skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What is a technology sector? Apparently it includes everything from manufacturing cell phones to "Real-Time Feedback and Coaching" (Rypple)

Is the implication that if Canada isn't Silicon Valley, it should stick to resource extraction and non-technology manufacturing?
Software breaks, sometimes very easily. Who knows if the next OS update or 3rd party add-on will screw something up? Maintenance is important, and unlike some other products you can't just look around your city and choose from 10 or 20 businesses to do a repair. With a lot of software you're screwed unless one person, the author, can keep it working.

I'm not sure this is entirely clear to the average person buying software. The problems that software can solve may not "stay solved"; they depend on their entire ecosystem to be stable solutions. You aren't paying $10 to obtain something. You are paying $10 to temporarily solve a problem.

That's a little unusual among products that are sold. For instance, if you buy a toaster, the infrastructure dependencies are pretty low; there isn't much risk that the voltage in your wall will change and prevent the toaster from behaving the way it was designed. Not only that but there are many regulations governing how such a product can be made, minimizing the chance that people buying toasters will have to replace them every 4 days. If you buy an appliance, it tends to last. But the reasons for appliances lasting don't really apply to software. It's bad for consumers to pretend that it's the same type of purchase.
"The key question is not whether there ARE tech companies getting started in Canada, it's whether they will stay in Canada once successful to help re-invest in the industry here."

I think that movement is changing.. Yes, it's harder to raise money up north but the cost for talent and gov funded programs here make Canada one of the most attractive places to start a company. Once established, why move down south?
>we as citizens have tremendously high standards of living and that is largely as a result of multiple other sectors—namely mining, foresty, and oil and gas ... Our population is but a fraction of America's, which places at an instant, permanent, and steep disadvantage

Interesting article. Canada has been made complacent by its existence as a resource colony. There are countries with small populations (Finland, for example) that manage to compete globally by using their brains and its great to see Canadian companies and VCs that aspire to that.

In addition to private tech startup funding in the US, the state funds a lot of tech through the "defense" industry. Canada's current government seems more interested in investing in prisons, however, than the tech sector.
I totally agree with the article. Perhaps if you're a startup moving very quickly, you might need someone with a specific skill set; otherwise, you're probably excluding better candidates by focusing on skills.

I've performed a fair number of technical interviews over the past few years -- usually looking for some combination of Java & database skills -- and I've developed a couple of informal heuristics, imperfect, but with some predictive power.

1. The ability to code seems inversely proportional to the number of acronyms on the resume.

2. Listing certain skills is a negative indicator: XML, for example, or Eclipse.

3. Certifications are often (though not always) a bad sign.
Valve's Steam games checkout.
Does iTunes qualify as well?
Is that not gigaom's model?

"First use the free version to drive adoption and build a large customer base, and then find ways to monetize that base by upselling the paid version and selling extras."

Gigaom gives away content for free to drive adoption, build a large base, then upsells GigaOM Pro.
Personally, I don't dev much in either one except occasional python so I'm not an expert here (also probably python biased). But If I were to choose I'd go python because I know the PIL and pythonmagickwand libs are good. Plus python has a more extensive lib set ( in terms of areas i.e. systems, networking, etc) than ruby, and I would think getting Python programmers would be easier and cheaper than Ruby ones...
Insider's Guide to Silicon Valley's Investors
Google, Keep Sparrow Alive
This is a plea to Google to keep pushing forward with development on Sparrow alive(under it's name or another) and set an example for other talent acquisitions.
Think of these acquisitions as a warm-up for bigger things to come. Let's see what these lucky entrepreneurs do with their money inside Canada.

What's more shameful is that RIM didn't produce millionaire entrepreneurs that went on and created new companies. That could have happened and should have happened, but it hasn't happened.
I don't know if free is necessarily an indicator or not. Craigslist at one point was a start-up and usage of the site is free with the exception of ads for some categories(apartment listings I believe?) in dense areas such as NYC. I would say the business supported the founder well enough and even so he was able to create a philanthropic extension because of it.

"Something similar" being companies that subscribe to an idea of "not heading towards acquihire." Substitute idea with ethos/loose organization/alliance/whatever other non-hostile word might suffice here. I'm not suggessting that by participating you elect to be lynched by a mob at the slightest whim of misunderstanding or error. It is more of a self-certify that a company has an intention of providing a service and not a portfolio to be hired in 180 days.
I got it through the Mac App Store.
> " tolerance for repetition that characterize her condition are also pretty much a recipe for success in ... computer science"

Obviously, the author knows nothing about computer science, since a tolerance for repetition is pretty much a recipe for failure in computer science.
So are you suggesting there should be some arbiter other than the market of what a business can or cannot do with regards to product decisions, or acquisition opportunities? Who might do that?

