skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Copyright and patents are entirely 2 different issues.

This trial is very important because Oracle is suing for both and because copyright protection is much, much stronger than patents.

The differences: patents expire in 20 years, copyright is basically unlimited; patent infringement is hard to prove, copyright infringement is easy; patents are easily invalidated, while copyright is pretty clear (except in this case); getting a patent is expensive, while copyrighting something is essentially free, etc...
Wedding Startup Appy Couple Has A Wait List 7,000-Strong
As a published mobile developer watching a huge daily churn rate on my free app's downloads, all I can say is I haven't been this excited to watch a video of a guy with a headset mic.. ever. So.. signed up and thanks in advance :)

.. edit: but you need to fix your audio. Your mic is using a noise gate to try to block background noise when you aren't speaking. The effect is like someone turning the mic on and off at the start and end of every word you speak. This makes it very hard to focus on your content. It would be easier to listen to you if:

- you had a single $20 dynamic mic a foot or two away from your mouth (or one of those $50 USB mics marketed for 'podcasting')

- speak louder (as if you were in a meeting)

- minimize background noise in the room.

If your floor is hardwood put a blanket down (or hanging behind the mic) to reduce reverberation and use audacity's parametric EQ to filter everything below 100hz and above ~30000hz (tune to taste).

As it is I got a few minutes in and decided to read the script instead (thanks for including it)
You can't solve everything with numbers, and I say this as someone who believes very strongly in data-driven decision-making. Even given perfect data as far as what practices are more effective, you still have the problem of interpreting it. This adds its own layer of purely personal and political choices.

My advice? Don't work with people whose best practices are your anti-patterns. Or at least strive to work with people who agree with you on a core set of principles. Or hell, work with people who agree with you on nothing. Just don't complain when you can't work with any of them. :-)

And besides that, what's wrong with "purely personal and political choice[s]"? Being that I'm the person who's writing my code, I'm allowed to make a certain number of purely personal choices. That is, as long as I take into account the political consequences of doing so. Put another way, it's ok to have personal preferences, but you have to take other peoples' feelings into account too.
And you have to use your real name or they'll disable you entire account - including email etc.

No, not true.
To add to my earlier comment, I can confirm that it does in fact do what it says on the tin, so to speak. I signed up, got a confirmation email, confirmed, and got access. No spam deluge ensued; I'll be sure to update you as soon as this changes.

Patrick, I did find that clicking the confirmation email link and then confirming gave me a page that said at the top "Confirm your email address! You have to click the confirm link in the email[...]". The supplementary "Did that already?" link worked fine; it was just slightly weird to get that message immediately after, you know, clicking the link.
Wow, that's pretty insane. Wonder how Apple will treat EA's iOS developer license if they keep doing it like that.

Otherwise you could dodge the whole "apps that are 'trial' versions" are prohibited... Release the app for a small sum, pull it after a while and release a sequel!

Or will this be another case of "some developers are more equal than others"?
Good grief. No, it doesn't. "I have a bone to pick with you" is a statement of immediate annoyance. Here's a thefreedictionary reference that matches my understanding. http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/have+a+bone+to+pick+with

This UK source isn't quite the connotation, though the reference to the Irish usage matches the American English one pretty well: http://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/30/messages/2182.ht...

Given that two of you now have gone out of your way to deliberately (and uncharitably) misinterpret me: are you sure that I am the one with a preexisting grudge?
Only a jackass registers a new account just to slam a person who actually creates value for people. He deserves an instaban, not validation through a response.
Facebook’s Recently Used Apps Module, Relationship with App Ecosystem
You've misunderstood me. I love getting mail. If you're going to make a list full of useful information sign me up!
In fact I'm subscribed to a few lists that I really enjoy reading every month. So I'm not against email.

But don't bait, "force", or use subterfuge to get me to sign up. "first five minutes free!" doesn't do your brand any good.
You'll need to branch out. GWT hasn't jumped from 2.4 in a good while and doesn't appear to be focused on. Just compare the activity from GWT [1] to Dart [2]. I too like GWT, but it is dying. Try clojure-script if you really like the concept.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit/source/list
[2] http://code.google.com/p/dart/source/list
The problem here is viewing software development as some sort of monolithic phenomenon. "Software development" is a crude moniker that covers an incredibly wide variety of efforts, varying in scale, detail, and significance across a much wider range than anything else we consider to be a single discipline. "Best practices" for development of an iphone game may not be the same as for flight software for an orbital rocket or for an international banking backbone.

