skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why hasn't anyone addressed the probable criminal activity going on with these handful of judges in this one district of Texas? ... My hypothesis is there's a payoff racket going on. There's a multi level system setup with a few insiders who know how to pay off the local judges to dismiss certain cases.

Careful there. Unless you've got more than a hypothesis, what you're saying borders on the libelous. (Not that a federal district judge would deign to notice. The judges are public figures, so you have enhanced protection under the First Amendment, but making a statement like this, without evidence to support it, might qualify as the type of "malice" that can pierce the First Amendment protection.)

The judge is constrained by long-established rules. Article III of the U.S. Constitution limits the power of the federal courts to actual cases and controversies. If the parties to a lawsuit settle the case, then that case is moot, and with very limited exceptions, the judge is automatically stripped of pretty much all authority in the matter. (You wouldn't want it any other way, given that Article III judges are appointed, not elected, and for life.)

The battle isn't necessarily over. Apple might well be able to make a case on appeal that it should be allowed to continue to litigate against Lodsys, on grounds that the same issue is likely to come up again and be settled again, thereby evading judicial review. That's a standard exception to the mootness doctrine [0], and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit is likely to give it serious consideration.

Disclosure: I'm a Texan; a lawyer, also admitted in California; and a patent litigator in a previous life.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mootness#Capable_of_repetition....
I guess that I have trouble imagining how any law of physics that I know of would enforce such a rule. The whole point of statmech is that the 2nd law is an emergent phenomenon: it's not a separate influence on the universe independent of the known fundamental forces, but rather a consequence of how those known laws play out in cases with many particles and/or states. What you're suggesting is some additional influence at microscopic scales, and that seems quite implausible to me. (Just how strict are you imagining this rule would be? If two states had phase space volumes in a 51/49 ratio, are you suggesting that the system would always pick the 51?)

It's hard to list intuitive counterexamples to your suggestion here, since anything intuitive is by definition part of a macroscopic system that would obey the 2nd law anyway. But... for instance, are you saying that you don't believe in the Maxwell speed distribution in an ideal gas? If no molecular interaction could ever take a system from a larger to a smaller total phase space, then every molecule in an ideal gas should eventually converge to the RMS speed. That's a clear experimental prediction, and I'm pretty sure that the usual answer has been well-tested (both explicitly and implicitly).
Funny, I use Trello in a similar manor.

Columns: Ideas -> Planned -> In Progress -> Deployed -> Client Review -> Done (week of x)

Ideas is: for new stories, unaccepted work.

Planned is: for stories the client has accepted as work.

In progress is: for work being currently worked on (also doubles as time tracking).

Deployed is: for stories that have been completed (tested & deployed).

Client Review is: for stories that the client has chosen to accept.

Done is for tracking completed work for that week, a new column is created at the start of the week.

Other conventions used are: Cards are in order, top of the list is the high priority. Blue label for blocked cards, orange for unconfirmed issues, red for confirmed issues.

Another thing used is Trello Points for estimations (a chrome plugin).
I can't use the sign-up-for-beta form due to an unknown error appearing again and again. I have registered an account however, and will see how great it is by tomorrow. Just watch for ProNoob13 in the issue tracker.
Agreed. The blockchain itself is an intellectual breakthrough, at least in application.
Sure, but software clocks could adjust themselves automatically based on your GPS location. Almost nobody uses a mechanical clock anymore.
Maybe you had better luck with it than me. I've tried on many occasions to buckle down and use it for typing and I always give up and get a real keyboard.

I just gave typeracer a try and got 81wpm, so you also may just be a better typist than me.
Moving to Ireland
Just. Stop.

You can no more learn programming in a week then I can learn to play the piano sufficiently in a week.

I started programming as a kid. Went to university for 5 years and got a CS degree. Programmed as a day job for 10+ now. Only recently did I have the sack to put "senior developer" on my resume after being one for a few years.

