skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I suppose that depends on how pervasive patent trolling has become.

But yes, I would say that the development of the vast majority of inventions worth protecting would necessitate more than some scribbling on a bar napkin.

If the process begins with some vague "inspiration" about where an invention may lie, and then promptly ends with a call to your lawyer - no feasibility testing, no fleshing out of the concept, no iteration of thought, I would say that the patent system is fundamentally broken.
His belief is not required for it to be illegal. "Wrong," on the other hand, is a whole different concept...
I always wondered if great tools like vim, nmap, git, etc. are successful because they have great documentation, or have great docs because they are successful.

maybe the answer is in the middle and above, great tool makers are great docs writer.
If C++ lets you optimize the readability of callers at the expense of callees, that doesn't mean you can optimize a whole system for readability, because it will contain both callers and callees. In Java it's common to have systems that are pretty uniformly readable.
Or without the unmentioned referal link

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003TSDG06/
I think of Go as a "modern replacement for C", being designed by Rob Pike and Ken Thompson: I think it's really designed to be a Systems Programming language, I wouldn't write a Kernel or a Driver in Go: but it's a modern alternative to implement other related software like userland or networking.

I also like Rust, but I'll wait until it's more stable and we have a couple of books to learn from.
Bug count is not a static per line of code measure. It also matters how well written and tested that code is. And when it comes to interpreters, they are very easy to test well. A JIT is perhaps more worrisome. But if those work, you can eliminate classes of bugs from what runs on top.
but, are you in stealth mode? what does the company does?
It's hipster journalism. Why are you fighting the reality? ;-)
Hear hear.

I'm very optimistic and excited about this, ever since I played several games hooked up to my tv using my Android.

Give me the ability to use the mobile as a console more than a touch screen haptic device (let me use my DS3) and ill give you 20$ for a good game.
> Portability is still a good reason to use C++. If you want to be portable between Android and iOS, for example.

> C# on either platform requires you to ship an extra 10Mb of libraries, and (especially on older phones) adding C# overhead on top of everything else just doesn't make sense.

These sound like two different problems. I think C++ is much less portable than C# but you might be right about the code bloat problem. Though C++ apps also quickly pick up bloat.

Are you saying there is a common set of C++ libraries that ship with both iOS and Android that you could dynamically link to in your app portably? Or are you saying that you can get by with shipping less library code on C++ because
there isn't a single big interlinked standard library?
Microsoft Faces ‘Year of Reckoning’ in Mobile Software
There are piles and piles written on this subject. Harvard Business Review is just full of research and essays on it. Every now and then, an article like this surfaces, a "case study" that is the result of survivorship bias - a description of one or two people that succeeded, their "advice", and values. What I think the community of entrepreneurs needs, is a more methodical research and insights taken from much larger samples. See for example Roger Martin's "Fixing the Game".
Holograms are here, from Tupac to Marilyn Monroe. Will you be next?
Looks amazing: but it takes about 100MB of storage, and you can't install it to the SD... come on, I only have about 200MB of internal storage, and about 20MB aviable.
I've actually ended up doing this in some cases. But I have to say: If the guy illegally copying your software and working on it via debugging and disassembly can give me a better user experience than you can, then you are doing something very, very wrong.
Or just take a break for 1-2 hours during the day to go out and hit the gym or go for a run.
I would argue it makes you feel better than trying to mix exercise with working on a computer.
Every year is the year of PC gaming. PC gaming rocks.

Shitty console ports and "release to console six months before PC" however, do not.
Routers (and bittorrent clients, and operating systems) allow households to prioritize their traffic already. (IMHO, any "solution" to bittorrent vs voip should live at the edge where it only affects the person who chose it.)
Arguably, there are laptop keyboards that are much better than most desktop keyboards.
This number apparently includes the standard library too. I wouldn't be surprised if, say, Python with its included batteries is even larger.
Circle of Fifths: Part Two
Incredible. This is exactly what I thought when that Cue email popped into my inbox this morning. "What the hell is this?"
PeoplePerHour I'm looking at you! Your emails are awful, border on offensive, and I can't reply to them. Finally unsubscribed, which means I'll probably forget about their service /even though I actually like it/.
I'm around thirty and I have no friends that would think of PC as a device for playing games. All of them have PS3s and are happy to spend on ever-growing LED TVs.

But they like to play FIFA mostly (or God of War) and I like FPS.

And FPS only works for me with keyboard and mouse... So for me to play FPS is on PC and lonely.

(I wish this wasn't the case because I don't enjoy the activity of assemblying gaming PCs, worrying if some video card performance will be good enough etc.. -vs- buying a console).
Callbacks considered a smell
Judge blocks Xbox ban,grants motion to dismiss Google request for injunction
I once got this question from an interviewer, who was a senior dev on the project:

"What is a vtable?"

