skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How much of the big picture must my team have?
Greetings all.

I'm currently comanaging my first project - a fairly featured HRMS system - and have run into a bit of a bother.

We are an agile-ish firm and some of the higher ups believe that every programmer should get a holistic view of the application design, the argument being that eveyone works better when they have the big picture and know what they are working towards. Others believe that every programmer must be told only about those classes he is working on, the argument being that 1) the programmer makes no assumptions when he codes, and 2)the design concept remains secure.

I am managing a seven man team and of those there are a couple of potentially unethical guys. This has till date remained the only reason I have gone with the 'Blinkered View' camp. What does HN think?
Great idea! I just donated another $100. Let's see what happens today...
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

wipes a tear

Seriously, VOIP, over US carriers? Yeah, they'll let that happen...
JP Morgan is no more formidable in litigation than Microsoft, and they've already beaten Microsoft.
I believe you either have to provide it or provide a written offer to supply it on request.
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This is an unconfirmed rumor. It looks like it was sourced from a semi-anonymous comment on another blog post.

More important question: If this product is for real, and it takes off, are Google's partner carriers prepared to deal with the surge in traffic?
Am I missing something? There doesn't seem to be any way to pass a function in the function namespace as a variable without a closure.
The feed items that truly contain new information is not one trains for traditionally with bayes or so, because it would imply something that has not been seen before, rather than just being similar to something already seen. Searching for meaningfully different stuff rather than similar stuff is a whole different problem.

I'd like to have a treemap view of google reader rather than a list, and where I could visually, in real time filter the feeds by adding negative and positive keywords/tags, and click around in various levels of a treemap.

Click on "technology" => make a new treemap of significant tags in that area, click on the next tag to dive into that space etc, and eventually see all the feed items somehow. Perhaps present them in all levels by some sidebar or hoverthing. Color code items for popularity / activity / freshness.

I'm thinking something like dabble.db but with a treemap interface and cappuchino js interface.
You've got to know where the review takes place as well. I'd be fairly confident it remained in China and not the U.S., and this is just another example of what may happen when doing business in China. I know that the cool thing to do is vilify Microsoft, but I think they are part victim here. Now that corporate is aware of the issue, they are working to resolve it. Plurk should be happy for the publicity they received out of this (I'm sure they were high-fiving around the office when it was discovered).
Close, but not quite. FTP:

This application is a continuation and claims the benefit of U.S. application Ser. No. 09/075,359, filed May 8, 1998 now abandoned, which is a continuation of U.S. application Ser. No. 08/324,443, filed Oct. 17, 1994 now U.S. Pat. No. 5,838,906, the disclosures of which are hereby incorporated by reference.

The lawyers will only see one date, and that date is 1994. Also, don't forget that there is a 1 year bar on patentability, so it is plausible that the prosecution could claim invention as early as 1993.
I'm not in favor of patent trolling, but if you're going to do so, I think they're pretty much fair game. It's not as if Microsoft is a bunch of lily-white innocents, after all.

Also, what was 'decent' (note the quotes...) was that they were supposedly just going to go after one group with deep pockets and leave everyone else alone. Once again: I'm not in favor of patent scams, but the idea that you would not simply shake everyone and anyone down was sort of well... 'decent' as far as that stuff goes. So it's sort of a 'negative image' - what's decent is what they were not going to do, if that makes sense.
Really? I have no metrics to go on other than assets/income. Do you have statistics? If nothing else, the sheer army of lawyers that could be brought to bear by the defendants could effectively paralyze Eolas under paperwork.
T-Mobile is the little guy right now but it has the most forward-thinking policies, however with limited 3g coverage.
And, at least when I looked into it, it reduces your night vision.
Although there are plenty of junk juices out there -- the other bad things in soda give it an edge in nastiness over fruit juice.

For example: acidity. Typical pH ranges of colas are 2.5 - 4.2. It literally causes your body to breath faster (exhaling CO2 makes you more alkaline) and if necessary pull calcium out of your bones to maintain your body's pH between 7.35-7.45. If your pH drops below 7.35 you go into acidosis; much farther and you die.

Drink excessive soda and avoid exercise if you want weak bones and osteoporosis.
One of the biggest is that anonymous functions typically are less verbose in terms of syntax required. This is really dependent upon the language you're working with but two pretty decent examples from languages I work with are Ruby and javascript. In javascript, an anonymous function is just a normal function with no name:

function(){ return "i'm anonymous"; }

function namer(){ return "i'm a named function"; }

In Ruby, blocks are a syntactic sugar for anonymous functions:

[1,2,3,4].each {|num| print i } # => 1234

[1,2,3,4].each do |num| print i; end # => 1234

In javascript a named function is very similar to an anonymous one - they can both be bound to variables, both be passed to other functions, both be returned from functions. I believe the biggest difference you'll find is that some languages enable you to write them with very little trouble (e.g. the ruby given above, simply brackets with an arg list) while some require more extensive declaration. Another good contrast of this is javascript, which doesn't even require that you give a function a formal parameter list, with (hypothetically) Java which will need both a return type and the types of each argument.

