skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"A few casual emails later and my new patent lawyer warned me that I might be unable to apply for a patent in certain important countries if I sell the app before filing an application.."

That's what people that make a living with the patents system will do.. they will convice you how patents are important, and make you fear to not have any patents..

I did'nt see any conceptual explanation for why he is filling for patents.. only that his moved by fear and bad advices from actors that have something to gain for making people like him, entering into this game

Also let my say that this is a bad strategy for a underdog..
because the base crowd for a underdog is the "green" folks.. hipsters, geeks, etc..

This crowd is very sensitive to this sort of things these days.. much more well-educated than the previous generations.. and they are the opinion leaders that can give a sustainable growth to a underdog..

Of course, there are curious people that will download it, and say "cool!!", but then, another app-dujour will beg for attention, and they will just move away..

The evangelizer type is very important, and they probably will move away once they are aware of the patent game.. unless of course instead of a cosmetic innovation you did a really important innovation.. something that everybody needs.. than people can just be arrogant and do whatever they want.. but for underdogs this is a risky game to play
I'm glad that you finally found a way to get up to speed. I find it very challenging helping people over the initial jump of Ember learning so any feedback about what worked for you is great to have.

I'll probably have lots of conversations about this next week at Emberconf!
6 Surprising Ways to Get More Creative
FWIW, Link Bubble development began early last year before I'd heard anything about Chat Heads.
He started it but then rescinded it globally, but moderators can enable it per thread on an ad hoc basis.
Good web design is...
Everyone pays for these services, but not everyone uses them.

Here's the deal: it's not about you, it's the university that runs the numbers and decides where the scarce funds will go. (Yes, the funds are scarce. The machinist in my old department will retire soon, and the fear is that there won't be a replacement. When he leaves it will be a disaster, there won't be custom-built instrumentation any longer.)

If the rec. center attracts more tuition than it costs to provide there will be a rec. center. If the center for remedial math will prevent an unprepared student from dropping out - if three years more in tuition provides more money than running the courses then there will be remedial math. That's how non-teaching staff are allocated.
Chunkhost has the same specs at the $9 price point as DO, though they claim 2 cpus (obviously could be apples and oranges). It's Xen, like DO and EC2, and they use ECC ram.

They also have this "hardware upgrade" thing that might make it cheaper at the higher price points, depending on how long you use it, and when each provider eventually upgrades its offerings.

I use them for my personal mail+whatever server, and have been quite happy, for about a year.
In one place on the front page, it says delivery takes 18 minutes. In another place on the same page, it says 20 minutes.

Not that 2 minutes makes a difference, but the numbers should be consistent.

I like 18 minutes because it sounds precise.
11 Tips For Fresh Newsletters
Buyvm.net is another good one. Lowendbox is great for finding lesser known providers that don't want to become the next Digital Ocean. You are right though, you still need to due your due diligence.
Just Eat is very popular in the UK as well. http://just-eat.co.uk/
There is a donut place in Berkeley that works very similar to that. The reason for them is that there are a lot of large-scale orders that want the donuts for breakfast (e.g. the school dining facilities).
Much like how slave owners worked the cotton fields themselves, with the superficial detail of the work having passed through the body of a slave first.
> If everyone went to college, the additional earning power of a college graduate relative to the mean would be zero

That's a pretty tautological conclusion- if everyone went to college and their absolute circumstances were that of the upper middle class today, wouldn't we all be happy?
Websocket MMO Asteroids (X: Bullet, Z: Bomb, Shift: Mine, Arrow: Move)
Assertion failure messages are sent to stderr. Production code can capture that as it wishes.
I rather deliver a great "give yourself upworthy's advantages for your content" and break my own sourdough...

But this is a startup that jumped the shark of meaning of startups. If they told me they had angel money, I'd be very concerned about investing in startups myself (if only I could)

which remind's me, I need to feed my sour starter today!
The jquery resource used in this page is not being loaded over HTTPS, so my browser configuration (Chrome + HTTPS Everywhere) is refusing to load it, which means none of the page works.

This is a really easy fix, just changing http://ajax.google... to //ajax.google... will load it over the same protocol used to load the full page.
There was a law that was supposed to make this easier, to make it so that students have more time to look for books rather than the week before the semester starts.

Starting in 2010 schools that receive federal financial aid are required to list the ISBN and title of books (or author, title, publisher, and date if an ISBN is not available) at the time of course registration.

In practice, though, one wonders how many courses have their texts listed as "TBD" up until the week prior to the semester.
I wonder if twitter alternatives have also become more popular in Turkey lately - it seems like if people are willing to setup Tor, they might also try App.net (you're of course loosing your network of followers, but your followers in Turkey can't see twitter anyway).

