skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No problem. I'll sell two versions of the software. The first will be as you get today with no capability of suing me.

The second will be a lot more expensive, but you can sue. The accompanying documentation will list exactly how you can use the product, and anything outside of that voids the product. It will list an exact certified environment you can use it in (eg only certain Intel processors), versions of operating systems, firewall configurations, other components that can be installed (any more voids the product). Essentially the product will be useless.

The problem with the "suing the developers" approach is who pays. It will always come at a cost including increased development times, more restrictive usage modes, less functionality, insurance, lawyers, court time etc. Ultimately people buying the software will have to pay for those, and it doesn't really benefit them.

At the moment people can put their money wherever they want, and they can choose the level of security, timeliness, access to code etc. I don't see the problem with that.
Conference posters are not considered a "real" publication, and the ones that I have seen are not as carefully designed as this example.
In this example prefix is something the user typed in. So textcolumn LIKE '%blahblah%'.
Yep. I easily Swype without looking. There are occasional mistakes, but it requires very little concentration. Anyway, I think there's too much magic in Fleksy and requires a lot of faith/buy-in on the part of the user to trust it.
I think it would be very easy to convince a jury under a straightforward liability framework that "failure to handle SQL injection is negligent". Which is unfortunate, because "failure to handle SQL injection" is by itself a mostly meaningless statement. Most SQL Injection flaws are indeed very dumb, very obvious bugs. But there are bugs that end up vectoring to SQL injection that are not obvious at all.
AWS Glacier's dazzling price benefits melt next to the cost of tape
To hell with bad browsers.
The same way that people are discouraged from making parts for cars, or ingredients for foodstuffs, or...

What silly argument were we making again?
On the homepage at microsoft.com, they are using the same logo for Microsoft Store as the company name.
I program mostly in Objective-C nowadays, but I started professionally with PHP. When I first started Objective-C, I found it really constricting in comparison. In PHP you can do things a thousand ways, most of the terrible. In Objective-C, specifically with Cocoa, things are a lot more rigid and prescribed. I found this frustrating, but love it now. It's made my PHP better too when I do occasionally go back. It forced me to think more about architecture. I also understand why my CS dept taught us Scheme first, not Java.

To link that back to the post, this is the type of constriction he's talking about to make better programmers. Cocoa and Objective-C restricted me to only writing at least halfway decent code. With PHP, because of it's flexibility, you're free to get things done quickly, but in a terrible way. Sure with PHP you can do things right too, but it takes a lot more self-discipline and also a priori knowledge.

Sorry to post yet another rag on PHP.
The 100% CSS Post-it Note
Pussy Riot and the Radical Power of Fashion
What resources you guys use to hire freelancers?
I have mostly used odesk.com (because there are lot of people over there) to hire free lancers. I have seen most of them are crappy. They are just there to take your money and no worries about the deliverables. Applicants will try to negotiate on your total budget and will ask for 30%-40% advance. It's upto your negotiation power and you might be successful in bringing the advance to just $30-$40 and once they take that, they are gone.

I have lot of ideas (iphone apps, websites) . I am not looking to hire a dedicated full time team, just free lancers - billed on a fixed budget.

Please let me know what resources you will suggest to look and please share your experiences also.

Much Thanks.
Ask HN: How many of you are an X who happens to program as your day job?
like the actor who is a waiter as a day job, the musician who is a bartender as a day job etc. Inspired by pg's high school graduation speech essay.
IE9 and IE10 certainly are putting competitive pressure on others (including Mozilla, my employer). For example, at the time of release IE9's vector graphics performance was far ahead (we're talking on the order of 5x) of any other browser, including Chrome and Firefox, and IE also led the way with background compilation of JavaScript (a very important feature, arguably more important to users than raw JS performance).
So utterly against the stream...heh
It is easy to accept such a position. But then you find many cases where it IS acceptable for an athlete to cause harm to themselves. You would know, you were a wrestler. You knew the guys who just cut a bit. And then there were those monsters who cut nearly whole weight classes. And it wasn't just that they were undisciplined and screwed up and had to make up for it. Those are the lean mean killing machines, who somehow squeeze out a gallon of water from their bodies.

