skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What I think would be interesting would be to add 20,000 H1Bs like tech companies are lobbying for and an additional 10,000 H1Bs that brings in foreign computer science and engineering teachers to teach at the high school level. That or some similar scheme that increases the number of competent high school CS teachers would be very valuable.

In high school I wanted to be a CS major in college, but a shitty CompSci teacher completely killed my interest in the subject and I ended up taking a 10 year detour before returning to software engineering as a career. Plus, as a kid there were like no adult role models around to help me out and Win3.1 wasn't exactly the ideal system to get involved with programming. The 80s was a much better time to grow up if you were a kid interested in programming and had access to a computer.
This. Most IRC servers (ircd-seven, InspIRCd, UnrealIRCd, etc.) are rock solid and require very little maintenance if you're not doing more advanced things like linking to other servers, linking to services (ChanServ, NickServ), etc.
How do you find the time?
I don't see how Python docs are terrible. Any doc is a help() away from you on any REPL.
You make it out as if appearing like a salesman is a bad thing. Why not be proud of what you're good at? This product is all about sales, it's aimed squarely at the HN demographic and the page does a fantastic job of proving that Patrick is good at sales (as if anybody needed convincing).

And if that did not convince you that this product rocks there is a glowing testimonial from a satisfied customer on the homepage right now.
Ask HN: Is there a site to interact with potential future customers?
Lets say you have an idea for an app/site whatever but no idea if there will be anyone willing to pay and use it. Is there any online platform where we can interact with potential future customers and get their opinions ?
Aha! That explains why for some users, I'm seeing them listed as having my own e-mail address.
You're asking the wrong question here. It's not "what plans does Google have?", it's "what incentive does Google have?" and the answer is none.
A River Ran Through Mars
Definitely not unprecedented.

I keep thinking it mirrors the introduction of Final Cut Pro X, in that a fundamentally broken product was dropped, without warning, on a group of users who relied on it heavily. Meanwhile, FCP 7 was yanked from the market at the exact same time - again, without warning - meaning (very) established users couldn't continue to rely on a very good system until the "improved" system was actually improved.

I remember seeing an extraordinary amount of dismissiveness on this very board from people with no media or post experience who were sneeringly characterizing editors and post-producers as neo-luddites who simply didn't understand technology (!) and who didn't want to change. The idea that Apple could have taken a big step backwards and tripped while doing so seemed like anathema. "Clearly" the fault must be with the users. "You just have to adapt to what MUST be good for you" came the refrain.

From the perspective of people who actually knew what they were doing, this came as insult added to injury. All the cloying remarks about Apple "simply moving the cheese (to a better spot!)" missed the real point, which is that Apple had made the cheese inedible then thrown it off a cliff. And they'd done so without warning, leaving a lot of heavy investments in equipment, media, and skills in the lurch.

Because it all this played out in a specialized niche, most people ignored it. Apple's chief competitors (Avid and Adobe) jumped on it, and life moved on - with Apple's once-sterling reputation in the professional post-production market forever dimmed.

Now that the same pattern is playing out with Maps. The big differences are (a) Maps are insanely mainstream - everybody notices this (b) Maps - unlike video editing - are absolutely central to mobile computing in general and (c) Mobile computing is clearly the future of not just Apple, but computing in general. So now there's a replay of the FCP X blowback, but this time, it's headline news worldwide. And the obvious response (switch to another system) isn't one Apple can afford having this many people make.

I have no idea what prompted this fiasco. Much of it may be external to Apple (e.g. a Google deal they couldn't live with). But judging from the reckless and completely unnecessary way they botched the FCP 7-X transition, I suspect something unique to Apple's culture is on display here.

It isn't pretty. But judging from the letter, Tim Cook seems to get it. They really Really REALLY need to get Maps right, and I really hope they do. The iPhone5 is beautiful, but I'm holding onto my 4S and its access to Google.
> Well we have no contract about anything what so ever.