Of course then you can just block that other service as well.
One of the best things about DigitalOcean is that they charge per hour, which means I can spin up several servers, test things out and then tear them down, incurring just a few cents of costs in total. OVH asks me to pay for 12 months up front.

Also, their support is awfully slow. I'm in the slow process of moving to another host/registrar.
Ask HN: What is the most rewarding outdoor or physical activity you do? 
I'm trying to find new outlets for exercise and km curious what others enjoy.
It doesn't fix the "custom book" problem, but if you're an instructor you should encourage your institution/bookstore to mandate price comparison for textbooks.

We run white-labelled price comparison sites for about 350 campuses, and the stores at those campuses end up winning 80% of the sales. The need to look competitive against online retailers is a really powerful incentive for the local store to do everything possible to get lower-cost options on the shelves (and we do things like help them get more used/rental books, lower prices strategically, etc).

Here's our website, shoot me an email if you're curious: http://www.verbasoftware.com
There aren't very many people who can do complex CS jobs. Or rather, there are a lot of people who claim they can do it because they read a "Teach Yourself X in 24 Hours" book, but who actually can only do the job poorly or not at all. I know because I've been one of these people and I've known many of them.

Everyone has to start at zero in any profession, so this is not a negative. I respect everyone who tries to learn something, and God bless "Teach Yourself" books. But becoming a good computer programmer takes many years of hard work.

A raw student who didn't already have a few successful projects using technology X would very likely cost an employer more than he/she would benefit the employer. Hiring such an intern has to be thought of as pro-bono work, or perhaps an investment in a future employee. With very occasional exception, undergrad interns in any profession don't deserve much above minimum wage.
What should I do if I find an app similar to one I created?
An app / webapp / website / whatever. I just found out that this thing I created already exists.

Time to kill the project? Or make changes?

What should I do in this situation?
>SVG is based on XML, I don't think I've ever seen XML and 'astonishingly concise' in the same sentence before, congratulations for being the first.

The rudiments of the vector description is extremely concise. That it is XML is superficially irrelevant, and if you really think the text markers are so important, consider it a highly compressible binary format via GZIP. Ultimately it doesn't matter.

I've never seen any metric that holds SWF as being more efficient than real-world SVG.
How thoughtful and selfless of them- and they say this isn't a Christian country!
Personally, I am still sticking with Linode. I absolutely love their support. I contacted them today and got an answer in minutes. This is a Sunday, mind you.

Sure the low prices on OVH and DigitalOcean seem lucrative and I have used DigitalOcean for a while, but I still came back to Linode. The Linode interface is another thing that I cannot do without especially when you see the alternatives.

YMMV.
>I invite you to reread this thread and determine who derailed an enlightening discussion

I just did and it appears to be you. You are making 2 kinds of comments in this thread: 1) inflammatory comments that appear to be deliberately written to cause a derailing flamewar, and 2) comments accusing everyone else of making inflammatory comments written to cause a derailing flamewar.
That URL doesn't load :(
It would be cool build. :-) My pleasure.
The phone combinations interview question
I feel that the problem is with MS marketing.

http://www.scroogled.com/mail
Micro-focus and hiring
Twitter is perhaps not the best idea for them, then. I would bet you can do a city level tag just based on who you follow. I certainly follow an order of magnitude more local people than any other place -- no tweets even necessary.
So, I think that there is something that a lot of businesses have trouble dealing with:

Employees are a leaky abstraction.

People are what you employ--and even if they present the IEmployee interface, they are still human beings who get mad, get happy, fight, fuck, flee, cry, laugh, and do all the other things that are more complicated than just taking in object A and emitting object B.

The best people I've worked with understand this, and have been understanding and supportive when things in life go sideways--and then their teams do the best work.

Especially in a knowledge/creative industry such as software engineering, it can be very hard to produce anything useful when you're stressed/scared/sad/pissed about something. Oftentimes, you need to go deal with those pesky facts of being a person and then come back, at which point your work will be much better and overall time loss lessened.

Trying to drive employees to produce when they're not at their best, or allowing them to drive themselves when they clearly have other things that need sorting out, is ultimately counterproductive.

For straightforward manual labor, one can make an argument that it shouldn't matter (and even then, consider accidents on the job when somebody's mind was on personal problems), but again creativity is very closely tied with how you're feeling.

Interestingly enough, this is a great time to plug universal healthcare--it helps lessen the burdens on companies and employees to deal with health issues, and that in turn helps plug some of the leakiness.
Amazingly the restaurant I am referring to is on grubhub.

So the questions is, why didn't I know that?

Back when we were selling (in the early 90's) advertising to restaurants and shops we provided them with window decals and things for placement at the register to alert customers. This isn't happening here. Also the other place isn't on grubhub. Nor have I seen others just checked a few.