And while temporary, it is most certainly dangerous. And they most definitely gain an advantage.

Which comes back to, it's all relative. Acceptable behavior is not fixed. What is sportsmanlike is fluid, and changes between sports, and over time, and even geographically, and carries a great due of subtlety.

For example, in basketball, intentional fouling is often a sound decision. North American Ultimate Frisbee is the most unsportsmenlike thing in the world according to the rest of the world. Major league baseball pitchers routinely (as in always) break the rules on how long they wait between pitches (and the batters are just happy to oblige). The whole thing is a complicated furball.
'Wiki Weapon Project' Aims To Create A Gun Anyone Can 3D-Print At Home
Another vote on this. Annoying "issue".
A couple million dollars can't quite buy happiness, but they can buy acquiescence quite easily.
VCs and Angels on Twitter
If by "cast-offs" you include the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief Joshua Topolsky; Managing Editor Nilay Patel; several other editors and the other personalities who made the Engadget Show: Paul Miller and Joanna Stern (who now primarily works for ABC network); etc.
So to sidestep this issue, a developer could provide a product configured to be completely locked down with little to no access to network/filesystem/kernel and provide a blurb as to being completely secure with the "recommended" configuration. Any configuration opening up access would be considered to be at the users own risk.
Yes, and they leave, and their key employees may stay, and this are people who have proven to be key hires.
After doing some additional reading, I can now see what the basis for the pro-patent argument is. However, I disagree with it as I'm struggling with the concept of "because we touched it, it's now different".

Below is a description, from a patent law blog, of the change that occurs during the gene isolation :

"To be clear, the change in the molecule that the court is discussing is that the isolated DNA molecule is cleaved from the larger chromosomal DNA molecule by enzymatically cutting it off at each end and slightly altering the terminal amino acid groups." [1]

From the same link, one judge ruled this as akin to plucking a leaf from a tree. While the analogy is simplistic - how is it [conceptually] different?

Judge rulings below :

Judge Bryson [minority] :

[E]xtracting a gene is akin to snapping a leaf from a tree. Like a gene, a leaf has a natural starting and stopping point. It buds during spring from the same place that it breaks off and falls during autumn. Yet prematurely plucking the leaf would not turn it into a human-made invention. That would remain true if there were minor differences between the plucked leaf and the fallen autumn leaf, unless those differences imparted "markedly different characteristics" to the plucked leaf.

Louie & Moore [majority ruling] :

It is also important to dispute the dissent's analogy to snapping a leaf from a tree. With respect, no one could contemplate that snapping a leaf from a tree would be worthy of a patent, whereas isolating genes to provide useful diagnostic tools and medicines is surely what the patent laws are intended to encourage and protect. Snapping a leaf from a tree is a physical separation, easily done by anyone. Creating a new chemical entity is the work of human transformation, requiring skill, knowledge, and effort.

[1]http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2012/08/gene-patent-debate-c...
If I don't pay for food, I die. If I don't pay for medicines, I die.

Does this then imply I don't have a right to live, because "rights cannot be denied based on the ability to pay"? That I don't have a right to property, because if I don't pay my debts my belongings can be confiscated and sold at auction?

I have a right to appoint my own counsel, but the government won't pay for the counsel I appoint. In order to use that right I have to be able to afford the lawyer I want.

US citizens have a right to run for elected office, but clearly that's not provided free of charge!

Rights are not irrespective or independent of my ability to pay. And if something is a right does not mean I get it for free.
Just browsing HN with iGPU on and my 17" dropped fast from 98% to 89% - it does show 7:04 Remaining though. Not confident about the battery life fix.
"The conditions of Myriad’s BRCA patent require that the only laboratories legally allowed to test and sequence the genes are the ones affiliated with Myriad."