The idea that some random can make a resume and just throw "programmer" at the top after doing some idiotic random online courses simply sickens me.

I await the downvotes from the self-described "growth hackers", "entrepreneurs", "creators", "makers", "social hackers" and other irreverent people flooding this industry with their stupidity. Remember folks, honesty is trolling, brainless backpatting and "you can do it!" is what hackernews is all about now...
I agree that one should not use language likely to offend others on the grounds of sex, sexuality, gender identification, race, religion, physical appearance etc.

I don't really like the tone of this article though - why must I know and repudiate a short and odd list of derogatory terms? And who decides what the "proper term" for a particular group is? Is each group uniform in their preference? Or is the author stereotyping people?

Whilst this article might help raise awareness, there is no substitute for being a decent person, and thinking for yourself before opening your mouth.
Sort of a poor man's Greenspun's tenth rule…

[see http://philip.greenspun.com/research/]
>> However, it may still be quite good to move developers not doing kernel/drivers/embedded stuff, away from C into a more secure language.

Yeah, only that you wont do this sort of things in a memory managed language like Go.

They make you think is low level(PR ?), only that it isnt THAT low level ;)

Go should be able to switch off the GC, and allow people do to manual memory management if it really want to be that low-level..

Also, a way to take off the runtime, and work as skinny as any C program could..

Only than, you could make real low-level programming like OS, device drivers and the like..

The use cases for Go right now in its current incarnation, are things like: cloud/distributed stuff(against C++), or command line tools (against Python)

To make it a contender against C, there's a long road.. and im sure its one route they dont want to go..
How to write a crawler
Thanks! I came back to add a belated comment and am very glad to see your answer.

My belated comment is that I just upgraded that code to HTML5 and it works fine.
This is the definition of "What the fuck." Why should he be careful about what he says on a forum, just because he's talking about a judge? He didn't threaten anybody.
This does not make any sense. They compare real data with made up data 80 years in the future.

Why they did not show 1950<->2012 comparison?
The simple answer about the Sahara is that's its (1) in our biosphere and (2) there are too many people about.

Part of the reason space is so attractive is because it's empty - land goes to who gets there, not who has force of arms to hold it, and there's a hell of a lot of it out there.

The other reason is, you can do whatever you want, and not endanger the lives, or livelihoods of other members of the human race. Toxic spills on Mars, or asteroids or in orbital foundries don't endanger anyone. There's a massive advantage to be had pushing heavy industry and mining off-world.
> I guess everyone is slow after a two hour lunch having three or six cervezas for an extra hour or two of the afternoon?

What are you talking about?
"The judge is constrained by long-established rules. Article III of the U.S. Constitution limits the power of the federal courts to actual cases and controversies."

Even if that was the case, assuming nothing bad is going on, there has to be a reason all these cases end up there. It's too frequent to be a coincidence.
OK, so, you know (or you may not) how when you're in the desert, and it's approaching midday, the temperature just rises, and rises? Imagine the hour around midday not being an hour, but 10 days. Insolation, even at our distance (remember, inverse square law), is punishing. On venus, it's ridiculous.

Venusian colonisation will have to be sub-surface, even if we cover it in water - at least until if and when we come up with a gigantic solar shield that can filter and weaken a planet's worth of sunlight.
Hence "heavily". There's a bunch of theory crafting over people having limited scale wars in the Antarctic once the resource exploitation treaty expires.

Which, really makes me hope asteroid mining and Mars colonization is a thing well before then.
Update from Musk: "Launch was good. All satellites deployed at the targeted orbit insertion vectors."

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/384392608350367744/photo...
Yes, I saw you registering on RoyalExtended. The closed beta sign-up form is now obsolete, I just didn't remove it yet. Thanks for noticing ;)
reply
My version of the logo: http://imgur.com/Laxvw7E

The logo is the wheel on a cassette, which is a fun throwback to the tape days, inspired by TAR -> Tape ARchiver.
I learned CS his way (my alma mater is where Edsger Dijkstra laid his eggs). It's a very nice way of thinking, and certainly worth your time. Warmly recommended if you know programming but not formal methods.