My answer was that it was the way in which a C++ compiler makes it possible to do polymorphism (calling base member methods through pointers to derived classes; virtual functions). The interviewer didn't agree with me and said that vtables have nothing to do with polymorphism and moved on to another question (about :: scoping). I didn't start to argue with him, and I got the job.
When working on or editing documentation or the comments, I start with the "two-year-old kid" review. I ask myself "why" and "what", and often repeatedly, until I get to a concise answer.

What's this? Why is this here? Why do I want it? Why is this good? Why do I care? Why? What's that mean? What's this knob do? What's that code do? Why is this code here? Why?

Flabby documentation, user documentation written in programmer jargon and scatter-shot code comments are all comparatively easy to write. When somebody bothers to write that.

Writing for the end-user (whoever that might be) is tougher, and I find require iterating on the content of the documentation, UI, release notes, comments, or whatever. Writing less documentation or fewer comments — while conveying the necessary details — is hard work.
A Budding War Over Internet Economics
To never get overly attached to my tools - programming languages, frameworks, paradigms, patterns etc. and to always choose the right tool for the right job, by putting aside my own personal bias.
I'd like to do that but could never actually achieve it.
Triple rainbow near Seatle: How was it formed?
I only "understood" Perl when I read the book and realized how much Larry Wall is a Languages (as in English Language) kind of guy. He expects you to learn Perl just like you would learn an usual human language - through experience and looking at examples from other people. Thi skind of explains why there are so many abbreviations and idioms and the TIMTOWTDI maxim, while also kind o justifying the lack of a simple nuderlying mathematical explanation to the language.

Sadly, that was also the day I gave up on learning Perl, since I am the maths kind of guy and I get hopelessly lost if my programming language isn't built on solid logical ground, with few "core" features that I can actually aim to master.
"Get My Name Right"

This is so important. If you just stop and focus on 1) pronouncing a person's name correctly and 2) remembering it, people are going to give you a much easier time.
There is no reason to force yourself to one solution.

I have access to this setup, but also to multiple laptops, desktops, tablets, phones. I use what works for the situation.

When does the ipad+keyboard shine?

When you don't have easy access to wifi, but can get 3g.

When you don't have power. iPad battery life is awesome.

When you want to have a tablet with you for reading, drawing, notating.

When you want your keyboard to be detached from your screen to have a more comfortable position. (e.g. you can put the keyboard on your lap, or even offset the screen while having the keyboard in front of you. Many possible configurations)

When you want the above features, but don't want to have to carry a backpack or some kind of bulky bag to fit a laptop or convertible laptop+tablet or carry around a few different devices.

The iPad is a very general purpose device. A lot of people are saying, "Just use a laptop" and completely missing the point. The author is specifically using this setup for 3g+battery life.
A few percent higher performance is not something that will buy you customers. Especially that after you finish your rewrite, the original will have more features, better stability (already used and proven in production) and... very likely better performance. The biggest impact on performance has architecture an quality of algorithms, not the low-level aspects.

People still like Java Minecraft better than thousands of its C++ clones.
A request, if I may: please be so kind as to keep discussions like this on sites where they are more appropriate. I'm rather fond of this one as a place to discuss hacking and startups. The internet is full of places where you can wear your fingers down to stubs writing about the evils of Monsanto, the virtues of Ron Paul, or whatever other political/politicized topics strike your fancy. Please go there for that, and stay here to discuss more on-topic subjects. Thank you.
I should go to them and tell them to spend more money on public relations.
I suppose that really depends on the screening process to determine how well and prepared, ready for learning, a person is entering the program. There's no guarantee a person will learn how to program as a language, where they may not be able to become fluent in it. This is where the risk is. And sometimes people take longer to learn than others. A program like this would be best IMHO to split into a condensed version and a longer variation.
i would argue that the massive difference in DPI on the retina display compared to the Dells isnt very good from an ergonomic perspective.

I wonder why you need a Laptop at all in that setup. Wouldnt a Mac Pro and a Macbook Air for on the go make more sense ?

Cool stuff though! For a while i had a Crosstrainer facing to the wall where i mounted a 22" monitor to watch movies while working out..That was really nice, but unfortunately my current home office is too small for a big work out machine.
> The internet gives ubiquitous access to unprecedented amounts of information.

I believe that this, even if technically correct, is a huge understatement. The Internet short-circuited the feedback loop humanity as a whole had in creating and processing knowledge. Both the "sharing speed" and number of people involved in any topic had risen by several orders of magnitude. For the first time in history, humanity can solve problems as a whole, like a one big brain. I expect many more amazing things to come out of this just because the speed of information transfer risen so dramatically.

>> The huge decades-long rise in crime in the US peaked around 1992 or so, and has been mysteriously plummeting ever since.

> I think that I could give a plausible explanation for that, although it would make this reply a lot longer. Actually, I would argue that there are several explanations.