(via Wikipedia)
> Ok, but you didn't address my point about concert tickets et al.

Fair enough. A concert doesn't work like a book -- the concert venue must know who is coming, in what numbers, in order to prepare. A traditional book publisher only needs to know enough to decide on the size of the next "printing", to fill the supply channel incrementally, as demand warrants.

The concert happens all at once, so the audience size must be known up front. The book publication might stretch over decades, with periodic decisions about the size of the next printing, so the publisher only needs to know the rate of change in demand, the "first derivative," to use the calculus term.

Two very different cases, from very different, non-comparable businesses.
I found it to be buggy. In fact, Virtualbox for me had the effect of being an advertisement for VMWare.

I would love, love, love to have a free and open source option here but it's not like a web browser or something where I can live with the occasional crash or glitch.
That matches my experience, too. I had dropping problems when I got my MBA (mid-2011) and it magically fixed itself sometime after Lion shipped. I have no problems now.
It's a question of whether it works for everybody, and unless somente here wants to do free research, we can only extrapolate from our on perceptions.
No, I meant the cursor that's highlighting the current character. This could be my own vision problems, but the size of the text + color of the cursor + motion makes it slightly difficult to tell what character I'm supposed to type on the fly. I found myself stopping and squinting just to be sure. That's mainly why I recommended a fisheye - enlarging the current character would solve the problem, but perhaps it's not worth it for most users.

Beautiful app though!
What bugs me about people saying that you need to buy a Mac for iOS development is that you need to buy a computer in order to do any software development. What do Windows developers develop on? Free computers? Is the criticism coming from Windows developers who don't want to buy a Mac to develop for iOS? :D
With multimonitor setup the apps are allowed to use those extra monitors while in full screen. You're supposed to be able to drag pieces of the apps into them if the app supports it.
There can only be one: Smartphones are the PCs of the future
He was pretty specific about the way in which you are incorrect.

Acqhires are acquisitions where the primary interest is the team, not the IP or product.
The web page actually looks ok on my phone. However, putting m.microsoft.com into FF on my laptop just belched xml all over my screen.
"I Have a Great Idea for an App"
Colleges are Predators; Freshmen are Prey
Physicists suggest selfishness can pay
In my personal, anecdotal experience, every vegan I know has serious health problems. Literally every single one. Never anything that can be traced directly to their diet (e.g. one of those I'm thinking of mostly has severe eczema), but it's such a sharp correlation that I can't help thinking there's something to it.

While I haven't looked at that particular study, the result you're claiming seems implausible; one would expect humans to be optimized by evolution for living on the ancestral diet. While there are specific reasons why certain parts of our traditional diet are unhealthy (e.g. the ancestral lifestyle burned far more calories than current), in the absence of a specific mechanism like that, "I like me therefore it's good for me" is a perfectly reasonable inference.

And if you're really only interested in health, it seems implausible that that would be 100% correlated with animal vs. non-animal. There are so many different possible food molecules and no reliable common factor that differentiates where they came from - even more so when it comes to the animal byproducts that make vegans different from vegetarians, such as honey.
Whether Microsoft's web presence is poor depends on if it is compared to a cathedral or a bazaar [a bit ironic, ain't it?]

Keep in mind neither IBM or Apple had a 20% rate of employee millionaires in 1992.

http://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/28/business/microsoft-s-unlik...
For people who have used flurry..Did the data collected turn out to make an actual difference in your revenue/downloads?
In a pair-programming context, what does "my code base" mean?
I think there's a bit of a show here. I'm guessing he went through this demo quite a few times before they filmed this. The prediction algorithm probably starts "learning" which words follow other words based on use (on top of the proximity algorithms). So if you go through this a few times its getting "smarter" and more predictive.
As far as I know, the payments are for Android-specific features that those devices use. I don't think it has ever been proven that Linux infringes Microsoft Patents. In fact Microsoft contributed code to Linux and continues to do so (81980085). If there are violations, the most serious are about some FAT/VFAT patents and the Linux developer community can come up with alternative filesystems on solid-state disks.