Would you even consider developing a product if your hands were then somehow tied to supporting it and even improving it forever? Would your company be attractive to potential buyers if they were obligated to support your product line indefinitely after an acquisition?

On top of all that I mean we're talking about TEN DOLLARS. I often spend more than that on lunch. If you bought a $10 hair dryer on Amazon and later discovered that the manufacturer had been acquired and was no longer producing hair dryers would you feel ripped off? Betrayed? Offended?
If it's really a tool to help designers, don't hide all the colour names on the list. Just let us look at the whole list with all the names and colours at a glance and make it easy to browse.
The Seinfeld calendar has been pivotal to me. Look it up.

Basically you come up with a standard of behavior and check off every day if you act in accordance to that. Helped him discipline himself to create a comedy empire.

My slant to it is that I

1) constantly email rule adjustments if I want to have new rules (say I'm not allowed to drink until a Wednesday demo).

2) have a sponsor, well my wife, who I run ambiguities by, in case I want to have an exception to a rule. Example, if I commit to cleaning every day and I get sick, that day is okay to mark off. But forcing me to verbalize my exceptions means I'll only use them as needed.

3) I treat this calendar as holy, simply so I take deviations seriously. Reason for this is that it is a bitch starting it again if I fall off.

4) I have prescheduled cheat days and stuff like that.

In short, this system works great for me. I might be bad at explaining the complexities here, but feel free to contact me for more info. My best weapon.
I'm guessing I have smaller hands (female) which I suppose could make a real difference in how it feels to hold/use the device and is probably at least part of why I find it more comfortable to use than the iPad.
The font size change when I reload is rather irritating.
Can you explain why jQuery is intentionally disorganized? Why would any project be intentionally disorganized?
At that time, it was commonly understood that "men" in such a context included "women". This was before womens' lib, etc. English is an evolving language; basically, 43 years ago, "men" in this use meant something different than it does today.
No, the opposite, actually: 2xFTE is aggressive; it presumes growth or steady revenue.

But you answered my question: you seem relatively conservative about this stuff.

What kind of stuff would you contract out if money wasn't an object?
You're saying that there's a chance that a company who's total sales EVER are maybe 1/10 of that $25MM offer is going to get every one of its users, who ALREADY PAID once for the app, to pay 10X as much to keep them from being acquired?
> Uniloc

aka "one line of code"?

I have a hypothesis that at least some of the patent trolls are actually a non-violent protest against the way patent law is implemented. They're forcing, demanding, the legal system catch up.
I disagree, as long as there is knowledge to be gained it's helpful to all of us. If a community loves the questions why delete them? I especially like reading this kind of posts because seeing lots of different opinions as to what is better in what situation can help me make the right choice. And it has some entertaining value much like the "new programmer jargon thread" or this one http://stackoverflow.com/questions/58640/great-programming-q... which, of course, I can't see anymore. I myself like to read these quotes because they often contain simple and elegant truths.

You make the following points for why they shouldn't appear on SO

- Nobody needs to know the answer to this question.
-> There will always be someone looking for the answer in question. Surely a lot of people would like to know it still. I googled "Git vs Mercurial" and it has 965.000 results. I suppose at least few people thought it was worth discussing.

- It’s not nearly specific enough.
-> A or B. Seems specific enough to me. And the difference in the opinions and experience of the those who answer will bring a depth and specificity that can not be found on Wikipedia or a blog post. If all the answers in life were as easy as A or B, life would be a lot easier.

- It is difficult to learn from these questions.
-> This is where I disagree the most with you. A person who hasn't used one of both will surely gain some insights why or why not to use A or B

- It drives away experts.
-> I only see it attracting people as there are lots of votes. Of course that doesn't disproof your claim. But perhaps you can show us the numbers? Do you see a disproportionate larger amount of votes from people with less points?

What I think are good reasons are:
- Perhaps you want the site to remain clean Q&A not Q&O(pinion)
- You want to avoid opinion battles as they can get out of hand

As for the opinion battles. I can understand. But I still value the opinions. And whether an opinion is constructive should be measured by it's upvotes.
But the clean just Q&A. As I said earlier. There isn't always a clean cut answer to a question. Life would be a lot easier if it was.

