skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not a fan of loopholes either, but they exist and it'd be ridiculous to expect those able to not to take advantage of them. They'd just be burning off a percentage of their income.

Everything Romney's done has been legal, if impolitic. I challenge everyone acting like he's the antichrist to show us their tax returns where they made a gift deposit to the US Treasury, because that's essentially what a lot of people expected him to do.
Like libc, or libX11 and apparently ld-linux.

Why not just ship a chroot jail to run it in in case some of those statically linked system libraries read config files which might be under a different path or in a different format?
> Either one is paid to do something or is not.

This doesn't reflect how writers and musicians are actually paid, though. You might be in a band but have a side project or a solo album, but you still receive royalties or concert revenue for it, same as for your role in the ordinary band. Most writers make nearly all their money taking the risk that someone will publish their work and pay them for it. In either case, there's no real distinction and the financial returns are uncertain either way.

There are authors who have regular columns or something, but even in their case it's a little disingenuous to say that writing books is a side project. If you wanted to describe Thomas Friedman's profession, it would be something like "New York Times columnist and author". You wouldn't say he was a NYT columnist who happened to write best-selling books in his free time as some sort of hobby.
Run your code in space - satellite programming competition opens 9/8
Honestly, the whole mantra of "differentiation" is a bit tired. Most android "differentiation" is terrible, and I'd rather have vanilla Android over "differentiated" bullshit any day.
>> Any camera is as good as its lens is good.

That might have been true in the film days, but these days sensor quality is just as important as the lens.

>> And Nikon makes it better

I don't know if this is particularly true about their lower end point and shoots, and that's where I would categorize their Android camera.
What It's Like for a Deaf Person to Hear Music for the First Time
Please read this article[0] and educate yourself. The amount of misinformation surrounding the Apple-Xerox relationship is dizzying.

edit: this article[1] is a bit briefer, and provides much of the same information.

[0] http://obamapacman.com/2010/03/myth-copyright-theft-apple-st...

[1] http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...
The teachers and administrators in this sad but true story did exactly what one might predict if the young author's claims are true. And they clearly are.
I loved "Prof. E. McSquared's Calculus Primer" when I was learning Calculus (look for used prices):

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0913232475/ref=olp_product_...

Home page here:
http://www.math.sjsu.edu/~swann/mcsqrd.html

Fun and funny, written in a comic book format. It illustrates the concepts in such an entertaining style, but makes the point better than many textbooks.
Well it's pretty clear what he means, if you ask me: someone's true potential is only reached when a guy named Acne_Researcher says it is.
I came here to say that too.

The "Inspired by raining.fm" link, links back to coding.fm.
Jwz: The CADT Model
If I were PadMapper, I'd try as quickly as possible to mock up their previous functionality as a Firefox/Chrome addon, which would just manually scrape craigslist from within your browser.

Apartment hunting is such a pain, I think a lot of folk would actually be willing to install addons if it made it easier.
as a person who doesn't want to be associated with random companies, i hope this stays that way.

Your business is not a person, and shouldn't be behaving that way. If you want people to follow your page, perhaps you should put out some high quality content that makes it worthwile to follow your page.
Even windows, crappy as it may be, has it. [...] Apple's work looks pretty-- because it is designed to function well.

Actually, I'd say the same of Windows, if not more so. I far prefer the Windows 7 interface to OSX, it's just stuff like the terminal/command prompt that really lets Windows down.
Print statements fit right in with good unit tests.
Does anyone feels that linux and desktop are at odds with each other? Don't we like small components to bind together using pipes ? Desktop apps are the reverse, big black boxes that barely communicate with anything (I'll admit I don't know dbus)
Cassandra Data Modeling Best Practices, Part 1
Check out this listing at 48th and Balboa-- pin out in the ocean. Really? So pitifully bad. Unfortunately, it's what we've come to expect from them.

And yes, as others have said-- this isn't anything close to the feature set we want, that has now been taken from us: the customer.

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/sub/3237512654.html
Flagged: off-topic.
Thank you. All too-often that entire line of thinking was minimized into simply "caring about eye-candy" and summarily dismissed. That irked me. It was like with the Linux desktop, you had to choose a side, instead of simply marrying what is great about GNU/Linux with what is great about a cohesive modern design and user experience.
Being enablers of dysfunctional behavior is an acceptable solution?

In the long run, the enablers and the dysfunctional are equally guilty for destroying the overall society.

At some point, you have to expect members of a society to meet some minimum behavioral requirements in order to be allowed the benefits of that membership.
Is Chipotle Rounding Your Totals Up or Down?
I've also shipped an Ember app and a Knockout App. To me, there's no comparison: Ember development was easier and produced a faster app and a better organized code base.