That said, I wish courses like this would stop using terms like "software design" or "software construction" in their descriptions. This course hardly seems to step out of the realm of algorithms.

This has absolutely nothing to do with software design, unless your program has 300 LOC in total. Software design is much more a social science than most CS researchers dare to admit, so they just keep refining their techniques of dealing with advanced but finegrained things that few programmers do a lot (such as algorithms).
The copyright cartel's plot to indoctrinate California kindergartens
In none of these cases did the client ask for more time/energy and not get it; I gave more time and energy than would have been necessary with a properly run project. Just bad clients, bad contracts. They happen, and my point is that it would have been hopelessly irresponsible for me to invest all my hopes in just one or two.

To give you an idea of what I mean, the one that's in the process of falling apart took over six months of negotiation, periodic prodding, and concessions to get them to actually provide me fully signed documents so I could start work. The whole time they were telling me how excited they were about the project and how important it was to them. Clients like this all seem to exist somewhere on a spectrum, and you have to figure out whether they're just a 'less profitable' client because you'll have to put more work in (and set your hourly rate accordingly), or whether they're a fundamentally problematic client that will just never work out. This client turned out to be the latter, even if I am billing hours now.

I suspect once you've been freelancing long enough you can just say no to any client that seems like they could be a problem. For me, it's been a little over two years and the influx of work is not remotely enough to justify that (even if I get way more offers than I used to, and they're better offers)
> I'm not speaking out of my ass either. I've lived in Texas. I have family there now.

Yes, you are. And you're a bigot to boot.
> Why should he be careful about what he says on a forum? He didn't threaten anybody.

Like it or not, libel laws apply on-line as much as anywhere. As just one example, in 2006 a Florida woman won an $11 million verdict against a Louisiana woman who had called her a crook, a con artist, and a fraud in an on-line forum [1]. Do a Google search for "libel on-line" and you'll see lots of ads for lawyers hoping to be hired to bring a lawsuit for libel.

Incidentally, accusations like those of the GP are known as "libel per se." [2]

Another thing to consider: If you make an arguably-libelous statement on-line about a foreign citizen, that person might sue you in a "libel tourism" destination such as the UK, which until earlier this year was (and to a certain extent still is) much more friendly to libel plaintiffs than is the U.S. (Fortunately for U.S. citizens, U.S. law severely limits the enforceability in U.S. courts of a foreign libel-tourism judgment [3].)

[1] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-10-10-intern...

[2] http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/libel+per+se

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libel_tourism#United_States
Ask HN: What is coworks [possible spam scam]
I've received a mail that I assume is spam, but it is quite strange. The mail is basically telling me to register on coworks.com for a job. As it seems to be a sort of hub for tech freelancer, I thought HN might have some answers for me.

I find it suspicious because :
- The mail says it comes from my Krop portfolio. I don't have any Krop portfolio (don't event know what it is)
- The mail is signed by the CEO of this company, why would he get people one by one like this ?
- No clear information on what exactly is the proposition, nor why should I receive it.
- The registering link doesn't contain any way to identify me, nor any key or whatever

Here is the full mail copy (except for the names) :

"Hi,
I have seen your Krop portfolio, it looks great. I am now looking for designer candidates for an offsite freelance position with Orginate, an awesome VC firm based in San Francisco. They do really cool stuff. This offsite freelance position is posted on Coworks.

I am CEO of Coworks. You can think of Coworks as something similar to Krop but with full online collaboration capabilities. More and more clients chose the offsite option!

Please use my personal invite link if you want to look at job at hand, coworks.com/personalinvite

It is free of course and I am happy to make you a staff pick once you get your portfolio up. You’ll find the Originate job in the job listings section.

Thanks for your time.

Have a great day and I hope to see you on Coworks!"