Also that stackoverflow link is pretty good :)
...according to a rumor posted in a comment on another blog.

I'd say there's basically no chance of this being accurate. Otherwise, I'd buy a case of phones and resell them for parts. They surely cost at least $300 to produce just in parts.
I have been a T-mobile customer since 1994 (they had 2 handsets and 2 tariffs back then, business and personal) and this is the first time I have heard anyone describe them as forward-thinking.
Supposedly they're starting to roll out HSPA+ now, which ain't too shabby
Good point. The government would also tend to be hesitant to let this put pressure on the bank as well because many banks are already in such trouble here in the US.
Just to keep the dates straight, application 09/075,359 was a continuation of application 08/324,443, which was filed Oct 17, 1994.
The paper equivalent of a DDOS.
Sports are by a mile the most valuable content on television, and the only thing that you can't watch online.

Any revenue they could make with online ads would be irrelevant compared to the TV contracts. Here's some anecdotal data:

Baseball:

- Fox pays MLB $625 million per year to show the World Series, every other NLCS and ALCS, the All-Star game, and 26 Sunday Night games. In addition, Fox pays $43 million per year for an additional 2 games during the week with no exclusivity.

- Simultaneously, TBS pays for one Sunday afternoon game per week, and the remaining NLCS and ALCS games not shown on Fox. I couldn't find a price-tag, but based on similar deals $200MM/year is about right.

- On top of that, ESPN pays $80 million per year for 2 games on Wednesday and the Sunday night game.

- In addition, the rest of the games are sold to major and local networks. There are > 2400 MLB games in the regular season alone.

Football:

- ESPN pays $1.1 billion per year just to show the Monday Night Football game

- NBC pays $600 million per year for the Sunday night game. Interestingly, the Sunday night game is the most expensive 30 second spot on a recurring TV program, at $400,000 per spot.

- If you're at all familiar with the NFL, you'll know about the ongoing drama between the NFL network, Comcast, TWC, and DirecTV. I don't know what DirecTV is paying for the rights to broadcast every game, but I would be shocked if its less than $1 billion per year.

And that's just some of baseball and football. There's no way in hell online ads are worth threatening that cash cow.
Google Voice is actually not VoIP. At least not on your end. It's basically just a slick interface to a long distance calling card.

That said, VoIP is surely coming to cell carriers. The FCC has already indicated that it isn't happy with user agreements from e.g. Verizon that restrict what applications you can run on their network.
It sounds to me like the patent is way too broad to be contested effectively by Eolas.
T-Mobile already does this somewhat--you can switch between WiFi/VOIP and the mobile network. UMA is great.

http://support.t-mobile.com/doc/tm23449.xml
The only thing anyone knows for sure is that Google handed out a demo phone to it's employees last week.

Every other part of this story is pure conjecture, speculation, and anonymous sources.

I think the Internet is setting itself up for a huge disappointment here.
From the article:

"Google will push full VOIP usage on these, meaning no voice/sms plans needed at any carrier. Voice calls will go through Google Voice on Data SIM cards and will provide unlimited free voice calling. And SMS is replaced by unlimited free Gtalk."

No one said Google Voice is only VOIP. I have it, I use it for non-VOIP calls. The article just says they're planning on doing all of the voice calls over IP. Considering there aren't data carriers that have affordable unlimited free calling, that's the only way you could get "unlimited free voice calling".
People were doing this in the 90s though.

Before XMLHttpRequest it was:

var i = new Image();
i.src = "/something.cgi?SEND_TO_SERVER"

Then when the image is loaded, check the dimensions of it to receive a small amount of data from the server...

if (i.width==10) { // Server wants us to do X

I remember using this exact code to write an updating scoreboard for a worm game I wrote in js, in 1999. No pageloads etc. AJAX!

Software patents just need to die completely.
30boxes does good enough for me.
XMLRPC. Very easy to use.
There is a solid xmlrpc client in python > 2.2

http://www.python.org/doc/2.6/library/xmlrpclib.html

A small criticism : some network overhead (it's XML's fault).
Seriously, someone needs to go to Tyler and take these joke-of-a-judge's gavels away. Totally annoying.
Conversations in 140 Characters or Less are not Exactly Meaningful
Can you actually use VOIP over their network, or just over WiFi?
Pretty sure I read an article a few weeks ago about how they'd found they could just dump some of your own stem cells on contact lenses, and your natural lenses would adjust back to near perfect vision in a few weeks. They didn't appear to even have to do anything complicated with them.