Edit: to use an analogy, imagine if all vehicle development was treated with the same terminology. Whether you're building helicopters, spacecraft, mass produced commuter cars, RC toys, nuclear powered submarines, formula 1 race cars, or tunnel boring machines: all of it is just vehicle manufacturing right? Just as anyone would find it ridiculous to put forward advice that could possibly apply across all of those distinctly different disciplines we should view advice about software with the same skepticism.
10 years ago only enthusiasts could create a website. 5 years ago more people could thanks to Wordpress. What will come in 5 or 10 years from now? I feel like Weebly is coming close to that 99% consumer's needs tipping point.
Incorrect on the mostly useless copies part. The Asus Transformer is not a copy and is cheaper than its iPad counterpart. I've been using it since May 2011 and it can do pretty much what the iPad2 can do, and it has an IPS screen to boot.
I think the problem is that all the companies involved (Apple, Microsoft, Google etc) are American; if the products of one American company are banned somewhere, another American company will invariably benefit. I think if an American companies products were being banned in the US to the benefit of a non-US company, only then will US law-makers start raising their eyebrows.
You are aware that clean room development is about protection from legal problems, not about solving the problem as efficiently as possible, right?
And the far bigger concern is that all of your "+1s" are completely public with no way to opt out of that. This was categorically not the case with "Likes" on YouTube.
Nope, I believe it. I bet they also didn't use SSL at all, just like they didn't in the iPhone app.
What happened in '08-'09 had as much to do with market capitalism as the Stalinist purges had to do with Marxism.
Windows Live to be rebranded as Microsoft Account
Anyone know the technology used for the client? Sencha? Perhaps another library?
I don't know you from Adam. Thanks for the correction though; I was genuinely mistaken, not "deliberately and uncharitably misinterpreting" you.
Deep Copy In JavaScript
A drop from 14.5M to 10M is significant, but that graph is misleading because of the y-axis range. It only shows the range between 15M and 10M. 10M users is still nothing to scoff at. I think it was inevitable that the initial hype would wear off a little and the game would settle in to a smaller, dedicated fan base.
If only a group of more than 5 developers were enthusiastic about the same thing! Your enthusiasm for node is another persons pain. I've got 1 coder enthusiastic about node, another for clojure, and another for scala. Should every project be a different language and ecosystem? What happens when programmers move around in an organization.

"I think part of node's mass appeal is that it has introduced an element of simplicity to a generation of developers who have grown up around bloat."

Who are you talking about? Right now I'm dealing with a generation of programmers that came up on ruby. Node isn't simpler than sinatra. In fact, we just tried to use node for a "small and non-critical part of your architecture". You know what happened? It took much much longer to finish because it needed to talk to an API that uses digest authentication and node's http library doesn't support that so we had to roll our own.
A minor quibble... You're _certified_ as an EMT, not licensed.
I think it had more to do with the fact that MySpace pages all looked like crap and played shitty music at you automatically when you opened them.

I think you're both saying exactly the same thing, using different words.
What does Java have to do with anything?
I'd expect the boundary condition to be whether those web apps were all exactly the same technology, or if there's evidence you're quick to learn and pick up new stuff. If you're like "I did this first thing in PHP but for the second, bigger project I moved to Python/Django with some client-side JS", your odds should be great.

Hiring highly skilled programmers that know exactly the technologies they need is what many companies aim for when hiring, and never accomplish. They're wrong. Even Google has problems finding (and hiring) those. That's why I said it was a mistake.

So, I would expect that you can find these jobs. And the companies that are willing to hire you might also be the ones you want to work at. But some HR departments will turn you down, and some people (like the original poster) may turn you down because it's a risk. (I can't blame them - hiring the wrong person is a bad mistake, too - but they shouldn't complain it's hard to find good people.)
The guidelines states that anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity is worthy of Hacker News. "The Cab Ride I'll Never Forget" was a short fictional text about death that tickled my intellectual curiosity. It was a short read and I liked it and by my understanding of the HN guidelines, it's perfectly normal that it was on the front page for 6 hours.

This post, on the other hand, serves nothing but bash people for no reason.
The 2012 Forbes Fictional 15
Single founder work flow/organization?
Super dumb question of the day, but I am looking for anecdotes about how people organized their work to launch independently. Yes, I have done a search of HN (and found a discussion of Trello, which might help me) but I am really not finding what I need.

I was a good student in my youth and I was a homemaker and homeschooling mom for a long time. Then I had an entry level job at a Fortune 500 company for five years. None of that really gives me a workflow model for developing my websites. I have several websites I want to develop. I have recently gotten some feedback and other support and implemented some of the suggestions, but I am currently waiting on other people for some things (not a criticism of them) and feeling directionless. Surely there are things I can be working on productively until they get back to me.

My sites grew out of audience interest. Initially they began as emails on a parenting list. After repeating myself two dozen times, I would take one of the better emails and edit it for publication to my website, or sometimes if something got a really big reaction out of people I would edit it and post it. But that wasn't a business model. It wasn't even intended to be. I have to find a means to organize my thoughts, develop my sites, work on not just posting but also promoting and monetizing my work. And I am at a loss as to how to work all that out.

