skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I doubt they get much say over what goes into their employment contracts. Added to which, you assume all potential employees are savvy about these issues, which seems like a stretch. I can think of several techies who blank out at the mention of IP and wouldn't appreciate (or care less about) the consequences of such clauses. Particularly not when there's a lucrative dream job at a big firm at stake.

If you're going to name-and-shame anyone involved in filing a patent (and I'm still doubtful about what this would achieve, given all they're doing is maximising a flawed system), the lawyers would make more sense (you can find out who they are by examining the filings on the USPTO PAIR database), or the upper management who determines patent policy.
I actually have used and are using twitter. It is a horrendous user experience - but I know how to fix it.

My main problem is my diverse interest in different subjects and twitters current inability to let me organize and follow what I like.

I'm following approx. 200 people divided 30% technology, 30% cycling and 30% friends/locals. For me, it would be impossible to imagine following more than 250 or 300 people with todays interface - because they are all thrown into each other and reading the raw feed is a clutter and mess of subjects.

You would think, considering their main goal is to get people following their interest, that they would get this part of the interface right. But the contrary - it is what is worst with twitter.

The solution (and problem) I'm hinting to is of course lists and as Facebook, G+ and virtually every other social network already have found out: people like to organize interests, people and subjects into different "buckets". Facebook had a lame interface for this many years, but does a better job now.

My point is, as an experienced twitter user, I know where the pains are and my first day in office I would make sure that the accessibility of lists were greatly improved.

The second day I would use to fix a decent conversation view and comprehensible reply scheme.

EDIT: To point out the inaccessibility of lists today, here is the general way to read up on a subject: tool-icon > lists > choose list. That's 2 clicks too many.
You could also use the shortcut "gl" and spare 2 clicks, but still, it is 1 request too much and way too complex for the regular user.
I completely believe the conclusion. And I believe that it applies to most of the people reading this thread. Let me demonstrate with a real example.

Perl by default passes by reference, copies by value, and mutates in place. How many Perl programmers have any clue of what I said?

By contrast Python by default passes by reference, copies by reference, and does not mutate values in place. How many Python programmers have any clue what that means?

And how many programmers who have programmed both languages professionally (or other commenters in this discussion) can discuss some of the differences in the languages that arise from this difference? Can you write a concrete piece of code which will demonstrate consequences of this difference?

My guess is that few really understand what I'm talking about. Nor do you need to because the memorized patterns for writing loops, functions, etc work perfectly well whether or not you understand this internal design decision.
The Smarter, Safer, Stronger, Far-Out Materials of our Future
Yes, it appears that employees can refuse to take part in this abuse.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/technology/patent-wars-amo...

---SNIP---

The first engineer discussed a piece of software that studied users’ preferences as they browsed the Web.

“That’s a patent,” a lawyer said, scribbling notes.

Another engineer described a slight modification to a popular application.

“That’s a patent,” the lawyer said.

Another engineer mentioned that his team had streamlined some software.

“That’s another one,” the lawyer said.

"Even if we knew it wouldn’t get approved, we would file the application anyway,” the former Apple lawyer said in an interview. “If nothing else, it prevents another company from trying to patent the idea.”

The disclosure session had yielded more than a dozen potential patents when an engineer, an Apple veteran, spoke up. “I would like to decline to participate,” he said, according to the lawyer who was at the meeting. The engineer explained that he didn’t believe companies should be allowed to own basic software concepts.
He's certainly letting his voluntarist-anarchist flag fly:

"What a wonderful world it would be if everyone accepted the simple moral premise of rejecting all acts of aggression. The retort to such a suggestion is always: it’s too simplistic, too idealistic, impractical, naïve, utopian, dangerous, and unrealistic to strive for such an ideal.

The answer to that is that for thousands of years the acceptance of government force, to rule over the people, at the sacrifice of liberty, was considered moral and the only available option for achieving peace and prosperity.

What could be more utopian than that myth—considering the results especially looking at the state sponsored killing, by nearly every government during the 20th Century, estimated to be in the hundreds of millions. It’s time to reconsider this grant of authority to the state.

No good has ever come from granting monopoly power to the state to use aggression against the people to arbitrarily mold human behavior. Such power, when left unchecked, becomes the seed of an ugly tyranny. This method of governance has been adequately tested, and the results are in: reality dictates we try liberty.

