skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Each synthetic tree would cost $30,000 dollars to build."

I bet you could buy a whole acre of forest for that. Best part is, you don't have to perform maintenance or anything on an acre of forest.
He's very good, by reading some of his technical articles, he is very smartand well read. English not his first language obviously.
Not that odd. About 5 years ago a certain subsidiary of a megacorp chaired by Uncle Rupert ripped about 60% of one of our sites (including the bugs).

Pursuing it became such a circus that after a time our CEO decided the effort was better spent improving our product. This turned out to be a good choice in the end as the impostors went nowhere and we went on to capture > 50% of the market.

Edit:

Sayeth PG: "The more slavishly someone copies you, the less dangerous they probably are."

Experience indicates this is nearly universally true, and today we devote considerably more resources to out-marketing, partnering with or acquiring businesses with winning points of difference.
Wasn't it determined awhile back, that if you provide access to any UGC at all, you should ensure that you have a mature (or whatever it is, can't remember what the screen says now) rating?

E.g., - All Twitter clients. All forum readers. Chat rooms. Anything of the sort. That'd include Wikipedia, of course.

j
Isn't convolution defined as an integral?
I like the layout, clean, simple and colorful.
One thing: new tweets should appear at the top and let it push the older ones down.
Unfortunately, in the Rails world at least, the two have been conflated more often than not - the need for testing has been presented as the need for TDD and vice versa. For newcomers, this may well lead to confusion between the two.
US budget deficit at $1 trillion
That is what's so brilliant about the GPL: if you accept the contract, then you are bound by it's terms. If you reject the contract (or plan to argue in court that it for some reason is invalid or does not apply to you) then you are still bound by copyright law!
If you already understand limit proofs of calculus go ahead and read the first chapter and the epilogue to get a pretty complete picture on infinitesimal calculus.
I don't even bother with that struggle you described anymore.

Get assigned ticket for new feature. Write test outlining how it would work with the assumption that the existing code does what it says it does.

If you find - surprise! - the code doesn't do what it says it does, create a ticket and recurse.

Compared with trying to make the tiniest possible change and running into gotcha after gotcha, this is a far more sane and sanitary procedure. It takes longer, but in the end "your" code meets requirements and you can prove it.
One tip: If you're thinking of starting out and don't want to shell out for the Vibrams, try running in water socks first. They are usually less than a tenth of the cost.
Well, lost productivity in a medical context all too often equals mortality. From what I've heard (and I've heard a lot from inside this industry), the author isn't exaggerating in the least.
But he seems to advocate outsourcing your workload to zero. If all of us outsource everything, who's gonna do the actual work in this world? Oh, right ... all the non-Westerners.
sure, here you go: http://www.apple.com/pro/
Live? I refresh and the same tweets play back again, never anything new.
oEmbed does have a discovery mechanism, though it's its barely implemented by anyone. 280 Slides implements the discovery consumer portion of the spec.
This has been mentioned here before:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=230292

If your browser has Java applet support, here you can watch the regex succeed (demonstrating a number is composite) or fail (prime):

49: http://regex.powertoy.org/?pat=/^1%3F%24|^%2811+%3F%29\1+%24...

47: http://regex.powertoy.org/?pat=/^1%3F%24|^%2811+%3F%29\1+%24...
Moody's cuts California rating
Site seems slow, here's a cached copy:

http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:d_FZMU2REmIJ:www.noulaka...
Joe,

You use "will" in your third paragraph a lot. Lawyers don't generally take cases for nothing just because a win is almost guaranteed (especially not over copyright). They take cases pro bono when they either expect to get massive publicity or massive payout. (i.e. the ambulance chasers exist because they are almost always suing insurance companies who settle)

You also state that the company will pay costs + damages. Again, the judge can rule that they must, but it's incredibly hard to enforce. Looking at the names of the founders, at first guess i don't believe they are in the US. So to start, you'd have to do searches of various company databases to find where to even file papers. It's non trivial and will add up.

