skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>How would patents have prevented him thinking about it ? I don't understand this logic.

It would mean he would need a license for every building block of an algorithm. It would have meant early (and vital) algorithm research bogged down by lawyers and lawsuits. You can't release a free implementation without a license and so the free software ecosystem may not have appeared at all (and we wouldn't even realize what we lost). Lastly, Knuth is a mathematician and he could have chosen any number of specialties; early lawyerization of algorithm research may have denied us all his input in the field.

Current software giants benefited greatly from free ideas and copied mercilessly off each other. Even now the tendency is to have broad and inclusive cross-licensing, leaving mostly young companies in the firing line. The things that never get built probably dwarf any measurable damage caused by patent litigation.
"you will find them to be a lot more profound"

BS - there's plenty of shallow people in Europe too.
I've got some street-sweeping parking tickets that beg to differ.
Be careful about criticizing Gates on here, especially if you point out contradictions between his past and present behavior. I lost a ton of karma in another recent thread simply by agreeing with another poster that the "DOS isn't done 'til Lotus won't run" mentality that ruled Microsoft's early days wasn't exactly a shining example of business ethics.
Thanks - am looking to jump to the dark side soon anyway :-)
Conquest of Mind by Eknath Easwaran
Nope, still running...
I think the problem is who gets to decide what, how and who gets what benefit. Really only the wealthy decide on what things to invest in. Anyone with low income only has enough to survive.
A music discovery/streaming curated platform.
> "Deprecated" is just a word that means absolutely nothing here since all of those kits are still fully functional

It means everything, who want's to invest or be excited about learning technology they know to be end-of-life'd? Being deprecated is the first deathknell of a platform that begins it's slow-fade out of existence. At some point developers have to abandon the time they've invested into a platform into a new one that will be maintained in future, e.g. Cocoa/iOS/Android/HTML5/Chrome don't share the same risks of abandonment.

> And I find the lack of a single IDE built and maintained by Google to be sub-subpar

You're talking about your own feelings here, it's doesn't say anything about Google or their IDE tooling.

> Visual Studio is superb without R#, but even if you don't think so

Right, I don't, working without R# is a primitive experience that handi-caps productivity.

> at least Microsoft is making life easy by offering an IDE that is tuned specifically for the task at hand instead of using some open source pile of junk that tries to do everything

That's the exact opposite of what VS.NET is, who is the biggest offender of what you dislike. VS.NET is a kitchen-sink offering that crams in everything into a single IDE, it's the very opposite of "tuned specifically for task at hand". JetBrains platform-specific IDE's, Android Studio, XCode are examples of tuned IDE's for the task at hand. Even the DartEditor is tuned, which is more a rich editor than an IDE. It starts from a blank Eclipse Shell and only adds tooling for specifically developing Dart apps.

> That's a weakness because "cross-platform" means a crappy non-native Java UI

No cross-platform doesn't mean crappy UI, it means having the choice of developing in your preferred OS of choice, collaborating with devs on alternative OS's as well having the opportunity to host on the most cost-effective hosting solution. i.e. freedoms that .NET developers don't enjoy.

> but my main point here is that they don't put forth a very comprehensive strategy at all.

Exactly what IDE's have you used? Your perception of their tooling suggests not much. Android Studio is a very compelling offering and DartEditor actually provides a faster iterative experience which auto-builds on save and lets you debug app code natively from within Dartium in addition to the IDE.
I know a few people (not celebrities, but very wealthy) that lost money by investing with Madoff, and one person that got out early and actually made money.

Madoff was jailed because he was clearly responsible for what was precedent had determined to was fraud.
I'm working on a RESTful API to run CasperJS scripts online plus an online IDE built on top of the API.

The IDE has quite a number of users so I hope it's useful.

You can check it up at http://ide.casperbox.com
what arrives in your inbox is often out of your control. account confirmation and password reset emails, pictures/info others send you who are more satisfied that you with the level of privacy normal email provides, etc.
With all respect to Knuth, if you really inspect his arguments and assertions they are quite weak or have turned out unfounded.