The idealism of non-aggression and rejecting all offensive use of force should be tried. The idealism of government sanctioned violence has been abused throughout history and is the primary source of poverty and war. The theory of a society being based on individual freedom has been around for a long time. It’s time to take a bold step and actually permit it by advancing this cause, rather than taking a step backwards as some would like us to do."
I think there's a deeper story here.... Politics -good or bad - tends to attract people with strong political views.

I mean how many brilliant (ex.)far-right, feminist vegans would work on a campaign for a left-of-center, sexist-"I love to eat nearly-extinct Northern Finnish deer" candidate?

The bigger question is why the Obama campaign was able to attract this level of engineering/technical talent.

I'm sure these individuals were not in want of a job.

I'm not sure how persuasive the argument "any one potential GOP candidate was denied the money/focus to start the development" is.

According to the GOP and the Fox News machine, the only people who supported Mssr. Obama were maxists-femi-nazi-pro-baby-killers and/or illegals who were offered free, student-loan forgiveness (not that they could ever get into Swarthmore or Reed or MIT without affirmative action)....or free cheese.

Either that or marvelously agile illegals who took a pass on self-deportation (the New Black Panther Party let them vote anyway).

But alas, I digress here....

I'm by no means unbiased myself. I think the 2 party political hegemony in the USA is a relic of the past.
"The internet will provide the alternative to the government/media complex that controls the news and most political propaganda. This is why it’s essential that the internet remains free of government regulation."

What bothers me about this statement is that either side of the net neutrality debate could claim it was meant to support their position. Net neutrality is government regulation. It is also the kind of regulation that would prevent the kind of control Paul is referring to.
I used to find it hard to walk past 'chuggers' in the UK (people collecting for charity in the street). I managed it but it was unpleasant. Why? Because I'd have to steel myself into a kind of Beast in order to break free from their psychological tractor beams.

I eventually worked out that if they were exploiting basic decency and human contact, that's fine. I'll smile and wave, even reciprocate compliments creatively, and then walk past.
This is a great reason to use tabs over spaces.
Here's some thoughts I've written on the subject:

http://dylanized.com/some-ninja-tips-for-outsourcing-web-dev...

I also I recommend Rob Walling's book "Start Small Stay Small", at startupbook.net
The photoshop plugins: Kai power tools and alien skin. Already did page turn effects back in +-92.
>1) These script kiddies are not Anonymous;

I think you may be overestimating "the real Anonymous".
This does nothing to help heal the open wound that is the conflict between Israel and Palestine.
Pretty sure I signed up on the day it launched because I remember reading the TC story:)

Where do you see the sign up date? I either didn't tweet for a year or deleted my tweets at some point or held another account(unlikely since I don't think I'd get my 4 letter name a year after).

edit: I have at least one other account: http://twitter.com/oonth
All programs terminate at the heat death of the universe.
The C preprocessor is a pushdown automaton, which if you add fixpoints (unbounded recursion) becomes a bounded storage machine. Our actual computers are such machines, which if you give them an infinite amount of memory are Turing machines. A language can be Turing-complete even if the implementation of that language is not.
Anonymous deserves our kudos on this one. It's true that these dbs may have backups, but as the world just watches, it's nice to see someone at least trying to put Israel's feet to the fire in the capacity they can.
The hardest part of configuring Sublime Text is the color scheme. It's written in some apple XML format that's hard to edit by hand.
Well it's not as if the heavy bombing of a densely populated defenseless area is healing anything either.
You know, as irrelevant as my comment is, this comment means a great deal to me. I haven't read it before but I did make the following Ask HN finally provoked by another of Atwood's posts:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4785581

For me, this is very reassuring so I thank you :)
Maybe they were upset about purchasing overpriced Dead Sea cosmetics?

http://dskang.com/post/35828532133/a-breakdown-of-how-i-was-...
Reddit alternatives
I spend a lot of time on Reddit, but I'm starting to get annoyed about the user interface. I find myself clicking a lot on the random link and openning a plethora of links.

For the moment I'm trying gsick which I'm liking quite a bit. But I was wondering if you people knew of some other sites I could look into.
Twitter is like RSS for people who don't know what RSS is. And I mean that in a good way. :)
I'd say the OP was a rather gullible customer. The salesman didn't even have to resort to the next level, which is when they try to make you feel guilty for taking up their time. Or try to make you feel like a cheapskate because you won't buy their product for your child, date, etc.
I've had an account since 2007 and this is the first I've ever heard of this also. Here is the explanation:

"Place a period before the beginning of the @ if you plan on beginning your message with a mention, or else Twitter will only send that tweet to people who follow both you and the person you are mentioning."

http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2012/09/15/a-list-twitters-lan...
How the SEC Almost Shut Down Wall Street (video/article)
Thanks for the post, it was the push I needed to get off my butt and run a pricing test, if only a weak one. I've been told I'm charging too little, and I've been told I'm charging too much.