OP: remember, whilst you may have a very solid case to win an infringement, remember the old adage: "never sue someone who cannot pay". You may, however, be able to get a c&d out pretty cheaply, and this sometimes shuts people down fast enough when it's obvious there is infringement.
When I was interviewing for a development position, the interviewer quipped "it is interesting that you come from a testing background, but didn't even mention TDD as part of your approach." I reminded him that my approach involved adding unit tests concurrently with development, to which he replied "Right, but I said TDD." I came very, very close to saying "well I'm not going to get all dogmatic about the latest 'flavor of the month', if that's what you're looking for."
Australia Considering P2P 'Three Strikes' Law
Why would you say this article is merely an attention-getting ploy? Seemed pretty sincere to me. And if you can't take "curse words", I can recommend some filtering software.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=499044

there might be a more current one in searchyc.com
Doubletwist has promise but was a bit buggy last time I tried it a few months ago. Maybe it is worth another shot
This article is riddled with errors; apparently Philip Longman and his editor didn't bother to do even basic fact checking.

1. IBM has not even remotely abandoned its propriety software business model. They contribute to numerous open-source projects, but most of their products are still proprietary closed source (some with quite high prices).

2. Regarding CCHIT, less than a third of work group volunteers work for vendors (I am one of those few). The majority of participants work for health care provider organizations, and a lot of them are actually physicians. All of the member lists are available on the web site.
http://www.cchit.org/participate
While some stakeholders would have liked to see much more strict and comprehensive certification requirements, that would have been pointless since no one would have been able to pass. The approach CCHIT is taking is to gradually ratchet up the requirements in each new certification cycle. The next round of EHR certification will at least include some usability testing.

3. VistA is a nice product in some ways, but since it was designed specifically for use in the VA it doesn't necessarily integrate well into other environments.
http://www.va.gov/VISTA_MONOGRAPH/
It's open source so in theory it can be be customized but consultants capable of actually doing that don't come cheap. So proprietary, closed-source solutions often end up being cheaper and delivering superior functionality. Furthermore, VistA is a client / server application whereas the modern trend is toward web applications.
i've been recommended three. email me 'off list' - james at imaj.es
You're quite right on all counts. I assumed a US violator. The game changes dramatically when things are outside of US jurisdiction.

C&D probably is the best choice here. (You have to do that anyway as the first step in a lawsuit. You must act to minimize the damages as soon as you are aware of the violation.)
> Inflation is an increase in the money supply.

Nope. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation "inflation is a rise in the general level of prices of goods and services in an economy over a period of time."

An increase in the money supply is an increase in the money supply. If the increase matches other factors, all is generally good. If it doesn't bad things happen.

> Rising prices are a side effect of that increase.

Rising prices are inflation. They happen when the money supply increases faster than the relevant function of wealth and "velocity".

> When the fed lowers interest rates they in effect increase the money supply through the expansion of bank credit which is the primary means by which money is introduced into the economy.

"the primary means"? The fed discount rate isn't that effective at affecting the money supply; it has a marginal effect. If it was an effective means, they'd have used it. Instead, they're printing money.
Oh... Sorry that seems to have come off wrong. I wasn't trying to mock the author for hyperbole. I believe in this case, hyperbole is nearly impossible.

The sheer immoral absurdity of a licensing agreement that forces you to keep it a secret if the system causes someone's death smacks of conspiracy so diabolical that a tin foil hat might actually be required.

