skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure why everyone is so gung ho about Sparrow, the reviews haven't been good and my personal experience using it was that it was a very underwhelming product. It doesn't offer the whole set of gmail features, and for anything other than gmail it's even worse. I thought we'd all moved on from thick-client email apps. Admittedly gmail on IOS is awful, but since gmail supports exchange access, it's possible to use the built in email client and get push notifications. Even before Sparrow was acquired, teh reviews were less than stellar.

Everyone keeps trying to change email, let's leave it alone, it works fine, its one of the few technologies that has lasted any length of time and still be on top. nntp, gopher, etc all faded away, but pop, smtp, and then imap have flourished and become the de-facto way the world communicates.
The US needs to start pushing vocational schools as much as college. People need an alternative. If college is not for some people, they have a viable alternative.

The German system is something that would work in the US. Unlike the Finnish system, it does have a lot of variation and would have a better chance of working in a larger country.

Also, some for-profit colleges are a scam. It is really hard to tell which are good. They also over promise (employment, etc) results.
Weak argument... This is specifically talking about race not personal preference. Nice try though.
Yes, this conversation is about the RIAA, not individual bands.
Texas Instruments 16 bit MPU with Core memory
And I'd rather not work at a place where my resume alone doesn't warrant at least a phone interview :-) Either I really wasn't a good fit for the job, or they have a broken hiring process. If it's the latter, chances are that a company with that bad a HR department is also dysfunctional other ways.

Programming tests can indeed be interesting. Anyone feeling bored could do worse than to attempt solving something from ITA's hiring puzzle archives. But unless you're extremely certain that your tests hit the sweet spot, it seems really dangerous to make them a mandatory first filter. A test once both parties are at least a little bit invested in the process, sure. Or if resume screening really is a problem, allow someone to "skip the queue" by sending a test solution along with the application.
Time to Admit What We Already Knew: Online Ads Stink
How are people who might struggle to afford to go to college supposed to afford to just "travel" as you put it?
JScript is already installed on every Windows including XP, it can access and parse files, it has most of Perl regexp goodness so you could still have a one click, again without installing IronSpread.
And that would work with your Excel 2003 too.
As well as reforming the rules under which a patent is granted, we should also double the pay of patent examiners, then make them professionally part-liable for court costs arising from the granting of illegitimate monopolies in the form of invalid patents.
This article is a bit confusing, I'm not sure it is stating its view in the simplest way. Trying to explain that view to someone else I'd do like this:

Twitter, Facebook and the like should be like emails: if you send me an email from hotmail I can read it on gmail or any other mall client. I should be able to subscribe to friends, interesting people or other social content provider and consume this comment from the client of my choice. Something that Google reader was not very far to provide.

Wrote something about this view sometime ago: http://www.douban.com/note/174513094/
I agree, but Meteor is still young and it actually has a reason for doing it that way. Meteor doesn't have a built-in module system right now, so when you add something like underscore.js to your Meteor project, you don't need to require("underscore"), it's simply available on both the client and server globally.

I feel like they chose to go for convenience rather than consistency with existing practices.

But like I said, Meteor is still in its infancy. It's entirely possible this will all change down the line.
I don't understand why we all don't just install a copy of identi.ca and run with it..
What's wrong with Jim Henson Co's actions? If you don't like a person or company and what they stand for, you're free not to work with them.
I always find the work you do that you are interested in usually has implications for the work you don't want to do, positive implications usually.
try ack it's http://betterthangrep.com/
> "wouldn't we get a lot less of these lawsuits when there were a stronger defense mechanism in case the alleged patent owner looses"

In these sorts of cases? I doubt it. Each troll shell company would just be set up with no assets to speak of beyond the patents-at-issue. And in the event of a loss, those would be left worthless and no practical redress would be possible. (They're not far from that already. The only difference would be a smaller patent portfolio for each shell company.)

Any work-around for that --say, requiring some sort of bond up-front by the patent owner that might be recouped by the defendant to offset legal fees-- would hit legit inventors and small companies much harder than trolls. The system would be tilted even further away from serving anyone but massive corporations.
This. There are some problems with software patents, but the solution is not to do away with them all-together. We as a country (and our founders in the Constitution) have decided that limited term monopoly is a fair trade for public disclosure. Exempting software would be an insult to software engineers, putting their work on a lower level than other fields. Let's change the discussion from the polarizing "burn it down" to "how can we do better?"

The legal system is complex, as is government, because it represents millions of opinions on how best to do something and has been evolving for hundreds of years. Imagine a 200 year old code repo. The original spec is ambitious in scope but extremely vague, the guys who started the project left the company years ago, and a few hundred co-workers give you vicious code-reviews. The project runs life support for 300+ million people.