Actually, with respect to OSTicket, you do. OSTicket is licensed under the GPL, which means that anything you write based on it is also GPL-licensed. Which means you cannot publish or offer it without also releasing your own source for anyone else to use or modify.

In GPL open source, everyone needs to acknowledge everyone else's copyrights, but no one is prevented from using the code in any way they please -- as long as they release their own source code.

> If they want one like it, they need to build one them selves or purchase it from Sam.

Before you get into trouble, you need to learn the rules of open-source.
The First Lecture
> Both of those points have been obvious to Apple for at least 6 months

I'm getting tired of this argument. Where was everyone when this was so completely obvious 6 months ago? The beta was released, people were using it, and I can't find any criticisms outside of "It's not perfect, but it's working great and looks fantastic". Where are the bug reports? Sure, it was an NDA product, but that didn't stop bloggers from publishing stories about it:

http://www.idownloadblog.com/2012/08/09/3d-map-wars-apple-vs...

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/18/why-apples-map-look...

http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/11/goodbye-to-google-maps-with...

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/06/ios-6-maps-app-challe...

http://gizmodo.com/5918176/google-maps-vs-apple-maps-a-side-...

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57450354-37/apples-new-3d-...

http://www.cultofmac.com/183742/apples-3d-maps-in-ios-6-are-...

http://mashable.com/2012/06/11/apple-vs-google-maps/

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/06/...

http://go.bloomberg.com/tech-blog/2012-06-12-apple-maps-alre...
"I don’t think there is a pivot happening now at all, but if I were there we would pivot."

Hey man, if you're the CEO and they aren't pursuing the right strategy, then get your ass back there and do your job. If you don't feel like doing your job, then resign and let the board find someone who is at least going to try to accomplish something.
You're right, the reality is far more nuanced than what's presented here. Setting aside the current Color fiasco, Bill Nguyen is a highly accomplished entrepreneur with close to $1B worth of startup exits in his past [1][2]. To say that he's gotten rich from "who he knows", and "marketing" is spitting in the face to a guy who's built real genuine successes from scratch, when he was a nobody. He is not making off like a bandit with the current $41M investment. This is turning out to be a failure from which he will not benefit financially in any significant way.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Nguyen
[2] http://www.fastcompany.com/1784823/bill-nguyen-boy-bubble
Don't be a law breaking jagaloon and you should be fine.

Edit: My take: just because a folder is private doesn't mean you couldn't suddenly make it "public", making Microsoft the proud host of illicit pornography. I say illicit because I'm sure there are, depending on the state, laws to abide by which you must have a "18+" warning/prompt in order to access it.

Edit 2: And, if you really don't want to MSFT to see your files, but still want to use their free service, use a TrueCrypt drive. You will lose the features things like opening documents on devices, etc, but you get the additional protection.
I fully endorse this. Coming from a sysadmins / devopps perspective, documentation is key to providing a reliable, dependable, available, scalable service. And dramatically improving the quality of my life.

How that documentation is written also matters. A lot.

Much proprietary documentation is also crap, for numerous reasons. Marketing having too much say is key (every reference to a Trademarked(r) Name(tm) Phrase(c) is both fully expanded and badged. Might keep the marketers and lawyers happy, but it's hell to read. Descriptions are vacuous to the point of idiocy ("More magic: select this option to enable more magic") -- tells me absolutely nothing not inherent in the control, and in particular, fails to tell me what the effect of enabling "more magic" is (feature name changed, but this construct is all too common in docs).

Usage notes and examples are mandatory.

As much as Free Software docs are pilloried, I still find that they tend to compare favorably with non-free docs.

Noted here: https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/bLaDaXNe...
Looks like their prototype is based on a Xilinx Zynq dev board from Digilent:

https://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?Prod=ZEDBOAR...