Its so far beyond funny that is past sad and almost to funny again, with a sardonic sigh at the end.
Because what you stated is completely fictional?
My copyright suit was with a major tech corporation that had been in business for 20+ years. They have since gone bankrupt, but it's not at all surprising to me that an established company would do something nasty.
> setting aside a portion of the crop as next year's seed-crop has been an integral part of farming for about 10,000 years

If it's so integral, why are they buying seed?
At the same time, they're 1000 times faster. Can a tree be planted for $30?
Joe,

Ignore this if you want, but - if you made $30k on the settlement, and legal fees on a reasonable case with a lawyer who will insist on doing discovery and prep can't be less than $20k, did that qualify as a win for you?
One in 50 people can join MENSA. One in 50,000 wants to.
Is there a way to test if you have a 6 bit monitor?
"Joel boasts that for 1/10 the hardware they have performance comparable to similarly size sites. He wonders if these other sites have good programmers. Let's see how they did it and you be the judge."

Let me be the judge then.
For a site serving 13 million pageviews per month (80% of them are uncachable searches) we use 2 servers with about the same configuration (same memory, cpus). The database server has an average load of 1 and the application server (that is serving a bunch of other sites as well) is under 2 most of the day.

We have 1/2 of their capacity running an equally heavy site (all sites running on those servers make up 16-18 million pageviews per month). So if they run on 1/10 of similar sites, we run on 1/2 of their 1/10. Even better we pay 100% percent less of what they are paying. I wonder how smart Atwood is.

I don't intend to be a smart ass here. I would never say "Hey we run with 1/10 of your capacity, you are stupid" because performance heavily depends on the application. StackOverflow probably has a 90% cache hit ratio (86% of visitors are from google that land on some question asked some days or months ago). So 3 servers for a cache and forget site (logins and bits for pages that change often can be cached too) serving 16M pageviews per month is below average. They maybe doing a whole lot of other things in the backend that we don't know of , but the same goes for the other sites that "their programmers are stupid and use 10x hardware."

I would expect them to say what problems they solved and how instead of bragging about how awesome programmers they (he?) are.
Probably because they want to reserve the ability to switch panel vendors or part numbers in mid-production. This isn't uncommon.
I just emailed you the latest, but considering the content you may find it's in your spam folder.
How about his mentions of evidence to the contrary being backed up by actual evidence to the contrary. Or the speculative weaker points like, "TDD wrecks time estimates", "inefficiency", and "scope creep".

Heck, in "Tests solve problems that don't exist" he sidesteps right past the real problem that TDD solves: refactoring code without inadvertently breaking something else.

So yeah, "No true Scotsman" would ever rail against TDD without proper evidence.
ouch good call, zinger! (ass)
Why not? I've come to believe that the actual field of programming matters much less to job satisfaction than the way it is done. Some "sexy" areas of programming (data mining, high scale apps) can be an enormous grind. Some CRUD business apps can be very rewarding. What matters is having a very good effort->reward loop. You can get that loop from building project management software. The specifics of the organization and the development process matter more than what you are actually building.
Great high level summary. Given current work scaling up a smaller site (3million pageviews/month) with more social networking functionality is that Stack Overflow ought to be pretty amenable to caching. Obviously it's pretty interactive so it's somewhere middle of the road. But what's a real cache killer are the types of per-user customization that Facebook does. Not to take anything away from Stack Overflow, but it seems like it ought to be served pretty well by standard techniques whereas something like Facebook obviously needs some juicy custom middleware. Would love to see an article about that.
Again, go ahead and run 20 miles a week without any shoes on. Let me know how it goes. Unless you're running in circles in a park or on a track, you'll have problems. As much as our feet were meant to be bare, they weren't meant to hit concrete.
And bulletproof vests are good for beginning or (below) average Marines, but really good/experienced Marines find them to be a hassle.
Cape Town poised to berth QE2 floating hotel
It certainly reads like a deliberately over-the-top rant, mixing in a little comic exaggeration as a spoonful of sugar to help the "TDD won't solve all your problems" medicine go down.

Alas, it's difficult to tell if the strawmen being setting up (e.g., tests preclude estimation) are part of a serious argument or just more dramatic effect to help underscore the general point.