* emigration? No. U.S.A still has smart minds immigrating

* stifle innovation? No. Innovation still happens, progress is being made

* mathematical/non-mathematical and numerical/non-numerical distinction - Not clearly elaborated

* Limp analogy to to previous edicts (designating PI as 3 and Earth as flat) are category errors

---

We now see that the end result of the current patent set up is that it allows those with questionable morals and/or deep pockets to extract rent from the stuff of thought rather than land or housing as was the traditional way.

Is this right or wrong? Only if rent-seeking is right or wrong. The patent system is working exactly as it should be.

Note: I actually think that some algorithms which are of significant invention/discovery could/should be patented (I mean, why not?) but what happens is that many many many stupid algorithms get patented and also large corporations can defend turf by sewing patents in virtual land that they have traversed. Because the systems surrounding patents is equally broken, patents are broken. The original idea to reward inventors for ideas is still valid. We throw the baby out with the bath-water if we do not acknowledge this.

What say you? :)
But it isn't just a population map. You can see where users have imported data (e.g. the parts of Canada that are lit up in small squares is CANVEC data) and you can see the relative brightness of the map in Europe vs. United States -- even in areas of higher population density the US is dimmer than most of Europe because there are more mappers there.
> SSD drive that is soldered to the motherboard of your MacBook Air/High-End Notebook/Chromebook

Nitpick of something I hear a lot: No SSD is soldered on in a MacBook Air or any Chromebook I've seen[1]. You may need an unusual screwdriver (MBA – maybe worse for a Chromebook) to get the bottom cover off, but then it's just a single screw. The PCs I've seen are similar, but I don't have as much experience there.

I assume the confusion started because the RAM is soldered.

[1] You can see internal pictures at chromium.org, e.g. http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-fo...
First mobile app, I'm mostly a web developer
Of course there are shallow people in Europe.

I met one last year :)
Ask HN: What is your biggest problem with in-app advertising
Hi guys,
I figured that many of you here build/have apps that are based on a freemium model, thus probably using some sort of in-app advertising.

I would love to hear your biggest frustrations with that as well what solution do you currently use. Feel free to be as detailed as you wish, I'm asking only for my own personal curiosity.

Thanks
I wrote the second article, which is on Ruby: http://www.howistart.org/posts/ruby/1

I'm psyched to see more articles here.
It guessed "Maria von Trapp" for Admiral Hopper.
NB: If you're going to use CSS styling for code examples, choose foreground and background colors, as well as text sizes, which are actually legible.

Monospace fonts, black on white, at default sizes, are your best bets.
I wouldn't consider those to be dead or dying.

Yet.
Nothing overly exciting, but I've started a blog recently at shanefitzpatrick.io and am working on a Ghost theme inspired by Google's recent Material Design.
OS X (2007)
Isn't Cambridge where OpenStreetMap started? That's a bit of a confounding factor!
Worked for me, and I live in South Africa. Maybe you left out the country code or got the format wrong?
Yes, it will be open sourced! I want to show engineers just how inanely dumb some of the algorithms in medicine are, and how (I believe) we can start creating publicly usable algorithms to pipe knowledge to the consumers once they get access to a bunch of data from consumer medical devices. Lofty goals, but I will attempt to execute on the idea!
The problem is that "[i]f they've broken the law" is not such a clear-cut question. Sometimes it is (WorldCom), sometimes it isn't (Qwest): http://www.cbsnews.com/news/top-10-ceos-in-prison-whyd-they-.... This is especially true with white collar crime, where the difference between legal and illegal activity often revolves around intent. There is definitely the potential for the government to use white collar laws to keep meddlesome rich people in line.
Thanks for sharing. I'm already doing like half of the things from that list, and I'll be probably doing the other half soon.

It's good to remind ourselves that you, and me, are not alone in this, and maybe to reflect on those "choices" "we" make and see if we can learn to live more of our own lives, and less of someone elses.
Isn't that what the Nielsen Ratings[1] are all about?

1. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_ratings
Android’s App Permissions Were Simplified – Now They’re Less Secure
I don't mean to shoot down the one thing that gets you through the day, but if you aren't happy now do you think hitting it out of the ballpark will help? I mean, money is great for the basics, but if you're having problems forming romantic connections I think money would make that problem a lot worse.
Your make some good points, but I don't quite buy them.

Turbo Pascal for example was written by a single guy, Anders Hejlsberg, in about 2 years for several platforms in assembly language, and included an integrated (though primitive) text editor/IDE.

Smalltalk was taken from ST-72 to ST-80 in 8 years, with small teams that also had to invent/implement complete VMs, operating systems, bitmap graphics engines, GUI framework(s) and sophisticated IDEs. You write that it would be nice to have an FP IDE so it could give you better feedback (or were you talking about an existing FP IDE). These guys built the live IDE (even better than types for direct feedback) in a fraction of the time. Does OPAL still compile to C? Does it still use Tk?

Think about Ruby, Python, etc.

I could go on (the VPRI stuff is also amazing), but I think you get the idea: it seems that not only can you be a productive member of society without FP, it sure looks like people can be a lot more productive without FP than with it.

Java is not really a good example of anything. Certainly not of an OOPL: "Java is the most distressing thing to happen to computing since MS-DOS." "If the pros at Sun had had a chance to fix Java, the world would be a much more pleasant place. This is not secret knowledge. It’s just secret to this pop culture." — Alan Kay (who coined the term "object oriented")

I don't quite get why you see LISP as an example for the power of FP, it is a multi-paradigm language with some functional elements, and most of its power comes, AFAIK, from its meta-system.

And HOFs like map or fold have been in other languages since the dawn of time, they're certainly in Smalltalk.

In terms of rhetoric, Peter Pepper might seem like an outlier, but as far as I can tell he is not. You can see it in this very thread: if you don't buy the self-evident awesomeness, it must be because "you didn't understand" and "refuse to understand", it cannot possibly be because you legitimately have a different point of view.

Another example. I watched the following talk by Simon Peyton Jones on data parallel Haskell:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWSZ4c9yqW8

Interesting stuff. But he has to go and say it: "this is only possible in a pure FP language like Haskell". Hand raised in the auditorium. "Actually, this sort of thing is pretty common in the HPC community, in FORTRAN [under some specific name]". And of course he can't just shut up and read up on things he obviously doesn't know about, he has to retort: "well, that means that it is nothing but a variant of Haskell at this point". Ouch! And finally, at the end of the talk he gives some numbers. It turns out that this amazing thing that's only possible in Haskell needs 6 cores to match the performance of a single core C program. 6:1. That's absolutely pathetic, especially when compared to what the HPC FORTRAN guys are doing. So maybe he shouldn't be lecturing them, they know this stuff a lot better then he does.

Now don't get me wrong, the talk was interesting and thought provoking, but the mismatch between grandness of the rhetoric and the paucity of the results was its usual epically proportioned self.
I tried again. "Unfortunately it looks like you've reached the free trial call limit." Bummer.
A distinction should be made between buyers and sellers. As we understand the trolls buy the stuff.
Same opinion here. Many possible interpretations.

For example: social interaction seems related to mortality as well, and social interaction leads to the very popular activity of consuming alcohol. Moreover, alcohol acts as a social lubricant, helping to fuel back these interactions.
I'd like to see more about how everybody is expected to stop learning after that, unless they're looking for more degrees . . . .

Who has this expectation? To me your perspective is weird because it suggests that if you're not taking classes you're not learning. And I would say that I often see arguments for college along the lines of it helping you "learn how to learn" on your own.
What openness exactly are you talking about? This is all closed source code being shared between some of the worlds largest corporations under secretly negotiated contracts.