Grubhub looks good. But I was thinking of something that would be an app specifically for the restaurant. Developer writes app for restaurant (using same one that has been developed for the test market) and customer downloads app. Or an html5 page I guess would work as well hosted by the "aas" provider.

Do you know what grubhub charges the restaurant?

Next time I'm picking up I'm going to ask the owner how it is working. (They have already given thumbs down to groupon and a few other things they tried).
Hiking and backpacking are fantastic. Lots of areas have hiking clubs you can join.
I graduated college in California late 2005/early 2006 (winter semester). My whole degree cost somewhere around $5,000 to $6,000. We didn't have much money, so I lived at home for the duration, went to a junior/community college for 1 year, then transferred to a local state college for another 18 months to graduate in a total of about 2.5 years. During that time I only took one summer off to work full-time.

During the school year I didn't work much because the way the school counted credits I could take as many courses as I wanted at the fixed full-time student rate as long as I 1) received approval from the professors and 2) maintained a certain GPA. So I'd just load up on a ridiculous number of classes and spend my days and nights in the library. The girl I was dating lived across the street from the school, so I'd just spend most weeknights with her to save the commute.

Even though the cost of my college education was low by any measure, we (my family) could still barely afford it and I almost had to drop out. I distinctly remember the conversation where my mom told me that she may not be able to afford to keep sending me to school. You'd think being a mix of Black, Mexican and Native American and being on the honor roll every year I'd have had a scholarship of some sort, but nope.

Anyway, last year I was back home visiting family and spoke to a buddy's girlfriend about her educational plans since she was going to the same community college I went to. The cost per credit hour is now about 3X what I paid just 8 years ago! WTF!? I'm not sure how much the fees have increased at the 4-year state school, but I can only imagine.

I was completely blown away. Maybe this is common knowledge, but I had no idea education prices had increased so much, especially at community colleges.
Exactly. I work in a government town (although not for the government), and the fear of "gotcha" is the single biggest inhibiting factor for getting things done. There are hordes of politically-motivated eyes waiting for the smallest chink in your armour, so they can blow it into a huge story. It literally doesn't matter what people try to do - if there are checks and balances it's "waste"; if they try to do something innovative and interesting it's "recklessness" and so on.

The people have the government departments they deserve.
> Otherwise this "stand up your own email/cloud" trend would have started last summer.

It did! Understandably, since it's not absolutely-zero-effort, there hasn't been 100% uptake, but Alex Payne started up a project that lets you run you own private cloud with surprisingly little configuration:

https://github.com/al3x/sovereign

I've been using it for a few months now and have been quite happy with it. I'm in agreement with you, though, that it won't scale to the entire world, but I don't think that it needs to.
I'd recognize Pittsburgh anywhere, even in Crayon.
For me, the main reason DO beats other VPS providers is its large collection of tutorials. For people new to managing their own web server, these tutorials are a major asset. I even went back to their tutorials section when i was testing the service of one of their competitors
I think that one will go bankrupt and we'll have to pivot.
Digital Ocean’s journey from TechStars reject to cloud-hosting darling
I love verbasoft! It's like a university-sponsored price comparison site. I believe the model is that instead of having a central university bookstore that sells the canon copy, students are directed to a site like http://davis.verbacompare.com/ that shows textbook prices on Amazon, Albris, Half.com, and a few others.

For students at universities that haven't yet partnered with verbasoft, I made a textbook search engine in college that does essentially the same thing: http://textbooksplease.com
Highly available 500 error, though! (It seems to be back up.)
> staple together some pages and make a free text, dammit [...] a quality text takes hundreds of hours of close work by experts

I totally agree that a meaningful text can't be created a la carte by mixing disparate sections written in different styles, and covering concepts differently. The value provided by the author is not just writing the words but choosing the order or presentation, carefully foreshadowing concepts in earlier chapters which will be presented in later chapters, and using spaced repetition in later chapters to review and solidify core ideas from the beginning.

That being said, I think texts can be pretty modular if written with modularity in mind by the same (or a few) authors. For example, I was able to reuse the "intro to high school math" sections from my first book on math and physics in the followup book on linear algebra.

<on topic plug>We at (http://minireference.com) are building an apt-learn command for first-year textbooks. Get in touch if you want to write the Bo bullshit guide to chemistry and/or biology.</plug>
could not you have a one person militia?
How many busy people here would benefit from a PDF with dieting tips?
"so while we are thrilled with the validation of this concept"

When you say "validating the concept" what do you mean? That if you get a high amount of orders you can deliver?