Once my app grew complex, Knockout grew increasingly hard to reason about how it's view updating was working. It also grew slow.

Also, Knockout lacks any legitimate data laye (knockout-mapping isn't a data layer). Ember has ember-data.
Well, that's up to him. I don't really think any editor would think Andy Ihnatko was a worse tech journalist if he spent his free time playing with his kids or riding jetskis.

When you're doing something you love to the best of your ability, sometimes it's mentally exhausting and you need to do something totally different to recharge your batteries. Monomania isn't always the best way to go. I mean, it definitely works for a lot of people but it's not a reasonable expectation.
I'm not chalking this one up as a win. This is Craigslist doing the bare minimum, just like they did when they developed mobile/tablet versions of the site. They build half-features that ultimately aren't that useful, but are enough to quell the angry masses. And given that embedding a map should be fairly simple, I'm surprised that they're having trouble with it:

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/sub/3237512654.html
http://www.workingwithrails.com/high-profile-organisations yell.com is also pretty high profile, but not listed.
I totally 100% agree with you but I'm not the average web user who will see a red lock icon with an X over it and think "these guys aren't running a secure site". As web-savvy folks, sure, we know that it's a basic change and the security shortfall is minor (potentially not, though! there's a reason for mixed content warnings). You're average user has to be conditioned to even look for the lock or the https and seeing a big red X over it isn't doing anything for trustworthiness.
We have a love/hate relationship with Google and Apple. Does that count?

Sometimes we just don't like where a company is going or what it has done to try to actually cough make money. I think with Twitter it's watching what used to be a very open platform slowly, but surely, becoming yet another walled garden.
Open Source != free.

Currently an Android license is more expensive than a WP one.

I have to post this for 50th time on YN - Android is a trademark, Google Play, Google Maps, etc are closed source apps, Samsung, HTC, LG, etc. are all paying license fee per device sold. Amazon and a few others forked the source, but can't market their devices as Android and don't get access to the app store.
What 10gen nailed with MongoDB
Jeff - CEO/Founder - The tax advantage is for the income earned on the investment. The kiddie tax exemption eliminates the the first $950 of unearned income.
As long as deposits are less than $13,000 per parent/grandparent each year there are no tax issues for them either.
^ is what I love about HN.

Is it better to stand by and let them get on with it, or to join them and provide a different opinion? A counterbalance?

I'm in the second camp; work with people, spread your ideas. Give it a try.

Of course I'm also of the opinion that, at board level, it's healthy to have a range of opinions. Only then can you make informed and reasonable decisions.

For the observant (or the fellow Hollanders), we call it the Polder Model (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polder_Model).
This is how I felt when first being informed that if I didn't go to first grade (it was a terrible school) my parents risked ending up in jail (maybe extreme, but I believed them when they said that.)

School was always about indoctrinating children to be "good little germans[1]", rather than educating them or teaching critical thinking... and it appears things have gotten much worse since I graduated.

I heard the other day a very young deaf child was punished or told to change her name because when she signs her name her fingers make a shape that is sorta like a gun.

And fingers in the shape of a "gun" is a violation of their "zero tolerance policy on weapons."

How can you expect kids to learn to be rational when this is the kind of irrationality you're subjecting them to on a day-to-day basis?

[1] eg: compliant unquestioning citizens
You can get a design patent on the look of icons, but not a (utility) patent.

Despite the name, a design patent is very different thing from a (utility) patent, which is what people normally think of as a patent. In many ways it's better to think of a design patent as a class of trademark.

If we want to reform the "patent" system, then at the very least we need to be clear what we are arguing against. Different types of IP - patents, design patents, copyright, trademarks, trade dress, etc. - were intended to achieve very different social objectives. Each has its own sets of strengths and weaknesses, and each has been distorted by regulatory capture in different ways.

I think it's important to understand these differences, and something of their history, to be able to make effective improvements.
Memory Management for Rubyists (with Jim Weirich) [video]
e0e0d8: a darker version of the background color...
At the risk of re-igniting that flame war, I posit that this is also a cathedral vs. bazaar issue. OS X is more or less centrally planned, by one company, Apple.
An interesting observation is that tablets are becoming the new desktop and in that space linux, through android, is becoming a dominant player. In a way, the linux desktop is finally here and it's winning against both Microsoft and Apple put together.

All of the article's criticism of mainstream workstation distributions is accurate, of course. But it's important to note that those represent nowhere near the sum total of the linux user experience these days.
This is video from our last Cincinnati Ruby Brigade. The topic was memory management including background, strategies and how it applies to Ruby development with the MRI.
From the Guidelines[0]:

What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.
That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to
reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that
gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

What can be of more intellectually interesting than education itself? Hn has shown itself over and over again to be horrified at the existing education system, and interested in how to change it, by evolution, or by revolution. Indeed, many startups are actively trying to disrupt education.