And to answer the Gorilla vs Shark question the answer is obvious. If you're on land the Gorilla will win. If you're in the water the Shark will win. And that's what you can learn from such a question. That's what someone is looking for if he's Googling for "Gorilla vs Shark"
> The author should make it clear from the outset that the goal is to minimize the number of drops in the worst case, rather than to minimize the average case

If the probability of an egg breaking on any particular floor is uniform over all floors--something reasonable to assume unless you're told otherwise--the average case is the worst case.
It's not so much the language as the practices that have developed around it, such as the "everything happens somewhere else" principle of strong OOP. Which has some advantages, but means that you'll be flipping through lots of classes to trace most code paths.
Indiegogo then. It's still a good idea.
"If I read them correctly the whole business of deciding if something is obvious is seriously broken in that it seems to be limited to combining claims from existing patents."

Obviousness is not based on existing patents only. It is based on anything that is published before the relevant date. Thus, examiners should and sometimes do use all kinds of different publications to determine obviousness. But the problem is that the patent office is accustomed to do prior art searches based on existing patents. Thus, internally the PTO is set up to favor prior art searches based on patents rather than other publications. This generally makes sense for other slower moving fields of technology (e.g. mechanical devices, farming equipment, etc.) or for fields where everything gets immediately patented (biotech) but it makes no sense in software.

Another problem is that software was considered generally unpatentable until a landmark supreme court case in 1995. At that time people started filing for software patents and the patent office was generally set up to mostly use patents as prior art searches. Well, there were no software patents then, because software was not patentable until then. The unsurprising result was that a lot of very obvious software patents got through.

Thus, my pet theory on software patents is that there is nothing inherently wrong with them, they were just not correctly administered by the PTO. If the USPTO hires proper competent computer scientists as examiners and encourages the searching of all available prior art, then we would get much fewer and much higher quality software patents.

And I do agree with your idea of opening the review process. The pto is trying to make tepid steps in that direction but they are obviously scared of a flood of comments that may happen if they open up the gates and them having to pay examiners to evaluate every single comment from every crazy person on the net.
The drop shadow needs to be darker to allow the names of the light colours to be read more easily.

But it's a lovely page, thank you.
Cases like craigslist are why I said "in some cases". A simple website which can handle millions of users from a single low-end server can survive being free for a long time. An online backup service where a single user might cost many dollars a month to serve, on the other hand, needs revenue to survive in the long term.

Your idea of self-certification is why I wrote that blog post. It's an open invitation to lynch me if Tarsnap gets acquired and shut down a few months later.
A positive side benefit has been significant endowments and support of basic scientific research.

e.g. http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/

However, it's even better if RIM had created an ecology of entrepreneurship that could endow dozens of such institutes...
> But I assure you, if you will look honestly, you will find something.

Following the same reasoning, my horoscope is true.

I'm not sure if I disagree with you entirely, but your argument is silly. If you look hard enough, you can find evidence for anything to some degree. It's a type of confirmation bias, in fact.

In my opinion it's most useful to look not at the degree of scarring, but the degree of how much childhood events affect a person later in life. Unfortunately, that makes the whole argument rather circular.
> I know that Europe cannot really maintain a talented team like the one Dom and Dinh Viet would need to take Sparrow to new heights.

Really? All of Europe can't provide a team for an e-mail client?
RIM is not a technology sector. There are plenty of Canadian technology companies working in areas that aren't considered sexy in Silicon Valley. Modern resource industries are highly technical. For example, most of the R&D required to extract crude oil from tar sands was carried out in Canada.
The Non-Technical Myth
" But nearly anybody can choose to become addicted to heroin, ..."

Can they? Certainly the can become dependent, experiencing withdrawal symptoms when they stop taking it, but do they develop a powerful long-lasting craving?
I think people are frustrated about this and feel betrayed because they were a great indie dev team that made a great product and the users loved them and their product and supported them by purchasing and recommending their product from the beginning, despite the lack of features. Customers trusted them because they thought that the indie dev team will continue to be focused on improving the app and creating versions for other platforms (iPad, Windows etc) and now, boom, it's over.

The author of the blog post focuses too much on the money. It's not really about the 10 or 3 bucks. I was an early adopter of Sparrow and I literally jumped out of my chair when I read that the iPhone Sparrow app was released, because that almost completed my email workflow. Now Sparrow plays a big part in my workflow and I KNOW that the iPad app will never come out and that they won't release any new features or improvements for new iOS and OSX versions. I'm not frustrated about paying those 13 bucks or so but because I will have to stop using an app that fits so well in my workflow and start looking again for alternatives. Which is not a tragedy in the end and as a developer and startup enthusiast I'm actually pretty happy for the Sparrow team.