Also you make it sound as though they somehow made peace rather than Google just defeating Samsung in the negotiation. It's hardly as if Tizen was a viable alternative.
SF tickets for more times than it actually sweeps (i.e., they do not always have a street sweeper come at all the restricted street sweeping times). They will also ticket you even if the street sweeper has already passed. :/
Nothing wrong with a little variety in your life, medium wise. Also, it's "h4xx0r", not "4axx0r"
Yeah, I'm eager to see the project get more lift and more tutorials with time.
Trying it out now. It's got glass and wear APIs but I feel that they're moving too fast for me now. I'm only just making my first Android App. It's interesting coming from Ruby on Rails back to the Java ecosystem with its heavy heavy architectural tooling. Amazing stuff really. I feel this is Google's answer to Visual Studio. I'm happy that Google is the company Microsoft and Apple should have been in terms of embracing software openness fully but I fear that their corporate mission will finally cause them to succumb and then we'll be looking for the next Google. Until then there's Android which at least has Linux at its core.
http://www.reddit.com/r/counting/
In the history of the world, economists and government planners have never been able to manage an economy better than the capitalisic model of individuals in pursuit of their own goals. I don't see any reason to expect that they'll suddenly become successful at it. Technology has been replacing human labor since the dawn of civilization. Why will things not continue on pretty much as they have? That is: when technology replaces a need for human labor, those humans are free to pursue something else.
I am rebuilding a 1981 Suzuki GS750E. I find it really helps to get away from my desk once in a while.

I have never done any mechanical work before and I am having fun and learning a lot. I highly recommend it as an alternative to starting yet another project.

When I don't feel like working on that or am waiting for parts, I am building an original arcade game. Its in the really early stages but I hope to house it in a traditional coin operated arcade cabinet painted with original artwork from a local artist and put it in a local coffeeshop or something.

I don't have a site to point anyone to for either of these projects.
Tor is not very slow, it is just not very fast (and has high latency). you can easily get download speeds of 1-2mbit/s.
Quora was started by ex-Facebook CTO / VP Eng, who previously lead "Facebook Platform", i.e. the login requirement now seen at Quora. However, most of the world moved on.

http://pando.com/2013/07/23/move-fast-break-things-the-sad-s...

http://www.crunchbase.com/person/adam-d-angelo
Perhaps the fact that 2600 has a large following among hardware hackers who might prefer something more tangible escaped you.
But the people who are already here are the ones who keep complaining about it.
I just saw your call in the logs! It will work in Serbia, but I need to do some additional work on the backend to enable certain countries that are typically high cost to call. I had already done this, but apparently it wasn't complete.

For now, I've reset your trial call limit and it should work for you.
I drank very heavily for ~ 20 years, a high functioning alcoholic and software engineer. Most of you have heard of stuff I've worked on. My other HN account has a pretty high karma, this one is a throwaway.

I was maybe three months from being homeless, and after being out of work for nearly a year (nobody wanted to hire me, go figure. I thought I had things pretty well covered up...) I found a job with a small company writing simulation software. Two weeks into working for them I lost control and went on a binge and didn't show up for a week, and the CEO went by my condo and asked WTF. I told him. Went into detox later that day, did two weeks in-patient at The Camp in Scotts Valley, then did AA really solidly. It mostly stuck; my earlier visits to AA hadn't been absolutely desperate, and I figure I was pretty close to dying through suicide or something a lot more slow and miserable.

I don't work at that company any more, but it took the caring of a CEO who I barely even knew to really wake me up. I'm still sober 15 years later.

Just switching jobs won't help. Nor will making promises, or going to school, or switching majors, or exercising, or moving, or just about anything else that doesn't exactly target what alcoholism is all about. This sounds deadly serious, and it is, but in fact AA was a lot of fun and I made a number of fast friends. (Feel free to substitute the organization of your choice, but AA worked well for me and I don't have experience with another group).
we use pyramid
Nope, EEs also party hard. Try maybe some theological university.
Python / Tornado
Sinatra as well as rails
Right, how does all this impact the I-DVR that I rent to my "friend" for $10 in BTC each month, to defray the cost of my internet bill?