Patent lawyers aren't to blame. As of today, there are only 30734 patent attorneys in the country, and only a portion will ever work in software patents. Sure they profit from the status quo, but they'd profit from whatever replaces the current system as well or they'd find work in other legal niches. The idea that there is a secret club of evil patent lawyers pulling the strings is laughable. If you want change, talk to your congressman.
No, Loving v. Virginia is not just specifically about race. It recognizes marriage as one of the fundamental rights.
> For some reason, masklinn's comment is dead. Posting it here:

Sorry, that's probably because I got error messages while posting ending up with 2 or 3 comments, and I removed the extraneous ones. You probably tried to reply to one of those I deleted.
It's ipso facto false. The argument as I see it arises in how much weight skills that are exclusive to or overwhelming present in a college education should be granted vis a vis skills that can be gained through on-the-job training. That's a perfectly reasonable point of disagreeance.
I'm not sure if a central patents court would necessarily fix things. The US already has a central patent appeals court ('the Federal Circuit'), and if anything, it has strengthened the rights of patent holders during the time it has been in existence.
I think that it's actually one of the benefits of the PHP development process, and one of the reasons for PHPs popularity.

The focus on syntax is actually a focus on it's users, the programmers (or at least the subset of programmers that PHP is aimed at). The syntax in PHP is what lets us simply Get Stuff Done, and so the top-down approach to development is suited to the language.

Sure, it has some trade-offs in terms of things like performance and future (internal) maintenance, but for most developers using PHP on a day-to-day basis those trade-offs are completely worth it.
How We Build CMS-Free Websites
Blizzard Isn't Happy With Windows 8 Either
So, this is online ordering on your phone?

>"Users skip to the front of the line, receive their item, and get on with their lives."

How will that work in practice? I'm quite sure if I'm constantly skipped over in line by people getting priority over me because they have an iPhone app, I'll discontinue business at the establishment.
>> Of course it is. The ergonomics of controller design are profoundly based on gripping the device with both palms while pushing buttons with the thumbs.

Let's agree to disagree on that then. The Playstation 1 controller introduced the exaggerated grip design language. Look at the "Classic" controller for the Wii, which looks similar to the Super Nintendo controller. Rounded but no appendages.

The original PS1 controller design has a flat backside that let people who were used to holding the old-style controllers (like me) to continue doing so. Believe me, the piano style of hitting the action buttons on a game controller predates the PS1. I basically hold PS1 controllers the same way I held Genesis/Super Nintendo/Saturn controllers.

>> The buttons are too small and too close together to rest several fingers on, while the button groups are spaced too close together to fit both hands over.

I have no problem playing piano style on any console controller of Japanese origin (that of course, excludes Microsoft's controllers).

>> We're in the second decade of gaming keyboard design

Again, the keyboard is a text entry tool that has been adopted by gamers. At its core, yes, it's a board covered in buttons. But, it's still designed for text entry.

That is a PHP hammer (devil's advocate hat on), especially if you're using it to play Tony Hawk, a game originally designed for a console controller.

>> It might be if there were something better.

See links below:

http://www.hitboxarcade.com/

http://shoryuken.com/2012/07/03/rts-x-fighters-check-out-the...
I find it amusing that the PDP-11/20 didn't have specifications this good and cost $50,000 in 1972. Here we are 40 years later and you can buy it from under $5.
Demo plots: http://gigamonkey.github.com/gg/
another load of crap from another illegitimate "entity" which once was composed of public servants and now full of "officials".

save the bs for the main stream
Few IP firms make a notable chunks of their revenue from litigation. Certainly not enough to meaningfully lobby against reform.

Licensing, clearance searches, opinions and the like are much more the bread-and-butter of serious IP and that would be unchanged by any proposed reform this side of junking the system entirely.
If "pier" and "peer" were merged into one word, then there would be sentences that are ambiguous. No such ambiguities arise with "its" vs "it's". They aren't even the same parts of speech.

You also have an incorrect notion of right and wrong. Read up on some linguistics and get back to me. E.g., there is nothing more "right" about "Standard Written English" than there is about the dialects spoken in inner cities. Both are equally good, full rich languages. Though certainly mistakes can be made within a dialect, you must understand, in order to be a civilized human, that for many native English speakers, their native language is not Standard Written English, but rather a regional dialect. Consequently, when they are in a situation where they are expected to communicate in Standard Written English, they are being expected to communicate in a language that is not their native language, and yet many people will not afford them the allowances that we make for people whom no dialect of English is their native language.