So yes, I think a 'cure' will be developed in the next few years.
Exceptions jump to the declared handler - i.e. the right place.

I remain convinced that far too many people have gotten wrong ideas about exceptions from the bastardized implementations in C++ and Java.
There is a difference. In human communication responsibility for getting it right lies on recipient side. Sender during dialog may try as hard as he can to make the recipient understand the message but ultimately figuring it out is the job of recipient.

In computer programming (at least nowadays) responsibility for success of communication lies totally in hands of sender. Lisp just as any other programming language won't help figuring the message out because it's rigid and lacks adaptability to the current sender. Lisp (or any existing language or language based on existing paradigms) will never imitate true dialog between humans.
ASN.1 actually did take off, somewhat, at least in telco. And after comparing thrift to protobuffs to ASN.1 for our internal protocol I ended up chosing ASN.1, mostly because of the great ASN.1 support in the OTP (I'm using Erlang). Erlang protobuffs library, on the other hand, is somewhat lacking and is terrible at encoding/decoding huge messages with big lists.

And AMQP was chosen for the transport layer because it handles persistent messages, transactions, all the routing, buffers messages, etc., etc. I'd have to implement all of these myself, had I chosen thrift.

This is how I ended up with RabbitMQ and ASN.1.
I hated them when they were VoiceStream.
I think it's either voip over wifi or voice of cellphone network. What it sounds like to me is that this phone has an 802.11 chip in it and can be used over a data network.

The bit about not needing a wireless carrier seems to suggest that.
Not that I know of. But thanks to a smaller 3G network footprint T-Mobile is being pretty scrappy with the WiFi. Not a bad play as that can cover you at home and work. As AT&T has shown, you probably don't want to be making calls over the 3G network anytime soon.
That would work to eliminate "noise" info but such algorithms still do a poor job of helping one find new content and subjects that you have never expressed interest in before. I still trust groups of real people to help me in this regard more than I would trust an aggregator.
Here's another way to approach the user's end of it: have them log in to their Google, Facebook, Twitter, et al, and shove all of it into a single stream. Let them filter by source, topic, relevance, time, and anything else you can implement. Record their preferences by watching what items they click through or spend time on or interact with, and your relevance sort gets better. Add other users' data, and you have a fantastic recommendation engine without ever making anyone rate anything.

Another problem to solve with current news reading is duplication. Even if you do want to read about Tiger Woods, there's a lot of duplication in the echo chamber of the internet.
I think hackernews used to use a similar method.
Welcoming Sean Ellis to Performable and Boston
Google Voice can send calls to Gizmo5 (a SIP provider they just bought). Phone number forwarding is the feature they let most people use, but there are a number of people doing straight VOIP with it.
Over 150 copyright holders (ex. MLB, ESPN, etc) have access to a tool that lets them instantly remove videos.

It's really really sad to me that this sort of thing is necessary. What is to stop one of these people from abusing this power? I'm not angry with you guys, you have to do what you have to do to stay in business, I'm mad at the fact that we've gotten to this point at all.
It might be bitter-sweet, since MS funded the SCO patent-troll mission, and would be nice to give them a taste of their own medicine; but you have to remember, Microsoft invented AJAX. It's just karmically wrong.
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Sure - It's obvious. Patenting anything like that is just ridiculous. It's like patenting the idea of having a pitched roof on top of a house.

It's a shame some do see things like this as innovative unique ideas that need protecting.

FWIW I don't think we help matters by constantly reinventing the same ideas with new buzzwords. "Real time web"? really.
Wasn't that plane delayed for like 2 years or something?
Fool Disclosure Woes
I find it interesting that of late there had been such a surge in articles about information overload. It is definitely a lash back that will probably continue to get stronger as the amount of information we are exposed to increases.
I guess I still don't understand the purpose of URL shortners. Isn't this what markup is for?

Hey, check out this <a href='http;//www.example.com/foo/bar/foo/?param1=foo&param2=bar&key=foo&page=bar&something&something&something'> page!</a>

I get it that twitter has the 140 character limit, but isn't this something twitter should have solved themselves?

Why do these news articles seem to pop up every other day? Why is bit.ly offering a "pro" service?
The original was referenced above, an additional reference didn't seem necessary. I don't believe the quotes are out of context, that was the majority of his post. Just so you don't have to search for it, here is the link: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.javascript/msg/1799...
That's great, but when at any given time a very high percentage of the most popular content is obviously in violation it doesn't seem like you're very serious about it. You don't need to monitor everything, just monitor what's popular.