Just to underline that this is a really interesting topic: Freakonomics[0] guys believe that one of the main causes is the legalization of abortion in the United States[1]. They made some convincing arguments for that, and it's one of the most reasonable (if controversial) theory I have heard so far.

[0] - http://www.freakonomics.com/books/

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_ef...
Its true, I can confirm that 1GBPS connection is available to general public, given your ready to pay the cost of it, and are in a well connected area, near a telecom center or something.

I remember a proper news was about a 300GBPS connection for academic use between US and Europe, though I don't remember the fine details of that. If it were to be India, yes, that would definitely be a first!

As a fellow Indian, I feel bad of how some people brought the malnutrition and poverty as a topic here. Its quite common for a lot of Indians to have that perception. I will not further engage that topic though. So lets concentrate on why we are here.

Peace!
Didn't you read the article? Apparently it was too cold to go outside...
Testing Lets You Go Fast
Y'know, this is a cute article, but as facilely as he refuses to accept that the present is not as weird as people thought - I'm wearing a flannel button-down right now as I type this in 2012 - the fact remains that I had a nice face-to-face chat with my dad yesterday, even though he's still on the farm in Indiana and I live in Budapest this year.
life: read Walden.
http://blog.fogus.me/2006/10/26/the-floating-books/

programming: going to college
Life: moving to London.

Programming: quitting permie jobs and going for a contract in London.
The article gets one thing right. It's about the games. That said, IMHO consoles are going the way of the dodo. Too many console games feel like the same experience. I've been a gamer all my life. It feels like some of the best game developers are engaging in more shenanigans than usual. I think this is because of one thing .. profits over anything else.

Let me provide examples:
- Diablo 3 ... the DRM and market place issues; inability to play a single player game without a network connection.

- StarCraft 2 has issues similar to D3. But I found them to be less severe.

- I bought the 3DS on the first day. The glasses-free 3D made me feel sick. On top of that, Nintendo lowered the price big time (which didn't upset me). They claimed to reward early adopters by giving them a number of free games. Few people neglected to mention that the free games were from a small list of classics/oldies (this really ticked me off).

- Few innovative games on each of the consoles. Lets face it ... if you are a gamer, you likely have all three top consoles. The reason is there are 3-4 amazing titles for each console. There's a pretty long tail of crap out there.

- Motion control makes arms tired. This is true for the tech used in all three consoles.

- I don't want to tell all my Facebook friends what I am doing in my games. I really don't.

- Games again ... there are entire genres of games that have been devastated due to lack of profit. This isn't game developers being evil. It costs a fortune to make most hit games these days. What surprises me is why this is the case. These days there are far fewer platformers out there. New space based flight sims? Forget about it! Real-time strategy? The winners are set .. no new entrants please. You know what we have tons of? First person shooters!!

Sorry for the somewhat ranting post. I just feel very letdown by console gaming. I'm going to go play "where's my water" on my ipad to calm me down :-p
Life: To buy only the minimum number of things I need, and work out the rest as I go along.

Programming: The realisation that once you understand the same basic structures (declarations, loops, recursion, data types) and the underlying paradigm in one programming language, you can easily learn any other programming language.
BMI Calculator Female
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Demo didn't work for me on iOS 6...
Sounds to me, someone is trying to 'advertise in disguise' for startupvillage.in

Just a feeling though.
Yes swap my 129GBP ThinkPad T61 running debian for a more expensive, less capable device with a pissy screen that falls over if you let go of it, rubbish keyboard, short shelf life, non replaceable battery, subscription based, lock in promoting glorified vt100 terminal that only works if you have an internet connection available.

I can't take this working methodology seriously, nor anything which contracts out every last egg to one basket. It's trendy but entirely batshit.

Ignoring the cost model which is broken, if all shit breaks loose, which it does in real life regularly then this is just going to screw you properly then.
Ask HN: Best framework for building a command line language?
I'm looking for develop a command-line interface to an API and allow simple things like SET, GET, LIST, etc. to make it very easy to configure and execute for people with little experience with the underlying API.

Is there a good way to go about this with an existing framework that will include stuff like token parsing, maybe variables and history etc?

I've started on a bunch of small shell script files but it gets a bit tedious and I don't want to do a full blown bison/yacc parser etc.

Example usage might be:

> LOGIN myname
Password:
AUTH SUCCESS
> LIST THINGS
> SET THING 123:Name = "Hello"
> SAVE

etc..

Maybe some sort of interactive parser/lexer library in python or something like that?

Suggestions?
even 10 years ago when we only had dsl with 1MBit i looked in envy to scandinavia with their 10Mbit connections everywhere..

