skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It really sucks when a company that supposedly has ethics high in their set of values does things like this.

If they would just come out and say we're just like all the other cutthroats out there it would be one thing, but to have all these lofty ideals and then to do stuff like this at the same time creates a real problem.

People will start to think that this kind of patent is ok. It's not. It's a web based user interface, a hole in a page with a couple of buttons next to it. There have been many sites before google that started out with an interface like that. The only thing special about the google page is that they kept it like that.
This boils down to:
(1) Charge corporate users of Twitter on a per-user-followed basis
(2) Strongly discourage "ego"-driven users of Twitter who follow lots of people

#2 is fine, but will only decrease Twitter usage and won't make much money. Can Twitter really make enough money from #1 to be interesting? I doubt it. (Why do customer service departments need to follow lots of people, anyway?)
Fair use rights lie in statutory and case law, not constitutional law. The DMCA is statutory law.
Or Heroku instead of cap/vlad. Makes getting a quick rails app deployed and up-and-running very easy.
Yes, but even then. That code might have a history, it could have passed through several maintainers before it landed with that person. Especially open source projects usually have plenty of contributors to any part of the code.

It's a tremendous exercise in trying to establish provenance.

edit: On another note, code quality is only one metric. There are others: productivity, being a teamplayer and so on. Those are at least as important as code quality.

Someone that can not work with others, is dead slow but produces 'perfect' code might be an asset to one project but a total loss in another.
Erector is a "builder pattern" view framework, inspired by Why's Markaby. In Erector all views are objects, not template files, which allows the full power of object-oriented programming (inheritance, modular decomposition, encapsulation) in views.
Perhaps a better alternative is to have them write code during the interview. That way everyone has the same chance to produce code, everyone gives you code that you know is theirs, and you have the added benefit of seeing how they think while they're writing.
True enough. But still though, why not wait until a company is actually profitable before we herald their business as a great example of profitability. Lots of things can happen along the way — a lot of the times it doesn't end well at all.

Given that there actually does exist plenty of companies that are profitable, why not let one of those provide the shining example of profitability, rather than one that isn't yet profitable (but might, or might also not be in the future).
You can still move capital out of the US. If you do not wish to pay taxes on your capital gains, you can move yourself outside and take up the citizenship of another country, while renouncing that of the US.

As far as I am aware, there is nothing preventing you moving (say) a million dollars of your personal, post-tax income to Switzerland and just parking it there if for some reason you feel it's not secure here. You have to declare the fact but it's not like there are capital controls in place that prevent you from doing so - I'm quite willing to be corrected on this if you know otherwise.
As the article points out Macheist are about marketing, and they seem to be very good at it.

If the tweet strategy becomes ineffective by putting off more people than it draws then I'm sure they will discontinue it. I'd be gobsmacked if they didn't track this stuff very carefully.
"I have the safety of knowing their are local police and fire departments in my home town protecting my house, for example, the things that non-citizens don't want to pay taxes to help support."

I don't get it. Why would non-citizens not want to pay for police and fire-trucks? Don't you pay for those essential services in China, or if you do, do you consider those an unnecessary burden there?
Excellent point. I suppose the only way to authenticate code is to run a live test, but even then it could be faked, and tests aren't representative of real client work.
After interviewing someone in person, so that you do not waste their time, have them take some time to program a take home assignment in a language of their choice. This assignment should take no more then a couple of hours and they should be prepared to discuss why they implemented it in this way, what alternatives there were, and why they did not use them. Ask them to also write any testing code that would go along with the code, so you can see how they write tests.
Wow, I read that paper you linked to and that guy seriously has problems interpreting scientific data. In fact he has no business writing any scientific papers.

His statement that antibiotics have not cured the diseases they cured or that public health measures do not increase health and lifetimes are pretty much ridiculous and his reasoning falls apart pretty quickly.

Anyways sorry to go off topic, but it is really annoying that people take this stuff seriously and treat it as science.
> Windows has plenty of programmatic text editors that offer most of the features of vim

profound disbelief.
IMHO "staying abroad" is the best form of traveling. You're not going to be steeped into the cultures of others until you live amongst them. Staying at the Hyatt and visiting all the mandatory sights by tour bus is probably the worst and least rewarding traveling experience money can buy.

