skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually Microsoft spend billions on marketing and employ top notch sales people. It is perfectly reasonable to assume they will do a better job of arguing to increase the size of the pile of money set aside for IT then you would.
Once the pile of money is increased it is a much easier job to argue for your share of it.
Rubik's cube: Australian Zemdegs solves in 7.36 seconds
None of them should exist including those for human interaction with the computer. Do your really think such things like "pinch to zoom" and "edge bounce" deserve to be patentable? The problem is in defining what software patent is to begin with, which gives room for patent aggressors to bypass restrictions (like it happens in Europe).
Good to hear; I have the developer preview, but I didn't dare to try it yet for anything serious. I'll try it for the next project. Maybe it's final by then.
Really great talk, thanks for the link.
#2 position here was a bit of a surprise, but site looks to be accessible for most.
This looks like it could be used as a replacement for 3d laser scanner.
> Having the ego to believe that your code is the best makes you a good programmer

I disagree. Whenever I am asked by somebody what the worst code they have seen lately is, I always point to my own hall of shame. Ego builds a wall around you and makes being a teammate more difficult. You essentially become unapproachable by management, and worse, by junior devs looking for guidance.
Download VS 2013 While Your Feedback Still Matters
That article does not indicate that they had trouble proving damages, it said that they were restricted in the damages they could ask for, and that the difficult issue was proving difficult was proving "subjective bad faith".

That seems to also accurately reflect the most recent action in the case, the order denying both parties motions for summary judgement in January [1][2].

[1] https://www.eff.org/node/73102
[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/01/lenz-v-universal-baby-...
A very misleading title. The blog post doesn't describe an entity who copies an idea and goes to form their own company and produce competing products.

Rather, this is the simple case of a "potential businesses party" who copied front-end code, design (obviously), and images. They also redirected traffic of an associated domain. So, beyond blatantly doing copyright infringement, they are also breaking fair trade competition/fraud laws and depending on jurisdictions, trademark (established through use in the marketplace rather than registration).

What you can do to protect yourself against such activities is simple, send a cease and desist letter, file a complaint to consumer protection agency (if you've got one), and possibly send the issue to the local police.

Their suggestion of registered trademark, watermarks, and (meh) patents might increase the reward money from a law suit and increase win chances in court, but it won't actually "protect" you against entities who already willingly commits copyright infringement.
All non-toy CL implementations do TCO nowadays. http://0branch.com/notes/tco-cl.html

Anyway, it is worthwhile to practice writing recursive solutions (beginning with Scheme) to understand possible pitfalls in case of non-tail recursion, and then, proudly, switch to fixed-space looping techniques.)
What Happens On The Internet Every 60 Seconds
... and even the #3 didn't end up as bad as it first looked.
> Lowering taxes for corporations was a ridiculous idea. It is higher almost everywhere else, and nobody could give a compelling argument for lowering it.

That's clearly your opinion and you're entitled to it, but please don't state it as fact, that's just dishonest.

> Corporate tax is paid of the profit, before the profit is distributed to its shareholders. 3 percentage points lower tax of dividends, before income tax, will not change much for the shareholders of Danish corporations.

No, it's paid of the profit at the end of the year, no matter what you do with that profit, including investing it next year or putting it into a rainy-day fund.

> You also haven't pointed to a country with a model you feel is working better.

Who said he had to? Why is it a premise for debate that there is a perfect country somewhere else that's working better? But Sweden.
Attaching a Thunderbolt GPU to a Macbook Air
Some "englightened" industrialists might have pushed for those laws (and other stuff, e.g Ford was all for paying his workers adequately), but thousands of people had fought, went on strikes, gor fired, got bullied and even killed by company lackeys etc, pushing for those rights before (and other stuff, from Jim Crow laws to the right not to be paid in scrip).
>"I wonder if those working in corporate IT realize that they're competing with Microsoft for money."

Generally no, but I expect many are quickly realizing it.

Microsoft in particular has been very open about trying to sell things like Office 365 and Azure to Enterprises. They aren't afraid to be blunt and say "Hey, you can get rid of your staff if you go with this".

It's an odd relationship.

In my experience, many in corporate IT are perfectly happy to be simple facilitators - shoppers basically.

I believe the perception is "It won't be me", that being increasingly beholden to a vendor might prevent the creation of new positions or filling vacancies but will never eliminate their own positions.

The entire industry of internal IT support has hard times ahead. Anecdotally, I see XaaS being adopted surprisingly quickly. A few big VARs I've talked to have noticed this and have been realigning themselves to sell managed services instead of stopping at planning and implementation as they have in the past.
> I finally ended the pain by taking all layouts out of IB and simple wrote them long-hand with pages of boiler-plate code.