Because obviously you can't depend on getting placement on HN or equivalent to drive business. And the cost of customer acquisition could kill your model assuming the price point stays the same.
Search for "Blue Laws." We have lots of WTF laws on the books that are clearly leftovers from the 1800s.
of course, some mogul like google could get interested, and because of the patent, will be forced to acquihire him.. than he can live a confortable life somewhere.. but in the end, this game only privilege the big ones.. so they can have control over innovation and platforms.. :/
IPhone 5C not much of a flop.
Are there any good repositories of open source/free textbooks?
About 1/4 down the page the author summarizes a sequence of optimizations of the basic ElGamal scheme.

I don't quite understand the "Eliminate divisions" step, which transforms

B^H(R,M) = A R^S

into

B^S = R A^H(R,M)

How are these two related?
Thanks for the heads up! We're on it! The fix probably came in mid-update and didn't get included in this batch. Rolling out a hotfix for it shortly, though.
If you're interested in this idea you may like The Unincorporated Man, a book partially about a future where people buy and sell stocks of each other. Taxes, for example, are replaced with the government receiving 5% of a person's stock at birth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unincorporated_Man
I'm not sure where you got the "I don't understand this" and the "This is dumb" interpretations from. It's pretty clear that neither of those are expressed in that comment. There's one coherent idea that is expressed, and it could perhaps be summed up as, "This idea is not particularly innovative or special in any way."

This is really no different from ordering pizza. I mean, the ingredients even overlap to some extent, although most pizza vendors will also offer drinks, sandwiches, chicken, and other dishes these days. And basically every pizza vendor will deliver to your door.

Many of the larger pizza chains have at least some presence over very large areas, so you can get the same predictable meal even when in distance cities or towns. And these days, most of these chains offer various ways of ordering, from in person to over the phone to websites to mobile apps.

Sure, it takes some skill to get such an operation up and running, but the idea itself isn't new by any means. And there really isn't anything special about it. It's just a very, very slight twist (perhaps even just a simplification) of a well-established type of business.
I've recently taken up backyard blacksmithing. I was able to start for around $100 and it has been a great learning experience. Also, I get to play with fire and hit metal with a hammer; it's a great stress reliever (:
Not exactly. Food stamps can only be spent on food, but you can determine what food you buy. Financial Aid must have tuition(and often books) deducted before the remainder is deposited into your account. Your company may pay for your hotel room and meal, but only a room at a 3-star hotel or lower and a $20 meal at a casual dining establishment.

It's not as black and white as you guys put it. Strings can exist, but how much they control you can vary greatly.
Well, it will solve the problem of supporting Microsoft, a known bad actor.
It's nice that all these hosting companies are dropping their prices so much. However, I've found it extremely hard to compare them against each other.

I wish someone would put together a site that compared each cloud provider when it comes to specific workloads -- for instance: Postgres and Mysql performance, Redis and Memcached performance, apache-bench, and so on. Even the performance of each virtual CPU is unclear.

Does anything like this exist?
Having worked with many people on teams from a couple to hundreds.

The answer is a smart self-directing AI that must be obeyed.

Pretty much everything else I've seen tried and failed.

The unofficial motto of the last place I worked was "the beatings will continue until morale improves".
We have to ask ourselves why college is so expensive.

It's certainly not due to inflation in quality of education. More and more classes are taught by graduate students and adjuncts rather than actual professors (who are mostly focused on their research programs in order to earn tenure).

There are probably a few factors.

- increased student expectations of 'fun', leading to new facilities (dorms, student centers, etc), as colleges compete with each other for students

- increasingly top-heavy administration (hey, let's add another $300K Assistant Deputy VP of Student Diversity, etc) providing a path for faculty to 'advance' in their careers

- federally subsidized student loans make it less painful for colleges to increase tuition than if students had to borrow independently or pay out of pocket (this is especially egregious in for-profit education, where getting that federal money is key ... gotta get those marks, er, students enrolled so you get paid!)

Essentially, it's a racket where everyone has an incentive for the price to keep rising - except for the students and their families, and perhaps the government, who's underwriting this entire disastrous bubble.
Doing nothing at all is a better option than DNSSEC. Not kidding.
> The root of the problem, he said, was that the system had trouble synthesizing information from so many sources and calculations based on so many laws.

So the gist of the article is that we pay these folks to do things with paper because the computer based replacements aren't flexible enough to handle the problem.
I can't find it in 30 seconds of googling. Can you give us a better hint as to what it's called?
Is it really careful cherry picking to pick one of the largest countries in the world over a 100 year timespan that had 0% income taxes?

It's a tough case to make that slavery in the US, 1800-1865, transformed tens of millions from poverty into the middle class. The southern states failed to industrialize, which is arguably one of the causes of the Civil War and one of the reasons they lost. The industrialization and rapid economic growth happened in the free states. There are innumerable books on this, but I suggest Bruce Cabot's "The Civil War" which discusses the two economies.

You might want to compare it with what happened in South America over the same time period.
Come on man, don't diss people on launch. If you don't see any value in it, look away.