Thanks
Lots of things might happen based on any non-standard terminology, but in general it's not something we worry about. It's meant to be a little fun, a little different, and attract people that are a little fun and a little different.

If someone wants an account director job at Automattic and never makes their way the Account Engineer link, that's okay. If someone is a bit intrigued by our non-standard titles and looks a bit closer at them because they stand out, that's cool, too.

Anything that isn't normal might confuse people. The goal of our jobs page isn't to confuse the fewest people possible.
It's harder to take you seriously when your name is Weebly. Just saying. ;)

The websites! They weebly and they wobble but they never fall down!
Sure. We'll hire Steve Wozniack and John Carmack after they apply. But we need a strategy for the rest of the applicants, too :)
I used to think about locality a fair amount back when I programmed in C.

In Java, I have no idea whether or not the fields in a copybook^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H bean are going to be anywhere near contiguous, or not. Packing and unpacking stuff in a byte array / string gets tedious.

It's a shame low level integration isn't somehow easier in Java, like it is in C#.
Mathematica influencing Clojure really surprised me. Any references?
Ask about how and when they scaled their team. They built this beast on a small amount of angel money, by keeping a small team. Their profitability allowed them to scale the company how and when they wanted to. I'd also ask them about their price/funnel/etc optimizations. These guys have a lot of traffic - so small changes have moved the needle a lot. Easily one of my favorite business in San Francisco.
With respect to style and syntax at least, this is why I like golang. There is one true way to format a go program, and there is a compiler/autoformatter to enforce it.
Passwords For Your Facebook Account
> My guess was that it was going to be the
> container library, rather than the language itself.

This walks a thin line for sure and in Scala the line is almost microscopic. I'll keep it for now since my reasoning was the same as the Erlang->Scala influence. A core language library that is rarely viewed as other than a core feature.
I got a rejection. Still determined to work at a startup so will have to look for some other opportunity to fulfill that dream.
Show HN: Remember everything you learn on Khan Academy
RentStuff.com -- Chicago, IL -- Full Time
PHP Developer for a venture-backed start-up working out of 1871 in Chicago (in the Merchandise Mart)

http://www.rentstuff.com/jobs/php_dev

We are a marketplace for renting out stuff you own to other people (bikes, camera equipment, tents and outdoor gear, etc) and we also aggregate listings from local rental shops (think Kayak.com).

Intimate, small team environment with lots of authority and great perks!

Mysql, jQuery, Bootstrap, LAMP, EC2, AWS, Javascript, FT, Full-Time
Sorry about that: you were in a race with an HTTP request from MailChimp. You won the race (yay?), so when Rails generated that page for you, it was unaware that you'd confirmed. I'll try doing some AJAXiness to prevent that in the future, but it won't go live today.
FYI, the full video includes both a transcript and an audio version for easy car-listening. It's about as convenient as you can get.
I don't see you responding very well to jwb's argument. You made a statement that the Golden Rule enables sociopaths. jwb made a counterstatement that your statement makes some assumptions that are not necessarily true. You address the first assumption with some logic and an anecdote of your own, but you by no means address the second, which seems to be the more important one.

Instead, you seem to (and if I'm misinterpreting you here, I'm sorry, but I see no other way to read it) say that the second assumption jwb pointed out is irrelevant because your anecdote demonstrates that the power of the horrible few can be larger by orders of magnitude. Not that I'm good at analogies, but it's like saying cats are absolutely horrible because 1 cat you used to have made 10 dogs go wild, while jwb is saying that whatever trouble cats may cause in our world, the world is still better off for having them.

And then ekanes responded to you with a statement that also reflects my own life experience. I can't think of a single time in my life when a small or large group of people have been unable to identify such similar culprits and then either reform or eject them. Aside from the fact that 1 anecdote does not a study make, I feel you're falling prey to anchoring bias, attentional bias, insensitivity to sample size, and belief bias all in one (the belief bias being the most ironic, given what appears to be your antagonism towards people of faith). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

edit: better word arrangement
Building blocks for APIs
This is my first django web app. Would appreciate your feedback!
Of course, I can't see inside your brain, but it tickled your intellectual curiosity? I thought it was an interesting story but it was an emotionally oriented story from my POV and I wouldn't have submitted it here. As always, different strokes for different folks :-)
DMCA takedown notices Github has received
EU's top court: APIs can't be copyrighted, would "monopolise ideas"
Nice. I was under the impression that ALGOL's IF-THEN-ELSE statement was inspired by LISP (but I can't seem to find any references more reliable than some wikis). Also, if System F is going to get a line into Haskell, why not give the untyped lambda calculus a line into LISP?

