skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> A title like "Abolish patents, full stop" is, to be blunt, sheer idiocy

Why? Apparently a Nobel laureate in Economics disagrees with you, so maybe we should take the idea seriously.

To see more of Maskin's arguments on software patents, you can read a paper of his on the subject at citation #6 on his wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Maskin
They complain constantly that the publicly funded universities don't graduate enough STEM graduates to meet their needs. Think about that--they complain with no hint of irony that the public doesn't train enough workers for them at the public expense!

At the same time, our esteemed corporate chieftains want the government out of their way. Our great economic miracle involves shifting the costs of production elsewhere. This is called putting the doctrine of individual responsibility into practice.
Yeah, I read that a few years ago, too.

Looking back, the authors approach mirrors very well what I tried to set up for myself as a student. (Asking questions, no notes, repetition schedule..)
This is a good comment, I have no issues with having such a discussion in the comments. Its just bad form to <conclude> the outcome a legal proceeding in a headline, generally. If someone with additional information wants to jump in and clarify, for example, the role of international waters the competing issues of soveriegnty, and distinction between the actors of states and individuals, etc. would be very informative.[1]

______________

[1] A bit of additional color:

International law differs from national legal systems in that it primarily concerns nations rather than private citizens. [Continuing...] National law may become international law when treaties delegate national jurisdiction to supranational tribunals such as the European Court of Human Rights or the International Criminal Court. Treaties such as the Geneva Conventions may require national law to conform.
...[A] state member of the international community is not obliged to abide by international law unless it has expressly consented to a particular course of conduct.[3] This is an issue of state sovereignty.

etc. Not my area of expertise, but this is very much an area where such expertise would be quite useful. Not just international law in general, but also (presumably) the UN doctrines Law of the sea, ect. (covers private parties).
http://www.un.org/Depts/los/index.htm
Saw Pusher mention this on Twitter earlier and had a play about with it. Good fun and impressive it was done as part of Rails Rumble - very polished.
Sim City adopts a tilt-shift style look and feel
I'd argue, though, that the word "creative" being used in this sense is directly related to how they go about solving their problem (producing effective advertising given the constraints) and not related to the fact that they are generating visuals or copy.

And these thinking techniques can very easily be applied to programming. If you haven't watched the John Cleese lecture I linked to, then I would highly recommend it.
Sorry, I did. Read to the bottom of the page, re-read your post, hit reply.

The hardcore pro-immigration site I link to is to indicate that the "non-partisan" CIS is not non-partisan, which would be obvious too if you look at the CIS site which quotes mainly fox news segments. I don't necessarily agree with anything else they state.
I'm talking immigration generally, not just H1-B.

But even in the context of H1-B: If an H1-B needs emergency treatment, hospitals won't turn them away because of their H1-B status. That's part of our social safety net. Education is paid via property taxes. Most H1-B's do not own their homes and thus do not pay property taxes. In any case, nobody who is living here six years is covering the cost of a child's education. It costs $15-20k per year to educate a child in most states. Very few people pay that much in property taxes per year. The system depends on long-term commitments--you pay property taxes during many years when you don't have kids, then get the benefit for the years your kids are in school.

My point is not to try and make distinctions about whether the average H1-B contributes enough to the tax base. I'm sure they do. But that's not the point. My point is that with any given H1-B, the community takes certain obligations to that person. It's not just a matter between the employer and the immigrant.
Dyson sphere hunt using Kepler data
I don't think this is discrimination against Americans: it's just discrimination against people who price themselves higher. H1-B workers are glad to be in the US and are willing to accept substantially less cash compensation as a result. Americans already have US citizenship and want to be paid in money. Companies don't like spending money but the government allows them to spend "citizenship points" on employees instead, so they do and here we are. (And, you can threaten employees you don't like with deportation, which is much scarier and perhaps more motivating than "you're laid off and will have to collect unemployement while waiting for your new job to start. remember to get out of bed for a few hours a day so you don't get bedsores!" It certainly prevents people from asking for raises, equity, etc.)

Ultimately, you get what you pay for. The problem is that the market hasn't figured this out yet, since good programmers are so few and far between that most programming-related projects fail anyway. If you're going to fail, you might as well fail with cheap labor that won't talk back instead of with expensive labor mixed with cheap labor, right?
What app.net could have been
It has nothing to do with the job title and everything to do with the person.

And yes, I am saying that the label of creative can be applied to any job in the world. Watch the video.
Haven't we put the "it's an accessory" bit to bed yet? It's awfully tired.

Also, the second someone needs to use that keyboard's bizarre-o trackpad to drive the software to write their term paper, you can bet the utility of having "traditional" apps on your tablet is going to be more carefully considered than simply assumed.

The argument against the surface remains that when you need a tablet, a 'full desktop OS' is not a feature you care about. And when you need a 'full desktop OS', the surface may not be a very good one.