Mother of god. Simply using layout constraints instead of auto layout would have saved > 1000 lines of code I would estimate.
The number of welfare recipients + public sector being approximately equal to the private sector is common in most Western societies? That sounds pretty implausible to me.

I think he has some legitimate, objective concerns that you have too flippantly dismissed as right wing biases.
Certainly not impossible: http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/04/features/ins...
I actually found the Little/Reasoned/Seasoned Schemer series to be rather enlightening even as an experienced programmer (Little Schemer can seem a little basic at first but the principles it teaches are sound and applicable outside of Lisp programming as well).
RethinkDB Cloud
IOS 7 beta 4 clarifies phone buttons with icons, takes FaceTime full screen
No matter which side you work on if you put the effort into learning how to do it right and use the tools the way they were designed to it becomes so much easier. XCode 5 is a massive improvement. Jetbrain's involvement in Android dev made it so much more palatable.
That made me feel a little sick. But very cool.
Mileage. We still use miles over here. :)
Lenovo Allegedly Banned by Spy Agencies Because of Chinese Hacking Fear
India: Facebook's new testing lab
Server dooown, get reliable hosting :)
From STUPID to SOLID Code!
I'd love this as a webservice (I'd pay). I need to create product shots for every customer I have (white labelling) and it would be awesome to be able to generate them on the fly.
You know. I am one of those people who don't believe in any specific political ideology. In my world all political systems holds the solution to the problems in others.

All countries have different reasons for why they are in trouble or not. All I can say is that the articles picture of Denmark is false.

Not that Denmark is going down the gutter but the problems are much more severe that the numbers show.
>You should re-read my comment. I'm talking about our customers who have this problem, resulting in us having the problem because we can't get the right person.

What's there to re-read? What I said is you shouldn't build your business so that a customer issue depends on ONE person.

It's not about the persons "being in vacations a lot" problem (also: define a lot), and it's not about the customer having an issue.

It's about your company being structured that way that a guy missing can result in nobody else being able to fill in for him.
Remember, it's all immutable data structures. So whatever you do locally (i.e. apart from git push), the old version is still there - git reflog will show it.

Git eventually garbage collects old versions (i.e. not accessible from a branch), but by default only after a month.

Unfortunately... using git reflog to find the old version and undo a command itself has a learning curve. :\
I was about to comment the same thing.

I've yet to see I company going bust because someone copied their front-end, icons or flat design.
An old Macbook - someone stole all my other ones :(
People don't appreciate that science is not an embarrassingly parallel process. Some steps have to come before others, and each of those take time.

There is a ton of money being thrown at "cancer", which is a large set of incredibly complex problems. I even believe that there is never going to be "a cure for cancer", while we will be able to manage and even "cure" most types of cancer during the next two decades (IMHO).

But it's a tough problem which doesn't lend itself to YC-style founder teams or extreme implementations of lean entrepreneurship.
Do you have any specific examples? I haven't been keeping up (I know, I know, I should be.)
Very much up for me.
or just don't use git... :)
What did you call my mother?
it's accessible from blog.pipedrive.com, but not through the url of the post
Jao, author of Geiser, talks about the impact they had on his development in his post A Scheme Bookshelf[1]. Are there any CL equivalents?

[1]http://programming-musings.org/2007/01/31/a-scheme-bookshelf...
"Ambition" is probably a less useful frame, in the article and in the comments, than "expectations."

I've only been to Denmark a few times but I think the feeling I got is that they are happier because they have managed to largely sidestep the otherwise ubiquitous trap of perpetually escalating expectations.

The American/capitalist model is that each achieved goal is a platform for the next goal. Growth is what matters. Being satisfied with a decent job and a peaceful context in which to love your family is not any less ambitious than desiring to get rich or "change the world." It's just ambitious in a different direction.

Americans, for example, optimize for economic performance. Danes, I think, optimize for happiness. The tantalizing, troublesome idea that captivates me as an American is that money as an abstraction of 'value,' when survival is assumed, might only be desirable as a tool for being happier.

And if the pursuit of money, on a societal level, interrupts the pursuit of happiness, that implies that we capitalists are doing it wrong.
License compliance with Microsoft software is a lot of trouble and risk, and it, more than the paper cost, is often the worst thing about using Microsoft stuff.

"Simple" scenarios like maintaining a warm replicated data center becomes a ridiculous exercise of license guessing, where every Microsoft rep tells you something different. Licensing newer instances of Sharepoint is simply a riot.

I'm not saying there aren't advantages, but it's nice as platform and system architects to plan out hardware and software and be done with it, and not get distracted for months discussing exactly which stack of licenses you need from Microsoft.

Or you could just ignore it and hope they don't come knocking. BizSpark is actually a great example where Microsoft encourages that -- the graduation benefits are in many ways incredibly vague (not to mention that the program duration and benefits are changing constantly). Right now when you graduate you get-

up to 4 Windows Servers (Standard Edition) and 2 SQL Servers (Standard Edition)

What does that mean? Per user/device copies of SQL Server, because that would be completely useless to any company serving the internet in any way. Two core copies, because again that's laughably anemic. What does it mean?