This article is in some senses a call to action.

Just my $0.02.

[0] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Show HN: Browse apartment listing photos pinterest style
Announcing Reports - Simple adds reporting for your spending data
How will people see my content if they're not following my page?
Support your local anything-but-a-record-label
>> "The tech-fad industry."

Exactly. :)
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/digital-camera-se...

this page has a convenient calculator for diffraction limit of a sensor given it's MPix and dimensions. it shows that a 1/2" sensor with 16MPix becomes diffraction limited at f/2.7, so this slightly bigger one would be limited at around f/3. lens is specced at f/2.8-5.9. results out of anything more than the widest end might be less than spectacular...
> they're also hurt by too many patents.

But they also spent a lot of money to get (and maintain) these patents over the years, so while they might not try to fight a patent reform, there is no chance they will lobby for it: With all the pain they are enduring, the patent system STILL gives the big guys an edge on the small guys.

> Personally, I'd like to see no patents for software and business methods.

Me too. But patents (paid for already) have already been granted, so even if you stop granting them today you still have to wait 20 years for old ones to expire; and patent holders would (rightfully) demand their money back if you decide to expire them early.

The only solution (which several people have apparently come up with independently) that I'm aware of that has a chance of working, is introducing a "cost-of-carry" for patents - if patents are property, tax them like property, at e.g. 1% of decalred value per year.

Think your patent portfolio is worth $1B? That's nice. Pay $10M/year to maintain it. The value would come into play in estimation of damages (e.g., patent infringement limited to patent value per violator, or at most 3 times as much for willful infringement); and alternatively in an "eminent domain" style seizure - someone could take the patent away from you in return for 20 times declared value.

The mechanics are non trivial, but can be solved in such a way that they create an incentive not to overstate the worth of a patent, yet still provide protection to inventors - and it would put old and new patents on equal footing.
>And I meant "platform fan" in the advocacy sense: he has a tendency to "fall in love" with favorite products.

Well, for one, C#/CLR was not a favorite product when he fell in love with them, were they? At the time lots of people thought MS was foolish to try to overtake Java, and it took a couple of years for people to accept and like .NET.

>But to claim that these were innovative new projects is silly.

Sure, they weren't, but it's not like Linux in general has given us much innovative things in the desktop space.
I'd agree with a whole lot of what's said here, but also add:

One of the big thrusts of the Linux desktop wasn't simply dominance itself, but for it to simply not matter what you were using on the desktop. The Linux desktop fought to produce the first cracks in Windows hegemony a decade ago, but the final push came from the rebirth of Apple and the rise of the smartphone.

Today people happily do their normal productive or recreational tasks from a variety of computing environments: Windows, GNOME, Unity, KDE, OS X, iOS, Android, et al. Probably the majority of (Western) web users use at least one non-Windows internet device.

During the golden age of the Linux desktop everything seemed predicated on reaching exactly this point -- that you wouldn't need Windows, and then, by virtue of competing on a leveler playing field, the Linux desktop would ascend.

But the Linux desktops didn't "scate where the puck is going" -- or their attempts at such missed the mark. By the time we reached the era post-Windows dominance, the Linux desktops weren't positioned to take advantage of the new playing field dynamics. The rest of the industry isn't even all that concerned with the desktop wars anymore. It stopped mattering very much -- and ironically, that came around to bite the projects in the ass that first got the ball rolling.
Largely the same issues that killed UNIX as a viable desktop alternative are the same issues that are killing Linux as a viable desktop alternative: Fragmentation and lack of consistency across different distributions.

This is compounded by most distributions having a lack of centralized vision on how everything fits together. They are merely a collections of individual parts rather than a collection of parts that are designed to work well together and they lack the polish as a result. While the lack of centralized vision was fine for SunOS circa 1992, it simply doesn't cut the mustard in 2012.

Ubuntu seems to be trying to push such a centralized vision with Unity, but I fear they lack the clinical editorial willpower to make the hard decisions required to see it through to its ultimate conclusion.
Jeff - Founder/CEO It does reduce financial aid, but only 20% of the child's assets are included.
TrustEgg assets also don't have to be used for education, while a 529 plan would assess a 10% penalty for non-education withdrawals.
Having the assets in the child's name also protects the assets from the parents, and parents creditors, which is necessary when taking deposits from other family members.
I don't buy that argument. I think the consequences of having kids one can't feed can be strong enough even in poor countries, to prevent the conception of those kids. Basic forms of birth control should be free (that's way better than providing free food). The least educated, poorest people can understand their usage.
Public education is 100% not even across the nation. This is for sure. However, when children are taught to read, they can very easily understand that they are not participating in an education, rather they are merely receiving "pamphlets" on what to fill their heads with so they can be perceived as educated. In the bigger picture, education itself obviously needs an overhaul. The school's reaction to her brilliant interpretation of an extraordinary individual is unwarranted and goes against the principles of what an educational institution is designed for. Honestly, I don't believe the issue here is race, as the author of the article makes it out to be. The issue is incompetence in public education across the board.
What other devices you got?
What killed it is that it didn't have a huge and multi-billion dollar company betting on it (on the desktop) like Microsoft and Apple had, even Apple with its billions is still around 5% market share worldwide so having 1% is still a great accomplishment when you think that it had no support from huge corporations.