Just to see if I'm leaving money on the table (and hurting my ability to grow by undercharging), I made the one-line CSS tweak to hide the cheapest pricing plan on http://www.improvely.com/pricing

If that doesn't hurt signup rates, I'll have this post to thank for it. If it does, it's easily undone.
You don't have some unique immune ability. The OP said he approached the vendor first for some sales advice, and in the end the guy got him to buy his wares.
42Floors Raises $5M, Expands Office Search Site To New York
The video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZs9RDj3i7E
Neither does killing an opposition leader during peace talks.
I'm not saying you can't build larger applications using Backbone, I'm just saying the journey to completing one and then maintaining it will be harder. Large javascript application used to bw written without any frameworks but I'm not bringing them up as examples. What would be interesting to see would be the same examples written across frameworks in terms of code written, code organization, maintainability and size.

The main issue as I see it is that people choose a framework for a project in a short period of time and larger frameworks tend to take time before you see where they shine. I hear people's reason for going with Backbone because it was really the first major MVC out there and because of it's popularity. When I hear why people go with another framework it's because of features - not popularity.

Add on to this whenever I've talked to people or read blogs on systems made with other frameworks the majority of talks on backbone are how to solve problems they encountered while talks about larger frameworks are how to use new features and get more from your code. Maybe it's just because Backbone has been around longer that we've all had more time to find the hardships, I don't know but time will tell.

Is it FUD to say all this? Probably a little, but if we don't have any fear, uncertainty or doubt when taking on a new project then you probably haven't got any idea what you're getting yourself in to.
Brilliant - A.B.T. (always be testing)
> but all of them had multiple decades of experience.

It certainly requires maturity on the part of the boss, but also on the part of the employee.

That said, sometimes there are personality differences for which no amount of maturity will matter.
Finally! I get my name back.
I could understand attacking government websites as a protest, but why go after random civilian sites? They're just associating themselves with the worst part of the Palestinian resistance that way.
99.13% of Internet users don't know what RSS is.
Windows 8 sales 'well below Microsoft's internal projections'
Sounds a bit like how Hollywood/recording industry equates piracy with theft.
am I the only one immune to the this sort of thing?

I don't know, I feel that way, too. I've been through long sales pitches, mall workers, even TV commercials . . . and I'm pretty sure the emotions I feel are not the ones they intend me to feel.

When I hear friendly pleasantries or "This is a special deal just for you" or "I just marked down the price 50%" or "Super exclusive supreme top-of-the-line product" or whatever, I'm supposed to feel . . . I don't know, flattered? Excited by the opportunity? That's not what I feel. What I feel is more like, "Don't insult my intelligence, you jerk." And maybe a little, "Don't pressure me to make a decision with insufficient research. Jerk."

I don't know, I generally like to think the best of people, but every time I've interacted with a salesperson, I've spent the entire conversation with the forceful emotional impression that they were insulting me and trying to take advantage of me. And I never buy anything from them.
These days, the most profitable ways to violate other people don't involve physical aggression. But as someone who makes a living based on people trying to screw other people over, I don't think the need for government to reign in such behavior is any less now than it ever was.
This isn't putting anyone's feet to the fire. You're giving way too much credit to Anonymous. And if they'd done it to a Palestinian company then someone would say the same thing you just said except we'd be switching out the word Israel with Palestine. And I'd still tell you that these people are fools and not doing anyone any good except themselves. Anonymous is now synonymous with being a joke. They come off as immature script kiddies who just reap havoc for the hell of it and think of a reason they did it afterwards. Or better, someone else ascribes meaning to their meaningless acts and then they don't have to do the work. I really don't care who got hacked or what damage it caused. I just hate seeing Anonymous held up as some sort of Internet hero (dis/anti)organization.
HI Non-EU Citzen, pricing changes per market so there is no unviversal rate. It is however up to 30% cheaper than standrad fluff and fold locations near you. (depending on where you are ;)
You know patents really aren't that hard to understand. If prior art exists then the patent will be invalidated in court. Just as has been done in the past and will be done in the future.
> I'm just amazed that they are able to do this for so long.