No idea what's hiding on the FMC daughterboard, though.
You might be over-thinking things a bit... depending on the conference, a talk proposal often only needs to be a couple of paragraphs. You don't need to have planned the talk out in detail - just an explanation of what it is you intend to talk about and some background on your experience with the topic.
Could you please describe your transition from software engineering into another field? What you've said rings very true.
It seems tech writers will go to any lengths to get "iPhone" in a headline, even further if it will cast iPhone in a negative light. But this is truly absurd. As in so many of these sensationalist stories, the iPhone is by no means unique; all consumer electronic products use the same materials. In addition, "rare earth elements" are not rare. They are found in abundance all over the planet. The only issue is cost of extraction. If they get scarce, the price will go up and this will incentivize mining in places other than China.
Haha, yes, I agree. 2:30 would probably be run at the pinnacle of one's amateur career -- a personal best rather than a typical time.

I do want to point out somewhat pedantically that it takes being in better-than-2:30 shape to run 2:30 on the Boston course, a notoriously slow course. There are runners who ran more slowly than 2:30 in Boston when they could have run 2:30 elsewhere.
exciting concept. the synchronous engagement is gonna hurt you in terms onboarding and retention
This is a much better answer than mine above :)
Boy, I sure wish I could get paid to travel while not having to deliver any results of any kind. Must be nice!
> There are a ton of people just waiting to sue Google over infringement or inducement, so they probably feel that they had to have blanket bans on AdSense for people linking to the Pirate Bay.

It's not even a matter of Google being sued -- sites that link to pirated content are frequently sites that advertisers don't want their ads to run on, even if those sites are perfectly legal.
Portraits of Rural Chinese Families Posing with Everything They Own
It's pretty clear to me that this is an attempt to explain the mechanisms of lambda calculus using familiar metaphors. I think it could be very helpful for introducing the concepts.
I agree to this. All of out-of-the-blue invitations to do something proved to be a scam, one or the other sort of - most plainly visible, but others more painful. So i never reply for job offers i get unexpectedly from people i don't know, and i never work for anyone writing to me in Russian.
Is it really important to type the delimiter? Or just to have it appear onscreen while typing?
The old Maps app was also coded by Apple. Is there any (legal? practical?) reason why they didn't collect usage data from that?
30-60 minutes of my time is worth something like a year of $10 a month charges. That's assuming no maintenance ever, good luck with that.
I don't think that is necessarily true. Majority of freelancing sites are geared towards overseas outsourcing and portray the value proposition to companies of adding money to their bottom line. This naturally makes it hard for US based developers to make market rate on these sites.

Shameless self-promotion: I am a co-founder of grouptalent.com which is geared towards high-end freelance developers and rates generally trend toward market.
This all seems a little too hard to believe. I'm not really confident that the CEO has been smoking pot and drinking beer in Tahoe and Hawaii for the past two months. When software companies start to fail, the engineers know it. I wouldn't be surprised if they just talked to some pissed off engineers and weren't really getting the straight dope.
Patrick and Ramit Sethi discuss this very thing in the last Kalzumeus podcast.

Book pricing isn't as hopelessly broken as music pricing, but that is faint praise indeed. It's sad. Writing a good book is a great deal of work, reading a good book provides a great deal of value, but the psychology of the book market recognizes neither of these facts. People vaguely imagine that producing books costs approximately the time required to type them, and expect to buy books for the cost of buying, inking, and shipping the paper - if the paper is absent they expect the price to be negligable.