In college my internships took me all across Canada, staying in each place 4 months at a time. All of those experiences have been invaluable to me, and taught me far more than any sort of vacation I've ever taken.
Interesting, I never knew that. The Geilenkirchen airforce base is about 3 Km from my house, I can see the AWACS planes take off with some regularity, all of them have American markings.
Why do some of the ads get run more often than others? Seems like google would run the one with the highest click through rate more often. I'm not convinced all of these are statistically significant anyway, but I don't have R at the moment.
Until there is patent reform, all companies will engage in this kind of cover-your-ass patenting. There are too many patent trolls out there starting multi-million dollar lawsuits on the basis of seemingly frivolous, obvious, or otherwise vague patents. As a defensive measure, companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple and so on attempt to patent everything they can possibly think of in order to prevent lawsuits from patent trolls or rivals.

As they say, "don't hate the playa, hate the game." It was obvious in the late 1990s that intellectual property laws needed reform, and it's increasingly obvious by the day when we see companies being forced to patent things that appear obvious or trivial.

I don't think for a minute that Google is going to turn around and start suing every other website with a minimalistic search interface as their landing page. I think this is a purely defensive measure.
He refers to these as launchers and lists several.
I don't know if it is necessarily bad for them to do this. If they don't what is to stop someone else from filing a similar patent and suing them. It seems like this is the best way for them to protect themselves.

If, on the other hand, they start using this patent to sue others: that would be very bad indeed.
Mint is Worth A Mint: $140 Million Valuation
KISS Alive 35 Tickets
Purchase KISS Alive 35 concert tickets online. Also find brief history on the hottest band in the world KISS.
"This assignment should take no more then a couple of hours"

Actually asking an applicant to code a couple of hours is asking a lot. Usually I bill by the hour, a couple of hours coding could quickly become expensive.

At least if you do that, make sure it is an interesting exercise (I like the problems from thesixtyone for example).

Maybe another possibility would be to agree on something together with the applicant, so that he can choose something he benefits from.
FTA: But when folks like Alex spend their later years trying to "do good" with the millions they were paid for actually doing good, they usually end up pissing it away.

I think he's missing the critical point that they enjoy pissing it away (as he calls it). Being able to spend the money you acquire in ways that bring you personal enjoyment is the whole reason for acquiring money.

The bottom line is that it isn't critically important to a working system how wealthy people choose to spend their money toward the end of their lives. What's important is that they be allowed to spend their money in ways they enjoy so that their younger selves are motivated to make the money in the first place by creating wealth for others.

How hard would you work on a startup if I told you that, if it succeeded, you could only use the money to create another startup, ad nauseum?

What's much more saddening is when politicians get acclaim for spending other people's money in useless ways, since they never produced any value in the first place.
I have to agree. It does have some good tidbits every now and then, but mostly spits out some derogatory non-sense. Does more harm than good.

It's somehow considered very professional and underground, but from what I've read by real pros in the field, the guy mostly doesn't seem to have any clue what he's writing about.
Would you consider Netherlands, Luxembourg (or Switzerland for that matter) tin-pot tropical banana republics?
Outside tech circles, I'm not sure I know anyone who knows what a Zune is.
This is the most thorough solution, but may be a burden to the candidate. It may be justified though.

If you knew people were going to be honest with what they submitted as their own, I wonder if there's a market for online professional judgement of code quality from say a pool of 40 experts. I guess these experts have to be paid too.
The original article.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/exploitation_elle_mag_h...
Oh, well, the DMCA is bullshit, that's how.

My understanding is that the "backup" of a DVD isn't really illegal. However, reverse engineering, or circumventing a DVD's copy protection scheme is. You're guilty of hacking, not copyright violation. IANAL.
CSS is missing from many of these.
The information on that site is a bit misleading. How would they figure out your name? Or who your friends were?

They would have to already know your name to search for URLs then that would contain your name. That is a lot of work to be doing in a browser. And if you have a common name, then whoptido. So what?

You can only use this technique against a set of URLs, you can't determine URLs unless you already know what to check against. At that, you would have to know the exact URL to check against.
Developers complain about Android sales
I dunno. This is deserves a celebration. It's a fucking triumph! These guys made a product that no one really competes with and are making real money largely giving it away. It seems pretty clear that it scales pretty beautifully and that they could turn the screws a bit, experiment a bit, and make a huge pile of profit off of this.

I'm all for thumbing your nose at some/most free apps, but EverNote has really proven something and deserves praise. There seems to be real (reinvested profit) buried under the growth/r&d spending.
How would you argue that?
Years from now, when the history books are written,
this week will be recognized as a pivotally beautiful one for Twitter.

http://twitter.com/sacca/status/3714731351
But the things they mentioned, US Treasuries, stock in US companies ARE benefiting from the US gov't protection. Its not like they are taxing Swiss citizens on Swiss stocks traded on Swiss stock exchanges.