They keep wiggling into new growth markets. If they were just a bookstore their stock price would've collapsed. But they've gotten into:

* Retail (a multi-trillion dollar market in the U.S. alone)

* Media sales and rental (much smaller)

* Cloud computing (something like $100 billin and growing)

* Consumer computing devices (something in the low hundreds of billions)

All they have to do to justify their P/E is be in a position to credibly say they can get a serious slice of these markets. And honestly, they're positioned extremely well in all four:

* In retail they're indisputably at the lead of home shopping, which seems to be the future.

* There one of a handful of companies with serious share in movie/music distribution at this point

* They're probably the biggest cloud provider, one that other cloud providers are built on.

* Given the growing importance of media as a selling point and revenue stream for device makers, and great traction in tablets, they're positioned very well in devices too.
Hardly. I find Twitter's official clients' UIs atrocious, and happily paid for a third-party's implementation with roughly the same functionality (TweetBot, if you care). I don't find data mining of mostly-mundane content terribly interesting, with the exception of people posting photos of their debit cards (https://twitter.com/needadebitcard)
PhotoChango: A video audiolyzing synthesizer in HTML5
How is firing dozens of rockets "peace talks"?
Coming soon to a theatre near you: Demand-based ticket pricing
I also use http://rescuetime.com. It might be helpful to you if you just want to track what you do on your computer. It's just an app you install on your PC or Mac and it runs in the background. And then you can go on their website to see where exactly you spend your time and how productive you are.
I suppose there's an exception to the rule: when I'm seeking out a product that I already intended to buy, I'm not above using the salesman as an expert on his own product line. That usually goes pretty well.

But man, when the unwanted upsell starts . . . I politely say no, but I'm sure you'd be able to tell from my demeanor that I feel quite insulted.
There's some subtlety going on here, but I'm going to agree with CJefferson.

Turing completeness is about separating the expression of a computation from the machinery that carries out the computation. If your expression language can be mapped to the idealized Turing machine, then your expression language can express all computations that can be computed. (That is, it is Turing Complete.) This allows us to reason about the expression of computation outside of the machinery that carries it out - because the machinery will always have limits.

The subtlety is: where do we draw the line between the expression and the machinery?

That is, assuming the question is "is the C preprocessor Turing Complete?" I answer no. Because implied in that question is that the C preprocessor language is the expression language we are interested in, and the C preprocessor is the machinery. The reason why I say that the C preprocessor expression language is not Turing complete is simple: you cannot actually express recursion or unbounded loops. No, the above is not a counter example. Why? Because the simulated loops are bounded, always. If you can't express arbitrary loops or recursion, then you can't compute everything that can be computed.

Note that I stressed express. Yes, an actual C program is clearly limited in how much it can recurse, but the language itself can express unbounded recursion.

And that can make our reasoning a bit more interesting: what if rather than asking the question about the C preprocessor, we instead ask it about the implied functional language that the author defined? This implied functional language is implemented in the macros the author defined. If we assume that his implied functional language is the expression language, and the machinery is both the C preprocessor language and the by-hand macros that CJefferson pointed out, then yes, that implied functional language is turing complete. That is, we could take the semantics behind his top-level macros, and go implement a fully Turing Complete language with those semantics. That's what you are getting at when you consider those macros the same as physical memory. We can do that, but now we're reasoning about the author's implied functional language, not the C preprocessor itself.

If you still don't agree, consider that the author's macro language is essentially the same as BlooP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlooP_and_FlooP
I know. The amount of rockets being fired from Gaza is terrible.
When you walk by 5 of these guys every day on your way to work you tend to develop a rather callous attitude towards all unsolicited sales. Like you said, give them an inch and they'll talk your ear off for 5 hours, progressing through their bag of tricks like how great the product is, on to guilt trips about how badly they need the sale, to the final stage of feigning annoyance that you wasted their time or that you are a rude person.

But with my parents who I think are quite "normal" and live in my small home town, the vendors and pan handlers can smell fresh meat a mile away. It's not that they're stupid or gullible. It's just that when someone approaches and starts talking - they give them their full attention. And as per small-town courtesy you wait for a conversation to wind-down - which will never happen with these guys. They will literally never let you walk away until either you buy something or you "rudely" remove yourself from the conversation. It takes them a little while to get into that "city" state of mind where you realize that the best approach is to not get yourself sucked into a conversation in the first place.
It affects current clients; they just enforce the limits differently. You can get up to the greater of 2x your current userbase or 100,000 users at the time of the announcement. For applications with a massive install base that could still allow for significant growth, but they're still limited to not more than doubling in size.
Do you have some evidence that Classics had this before Apple ?