A $6/hr intern could rid your site of pirated content, but you don't do that because it would also rid your site of viewers.
Amazon.com is in the list... Maybe a little software patent karma?
That sounds like a great interface. But it doesn't stop you from having to do all of the filtering/categorizing. Maybe if after having done all of that work on your end, there would be a nice way to share that with followers.
I'd say there's basically no chance of this being accurate. Otherwise, I'd buy a case of phones and resell them for parts. They surely cost at least $300 to produce just in parts.

Hmm, the iPhone 3GS teardown is only supposed to be ~ $175. I haven't seen any reason to suspect that the Nexus One is more expensive hardware.

Not to mention that whoever posted this clearly doesn't understand Google Voice (hint: it's not a VoIP endpoint)

Sure it is - you just use POTS to access it right now. I wouldn't get too caught up in product details, when there is no technical reason to prevent it.
I have to be honest; while I enjoyed this article, I mainly upvoted it for the author's use of the phrase "shrimp-induced torpor," which elicited giggling from me in turn.
That image trick is brilliant. I have never heard of that before.
The necktie paradox
What I find amusing about the whole thing is that it's like a microcosm representation of how developers always think operations is trivial and unimportant..... until they have to do it themselves! :-)
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A List Apart's 2009 Survey For People Who Make Websites
Consider: Microsoft has been in business for 3 decades and 2 of them have been spent fighting IP lawyers. They're much more likely to know their way around software/IP law than anyone else. I'm not arguing much against your statement of a legal deluge on behalf of the defendents: I agree with that. However, these guys just won 500 million dollars -- surely Microsoft tried the same tactics that these new defendants are going to employ. I hope they work this time.
Yep it could learn from the usage.
To add, I believe there's some precedent here. Some of the key JRuby founders were hired by Sun (though they've now left), IronRuby's main developer was hired by Microsoft, and MacRuby's main developer was hired by Apple. Of course, there's a heavy platform slant on all of those examples..
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"There is no such thing as information overload. There is only filter failure." - Clay Shirky
Sounds pretty believable and reasonable to me (except for launch date).

Do you have further info on why the phone will cost about $300 to build? In comparison, the iPhone 3GS allegedly has BOM of $178. http://www.isuppli.com/News/Pages/iPhone-3G-S-Carries-178-96...

Curious here: who would buy the "parts"? It'll cost you a lot just to disassemble the phone.
But thats only half the story, right? The other half is that people (enough for apple to be successful) decided they wanted apple again and have been switching to apple products for the last half a decade. Where does this fit into the analysis? He has only looked at half of the history here and the other half seems to contradict his main point.
I just did a Google search on the submitted title. When did the title change occur? When a link to this article was submitted to another social linking site? Or right here on HN? I'm perplexed at how an L.A. times article that has the same title in a heading at the beginning of the article and in the HTML title element for the article can get a title change to what was submitted here, but I know the New York Times sometimes has link titles to its own articles from its own front page that don't match the article title, and for all I know this article did too in the original newspaper.
This seems more like an issue with IP mentality in China than with Microsoft.
This whole patent is annoying because it reflects something that has been bothering me about the web for a long time. We built this enormous architecture that is built on TCP/IP, then carefully, oh-so-carefully made damn sure that it was much, much less functional than the base it was built on. Only recently are we sort of getting back to the base capabilities of TCP/IP with web sockets, and by the very phrase "web sockets" you can guess that they're a bit mucked up. Which they are.

It should hardly be patent-worthy when somebody figures out a way to undo the damage done to TCP/IP by a higher layer. Obviously TCP/IP is useful, why would it be remotely surprising that bi-directional communication is a good idea? It's not like the implementations are that surprising; channels of data are channels of data. Anyone who doesn't find that an obvious statement is not "skilled in the art".

I suppose I should rush out to file a patent on layering SSL back onto web sockets. Or proxying web sockets back to real sockets. If somebody hasn't already.
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Yep, that's the position google has to analyze data, it's incredibly powerful to have almost the whole activitystream on the internet.

An interesting sidenote, apparently google could activate face recognition for google goggles but have chosen not to do that at this moment for privacy issues.
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Again, like I said to axod: "What I would really like to see is something like a cross between the NSF and YCombinator."

Have a few experts decide which projects to fund. Give people 50 to 100K a year to cover their living expenses. Anything they produce goes under a commercial friendly license like BSD. Everybody wins.

Does open source not facilitate the sharing of ideas? Would this not make it easier to stand on the shoulders of giants?
They were OK when they were Mercury/one2one.

To be fair, their dataplan in the UK is pretty reasonable. Customer support for anyone who isn't on BlackBerry is dreadful.
I think about 5 googlers just got yanked from their fun 20% projects into a meeting room.

Yes, of course!
Do you have sources?

Specifically, they're saying you don't need a voice plan at all, just data, so they'd be using only VOIP, which Google Voice supports. No where are they saying that GV is only VOIP.