Whereas the one good thing to be said about modern college tuitions is that they provide a nice big anchor for the cost of a "course". Practically anything looks like a bargain next to the list price of an hour of TA instruction at Harvard. [1]

[1] That's a fun math problem: Assuming five courses at Harvard, five hours per week of lecture and recitation per course, a fourteen-week semester and $38k tuition and fees, I come up with about $55 per hour per student. Of course, Harvard does not bill by the hour, but that's a whole 'nother essay.
Are you sure about that? Doesn't google have a maps application that is pending approval in the app store?
Since when are nude photos stored on a personal storage service breaking the law?
Doug James Teaches a 17 year old to Build an App in 6 hours Using Game Salad
Doug James from Jaxel Studios comes by the podcast to chat about Game Salad, its low cost and ease of use. We also talk about analytics platforms and app testing products.
> I have been waiting to write a response to patio11 like this for a while

I believe it's also the first time someone other than patio11 has used the word "ROFLstomp" on HN ;)
Hmmm... bad example, since according to the provided link physicists make more than developers, both in mean and median.
Creators of Bootstrap Leaving Twitter
Finderous looks pretty cool. Good luck! We've just launch out app in beta - not a mobile app yet neufit.com but we are gaining some traction with it to go mobile as well!
I believe the antenna was slightly different for the verizon versions. But the ATT iphone 4 hasn't been changed that I'm aware of.
That part is referring to motivation to combine references, or extend an existing reference.

The Federal Circuit precedent on the issue used to be that you needed an explicit suggestion or motivation (in prior art) to combine two references or do further work, in order for that combination to be prior art, which was fairly ridiculous, but it was the law. See, for example, In Re Lee, 277 F.3d 1338 ( http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F3/277/277.F3d.1338.00...). Some choice quotes (i'm too lazy to pull out the cites the opinion itself is making):

"The factual inquiry whether to combine references must be
thorough and searching." Id. It must be based on objective
evidence of record. This precedent has been reinforced in
myriad decisions, and cannot be dispensed with.

...

"Our case law makes clear that the best defense against the
subtle but powerful attraction of a hindsight-based
obviousness analysis is rigorous application of the
requirement for a showing of the teaching or motivation to
combine prior art references."

There is also a still open question of the skill level of a person with ordinary skill in a given art and "obvious to try".

As for bad ideas, nothing in the law prevents you patenting useless or non-valuable things. We do in fact, grant plenty of patents on useless or non-valuable things.

As for whether we should, I personally don't believe we should, but the argument goes that "plenty of things that people thought were useless or bad ideas at the time turned out to be quite commercially valuable".
Cloud Link Roundup – NY Times vs Wired, IOPS for Amazon RDS, Nasdaq Cloud
As a single datum:

I certainly learn abstractions better when I have a solid concept to work from. I understand it is a crutch/bridge/scaffold for a true understanding, but such a thing really helps me learn anything. This has been true for me of maths, various programming concepts, human language grammar rules, and on.

I really really dig the power abstractions and abstract thought provide, but for whatever reason, I can't grasp a lot of abstracts without first learning how to apply them to a specific case and working out from there. As I have gotten older, I have been able to see quicker how to apply the abstractions from the initial case study, and regularly can apply abstraction in interesting ways - I am particularly good at seeing where various design patterns can be used on some software we are architecting, and doing the mental refactorings on the fly. Yet when I learn about a new design pattern, I still need to see it in a working piece of code, and preferably a step-by-step transformation to grasp it.
Wow, color me incredibly impressed.
Apple has used the P.T. Barnum strategy of even bad press is beneficial.

By releasing a crap version of Maps:

1. Everyone now knows that Apple has their own version of Maps.

2. The story has become, "Look how hard Apple is working to make it better."

One can see this in the Tech press already, e.g. Apple posting jobs, hiring ex-Googler's and Cooke's letter have supplanted criticism.

It is inevitable that the next release of maps will be covered with great fanfare and that the bulk of the stories will praise Apple for how much improvement they have made. Cooke's sincerity and the key hiring strategy will be mentioned. In other words, no matter how far behind their competition the next release of maps is, the standard narrative will reflect positively on Apple.