Sounds to me like some sort of marketing spam... Did anyone receive something similar or know about this business ?
Daylight Savings Time drives me into a borderline suicidal apathy for most of the year. Halloween is the perfect prelude to 6 months of stormy irritability for me, during that miserable span of the year when I wake up in darkness, travel home in darkness, and suffer through my miserable hell of 9-to-5 drudgery bathed in a buzzing, artificial flourescent light.

I am an American who lives his life an hour off for the majority of the year, and I will tell you that it pretty much harms everything, from my point of view. But I just sit here and take it.

You see, that's the thing about the apathy this institutionalized circadian chaos and lack of sunlight induces. It immerses you into a hell you can't be bothered to alleviate yourself from. And when you grow up in public schools which heap layer, upon layer of pointlessness atop your life, this is just one more thing, and at some point you just stop caring and capitulate to the stupidity of TV dinners, 2 liter bottles of soda, and mindless sitcoms that you hate but can't stop watching.

It's a sort of perpetual, depressive cabin fever, where there are never any trees or animals or sky. You're ferried back and forth to your stations in life by automobiles, buses, or underground trains, wondering what happened to the timeless but fleeting enthusiasm of summer, and you stare out the window all day, but you'll never feel enough sunlight and wind on your face at the same time during the winter. In my gut there has always been an undeniable sensation that there's something wrong with that. These compulsory, artificial extremes.

I envy you and your life which is so insulated from this annual exercise in negation.
Don't be an idiot, I hate titles like this. Todo lists are one of the greatest things ever invented, and I use them every single day. Tons of them. I revel in them.

HN is such a great place except these ridiculous HERES AN INSANELY BROAD GENERALIZATION THAT IM GOING TO TELL YOU IS BAD FOR YOU WHEN IT IS IN FACT ONLY BAD FOR ME BECAUSE I DONT UNDERSTAND IT threads
The wikipedia article for the Eastern district Federal court gives a good summary without appealing to anything nefarious:

Most recently, the Eastern District of Texas has seen an increase in the number of
cases filed relating to patent infringement. This District has experienced an increase
in the number of patent cases filed and tried, notably in the courts of Judge T. John
Ward in the Marshall Division, Judge Leonard Davis in the Tyler Division, and Judge
David Folsom in the Texarkana Division. Perhaps because the district has a set of
local rules for patent cases and relatively fast trial settings, patent plaintiffs
have flocked to this small venue. In addition the proximity to larger cities (such
as Dallas and Houston) along with an aging jury pool interested in protecting
property rights, may attract patent cases to Marshall, Tyler, and Texarkana. [1]

Basically, the judges tend to be friendly to plaintiffs (as is their right as duly appointed federal judges) and the jury pool tend to be in favor of patents and strong property rights.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_District_Court_fo...
Religious bigotry == instant downvote. Go back to Slashdot.
That's his point; he's saying worse case no harm done.
What a marriage advice book can teach you about co-founding
It's rare that anyone tries to replace 10 ordinary engineers with one 10xer. It's common, however, to try to replace one 10xer with 10 ordinary engineers, and find that they can't cope with the challenges.
FlightCar Needs a Lead UX Designer/Developer
We're looking for a Lead UX Designer/Developer with a strong sense of design and a passion for creating beautiful interactive experiences.

You'll be designing our desktop and mobile sites and developing your designs into HTML/CSS/JS/jQuery frontends.

About FlightCar: We give travelers free airport parking by renting out their cars to others. Everything's insured up to $1m. We're funded by General Catalyst, Softbank Capital, Brian Chesky, Ryan Seacrest, and others.

Responsibilities:
- design awesome user interfaces
- develop your designs into HTML/CSS
- sketch, wireframe, and storyboard to communicate your vision with others
- run a/b tests using Optimizely to make data-driven decisions
- visual and interaction design of our desktop, iPad, and mobile sites
- graphic design for billboards, posters, flyers, and online banner ads

Requirements:
- able to create pixel perfect mockups in Photoshop
- comfortable working in a fast-paced startup environment
- have solid understanding of HTML & CSS
- knowledge of jQuery and JavaScript preferred
- knowledge of Google Analytics or other analytics software is a huge plus
- love simple design and bright colors

Email rujul@flightcar.com if you're interested.
Thanks for clearing that up!

