be kept private. But using Circles like tagging seems excessively exclusionary when it is not done for privacy reason. While I appreciate the sentiment of people not wanting to bore me with stuff I may not be interested in, I think it made the "share ALL the things" pendulum swing too far the other way. (just my opinion)
Aren't they losing money every time someone downloads desktop Java SE for free then?
If you follow the "forced to rename his opensource project" link[1] you'll find that the developer wasn't forced to rename anything.

He had an IM conversation with a female developer friend and concluded: "The truth is that I really do want to encourage women in tech, and a project like testosterone does not do that."

[1] - https://github.com/whit537/assertEquals/blob/master/ANNOUNCE...
I really like comment pages like this one - where all seriousness is lifted for a second. I know, its HN. This shouldn't have happened. Still, I would even say its _healthy_ that we have some of these.
This used to be a big problem, but now there is this brand new feature called semicolon maps. You should check it out.
So the message is pretty clear. No one should ever again build anything on top of Java.
Stop thinking like an engineer and think like a non-technical common user.

Being a non-technical common user doesn't mean you don't need better filters; it means the service needs to make it easier for you to explain to it what you do and don't want to see. You don't even have to expose the word "filter" to the non-technical people, but the filters need to be there conceptually, nonetheless.

Note that I'm not saying this is easy... I'm saying this is the challenge that G+, Facebook, Twitter, etc. need to take on and solve. As opposed to the challenge of "how do we not let people post stuff." That's easy, and it's a cop-out.
Sorry, "literally no equipment," except the openflow stuff? Which shipped some time back.
How about: "The Fandalism Bundle"

Just like all those "indie game and app bundle" sites, but you source the goodies from your musical userbase. It could be anything, but enough to be of "value" for say 10 bucks, or $25, or $50 or whatever, i.e. 10 mp3s, 2 cds, 1 t-shirt, 25 stickers -- whatever, just start small and built it up in future bundle "events".

edit: and of course, you take a cut.
We are already having them:
1. go here: http://amber-lang.net/
2. click "Open Browser"
3. start having nerdgasms
> That's no reason to accept unacceptable behaviour. We should be working to make things better for everyone. We should be helping people who have good contributions. Saying that startups are stressful becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What is unacceptable to you is likely completely acceptable to a different group of people, especially when we are talking about workplace environments.

Phrased another way, why should a small, committed group of people who get along very well with a particular workplace culture be forced to change it and shunned by 'the community', not because they are actually doing anything illegal or actively putting up barriers to entry for a certain group of people, but because someone, somewhere, in some sort of underrepresented group might not like the culture?
Elegant? Maybe, but how many semicolons is it compiled?
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How cool will it be when, having a video call, your iPhone naturally switches from the cellular network to your home WiFi when you get home.

It might be technically cool in the video, but my cellphone contract costs more than my broadband one and the connection is more stable too. I don't want to pay a phone company while they get to freeload on my ISP contract, and I don't want my phonecalls dropping out when my broadband does.
Smalltalk is great (mostly for historic reasons these days)

In my experience coming to Pharo Smalltalk after a 15 year journey through C, C++, VB, PHP, ObjC, and Ruby (my second favorite lang), I can say that none of the reasons I find Smalltalk awesome are historical. This idea that one should "learn Smalltalk to bring those lessons with you to the language you 'really' plan on using" is a silly idea, often repeated.

Most importantly, Smalltalk is an environment, not a language...

The Smalltalk community is full of talented developers doing cutting edge research and serious commercial applications. We use Smalltalk, for example, because its live, open, dynamic environment makes it a joy to use and blows productivity through the roof. Having complete control over the IDE is a dream - as a small example, when I got tired of constantly navigating to my default code directory, I added a default setting to Pharo Smalltalk, in about 5 minutes, so I and every other user could benefit. This kind of enhancement is routine because it's so damn easy! Even in Ruby, it's a hassle to dig through a lib's source files and find the code to edit. In Smalltalk, one can drill down through the UI (from menus, windows, etc.) into the actual code, or set a breakpoint launching a debugger on the running system. What other OS (Squeak/Pharo can run on bare metal) lets you do that, all in the same language?!
I agree. However what I'm talking about is when you say something well-intentioned, not realizing that it can/will be taken in an offensive way. This tends to happen more often as you lose sleep and crank up the stress. My impression is that the author is using people's reaction to slurs and the like as a proxy for how they will react to the unintended offenses I mention.
I have worked in places where overtime was just a part of the job and I didn't last in such places for very long.

I have at times had to suffer such treatment because I needed the paycheck even if I wasn't getting paid extra for the extra hours.

However there was still the choice to leave such a job and deal with the consequences.

On one occasion I wasn't even given the choice. It was expected and I didn't live up to those expectations. I wasn't that upset in the end because even though money was tight for a while I still made it through and got another job within a couple of weeks. I was much happier in the new position and most of the people I knew who worked for that company eventually left anyway.

At some companies I would get paid for the extra time or at least would be given paid time off later on. I just had to ask. Otherwise I would just go home at my normal time.

These days I probably wouldn't even work over time if you paid me extra. I only work overtime if I made a promise to deliver something by a certain date (and I rarely make those promises unless I'm certain) or if I have some stake in the company. That's largely because I'm in a position where I'm not living paycheck to paycheck anymore and don't need to work for my employers if I don't want to.

Admittedly if you're just starting out or this kind of "overtime culture," is pervasive everywhere ymmv.
My first use of actionscript was a spell checker. It worked great. Good times.
What an ignorant fool.

This article doesn’t say much (except that sexism is super awesome which I don’t think deserves a response) but the one he linked to (about hypocrisy) is incredibly bad (http://kswizz.com/post/8275502957/hypocrisy).

Facebook has very liberal fields for all kinds of stuff. It’s no problem to say that you believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster (9,573 fans) or Russel’s Teapot (86 fans). Like Jedis? Facebook’s got your back (2,829)! If you can’t find your religion you can enter your own, even with a description.

Why then is the gender so locked down? There are two choices. It’s not even possible to just say nothing. I mean, what the hell? That’s a serious indicator that Facebook hasn’t done much thinking about gender. That’s just awful for a huge social network with nearly a billion users.

(Also, is he seriously defending saying “retarded” to people? What the hell?)