They may be fairly unique in doing so, but the US is a fairly unique country in terms of percentage of the global economy. Other countries may have no tax in order to entice more investment, the US does not have to do that. If you don't want to pay the taxes, don't invest in the US economy.
Microsoft pushes for single global patent system
I suspect that the best response to this question is not yes or no, but rather "Who cares?"

It's in a similar class to "Can you prove that the Universe wasn't created by an invisible pink unicorn?" Well, no, I can't. But when I go to my grave, this inadequacy won't be at the top of my list of concerns.
Nokia Announces Laptop Details and Rolls Out New Phones
Actually I loved the twitter.com screenshot - especially the Times New Roman font - IMO it's much better than the site's current generic 2.0 look. So alive and breathing. If I saw an online community with a similar aesthetics today, I'd probably join it!
Interesting that there's a correlation between sites that haven't changed much and sites that are doing extremely well.
Is it fightless or flightless?
That's because their screenshot is wildly inaccurate.

Amazon's original page was totally different - grey background, serif text, pyramid-shaped logo of an abstract "river" in a maroon background, forming an A. The whole identity was different.

Amazon has changed HUGELY.

The screenshot they have is, at most, 4 or 5 years old, around the time of their biggest overhaul. Nothing like the original.

EDIT: Found this article that has genuine historical Amazon screenshots http://www.kokogiak.com/gedankengang/2004/07/amazoncom-logo-...
In the same discussion on Slashdot years ago, one user insisted that the possibility of living in a simulation was the most horrific thing he could imagine, because someone could just pull the plug. Nobody managed to convince him that this was any less horrifying than, say, the possibility of the sun going nova, or being killed in a plane crash.

But, if the simulation is "airtight," you're exactly right. This possibility does not color our behavior one bit.

The only possible distinction I could see would be that interesting behavior might get your state saved for a future run of the simulation; the problem is that "interesting behavior" is impossible to determine.
Apple builds security against those types of attacks into the OS and the SDK. The review process basically adds no additional protection. Holes in the SDK which accidentally expose such features can still be exploited, and those exploits are highly unlikely to be detected by Apple.
A modern rehash of René Descartes's "I think therefore I am" problem. He asked, essentially, am I living a fantasy dreamed up for me by a "great deceiver".
Replace "great deceiver" with "computer simulation" and the argument plays out the same way (albeit, with more probability in the modern case)

Ultimately, your existence is exactly what you perceive it to be. Speculating on the nature of our existence, on this level, is indicative of those who don't have to pay their own rent :-) You can chase your own tail on this one literally forever. As we cannot access the simulation we are running in (just as you can't really think about thinking) this idea becomes a debate on par with the existence of God. It cannot be proven one way or another.

All this aside, I'll admit it was a fun read.
Screenshots of Apple.com every year since 1996:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kernelpanic/sets/283374/
It's true that the review process won't catch these problems, but the process increases accountability.

I'm not arguing in favor of or against reviewing though. I'm just pointing out the flaw in Hewitt's logic. There's no magic sandbox that will reliably keep an iPhone app away from the dialer. That's in stark contrast with sandbox systems like Java, where the dollar value of a sandbox break is extremely high.
Static Typing and Functional Languages
That may be what the OP mentioned, but it's only part of the picture. If I'm an ex-pat, and make my money as (say) a laborer in another country, my income on that labor will be taxed by the US government. What right do they have to it?

the things they mentioned, US Treasuries, stock in US companies ARE benefiting from the US gov't protection

The companies that our hypothetical expat owns the stock in already paid corporate income taxes for their own protection. Why should he pay again for it?

Really, the questions here are

* Should the US government be able to dictate the laws of foreign lands, in order to satisfy its own choice of tax regime?

* Should the US government be able to dictate that foreign corporations provide data to the US, forcing those foreign corporations to bear the costs for enforcing the American tax regime?
Table tents printing, presentation folders printing, folders printing
See also the hackerspace movment.
Looks like a must-read to me. My CS professors name drop half of the interviewees daily in lectures. It'd be nice to be prepared with a solid background.

It's good to see a book like this that for once doesn't list the Microsoft and Apple crews. No offense to Gates, Allen, Woz, et al, but their story is overdocumented. There are many more not-as-frontpage histories to learn about and this book seems to contain a good portion of them.
You only need one: http://andLinux.org/
"This site normally works even when JavaScript is disabled, but we temporarily switched off that functionality for performance reasons. Please come back in a couple of hours."

Riiight.
Neutrality will suffer under that small conflict of interest
plenty of fish?
So any reason for staying at home is a lie?