Yet almost no one actually talks about what it means because who cares, right? Until the day that the BSA comes knocking because a disgruntled former employee left a tip.
The two footnotes are good counter-arguments. The only time I can imagine making a class final (can't extend) is when it's a matter of security (e.g., Java's String class).

Then there is a matter of "well, it's not MY fault if you didn't use the public API and your code is now broken." I recall even Steve Jobs chastising developers for doing this.

Building something with a sensible yet strict privacy model takes a lot of upfront design. Makes sense for code that will be used by the masses, but maybe not for a small project.
Brand new Scala lang website
Residential Roofing: Top Three Eco-Friendly Material Options | LGC Roofing Blog
>The opposite of what you call "Americanesque slavery system" is this, oh-so-common system in France, where people have no passion for their job, care only about the salary and picture quality time only "outside" of work.

Ever been to France? Or talked to French working people?

For that matter, ever talked to US office drones?

>Disclaimer: I'm in my twenties with no family to feed, no financial debt and generally very little financial responsibilities. I don't know how long I can afford demanding having an interesting job.

So, basically "I'm under thirty that happens to have an interesting job and no family, and I have no idea how my experience relates to the rest of the working population out there, but I'm going extrapolate anyway".
Amsat AO-7 from '74 handily beats it.

Some of the "program" in AO-7 is discrete hardwired. Depends if you demand its reprogramable. In which case mask programmed rom devices are unintentionally removed. Or keyboards which are debounced in hardware instead of software are unintentionally removed because the debouncing is done in hardware logic not software. AO-7 is probably "close enough to count" although I can sympathize with an argument against it.
Spreadsheet blunders costing business billions
If you spend the day exercising self-control (angry customers, clueless co-workers),
by the time you get home your cog resource tank is flashing E.

The Linus solution becomes increasingly appealing...
> The changes in programming are pretty superficial.

In mainstream programming. You don't need to time-travel to experience huge cultural and technological shifts - you can go from Prolog to Forth to Racket to Smalltalk to OCaml to Haskell and experience more of a change than a C++ programmer from 1985 would if transported to 2013.

Inside one paradigm the changes are necessarily iterative and slow. Differences across the paradigms are huge. At a given time only one or two paradigms are mainstream, and they change rarely. The same goes for hardware architectures. This makes it look like programming is stagnant, and for the most part it is. However, when the change comes - like from unstructured to structured programming or from 16 to 32 bits architectures - people who lived happily inside the main paradigm have a hard time adjusting.

I don't know when the next major shift in paradigms will come, but it will, and then the belief that the only changes in programming are superficial will prove dangerous.
i agree, on my team we manage code by just having project_name_YYMMDD_RELEASE in a big folder /code. Works fine for us!

/s
Why not transform the image on the client side? It will save load on the server.

But it's a nice idea!
Ask HN: Am I hell-banned?
Am I hell-banned or not? If so, how to remove hell-ban?
>The type of people who can't think originally enough to come up with their own idea are probably not going to execute it well either.

* Ideas != execution. They may be excellent executors but not good at ideas (Apple in the early days).

* If they beat you to market see what works for them and what doesn't.

* If you beat them to market use them as an example that the market is viable (competition is good for business).

* If they do execution well, hire their best executors. It takes a company to embrace an idea, but a single person to execute part of that idea well; hire that person.

* It is not stealing to learn from someone else's failures. Competitors are market sensors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer
Show HN: Just launched a calendar app
I was part of a team that was working on creating a calendar application to help learners organise themselves when revising a topic or studying towards something. Would love your feedback;

https://my.examtime.com/ is the site.
The body has thousands of kinds of 'energy' levels we can measure, but combining them into an overall value is a matter of preferences, numerical weights, and semantics. I see willpower very similarly.
Moscow Subway To Use Devices To Read Data On Phones
It doesn't work at all for me. I just keep gettign 500's
they aren't afraid to be blunt and say "Hey, you can get rid of your staff if you go with this".

During the release of, I think, Windows 2008, Microsoft put out an ad campaign that showed the IT staff doing the congo and other non-work things. It was a fun, upbeat message about how it made things so much easier. Only the real, unavoidable message was to HR and the executive -- give us some cash and you can start sending out the layoff notices.

I'm not judging Microsoft for that -- they've forever boasted that if you go with Microsoft stuff you can pay your employees less -- and efficiency is good for everyone. It was just such a bizarre ad, and seemed to be like one of those dark side Skittles ads, but minus the awareness of what it really was.
>Unpaid overtime when you're doing it willingly is not wrong per se.

Not wrong, but unprofessional.