You guys are still far ahead, but today i have 120Mbit at home which is plenty even for a heavy user like me! Still 1Gbit is exciting for me :)
Abolishing zeros
I think there's a typo in example 1.5: "In normal-order evaluation, (p) is not evaluated because predicate of if evaluates to false". The 'false' should be 'true'.
Care to elaborate? I think Amazon does it similarly, so what's so baroque about it?
Then use D ;)

If you write a function in D with extern(C) like this:

extern(C) int add(int a, int b) { return a + b; }

it uses C calling conventions, so it can just be linked with C.
Life: The day I learned to stop worrying and love the chaos.

Programming: The day I pulled my head out of my ass and started learning from my peers.
Any ideas where the bottleneck is? Is this a latency issue? What is your ping to s.ytimg.com like?
Life: Making the decision last year to do things outside of my comfort zone in an attempt to bring them inside. I went travelling for a few months, moved to London, and now have a lot of paths open for work

Programming: attempting to build an MMO each year and getting further each time. The problems are hard and very interesting to me, so I love to learn in this area
Primera Guerra Mundial
Too vague. What kind of API are you talking about (Web, C, Python, ...)?

You might want to look at TCL, if you want to provide a "shell" for an "application".
Thanks for the tip about TedX - just bought a ticket! sean@here.st

( also, here's the hacker news NYC group - I'm trying to get it started up! http://www.meetup.com/Hacker-News/New-York-NY/ )
I'm trying to start up the NYC meetup, please join: http://www.meetup.com/Hacker-News/New-York-NY/
The crazy thing is they're debating on Sender-Pays:

FTA "The concept—known as “sender pays”—would radically alter today’s Internet economics. Some countries say their networks are groaning under video and other content provided in large part by U.S. companies such as Facebook, Netflix, and Google. These countries suggest that fees on content providers would help defray local infrastructure costs."

This is exactly why ITU and other agencies should stay out of the way. They have no clue how the internet works. Content providers do pay Bandwidth fees at their edges. If the networks are having a hard time with this content they should have not signed deals at the edges of their networks that put them in these positions. What they really want is to dig their hands into the deeper pockets of content providers and create a sort of "Tax" to improve their "groaning" networks. What would really happen is they would get the money and continue running their inefficient networks and magically the extra money would just disappear in a flash of "operating expenses".
life: going to study abroad as an exchange student.

programming: learning ruby in 2001. Not the language per se, but the community at the time was full of smart people (lispers, smalltalkers, random PL geeks) and dumber people like me would learn a lot.
It's not supported in iOS, but all recent Desktop browsers implement it (except Safari).

http://caniuse.com/#search=datalist
Facebook is not going anywhere. These are all smart business moves to make it an almost necessary part of our lives. "Facebook is like chairs" seems to quite literally describe the end goal of their campaign. I would argue they are doing a very good job, perhaps on par with De Beers and Coca Cola in their time.
Here is the Hacker News Meetup Everywhere for NYC:
http://www.meetup.com/Hacker-News/New-York-NY/

It's rather empty but I'd like to get it going - please help: join and let's set a date and place!! I just got back from Seattle where the hacker news meetup is a big event - let's do the same in NYC!
Just curious, is this stuff open source? Meaning, I use them for commercial production and I won't be sued for just using these boards(assuming I don't infringe on anything else)? Just curious.
Life: Leaving my comfort zone and moving abroad.

Professional: Working as an independent developer, instead of as a wage slave.
Also the increasing popularity of computer vision on those mobile platforms. You can't realistically do 'serious' CV in anything but C or C++. Maybe in Python, since it has NumPy and bindings to OpenCV and Leptonica. Though I've found it difficult to avoid running out of memory.
I don't want to be too rude, but to quote the hn guidelines

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.

I'm not saying that this article belongs here, but hn is not just for discussing hacking and startups.
I have long thought that the highest purpose of engineering is to reduce entropy. Although he doesn't express it in those terms, I think Taleb is advocating something similar here. It's not anti-technology in the way that a lot of comments here seem to be interpreting it, but it probably is incompatible with the sort of techno-utopianism that is in vogue at the moment.
My most important decision was having a child. Returning to my first love, Lisp, pales in comparison.
New York City: http://www.meetup.com/Hacker-News/New-York-NY/

Only a couple people, please join!

If you are looking to start a meetup in your own city please make it under the Meetup Everywhere for Hacker News, that way we get a nice directory - and it's free!

http://www.meetup.com/Hacker-News
Ask HN: Which Programming Language To Build A Web App?
Hey guys, my name is Pravin (more here: pravindaryani.com). I'm writing a blog post which discusses my experience with the question: "Which Programming Language To Use To Build A Web App"

I have my own thoughts from what I've learnt off course but would be great if you guys want to add your comments on this - would be good further learning from me.

Note: The post has been approved by a popular web publication you probably read (i'll avoid giving out the name for now) and if I use your input/quote in the post, I'll be sure to credit you for it