So the comparison will, again (and as it almost always does) hinge on what people need or want these things for and how good each product is at performing those tasks in reality.

Also, pretending that all the iPad brings is ecosystem is just as silly as flatly stating the iPad as more elegant.
I don't think 'creative' denigrates regular coders precisely because the term IS from the Advertising industry where there is a clear delineation between "creative", "sales" and "business". [1]

Ad Agencies/VFX Companies/Design Firms tend to have a "Creative Director" [2] where a Creative Coder would report to and up until recently, their roles would not exist in traditional consumer/enterprise web companies.

Put another way, it's still blurry if someone in such a role would report to an Engineering Director or a Creative Director at a company that had both groups.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=ad+agency+org+structure
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_director
They lost me at "Were a one stop shop".
I'm planning to visit there soon, if I know English only, would I able to get around?
It didn't save my comments? At least I couldn't see them...
I was with you until the "cost more than oil" line. My reasoning on that is the third world is going to need large amounts of energy to boost themselves to everyone else's standard of living. Like India and China, they are going to use the same, proven sources we did unless the alternatives are cheaper to implement and just as reliable. It isn't a do nothing attitude, its a realistic assessment based on human behavior. That's why alternatives really need to have an advantage over oil.
Apple cans game modeled on Foxconn tech workers’ suicides
How do you know that someone else has been banned? How do you know if YOU have? What's "hellbanned"? What's "shadow banned"?
It's official - CUTC has a new visual identity.
Show HN: StopArguingNow.com - See what others have to say
Though Python doesn't have the library support that R has, it far exceeds what's available in Julie (and,depending what you are looking for, in Matlab as well)
How about the despecialized edition?

http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Harmys-STAR-WARS-...
I'm quite happy you reposted as well. I'll be teaching a course (first time teaching full course) next semester, and rereading that post was quite timely, since I'm starting to plan the whole thing.
Do y'all have a performance roadmap (or issue tracker tag?) that lists some optimizations that you foresee as julia matures? If not, I hope you and/or Jeff will do a blog post on this at some point! One key point of interest would be the split (obviously hand-wavy) between:
- llvm hotness that you don't use yet
- well-known techniques from HotSpot, Smalltalk, V8, etc.
- researchy optimizations that julia is particularly suited for?

This would be a nice resource for newcomers with a language bent, and also as a building block for your Google Summer of Code applications ;)
The Knockoff Economy: Copying and Creativity in Cuisine
Optimizing Node.js and MongoDB: Everything I Learned (and what's still broken)
How Fast is Bit Packing?
Are you using a large fixed point system or floating point? I hope the fractal-ness isn't just floating point rounding writ large.
Ranging from little at the low end.

We have customers ranging from startups in a garage to enteprises and everything inbetween. Plenty of customers who started small and scale up. Talk to you friendly Zuora rep. He'll give you a good price. :)
"We need to do something. This is something we can do. Therefore we need to do this."

It's a false dichotomy. There's probably a wide range of things we can do, and picking an option just because it happens to be there & feasible, regardless of evidence of merit, doesn't seem like a winning strategy.

Put another way, you could cut off your hand to treat an infected wound. It's "feasible." But is it anything remotely approaching the best way? Furthermore, what if it turns out that artificially seeding the ocean with plankton is approximately as disastrous for the health of the ocean?
Then you got past the premise. :)

Beyond the education we were trying to go for a little bit of the corny/infomercial feeling.
Yes. Big-O is the worst case for the input, not for the algorithm. If the input is the expected average, then its Big-O is the upper-bound/worst-case for the average. But if the input is the worst case or just the algorithm itself, its Big-O will be an upper-bound/worst-case for the entire algorithm.

In other words, the original article's point should have been about vocabulary. Big-O is about worst-case, but sometimes it's implied that the Big-O analysis is about the algorithm's average case, not the algorithm's worst case.
Gary Rennie, Oliver Cannings and me built this for the Rails Rumble this weekend just past. http://railsrumble.com/entries/272-uptilt
> Are the employees entitled to the 'artificial' supply limitation created by national boundaries?

It's not caused by boundaries, but by immigration policies. Open up immigration and it won't matter that there are boundaries.
AJAX commands are still shown as:

var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest.getTEMPNAME(

Hasn't this been changed per http://code.google.com/p/dart/issues/detail?id=2584 ?
Voicebunny lets you select gender and add notes. They also seem to have a process that reads your notes and looks for the ideal talent.