It poisons the well for the people not willing to do it, and it gives the picture (to your employer) that you are a sucker eager to be exploited, and your time is worth nothing.

And when layoffs time come, he could not care less if you did "unpaid overtime" to save some project on death march.
Introducing Selmer: A new fast templating engine using a Django inspired syntaxt
Maquina Laser de Grabado
Comparing Smart Locks: Lockitron, August and Kevo
Isn't working for me right now...possibly server load? But great idea. I too would pay. And I second the suggestion for more diversity in the shots. E.g., I could use one right now in the hands of a Hispanic teen girl. In general, I would need more women.
Clearly there are many who agree with you, since despite the large number of upvotes, this item has fallen a very, very long way from the front page.

However, I feel that you've missed the point. There is a very real phenomenon in programming (and in life in general) for finding oneself in an ever-lengthening chain of tasks, all spawned as sub-tasks of something you want to accomplish. The challenge is always to find the right place to stop, re-assess, and possibly abandon the existing stack in order to get the original task done.

Yes, this an an image. Yes, it's intended to be humorous, but no, it's not just a funny picture. It carries a real message.

Perhaps the HN audience doesn't have anything constructive to say about the general problem of Yak-Shaving. Perhaps the problem has no real solution. Perhaps there is a solution, but the HN community isn't clever enough, or motivated enough, or interested enough to try to solve it.

But it would be nice to see some intelligent discussion.
Ask HN: How would you promote/build an audience for a satire news website?
Say you start a satire website, let's say The Onion doesn't exist yet and you're trying to start it today.

Assuming you're starting more or less from scratch, you have your website built and have accounts on Twitter/Facebook posting links.

Obviously "content is king", and focusing on writing great content is the most important thing (that would improve word of mouth/sharing in and of itself). What are other things you should be doing to promote/grow?

Posting articles to Reddit/other relevant forums? Paid advertising/adwords?

Have a startup-style launch? Press release?

Any suggestions would be most welcome.
Just one datapoint here, but I've found the v5 betas to be faster and more stable than most of the v4 releases.
Yeah I've blown the stack more times than I can recall when using non-tail recursion. I do enjoy recursion, it seems like a clean and elegant solution, though I'm ridiculously preoccupied with writing non idiomatic code.

Pascal Costanza has an interesting opinion[1] on why TCO wasn't included in the ANSI standard.

[1]http://www.p-cos.net/lisp/guide.html
That's a very good question - I have just spent half an hour trying to answer it to myself. Here's my answer:

Racial discrimination is a special case because it has a very long history which is rooted in bigotry and prejudice. Due to this history any current policy of racial discrimination - even one based on a rational profit motive - would foster bigotry in some people and deeply-felt resentment and hostility in many other people. Other forms of discrimination don't have this problem, at least to the same degree.

For this reason all race-based discrimination should be illegal, but other types of profit-based discrimination should be legal: (a) Senior citizens pay less than other people for cinema tickets; (b) Women pay less for car insurance than men; (c) Students pay less for drinks at the bar; (d) US citizens pay less than Australians for software licences.

By the way, it sounds like you want to see both race-based and country-based discrimination banned. If so, do you think that (a), (b) and (c) above should also be banned? If not, by what principal are you allowing businesses to segment their customer base?
I tried to drag and drop one of the images on top, but I get:

We're sorry, but something went wrong.

We've been notified about this issue and we'll take a look at it shortly.
It's not that we don't have great quality of life - we do. It's that we're not going to keep it for long: the baby boomers (the group currently aged ~58-68) are retiring from high-paying (high tax revenue) jobs with little demand on public services to little or no income and higher demands on public services. There will be decades of lower revenue combined with higher expenses, and we have a history of poor growth.
The concept of the egoless programmer, which this article is using correctly, is an old one, introduced by Jerry Weinberg in his 1971 The Psychology of Computer Programming (read it if you haven't, it's still very relevant even if we're not using punched cards anymore). Wikipedia describes it pretty well, and also notes it was in opposition to the then trendy "chief programmer" model (which I'll note was in part a response to computer time being very very expensive back then): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egoless_programming

I think you might be misreading it, it's all about both speaking up and accepting criticism; let me just repeat what the article says:

"Remember that you are not your code. The only way to improve is to be open to feedback from others and give honest, non-judgemental feedback to others."

What's bad about any of that?

And while I haven't followed the "rockstar" programmer concept, the connotations of "rockstar" certainly would seem to include an unproductive amount of ego.
Services, Not Devices is the best way forward for Microsoft
I getting really tired of seeing "Janteloven" every time Denmark is discussed. It's not an issue and haven't been for a long time. I'm 32, and I have NEVER heard someone be anything that happy for the success of others ( Unless their business is bordering what is ethical ).

People are generally happy for the success of other people, and if they even managed to create jobs for others it's even better.