Now take the mobile world for example, Linux on mobile had been around for a decade but it never really took off until a huge company like Google decided to throw its billions of dollars and its great ingenuity at the task. Getting an OS to be popular is just incredibly difficult and it needs way more than just good driver support and/or good software. It needs marketing, talking to manufacturers, dedicated and well payed devs, designers, UI and UX professionals, sales, R&D and so on and so forth.

Focusing on the technicality of drivers and API is typical of us devs, but it has nothing to do with why Linux didn't take off on the desktop, sure Linux did fail because it couldn't do any or some of that well, but why couldn't it do any or some of that? Because it didn't have a huge and focused company pushing for it. How many popular desktop OS are there? Only 2, I think that's enough to show that it's incredibly hard to get into that market and that only a huge company can make it. Also, let's not forget that Windows was good enough and there was not much Linux could do to attract users, in fact this is still true and probably why even OS X is still at 5%: Windows is good enough and it's the de facto standard used by +90%. Having the best UI and UX in the world like OS X doesn't help that much either.
> Most writers make nearly all their money taking the risk that someone will publish their work and pay them for it.

You are right, of course, but this is not what I was asking about. Let's leave 'nearly' (for clarity) out and let's say that 'all the money writers make comes from publishing their works', which is true. I'm asking if it's also true that 'all the writing writers do is supposed to/has to/they hope it will make them some money'?
>I think he's right, but I think he's missing a key point.
Design. Design is what killed the linux desktop. It never had it. OS X has it. Even windows, crappy as it may be, has it.

I'm not sure he is missing it, even if he doesn't name it explicitly on the post.

For one, he was always pro good design (and trying to get the good design parts of other systems), but also, when he laments the anarchy and lack of long term planning on the Linux side, he is essentially lamenting the lack of a central design authority.
Choice here too - have been running Linux at home for almost 10 years and I never regretted it. There are almost no downsides, except careful choosing what hardware to buy and the lack of Photoshop (though Wine helps with that now).
An Investor Asked A Founder For Complete Access To Emails During Due Diligence
Its a trial and error process.

I was afraid of that. :) But yes, I see your point. I suppose it's hard to do better than: think of what your future self would need to know, providing both context (to jog your memory when possible), rationale (because that is NOT always obvious), and technical detail (both because that stuff changes and because it's better not to re-derive your previous understanding from scratch whenever possible).
Hi Jacques,

Thank you for your comment, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Thank you also for summarizing the many forseeable possible discussions upfront so that we could have avoided them here.

The books were chosen by a group of five, half of us with 10-15 years of experience, so no, they aren't the latest books the author by a chance happend to read.

I admit that, as others have complained, the title might be percieved as misleading. The reason is that these are books that our company recommends to its developers and we want the developers to be something more than coders (= what most people understand under 'developer'). Though it's important to write great code, it's even more important, IMHO, that it is the right code that gets written, i.e. that the resources available are used to produce the maximal business value possible (and we believe that this cannot be planned but must be discovered based on feedback from reality - that's why lean/agile). Going quickly (great coding skills) in the wrong direction isn't progress.

Some of us have read Code Complete or The Pragmatic Programmer but it hasn't made it into the list. More of us will read it now and we will reevaluate the list afterwards. I hope it's good with you :-)
Was gonna say exactly the same. People thinks that if it's not popular among the masses it's "dead". Totally wrong, since it covers a completely different niche.

The author seems to forget that some people actually enjoys configuring and hacking their systems in detail. Also there is the people who hates using the mouse, and wants to do everything with the console and keyboard.
Zebra Sarasa. $13.24 for a dozen.
http://www.amazon.com/Zebra-Sarasa-Retractable-Rollerball-Bl...
There is nothing stopping people sourcing the parts from the bazaar and using them to build a cathedral.

After all it's exactly what NeXT (and Apple) did.
At a minimum, I'd like to see Non-Practicing Entities be unable to sue for infringement.
Both.

I need it for work, and I wouldn't have it any other way.