All of this is based on the fact that the quality of Maps is not a critical component of the decision tree within the market segment which buys iOS devices. Yes, there is perhaps a meaningful minority of people for whom Maps is a deal breaker when it comes to an iPhone. The same doesn't hold true when it comes to iPads or iPods. "Nobody" buys an iPod as a GPS [scare quotes because there is someone hacker who has].
Hey, why don't we make a list of employers who ask for social media passwords? That'll keep them from getting decent employees for a while.
Even very early alpha code can find its way into production systems. I'm familiar with a case involving a three-letter household name company a few years back using early releases of cassandra, as well as nginx (not entirely beta at that point, but with much of the documentation still in Russian).

Engineering making it work was a long way from operations making it reliable and understood.
I just wish skilled computer science people could work
for whomever they want. Our industry would be so much
better off. So long as you pay taxes and are a lawful
person, I support anyone living in this country.

Amen to that. I wish more people though this way. Citizenship based on birthright is a really antiquated notion in my view and I'm surprised more countries, at least smaller ones, haven't experimented with this idea more.
I read it wondering about the game dynamics. It felt like a trick to waste my time when it wasn't a game, just a lesson about something else.
Gosh, it seems like Pycon 2012 was just yesterday. I considered contributing to PyCon 2013 but time just flies.
Here's my own one I recently built: https://github.com/stephenmcd/gnotty

Built with Django and websockets, so you can easily wrap authenticated views around it.

Also includes a bot framework with support for webhooks. Some of the bundled webhooks include things like incoming pull requests from GitHub or Bitbucket.

On top of that it provides a browsable/searchable message archive as well.
This is great, while I've often thought I should go back to my college and bridge the glaring holes between the curriculum and reality, I never got much further than that.

Definitely alumni going back and helping their schools should be encouraged, and hopefully most dept's are humble enough to accept that help. But I worry it's a small thing that doesn't scale, have you thought about the growing online education movement as a vector?
Edited my original message.

Maybe MSFT should allow to flag your content as mature, but who knows what other jurisdictions they run under.
I participated in the first October Challenge two years ago. The timing was perfect for me since I had a project that was nearly done, but I was getting burned out, like you said, on that last 10%. The addition of a deadline helped me focus and get through it.
Welcome to the cloud, where your personal data is no longer personal.

Microsoft may have made a mistake doing this, it may look like a relatively small issue but they have taken on the burden of being responsible for the data stored on their systems now.
it's like the guy at the newspaper cannot read. google sent him a link to a list of issues, and he doesn't address them at all.

if you look at the link, it was shut down for bad clicks, incitement to users to click, or similar. at the very least he could have said in the reply something like "we don't think we have people clicking on links, but if you could provide some IPs we might be able to track down someone at the paper who's being over-enthusiastic".

even if he knows nothing like that has happened he could have added to the reply (talking about XML uploads, copyright issues) something like "these don't seem to fit into the ilicit activities listed. we don't have incitements to click on ads (see ...) so if the above isn't relevant we suspect there has been some mistaken clicking locally. we have educated the users and we've put in place the following measures to track ..."

instead, he shows no sign of having understood the issues and no inclination to help solve the problem. he just whines.

this is basic psychology. you need something from these people. so you try to act like you understand and want to help, even if you think they are incompetent assholes.

[edit: maybe i come across as unsympathetic. i can understand how maddening this must be. but surely that's more reason to get it fixed? and to get it fixed you need to cooperate, not act like a victim. at least, that's how i would play it (it's his job to make this work).]
How to downgrade -- simplee but powerful tips fromom Sethth Godin
Former bank robber in 2nd year at UW law school
The goal of $100 million isn't that Yahoo wants money. They want to be a sexy, ambitious, developer-oriented employer like Google. They want to experiment, and break things, and most importantly identify what is and isn't working. Rather than letting some cut-rate dev produce a middling Japanese Finance page for his whole career, they want a few impressive brands that will draw new, talented developers in. Free food is part of that branding as well.

Buying a promising startup and smothering it with their existing bureaucracy would only hurt their reputation at this point.
For a 2 to 5 size company, I don't see why they don't just use a public IRC server and set mode +irsp to a private channel.