From http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/...

<< But he does break down the total number allegedly violated - 235 - into categories. He says that the Linux kernel - the deepest layer of the free operating system, which interacts most directly with the computer hardware - violates 42 Microsoft patents. The Linux graphical user interfaces - essentially, the way design elements like menus and toolbars are set up - run afoul of another 65, he claims. The Open Office suite of programs, which is analogous to Microsoft Office, infringes 45 more. E-mail programs infringe 15, while other assorted FOSS programs allegedly transgress 68. >>

So who must they sue? Right now, I'm sure Microsoft enjoys being perceived as less lawsuit-happy than Apple.
Google's cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

(down at time of writing)
Static code analysis has a long-term benefit as well as the more obvious short-term benefit. That is, it teaches us to be better developers as we strive to have the static analysis catch less issues in our code the next time [1]. I used static analysis to improve my style for C, Python, and most recently Ruby [2].

I think it had a lasting effect on my personal coding habits. But every once in a while, I will use the tools on my new code and it still finds things. I would probably benefit from being more persistent in using these tools.

[1]: This assumes that the issues caught be your static analysis tool are valid concerns, which in my experience, they tend to be.

[2]: Some static analysis tools that I've used with Ruby are reek, roodi, flay, and flog. Reek and roodi report code smells. Flay reports structural similarities (opportunities for refactoring). And flog estimates the complexity of your methods.
I close my lid and my MBP (last of the 17" line) never sleeps. Really frustrating.
I frequently speak with people in my neighborhood about my experience of working from home, and they say: "I don't think I could handle it."

For me, it's just a different type of distraction. When I got bored when working in an office, I would take a break, go get a drink, walk around and see what everybody else was up to, and then go back to work refreshed.

From home, when I get bored, I get up, get a drink of water, play with my kids for a couple of minutes and then go back to work refreshed.

All that being said, I'm not sure this particular study has much to say in the way of helping those of us who do knowledge work from home. Call center work seems like it's different enough that I can see the type of work invalidating the applicability of this particular study to our particular line of work.
> if(obj == null && obj.isValid())

Why would you encounter this (often)? It seems to me that this code would never evaluate to true.
I bought Fusion because of one feature: The ability to boot my Bootcamp partition into a virtual machine. (For heavy Visual Studio useage [and gaming] I dualboot into Bootcamp, for lighter Windows use I launch the virtualized machine without shutting down Mac OS X. Two levels of performance, one installation.)
Looks fantastic. One thing that is confusing is how to add additional social accounts. The startup process lets you link one (e.g., Facebook), but it is not evident how to add another (e.g., Twitter).
Why is Twitter Destroying Itself?
New funding models for open source software
Resque 1.22.0 Signal Handling Changes
Congrats to the team at Facebook, overdue, but it's a massive improvement.
Yes, and the same goes for overstocking the regular pipeline of food distribution, such that some is thrown out due to spoilage, but shortages are rare. If it were possible to have as few shortages with less spoilage, that would be a pareto efficient improvement that did not entail a tradeoff. If you could have an emergency food supply without throwing out as much food, you'd have less waste, but if you stop stocking up for emergencies then you lose the utility of the security you get from having an emergency supply. You could forgo this security, but it isn't possible to analyze whether this would be better without good information on the exposure to risks and perfect insight into your own preferences, and how you might rank the security in comparison to the next best thing you'd purchase.

It is a parallel situation to the main purpose\* of insurance. In the general case, the odds of a bad event occurring multiplied by the cost of paying for that event will always be less than the cost of purchasing insurance to cover that event. However, buying insurance is not implicitly an inefficient decision, because you are buying with insurance is some of the insurer's higher risk tolerance, obtained by pooling together all of its clients' risk.