As for my dyslexia, it certainly is relevant, as this entire thread, from when I started posting on it, which is a direct ancestor of this post, and yours, is about whether it is moral to deny people jobs just because they make such an unimportant mistake. It's a mistake that never actually matters, except to the pedantic, and it's a mistake that dyslexics are particularly prone to. Not because they don't understand the difference, but rather because they often can't see when such mistakes are made.
I have a slightly weird method for doing it, for each specific language I'm working in I use a slightly different theme for my text editor, it provides a small cognitive differentiator that seems to trigger the right parts of my memory.
There is actual data to look at here: http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009030.pdf

Desire to provide religious or moral instruction is at the TOP of the list of reasons people homeschool.
I don't think this will change. I think one of the design goals is to have it's own ecosystem.
In My opinion The 5 Languages would be

1. Mind Bender (Common Lisp or Haskell)
2. Social/Internet (Java Script) (Browser/Node.js)
3. Numerical analysis (Mathematica or Matlab or R or Excel)
4. Inside the Engine (C/Linux)
5. Money Machine (I want big salary) ( C++ )
At least in my area, vocational training is absolutely being pushed. The problem I see is there aren't enough state-funded schools providing inexpensive training for things liks Medical Assisting. There are lots of $20k private programs, but the earnings from the job can't (rationally) justify that.
Compare the productivity of a recent graduate with someone with someone without a degree but with 4 years of job experience and experience is a clear win. Now, in the long term they tend to balance out, but that's hardly a 'win' for the collage degree.

PS: Granted, not a scientific study but my sample size is over 30 and the difference is fairly dramatic.
You order on your phone, you wait, you pick up your food. If people don't order in advance then they stand in line.

Its a long overdue concept. Being able to have my order ready without waiting would make me far more likely to eat out.
US to make solar energy development on public land easier
I haven't fully reviewed the patents in question, but the oldest looks to have a filing date of sometime in late 2000. I would think that there has to be some prior art out there for many of the claims of this patent. For example, the sport of geocaching was founded in May 2000, and people pretty quickly started writing software applications to assist in finding caches.
how about a non-ads business? they add a ton of value by serving as the identity provider for the web, but all they're monetizing is pageviews... you would think they could/should capture some of the value they create at some point.
Ask HN: Recommendation on Demo Video for Startups
Hello!

I am a co-founder of a startup and we are getting ready to raise our first round. We would like to include in the pitch a brief intro video (around 1 minute long) and already have a script created of what we want said. We want to have an animation video to go along with our script. I found companies that specialize in demo videos but they are all very expensive (cheapest I found was $1,000 per finished minute) and I was wondering if any startupers our there know of anyone that can create awesome videos on a boot-strap startup budget? Students that are looking to make some extra money and get experience that have done it before would be great. If anyone could recommend someone it would be very helpful!
vs. Meteor, Derby has server-side rendering (need REST?) and uses NPM.
Somewhat similar to Cygwin is UWin. Tried it recently.

http://google.com/search?hl=en&q=uwin

It was created by David Korn, author of the Korn shell (ksh).

You can find the UWin site link some hits down the Google results page. (First link is for its Wikipedia entry, then there are some unrelated hits for the same string "UWin", then the actual site).
Insofar as the discussion remains civil, either both sides are guilty of "intolerance" or neither are. When one side makes unreasonable demands, and carries them into action, then we can begin to discuss an imbalance of tolerance.
Heh. Yeah. But remember also to get back to the original post, no lawyers would be forced into starvation if the patent system were fundamentally changed.
The average tuition cost is approximately $16,000 per year. Plus assume another $10,000 in living costs, books, etc. $26,000 in total for a complete cost of $104,000 in a 4 year period. Some people choose to go more expensive by going to a private college and some people choose to go a little cheaper by going public but this is an average. Also, a huge assumption is that its just for a 4 year period. According to the Department of Education, only 54% of undergraduates graduate within 6 years. So for the 46% that don’t graduate, or take 10 years to graduate, this is a horrible investment. But lets assume your children are in the brilliant first half who finish within six years (and hopefully within four).
Is it worth it? First, let’s look at it completely from a monetary perspective. Over the course of a lifetime, according to CollegeBoard, a college graduate can be expected to earn $800,000 more than his counterpart that didn’t go to college. $800,000 is a big spread and it could potentially separate the haves from the have-nots. But who has and who doesn’t?

If I took that $104,000 and I chose to invest it in a savings account that had interest income of 5% per year I’d end up with an extra $1.4 million dollars over a 50 year period. A full $600,000 more. That $600,000 is a lot of extra money an 18 year old could look forward to in her retirement. I also think the $800,000 quoted above is too high. Right now most motivated kids who have the interest and resources to go to college think it’s the only way to go if they want a good job. If those same kids decided to not go to college my guess is they would quickly close the gap on that $800,000 spread.

There are other factors as well. I won’t be spending $104,000 per child when my children, ages 10 and 7, decide to go to college. College costs have historically gone up much faster than inflation. Since 1978, cost of living has gone up three-fold. Medical costs, much to the horror of everyone in Congress, has gone up six-fold. And college education has gone up a whopping tenfold. This is beyond the housing bubble, the stock market bubble, any bubble you can think of.