I wish this post were separated into two articles, one of which discussed the genuine tradeoffs of TDD (such as the possibility of painting yourself into a corner), and the other of which contained all the spurious, unsupported assertions (tests cause scope creep, tests are blinders, etc.) One would make excellent discussion fodder, and the other, well, the Delete key is right over there.
I'm not complaining. The app store has been very good to us... we have sold a lot of apps, and we'll continue to sell a lot of apps. I didn't offer any commentary on this, and I don't think it's "unfair." I am just warning anyone who submits an app - I posted the exact email that was sent to me, and nothing else.

But, this is not part of some checklist you have before submitting an app. You'd have to be an incredibly savvy and aware person to know this... after all, this is our third version of the app, and our app has always included Wikipedia content. Also, it's worth noting that MOST apps that include Wikipedia content are rated 4+, just like we were when we submitted. Have a look at the apps on the App Store if you don't believe me.

But once again, I'm not complaining. I'm just trying to help people (like you) avoid the same pitfall. We changed our rating, and we resubmitted.
Study finds more millionaires in Bay Area
You're right if you mean by "orthogonal" that licensing was not a major concern. We needed an open-source license, I looked around and chose the AGPL over the GPL, and that was that. I didn't think it was going to be an issue.
Richard P. Feynman - the last journey of a genius (1988)
The rise and fall of Word Perfect
> For homeowners than owe more than the property is worth, the debt should be renegotiated if the banks want to get any money out of them.

What about the people who didn't "buy dumb"? Why should they pay to keep said "homeowners" in houses that they never could afford?
This is clever and impressive.

For what it's worth, though, it is possible because most scripting languages make regular expressions more powerful by allowing you to match against previously captured values. As formally defined, regular expressions are not powerful enough to check whether an arbitrary number is prime.
Twitter calls lawyer over hacking
yes, that is the search...
In 15 years in the industry I have met many people who like to quote Joel Spolsky, but I have not come across one single person who actually uses a Fog Creek product. Kinda like lots of people have read ESR, but no-one is using his code...
It reminds me of the AOL.com redesign which was extremely similar to the Yahoo! frontpage at the time.
http://i12.tinypic.com/2cyocw9.jpg
I believe there is an API of some sort that allows 3rd party players to integrate with iTunes. The Pre didn't bother to go that route, instead choosing to emulate an iPod.

Although it's possible that the 3rd party devices are not first-class devices the way an iPod is (in fact, knowing Apple, that's almost certainly the case).
Properties in India
If I were interviewing you, telling me to take my dogma and stuff it would be a great way to win me over. Nothing says Smart And Gets Things Done(TM) like being confident enough to say that you don't do things the way I do things, and that's okay.

(Of course, if I were interviewing you, I wouldn't have asked you about TDD anyway)
The previous conversation:

http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=706403

I agree with the thoughts on the other story more. Palm hacked the Pre in a bad way, tried to make it emulate an iPod. I think that Apple ought to open up iTunes more, but I understand why they don't, and because they offer an alternative syncing method for other devices, Palm's being underhanded here was unprofessional.

iTunes stores all of its music in neat folders. It's not hard to sync that folder directly. It's created in the same directory every time. Couldn't Palm just use that? What's the advantage to doing it through a proprietary program when the current storage system is open and doesn't need hacking?
7:20-7:50 minute/mile seems to be the equilibrum of fun/ease. Under 7 minutes is pretty painful, over 8 feels pretty slow.
> Fast forward a few years and you can sell the house for $950K and decide to do so. You get $807K

Hmm - no. You get a little bit over $7k. You still have to pay off the mortgage, and very little of that happens in the first few years.

Note that you're assuming another housing boom because you need it to make the "equity forgiveness" look less insane.

The big problem is the assumption that these folks can pay an $800K loan yet a $1M loan is completely out of their range. For a small minority, maybe but most of the people in this situation can't afford the $800K loan either.