Our first recording came back a little too whimsical. So we asked for a revision to have it more profesional sounding and got it for $16 more dollars. Still within our $200 budget.
Respectfully most programmers don't work in advertising. It may be suitable in Advertising where the term is well understood. However, I don't think it should be a widely applied term outside of that field. The "plain sense" of the term is not the technical definition the "plain sense" is as I described it above.
And my first thought as well. Except that it's dead wrong when that troll sets up shop on K street.
A more sensibly Lisp-y Javascript with a closer eye to performance. I like it!
Considering the recent brouhaha about Dropbox messing up Team-linked accounts, I wouldn't be surprised to see a spike in GDrive uptake. Differently from management-driven projects like G+, it's clear that Drive is real dogfood inside Google, essential infrastructure built for Googlers first. As such, it's gaining features very quickly.
I have a theory that shooting holes in clouds makes the rain pour out. I can't get the UN to agree on it, but I do have a lot of bullets and a rifle.

"It takes too long" isn't a good excuse for acting in an unsafe or illegal manner. If it does work, good. But the guy should still be punished for acting in an unsafe and illegal manner. If he damages the environment, he should be punished for breaking the law and for the damage done. If he succeeds, he should be celebrated for his solution, but still punished for breaking the law.

Driving at a steady speed between freeway and city driving and blowing through stoplights will save on greenhouse gas emissions from accelerating a car, but it's still dangerous and illegal.
While condescending, this analogy isn't terrible for user-facing applications of the most trivial complexity.

But equating developers to line cooks in domains where actual engineering talent is required seems a bit ridiculous.
>Most H1-B's do not own their homes and thus do not pay property taxes

I see this ridiculous assertion everywhere now a days. If h1b's are renting an apartment, they are still paying property taxes because the building owner has to pay these taxes. Do you think that property owners really pay these taxes out of the goodness of their heart?
Kaspersky Labs preps its own OS to guard vital industry against cyberwarfare
OOCSS + Sass = The best way to CSS
I use a MacBook Air because I like to work and write often while travelling. The thing I miss in the MBA is a touch screen.

The Surface seems like it might fit my needs in the future, especially since I am not in the mood to buy more Apple gear given their behavior recently that I don't like. Ironic to me that I am viewing Apple in a more negative way than Microsoft.

In any case I don't need any more writing development gear right now so I can wait several months and see how well the new Surface platform is viewed when I need to buy.
IDE: QtOctave
Toolboxes: Exceeds those of Matlab (http://octave.sourceforge.net/packages.php)
Speed: On par or better than Matlab generally, unless you use compile your Matlab with MEX (but then, Octave interfaces with C and Fortran for even more speedup).

Python is better generally than matlab/octave, and R I view as roughly on par.

*Source: 7 year veteran, octave and matlab user, python lover
I've been using promises for my work lately, and I really like them. This doesn't have it, but one construct I use is the `when` function. It's useful for situations that may return non-promise values, and works like this:

Promise.when(func(), function(val) {
alert(val);
});

So if `func` returns a normal value, the cb runs immediately. If it returns a promise, the cb runs on fulfillment.
> The answer is D, D a thousand times D.

Do you mean option D or D, the Language?
Amazon in talks to buy Texas Instruments’ mobile chip arm
When introducing python, the author writes "Despite the obvious advantages of MATLAB, R, and Julia, it’s also always worth considering what a general-purpose language can bring to the table."

Even with thousands of hours of experience in Matlab, R and Python... I'm not sure what "obvious advantage" Matlab
and R share over Python.
> i don't think that's an unfair implication.

we will have to disagree there. which is fine.

> if you start defining it as broadly as you want to you could probably apply it to just about any job, anywhere in the world. The guy wiring up power poles outside my office does his own thinking, does that make his job creative?

Which is my point. I am not saying all programmers to should be called "creative." However, calling a portion of them creative is inaccurate. It also doesn't really get at what OP wanted to get at which is: A programmer with visual arts training/skills.
(Disclaimer: I am a current college student.)

I took a seminar on Film Studies my freshman year (all freshmen are required to take a seminar outside of their prospective major). We watched exactly one film -- Psycho -- which I greatly admired. That being said, I can't tell you much about the theory behind Psycho; but I can tell you pages upon pages about the evolution and use of 90mm film.

The results in the blog post speak for themselves; the final exam scores were phenomenal.

That being said, I feel the author didn't spend enough time dwelling on the repercussions of his approach to the course. If you're in a two- or three-credit class, you take that class with the implicit understanding course that the time commitment is going to be similar to that of other classes; if your students are spending all night working on an introductory class, then they might master that material -- but at the expense of other classes.

I took a Linear Algebra course last semester that I did well in. It was a conventional class. I definitely couldn't answer that final bonus question (and I bet I couldn't answer most of the questions on that exam) but is that an issue? Introductory courses are meant to be breadth-based, not depth-based; my class wasn't filled with Math majors but CS majors, Chem majors, Stats majors, etc. etc. -- I recognize the huge role tenets of L.A. play in programming, but I'd absolutely resent a professor who essentially uses false advertising in his course.