\* There are some other dynamics at play. Information asymmetries mean that the insurance companies actuaries may have a better idea of your actual risk than you do, and you may privately know that you will do something more risky than you lead them to believe. Furthermore, in the case of health insurance you are also purchasing the insurer's bargaining expertise which can dramatically lower how much is paid for a procedure.
Lego colors:

http://media.cnbc.com/i/CNBC/Sections/News_And_Analysis/__St...
one possible conclusion from that is that most "must-read" programming books are by authors who don't know that they don't know what they're doing.
Where are my flying... motorcycles?
The question then becomes, who decides what that falls under? It's the kind of question that results in laws against braiding hair without a Cosmetology license.[1] And it's a lot easier to code for public consumption, given that all you need is a computer and an internet connection.

[1]http://www.dailypaul.com/249310/federal-court-rules-utah-s-a...
With the NASA style devel­op­ment process, they can deliver very very low bug rates, but it’s at a very very low pro­duc­tiv­ity rate

I wonder how many non-developers understand this. I, along with the rest of my team, am trained in PSP (http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/00tr022.cfm) and TSP (http://www.sei.cmu.edu/tsp/) and we use it in our day-to-day development.

It definitely helps us keep our defect rate below one bug/kLOC but it's an expensive process that results in very low LOC/day productivity. If very low shipped bug counts are very important to your organization, great. But most businesses these days seem to care more about having a usable product than they do a perfect (or close to it) product. Especially if it's on the Web where you can do multiple releases per day.

As an industry, we really need to bear in mind that different business domains need radically different approaches to software engineering.
It has constantly amazed me that Facebook's mobile app experiences are so, so poor.

At the same time, having watched my friends swear at Facebook on their smartphones and yet continue to use the app, day-in, day-out, maybe Facebook are more clever than I give them credit for; I haven't seen people move elsewhere because of the problems.
Facebook made the mistake of optimizing for their developers' sense of efficiency -- at the cost of user experience -- rather than optimizing for their users' experience.

Given the resources available to them, switching to UIWebView was a ridiculous trade-off. I'm glad to see they rectified this decision.

The lesson to be learned is this: at the end of the day, it's the product and user experience that matters. If you sacrifice product quality for some notion of engineering perfectionism -- whatever it might be -- you're not doing your job as a professional engineer.
Free API Infrastructure is definitely a cool thing and we've been doing it from day one - our thoughts here http://bit.ly/OY7mLN :). Welcome to the party Apigee!
Lumify Launches To Stitch Beautiful Short Videos Together On Your iPhone
The court decision: http://www.aclu.org/files/assets/10-1406_0.pdf

Patents at issue: 5,747,282; 5,837,492; 5,693,473; 5,709,999; 5,710,001; 5,753,441; 6,033,857.
If you can patent seeds, then why not genes. Monsanto has been notorious for throwing around their weight when it came to protecting their patented seeds, if this ruling stands I am actually scared to see what comes of it.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment - the bit about making a guarantee that your product will do X really does make sense when put like that.

Ultimately, I realize a few things 1) relatively few people take up money back guarantee offers and 2) I do want to ensure that people are happy with their purchase. Maybe there's a better way of doing that than ensuring some outcome?
I remember seeing http://hover-bike.com/ last year, but this one seems to be closer to production-ready.
I'd say the AVG logo is the Windows logo with colors flipped around since AVG was born in 1991. :)
Adam Savage's Complete Model Making Toolkit
Thanks for the feedback. We're revamping this part in the next version -- for now you can add Facebook or Twitter directly from the share box, or sign in on the web to associate your Google account and get suggestions from Reader.
There are petty crimes and there are serious crimes. Objective-C in Ruby is definitely the latter.
When I hear IE, I think about it's own way to render pages. Over all websites ever created, IE has cost a huge amount of wasted development hours.
Stand up and code like a chef.