Many people get a sense of purpose from doing things that are done more easily by staying in one place: write a book, build a house, educate yourself, create a company, raise children, withdraw from society...
Note that this is a design patent. This is not a patent in the ordinary sense; it doesn't mean they're claiming ownership of the idea of a page with a logo and a search box.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent
How have the lawyers fucked you? We've had a good experience with ours (McGuireWoods). And I've been able to raise a low seven figures in angel money in the area.

Having said that, were I to do it all over again, I'd have to think harder about which region is appropriate, even though my business is not web-based.
whatever, I presented the evidence that it is on a standards track, the IETF seems to like it, and it is a better protocol than any of the alternatives. I'm sure it is possible that one can come along one day to supplant it, but for the meantime it is the best we have and it would be nice if people would adopt a standard rather than whine about it not being done in their way.

in fact some amazing things might be possible if the service providers adopted it rather than maintain their proprietary walled gardens. I would love to be able to use my google talk account to initiate a jingle session with users on AIM/MSN/Yahoo/Facebok/etc.
Yelp Is Growing 80 Percent A Year
Because UNESCO isn't thoroughly politicized.
Why do you have to? A perfect simulation of the real world is not a falsifiable hypothesis, therefore rational argument doesn't apply.
Ah, and here we have the crux of the problem with the software engineering hiring mindset today.
Over the years I've hired many software engineers and I've never hired anyone based on their ability to write code, in fact I never even ask about it. It's completely irrelevant. Why? Because I've never hired code monkeys. Those I outsource. I hire engineers. Engineers need to be problem solvers, and based on the proper interview techniques we can ascertain if they're problem solvers or not. These people can learn just about any language quickly so familiarity is not an issue.
Want to know if someone understands recursion, ask them about recursion. Ask them about the theory of recursion, how to use it, where it's appropriate and possible downsides. Ask how they've successfully used it in the past, when they've used it and it's been a problem and how they solved that problem. Ask them when might be a good time in a project life cycle to reactor non-recursive code. But for gods sake, please, please, don't ask them to write a Fibonachi generator. This either proves that they just finished college, or have one memorized for just such an occasion.
Hire engineers, not code monkeys.

P.S. If you want to see some of the worst examples of this kind of abuse apply for any Ruby on Rails job at the moment - the stories I've heard boggle the mind.
The 'technicality' is that you're allowed to create a way to circumvent the DVD's copy protection scheme, but you're not allowed to sell or distribute it. Therefore, anyone that wants to make a backup of their DVDs has to crack the DVD copy protection scheme on their own. They can't (legally) get a product to do it for them.
How about temporary workers (e.g. 2 year work stint in a bank, etc.) in the US having to pay social security and medicare taxes during that time; a tax for a future benefit that they will never see. I always thought that was super unfair.
Not to mention you have access to the US embassy in China, which is also supported by your taxes (and mine!).
My question is whether the signalling is actually approaches a deeper optimal.

For example, I seem to be more deeply motivated by things like relationships with others and ideals, than naked self interest or societal interest. These suboptimal choices Hanson points out signal to others the value of the less physically based motivations for themselves. I start to lose hope if I think I'm the only one who has such ideals and somewhat question my own sanity. But, when others signal that these ideals are actually crucial to their own decision making, I feel I'm not the only one and am more motivated to follow them.

But, how do such ideals related to naked self and societal interest? Well, the ideals tend to motivate the deeper insights we generate, and motivate people to work together voluntarily without the overhead of contracts and reward/punishment systems. I would argue that while perhaps inefficient in the short term, these "biases" actually turn out to be much, much more efficient in the long term. I.e. just look at what happens when people do lose hope. They don't suddenly become productivity monsters, instead they tend to turn both self and other destructive. Definitely not creating value in terms of self and societal interest here...
Yes. Now we may disagree on the definition of computer though...
I'm not proposing that it should be forced on you. I would like to have the choice.

I recently discussed Napster with a group that had never heard about it and they were very excited until I told them that it wasn't compatible with iPods.
Abstract thinking is sadly lacking from our school curriculums.

I've seen students even at university level who are bewildered
by equations like w^2-2w+4=0 or d/dm(m^3-m^2+m) just because the they haven't been taught that the variable x is just an abstraction.
Did you read the part about foreign non-resident aliens being subject to US inheritance tax law, simply because they own shares of US companies?

It's nice to have different countries with different laws and customs. I don't want to be subject to US law just because at one time I had an interaction with some US entity. This opens the door to all kinds of over-reaching.