Yes, some folks are bailing on loans that they can afford, but the vast majority of foreclosures involve people who can't afford their loans. They're not 20% away from making it, they're 50-70% away. (Banks don't foreclose on folks who are current.)
Apple makes money off selling iPods, not selling songs through iTunes. Why would they want to make other music players better by writing software for them?
London SEO
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Live search had an integrated exclamation point in the name?
I'm an attorney and I've done quite a bit of work relating to copyright law, so I'll chime in.

Copyright to your work is established immediately when your work becomes fixed in its ultimate form. You don't have to worry about losing it.

Assuming that your site existed before theirs, they MAY be found to be infringing. Emphasis on "may" because you don't have a copyright on ideas, only on the expression of the ideas, and it has been ruled that the "look" of a site isn't protected. So, for a court to rule that the they are infringing, it will have to find that significant portions of the copy, code, or presentation must be a near duplicate.

I haven't viewed the two source files or CSS, so I can't even an opinion on the significance of the replication in this case.

Regardless, there are several reasons why pursuing this in court may not be a good idea. First, your copyright isn't registered, so you have the burden of proving that your site existed first. To do this you'll have to meet with an attorney several times, file to have their ISP provide evidence that you will need to prove you case, suffer through the other side's discovery, depositions, etc. Basically, it will waste a lot of time. Second, even if you win you will have to show that you suffered some loss due to the infringement, and any monetary award will be based that loss. You're loss would likely be found to be the percentage of their revenue derived from infringing on your copyright. It appears that in this case, that would be negligible.

All this being said, it wouldn't hurt to have a lawyer write a cease and desist letter, and another if necessary. At the very least, that will force them to reword there sales copy, and rework their markup.
Sudden change to forefoot-only form will give you shin splints. When I dropped weight and forced myself to run on forefoot most of the time, in three-four weeks of 40mpw my shin muscles felt like they were being dragged away from bone.
Back when I was looking into outsourcing, friends told me that whomever I hire outside the country, make sure it is very clear that:

A) They do NOT use any GPL'd code in the work they do.

B) They do not COPY any competitor or other product in the process.

Apparently people hire outside companies to develop software and end up getting "borrowed" products in return.

Just a thought.
OIC. Unfortunately, I must confirm all your worst fears: it is that bad. This is not to say private industry is evil - I could tell you some absolute horror stories of medical and administrative hubris that takes place on the public payroll. But fortunately those kind of abuses tend to be anomalous rather than systematic.

Even then, I'd be inclined to let the market work it out, but you can't have a proper free market in healthcare because the customer can't make free economic choices or fully informed technical decisions without medical qualifications. This is one of the few instances where I believe there's a pressing case for governmental involvement on behalf of the citizenry (and as it relates to HN, for government to seriously examine the open-source alternatives before those offered by private suppliers).
This is absolutely not true. The difference between the screen on the 13" and the 15" MacBook Pro is enormous. The text is far sharper on the 15", and that matters hugely to developers. It matters to anyone who reads text.

When you use dithering/pixel tricks to fake color depth, everything turns slightly fuzzy and washed out. Even black is affected. It really begins to affect the way things look and feel on the screen.
Pyjamas is a port of GWT to python by a different team, by the way (you probably already know, just making it clear)
A Virtual Game to Teach Children Languages
another +1 to parent's last sentence. If they can copy your site easily, hackers here can probably copy it in a weekend (StackOverflow, cough). Keep moving forward, improve with features until they can no longer keep up copying (unless your functionality/service is trivial, then too bad). Improve your reputation and marketing, and if you are truly better, it will be like StackOverflow and it's wannabe.

to tell you the truth, both sites look like a slightly modified basecamp to me.
Will Twitter really make $1.54 billion in 2013?
You're missing the value of having the same language for both client and server. If you have some code that you want to run both in the browser and on a server, GWT lets you write that in Java. Unless you write server-side javascript you can't do this in pure JS. (Too bad appjet is shutting down.)