So how can people afford college? Well, how has the US consumer afforded anything? They borrow it, of course. The average student now graduates with a $23,000 debt burden. Up from $13,000 12 years ago. Last year, student borrowings totaled $75 billion, up 25% from the year before. If students go on to graduate degrees such as law degrees they can see their debt burden soar to $200,000 or more. And the easy borrowing convinces colleges that they can raise prices even more.

http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2010/02/dont-send-your-kids-to-....

http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/01/10-more-reasons-why-par....

http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/01/8-alternatives-to-colle....
A good place to start is to articulate what you are asking others to help you with.
For instance, what exactly is it that you want help understanding how to start? Is it a business idea or university studies?
oh there is prior art. the military used GPS way before 2000
Who says it does? But I myself won't dislike and rebuke people simply for disagreeing with me.
And the Hadoken is an easy example.

Fortunately Street Fighter has gotten more forgiving in inputs with each release, but to do a 360, super, old school dragon knee or shoryuken, you really have to be nimble with your fingers.
I like RandomPlay or CMUS in preference to iTunes. Their randomness is more suited to my collection. Both on Linux and OS X. But what I love more than anything is listening to the playlist on FiP, any time of the day. Their programming is pure genius.
> Citation Needed. People keep saying that, but you would not want a self taught engineer.

I'm a self taught Engineer. I had no problem getting a job; my professional educational experience has not been an issue so far. I've taken over projects from CS graduates that break just about every solid design principle I've learned (when its actually capable of running, that is).

CS degrees are certainly useful, but in my experience they do not make a good engineer on their own. A self-motivated learner will always outpace one without such qualities, regardless of credentials.
Polling always works, but if the feed and the client are PSHB-enabled, then they can use it.
The thing is you're not cutting them. You just grab a bag from some guy. No pushing in to pay real quick for your pickup.

I have no issue with that.
This patent uses GPS:

http://www.google.com/patents?id=FKuoAAAAEBAJ&printsec=a...

"Ownership" is a big stretch but not as big of a stretch as this being a patentable idea.
*iOS
Generally, (based on conversations about this with HR people) the point is to filter out applicants who don't have any experience at all.

They expect people with experience sufficient for the entry-level nature of the position to contact them or include in their cover letter a statement which points out that they lack the arbitrary 5 years but otherwise have X, Y, and Z sufficient to do the job.

For example: most federal agencies required 5 years of experience for legal positions for entry-level legal positions, but frequently hired graduating law students for these same positions (at least until the hiring freezes in 2009 and 2010). To put this in perspective: 5 years is usually the standard experience required for a lawyer to seek certification for a speciality in an area of law...
they should charge a monthly subscription for the mobile experience. like $2.99 a month or even $1.99 a month. If nobody pays it means Facebook provides thin, trivial value, and shouldn't deserve to be valued so high. It's the truth. Hey, can't have your cake and eat it too.
And then move person with 4 years of work experience slightly out their comfort zone. Say working on designing locks, to working on designing engines.

The mechanical engineer would have a better time. It's one of the reasons vocational/on-the-job educated people end up with lower wages; generally educated people can go where the money is.
Hackable Humans Are The Future?
FB stock pluges to an all time low of $22.28 (down 17%)
If you blame sugar, you get the sugar lobby making similar arguments about poor scientific data for the proposition "sugar increases risk of diseases" that you're making against the proposition "red meat increases risk of diseases".
Not to suggest that credentials are everything, but, lacking any other information, they do provide useful signaling indicators, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Academy

"After earning three degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (a BS in mathematics, a BS in electrical engineering and computer science, and an MS in electrical engineering and computer science), he pursued an MBA from Harvard Business School"

One would hope that his education background might have given him some insight into what "slope" was, and how to best explain it to someone in the 8th/9th grade.

I can _recall_ when it was introduced to me, and I didn't really grok it until a few years later - "rise over run = slope" was complex enough for my brain back then - I can just imagine if people started yacking about "Ratios of variables" - my head would have exploded.
Given that no fewer than 10 legal firms are queuing up lawsuits today (7/27) it seems like there may be some problems with the paperwork.
Yes, I completely agree, that's the point of getting out the vote. I'm just saying that part isn't concerned with changing minds, just getting the minds to the voting booth so the vote is affected.
Those are statutory damages, not actual damages.
Rob Pardo thinks Windows 8 Isn't "Awesome for Blizzard Either"
>"Its a long overdue concept. Being able to have my order ready without waiting would make me far more likely to eat out."

Maybe I'm missing something, but I've been placing orders online for years. Order, go pick it up (or even have it delivered!). Obviously the app could simplify that by having all my restaurants there in one place, but I'm not sure the "concept" is new.