I'm having trouble finding a detailed history of Clean, but I believe it predates Haskell. My understanding is that Miranda prompted a handful of lazy, pure functional languages. Haskell was an attempt to unify them. In Coders at Work, SPJ mentions that a few of those implementors were not interested in participating with the Haskell group. Is Clean one of those languages? (Of course, that doesn't mean they haven't influenced each other over the years, what I'm trying to suggest is that maybe an edge belongs from Miranda to Clean as well.)

It'd be interesting to see a graph of the influence of functional languages on other languages, too. Things like Python's list comprehensions borrowed from Haskell, and JavaScript borrowing lots of things from Scheme. I can only imagine that such a graph would be larger and less comprehensible than the present one!
HTML5 canvas editor
Entrepreneurship and optionality don’t mix
I wonder if any scammers would spend the resources banking on the 1/1000 chance of guessing the three numbers correctly.

If you call a thousand people, odds are that you'll be able to convince one of them you're from the bank. At that point, what are the odds of engineering them into giving you money?
Yes and giving up inevitably means going and working for someone else, either on their dream, or under their command. Never ever give up..no matter what. I'm certain the majority of successful entrepreneurs toiled away for 10, 20, 30 years before they finally 'made it', certainly in the olden days. It's easy to get distracted by these overnight success stories, because success can happen so quickly with these dot coms, but there is a danger you can get demoralized and wonder why it's taking you so long to make it. You aren't alone on this and you have no idea what those overnight success stories had to contend with to get there.

Bootstrap your lifestyle, live off lentils and water, if you need to support the wife and kids work part time, but you can still make progress and find a way out, no matter what the obstacles! to paraphrase Robert Crumb, "Keep on Truckin"

Then go and play some Albert Collins on full blast....preferably the album, "Truckin' with Albert Collins", it'll make you smile...
Static considered harmful (2011)
A self-promoter.
I'm happy to hear more from you, so I gave you my e-mail - despite the fact that I don't like video and was going to post here asking whether there would be a transcript. I was happily surprised to find a transcript on the "you have subscribed" page.

Thanks!
Lately my problem has been convincing my boss NOT to use Node on every little project. Don't get me wrong, Node is versatile and fun, but not the most appropriate choice for systems work and your usual DevOps tools.

To him, any little one of script written by the team (except his own) must be re-done in Node. Then, the code being "his", he'll upload it to his own personal github account. Meanwhile, we have to reimplement the new Node written tool.
Pull requests are great, but I think they don't work well for the example that github provides. This use case sucks for reviewers:

1. push commits to a branch & open a pull request

2. get a bunch of comments

3. push a few more commits fixing some errors

4. more comments

5. more fixes

At every step of this process you either have to review each individual commit or the entire diff. You can't see only what's changed between two arbitrary commits. I endure this process so often (and it makes me pine for review board) that I wrote a greasemonkey script to view intermediate diffs: https://github.com/sbuss/pull_request_intermediate_diffs

Github, apparently, isn't interested in fixing this (https://github.com/blog/1124-how-we-use-pull-requests-to-bui...)
15-Year-Old's App Turns iPad Into A Windows-like OS
iPad apps normally take up the whole screen, but it doesn't have to be that way. Pedro Franceschi is a 15-year-old Brazilian developer who hacked the iPad, because he wanted his iOS device to run more like a traditional PC.The app is available for $9.99 on the Cydia jailbroken app store. The app has been downloaded 1,100 times.
Jessica Livingston interviewed him a while ago. You could pick up the thread from there.

Edit: Here it is - http://vimeo.com/10123713
The post bashes people, sure. But it does have reason- trying to draw attention to Eternal September:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

The part where my opinions and those of the post differ is that I don't think HN is an entirely lost cause. The fact that this post is being upvoted (and will probably stay on the home page for 6 hours) demonstrates this. Maybe the HN guidelines need to be tightened.
What petercooper said, basically.

I like the story and I would share it around on social networks, but I wouldn't post it to HN. That's not where it goes.
I noticed that too. Sounds kinda weird and also kind of risky to me, but hey, whatever.
Their engineering blog is chocked full of information on how they built and improved upon their site. It is an interesting read.
"So don't try to build hard realtime systems in node, that require consistent response times. Erlang is probably a better choice for these kinds of applications."

Erlang is actually suited for soft realtime systems as well. I've never seen it recommended for hard realtime systems.
Anonymous Analytics: Acquiring information through unconventional means
Unfortunately, there have been a few other less welcome changes recently that weren't mentioned in the TechCrunch article. For example, I can no longer see the revision history of a very important spreadsheet at all: it seems to have become corrupted somehow a few days ago, and winds up half-drawn with no content showing any time I click on an older version now.

As much as I appreciate allowing more design features in Docs, I think they should first have addressed the glaring omissions in basic functionality (by which I mean things real spreadsheets did a decade or two ago, not "basic" things that are very important but only to 5% of the market) and the horrible reliability and backward compatibility.
The Declining Role of Start-Ups