And thanks for such a great IDE!

So if I'am using Android Studio I am a bit ahead (Android specific) feature wise that by using the latest EAP of IntelliJ IDEA?
The syntax of Rust is 99.9% (approx) decided. There was only one (or maybe two?) syntactic change in 0.8, and it was trivial to fix: https://github.com/steveklabnik/rust_for_rubyists/commit/a18...

It's the standard library and such that are moving fast still.
The problems that the author mentions are behavioral problems not problems with to do lists in general. Nothing is stopping someone from adding priority, context, etc. To do lists in their simplest form are just a way to get it out of your brain and in a real-world format so you don't forget them.

It's actually a really interesting time for people building software in this space: http://alexdschiff.com/post/58069189811/chaos-in-consumer-pr.... Lots of shut downs, fundraises, acquisitions and chaos that is consolidating user bases in one of the most fragmented industries around.

I'm writing an essay on the subject right now, and I think the biggest problems with productivity software come down to these three things:

1) It's not just your to do list. Most tools try to make arbitrary distinctions between what is a "to do" vs. what is not when the way that most people operate — and this is often a shocker to people that are into productivity — is just "I need to write SOME thought down for SOME reason LATER." For example, people might make a "note" that is just "Local Natives" - the name of a band. But isn't that representative of a task, "Check out Local Natives"? The lines are blurry, and while most people keep track of tasks in some way, they don't really "do" task management consciously.

2) No one is getting social right. On the one hand, there's Evernote, which deliberately ignores social, and then there's email, which is a great way to send things to people but a terrible way to keep track of things for the recipient. In the middle there are collaboration tools, but any project manager can tell you getting everyone to adopt a new system is heinous. IMO, you need to start with and build around the individual first (like Evernote), but tightly integrate a social layer to get those notes and to do's to other people on top of it.

3) Now what? The author makes an important point about context. Note-taking apps and to do lists have incredibly rich data about people that can be leveraged to actually help deliver that context and guide people through the next step. The next generation of productivity software will be less about helping people stay organized and more about actually helping them execute and get things done.

Disclaimer: I'm the co-founder and CEO of a company in this space called Fetchnotes. We're gearing up to release a new version with the above 3 things at the heart of our approach. If you're interested, get in touch: alex(at)fetchnotes(dot)com.
How about:

Tarsnap: a guard dog for your backup data

An then your logo is the very stylized face of a bulldog, looking straight on. The word tarsnap is set to the right of the dog face for the full logo. You can use the face by itself for the favicon etc.

I think the word 'snap' has a lot of dog connotation to me. A dog snapping at your heals. The dog snapping at the mailman. And a guard dog is a pretty good metaphor for your product. It keeps things safe and protected from the bad guys.

Also, to have a 'mascot' like logo fits in with the penguins, devils, ponies, etc. You can make it stylized to project a "serious, reliable" image, rather than cartoon like.

If you like my suggestion, take the $500, and hire my favorite designer, tywilkins.com. You get a much better result than me trying my hand. The problem with a $500 budget is you don't have a the time to explore a lot of options. At $100/hour, you just have 5 hours. But that might be enough time to draw an already fleshed out idea.
So yes Tax benefits for most engineers are pretty much off the table. I am more interested in seeing Accommodation as part of the Job Benefits. I am willing to take 10-20% less salary than other employees if I am provided accommodation by the Company. It could become a win-win situation if companies can write off accommodation as expenses.
Any particular reason why? We just released 0install 2.4, which has around 10,000 lines of OCaml. It seems to be working well so far, but there are bound to be a few bugs... we can always use more testers!