The metric for a successful college course, I'd argue, is not 'amount learned' but 'amount learned with respect to time and respect to the goals of the course.'
I suspect that you are in the minority, outside of tech circles. I'm yet to meet a non-techie that "requires" a "Retina" screen on their device. MS describing it as "HD" will likely suffice.
A person's priorities usually change over time. I've changed jobs in the past for industry (worked at EA for a bit), money (worked at an investment bank for a while), and for culture (currently doing mobile app development). Each choice was 100% correct for me at the time ... you just have to decide what is important to you.

For whatever it's worth, of those choices, the one for money is the one that I'm least happy with (in some ways, not all) in hindsight.
> I'm English, and lived in Scotland between the age of 10 and 14, and the genuine anti-English victimization I received both at school and out and about was ridiculous

But please don't make out that this only happens in Scotland. I'm Scottish but went to school in England and had a similar experience.
I love google drive so much. I'm just frustrated there's no common API for web file storage---flip a coin to see whether a given app supports a given service.
I wasn't sure if I was going to get it before, but now I am definitely going to get it.
> If supply is dwindling then raising wages can work for individual companies, but not I think for the industry as a whole.

It's interesting you look at this from the perspective of benefiting the companies. My discussion was about the lack of benefit to the employees and people in the country in general.

> supply is not going to jump like the growing industry needs it to.

Industry only needs supply to jump fast so that profits can jump fast. Let's face it, if Apple can't get enough Software Engineers fast enough, iOS 7 might be delayed and profits might be reduced, but they're not going to fail because they can't get enough good employees fast enough.

The approach of bringing in foreigners absolutely supports faster growth for the companies, and higher profits for the companies, but it's not doing anything to help employees or the people in that country on the whole.

Is it really worth lowering the overall wages and standard of living of people in your own country so that the companies can make higher profits faster?
Here is a #5

Curie is a figurehead of the nuclear era, while Lovelace's importance is seen to be in the genesis of the computer era. Even ignoring the "nuclear == icky" aspect, people (likely rightly) associate computers with something that is more important in their own lives.
Again, these are good points. As i like to say, there are two kinds of political economy.

1) <Political Policy> that supports the Economy (in general);and

2) <Economic Policy> that has been Politicised to supports a particular group of people

Nations are always looking out for themselves, but then so too are politicians (and their $supporters). =D

It is usefull, though, to seperate them. In that sense, the default logic of economics in a politicised argument should not (IMHO) be deferred to [just because]. It should be viewed as critically as a political policy (ie Art, not 'Science'...its not objective etc). And also debated thus and put into perspective also.

That's why many debates on immigration, etc get so far off track and/or are difficult to conclude with much progress. Folks conflating the two ideas and the standards of judgement, performance, opportunity cost, etc.

__________

On the substance of your point:

By not allowing companies to pay lower wages to foreign workers the wages of the local market is being protected.

The answer is yes, it is being protected. But this is a normal thing. Also what is being protected is the political Atom of <citizenship>. This is not something that should, in general, be commoditized. Thus, the "permeability" of the body politic (at the level of citizenry) is a legitimate debate, but its a political one, not a one-dimensional one in terms of wages/pricing etc.

So, to advance the debate, the question needs to be reframed a bit: what is the optimum level of social-permeability desired to grant title: citizen (or: greencarde, etc) for a nation state? And the you have to address issues of other kinds.

For example, do you care more about well to do foreigners than your less well-off existing compatriots? This is sort of an empathy argument (vs. efficiency). And in part its a longer term argument (are citizens more efficient working with some safety net underneath them?)/etc.

Right now in the usa, "merit" is not really a big goal of immigration policy. Can't say I agree with this, but the policy was revised to be more about human-right/family etc. So, if you are an immigrant general labororer US citizen it might be you get your cousin a greencard. But a regular no-strings PhD in astrophysics or whateve is not at any advantage vs the cousin of the general labourer (in fact just the opposite).

But family and the like is the ultimate sort of political argument. On the one hand, its very emotional (for those involved). And on the other hand, their are very specific special interests at play (important, process wise). So, you can see this is not something just totally possible to ignore, intellectually or practically.

Each country is different, though, in these ideas. Places like Australia have been know to offer more open merit-based immigration. Canada too, I believe.
Try to work with people you don't want to punch in the face every day. If that isn't possible, pick the highest bidder.
This project was clearly around before Autobahn (May 27 blog post vs June 8 start date) and according to the Chrome Web Store it has more users (785 vs 409).

http://danmaz74.me/2012/05/27/save-time-on-hacker-neww-mark-...
Apologies for mis-stating your position. Annoyingly, it's now too late to edit my post. I can delete it instead if you like.

I got the impression that it wasn't clear how much she understood of the workings of the DE/AE from reading your blog post, and then some further reading on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_lovelace#Controversy_over_e...