It would be interesting to see a decentralized Aereo make another go at this.
I think we've shown our case.
We have Ruby, Python, Go, C, Node, Perl, Backbone and maybe a few others I'm not remembering right now.

When you're building distributed systems, you pick the right tool for the job.

Edit: And Assembly: http://youtu.be/zrSvoQz1GOs?t=15m44s I'd actually recommend the entire talk.
And what happens when there is nothing else to pursue? When I say "human labor" I don't just mean construction etc. Lawyers, doctors, mid-level managers etc....any field that doesn't specifically require human creativity can either be replaced or have the number of people working in it greatly reduced by technology.
Everything is correct except for the last two. Only some people are annoying when drunk. It's also not a waste of money if you are intentionally consuming it for its effects. If that's a waste of money, so is every experience you pay for (travel, amusement parks, donkey shows, etc).
Goodbye, for Now, San Francisco
We mainly use Grails for webapps. Most of our code is Groovy with a smattering of Java here and there, + some Javascript in the front-end.
I would suggest taking a look at I2P-Bote. Although I haven't had it installed for a year at least, I2P-bote seems to be a slow-moving project, with lots of features TBD, but it does hit all the keywords.
K-9 Mail is good, but it doesn't support PGP/MIME. Only inline PGP. Doesn't look like they will either as it's been on their todo list for several years now with no progress.
Things which may help, in no particular order:

Play a sport you like, work on a project you enjoy (hack on something small and put it out in the world), make a few good friends and maybe work with them (not easy but worthwhile), remain intellectually honest (write down your thoughts / emotions).

Its a cliche to say it, but the gap is creation vs consumption.
Nice to see some Django. I had to move away from it and towards flask and rails since it was basically abandonware for years. I'm glad they are moving forward and that the project is hosted on GitHub now.
Having submitted to that journal before, I suspect the authors just ticked a check box that said something like "Relevant ethics approval was obtained for this paper".
Yo Hackathon Attempts To Show How Yo Can Grow
That's also do to teaching the kids at a young age. Social acceptance was the main factor, and will be the main factor in limiting alcohol usage (if it does happen).
What is economic growth here?

Piketty discussed the return on capital versus earnings. He doesn't claim one is superior to the other, or even that in the long run one will certainly trump the other. He simply argues based on the evidence that it is likely that in the long run, because it appears that the long trend is negligible economic and demographic growth, there is no intrinsic law within capitalism that ensures capital returns will not become so important that inequality can reach massive levels.
Logging in is required to read, but you do not have to use Facebook login. I just created an account with my email address.
> In a previous HN thread, we considered the possibility of medicine becoming automated, imagining that (say) 80% of doctors’ labor is replaced by machines.

http://www.citehr.com/8951-knowing-where-tap.html
I find it odd that so many nostalgia posts are going up. Are we running out of new content and having to re-use old stuff, a la Hollywood?
I have a similar question. I have been watching "Steve Blank's Customer development" type videoes on youtube lately. He pitches completely validate idea before writing a single line of code.

For successfully companies/products like dropbox, google, twitter, etc. What are the "right" questions/methods to "validate" the idea before the development - without developing the product and let the massive traction do the talking?

What are the name of any of "really" successfully product/company follow that method of "validating idea" before writing a single line of code?
> I don't understand this. How would patents have prevented him thinking about it ? I don't understand this logic.

Standing on the shoulders of giants. Imagine everything software-related that AT&T or IBM did in the 1960s was patented. There could have been no Xerox PARC. There could have been no Free Software Foundation. There could have been no Apple or Microsoft. There could have been no Compaq or any other PC clones. All of the contributions these organizations made to the state of the art and all of the benefits of competition they brought could have not existed.

It would be hard to think about computers formatting text if there were no computers that supported a GUI or fonts and configuring your operating system to allow the computer owner to access the frame buffer required a $20,000 site visit from the IBM service technician.