We tend to get too attached to these startups and it's painful to see them get acquired by the big players but it looks like it's a trend. It's getting harder and harder to be an early-adopter, to support a product/startup with money, data and feedback, to see it be awesome and then to watch it die.
"The right environment" is key to your statement above. A slightly different environment, one that tolerates and is aware of the effects, both beneficial and otherwise, of stimulant and opioid use, would produce some number of people who's enjoyment of life, work productivity and effect on the world will be better when they abstain entirely - but others will have lives that are better when they consume some mind altering drugs some of the time. I imagine the number of people who become cripplingly addicted to a substance would be similar to the rate of severe alcoholics in society today. And we might decide as a society that this is an acceptable rate, and provide addiction care for those who are susceptible instead of forcing them to the margins of society.
Perhaps if you're a startup moving very quickly,
you might need someone with a specific skill set

My experience is the opposite of this claim ... when working for a startup you cannot afford the privilege of being specialized, but rather a jack of all trade that can easily switch between technologies and problem domains like putting on socks in the morning.

I've developed a couple of informal heuristics,
imperfect, but with some predictive power.

Your rules will give you a lot of false negatives, because the current hiring practices are completely broken, so naturally many people also know how to game the system (devs are a smart bunch in general)...

1. I also added lots of acronyms on my resumes in the past, because resumes are first read by HR people that look for keywords

2. I never listed XML or Eclipse, but I am listing Emacs :) ... regardless, this is in no way worse than listing those same requirements in a job posting, which many do

3. Certifications are cheap to get and in the corporate world certifications matter. I never got one, but that's only because I work with startups or with companies that know these certifications are useless
I don't use Sparrow, nor did I have an iPhone before Siri was acquired, so I didn't really feel outraged for either.
[citation needed]

And that citation better reference some twin adoption studies.
> twice the screen area

I have never understood this way of thinking. (Nor, likewise, the idea that the right way to compare laptop screens or monitors is by how big they are across the diagonal.)

The Nexus 7 has a smaller screen area than the iPad 2, but it has more pixels. If for some purpose the physical size is the limiting factor for you, you can hold it closer to your head.

Of course this stops being true at the point where you can't easily focus on it any closer (which gets further and further out as your eyes age), or where having it closer makes touch interactions uncomfortable somehow. But is either of these really the limiting factor for a lot of tablet users?

(I'm in my 40s -- some way above the median of the market for these things, according to the stats I've seen -- and for me a 7" screen at the closest point where I can easily focus occupies about the same amount of my visual field as my (home) desktop monitor at normal operating distance.)
The trial period appears to be at the developer's option.

Presumably apps like "Tax Me! 2012" and "Fantasy Football Draft Dominator" will know better than to offer a free trial.
This becomes a problem when Q&A sites outrank the tutorials and documentation, making it difficult to find them via search.
Even with games, if you use vector graphics and the aspect ratio is close-ish it can work pretty damn well. I tried out the phone version of Angry Birds on a Transformer at some point and if it weren't for the extra button on the bar allowing me to choose scaling modes I couldn't have known this wasn't targeted for tablets.
Someone should tell the games industry that freemium is dead.

I doubt that they will hear you over the sound of all the money raining down on them though.
Psilocybin does wonders for me, one dose keeps me positive for three months or so.
No, it really happened like that.

</sarcasm>
Other than HTML/JavaScript the only one I know is http://getmoai.com/ which uses Lua. JavaScript might still be something to look into, but even in node you'd need an api or everything.
Touchscreen devices existed previously, so that seems to suggest that it is non-obvious.

Usually, these obvious "innovations" are simply a combination of a technology that might or might not have existed before, plus a need or an opportunity that didn't exist before. Bouncing lists are one example; one-click ordering is another. For the list case in particular, Apple needed a touchscreen and a fast CPU, plus a reason to implement it. That combination didn't exist in general-purpose portable consumer devices before the iPhone.

We already have a mechanism for rewarding those who recognize opportunities and fill needs: it's called a "market." No additional monopoly protection is appropriate in such cases. When patents are granted on the basis of a foot race to the USPTO, everyone (except the lawyers) loses.

Basically, we're rewarding the first people who apply the easiest solutions to problems that few others have even encountered. Instead, we should be limiting the use of patents to cases where a difficult problem has been solved by means that might otherwise be kept locked away as a trade secret.
Why is The Fed not printing like crazy?
Suggestion for you: help out on this other e-mail client that exists asopen source and is desperate in need of some patching: https://github.com/waseems/inbox2_desktop :-)) (disclaimer: I am the original author of inbox2)
Episode 0.8.3 - Cloud 9 IDE with Ruben Daniels and Matt Pardee