SoftwarePatent

> I would love to see or find a group of people who are just interested in getting together and banging heads together and see what comes out.

Great idea! Something similar has actually happened, not with the HN community, but just a handpicked group of highly intelligent people put into a room together with the mission of coming up with innovative new ideas. It is described in this article.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_...

Foxconn is inching towards respectable treatment of its employees, which will by definition make them unprofitable. When you look at Chinese government policies on quai moving out of the country, their black market exchange rate (moving closer to the official exchange rate), and rising wages for blue collar workers in China, the cost of manufacturing in China is going up for foreign companies. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Apple make a big move in their manufacturing. The interesting question is where? Obviously Bangladesh and Vietnam are the destinations of choice for low cost, but do they have the skills and infrastructure to assemble Apple’s stuff?

If I were a linkbaity tech journalist (is there any other kind?) I would write an article suggesting AAPL move some manufacturing to the American South. Can you imagine the corporate welfare bidding war that would erupt if AAPL suggested they might maybe consider opening a plant in the West?

In the Bay Area and NYC, a self-taught coder can find work without a college degree. I recommend that you work very hard on your Rails skills, build a website all by yourself using rails, and put the source on github. If your site works, looks good, and you know how to present yourself in an interview, you can get a paid internship at a startup that uses rails. Of course this doesn't solve your short-term cash crunch, but depending on how disciplined you are, you might not need to finish college right now.

HN changed my life too! I went from soul-crushing job writing patents for Amazon to ruby hacker in NYC. [1] I'm a self-taught coder hacking RoR for Pivotal Labs. I used to hate my job, now I can't wait to go to work!

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3754917

thanks for coining the word "unconfused"

Why would someone with a 31334 github profile want an internship? They can get a regular job making regular money.

Absolutely. Maybe you can get acquired before the game is actually released! ;)

'Roussel says his team completed the entire deal in about 54 hours. Why the urgency? "It's just the way Facebook does stuff," Roussel says.'

> Congress simply doesn’t understand financial markets and instead legislates to the political winds.

Sure, and while we wait for that to change (never happen), let's allow people the freedom to make their own decisions about fundraising and investing. This bill is realistically the most we can hope for, especially in an election year.

Reading all these wikipedia pages is going to kill at least an hour of productivity today :/

Good question. To run python on this CPU, someone (you?) needs to port Cpython to it. A CPU runs assembly language, and it's not hard for a hacker to port C to a new CPU, because C is small. In addition, implementing C is the sort of thing that hackers like to do. So you can count on C running on any given CPU, virtual or real.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPython

Possibly because Twitter has a patent on "pull to refresh"

http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/27/pull-to-refresh-the-patent/

Congratulations! Your age might give you trouble--people will feel embarrassed to work for such young people, and people in general might not take you seriously. Good luck!

If I could go back in time, I wouldn't change a thing. It makes life more interesting to be able to read law.com and the Volokh Conspiracy and know what they're talking about, even if I don't practice anymore.

Yes I did. Even though I'm a big Linux guy, I bought a computer with Windows installed, learned C#, and was starting a legal software company when I got the paid internship. I decided to take the internship, because spending three months programming Ruby/Padrino/MongoDB with good programmers and learning from them would be very educational. I can always start my own startup later. eDiscovery is going to make someone tons of money.

> When/how did you know that you would actually be able to build something useful?

When I got the CRUD interface working on the non-profit database. So I didn't know I'd be able to do it until I actually did it ;). The system I built replaced their old system, which was literally pieces of paper in filing cabinets.

> Edit: P.S. Good move getting out of law! ;-)

I wanted to get into tech anyway. My friend (dm8 on HN) introduced me to Hacker News in 2009 and it was a life-changing experience. It was my first peek into the whole scene.

"As a journalist, I think it would have been irresponsible not to inform _why of the article and not to try to interview him. (As a general point, you don't write articles about public figures, and he was absolutely a public figure, without giving them the chance to respond.)"

There's a difference between "giving them the chance to respond" and what happened here. Being a journalist doesn't give someone an excuse to act outside the bounds of polite society.

"Yet once again, we were stuck looking at a binary blob. And this time, we had no real HLE code to go off of. Luckily, Cydrak recognized the ISA just from looking at the binary: it was an ARMv3 CPU!"

From the perspective of a software guy, this sounds very impressive. Can some hardware guy chime in and tell us just how impressive it is to recognize a CPU from looking at a binary dump?

Hi bonsinger - I practiced IP law for 18 months before leaving practice to do a startup. If you'd like to chat about my experience, email me, it's in my profile.

Using twitter gave me a socket error, Google worked.

oops, listen to F_J_H! The improv phrase is "yes, and" not "yes, but".

Here's a tip from improv comedy: when you hear something you don't like, don't say "No." Say "yes, but..." This one little tip can really change how you interact with people. It won't change your world by itself though. Example interaction: your new boss says, "We should switch all the Linux servers to Windows." You say, "Yes, that would help with X, but have you considered the cost?"

Also, come up with a narative that explains your resume. I know a professional person who left a good job to take another good job in their home city. The new job evaporated for reasons out of their control in less than three months. This person came up with a narative that allowed hiring managers to see past the black spot on their resume: "I had family issues to take care of in my home city, they are resolved, and now I want to return to X city."

Good luck!

On an iPad 2, the text appears, and then dissapesrs. I can read the comments only.

ouch

I'm currently preparing for my first coding interviews, using a blog post about interviewing at Google as my guide. [1] In addition to studying the subjects in the post (algorithms, data structures, discrete math), I'm taking the three public Stanford classes and writing an iOS app that I will put in my github. Any advice re this approach? My career goal is to program useful stuff people use, with smart people.

[1] http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog...

I agree that LibreOffice has a long way to go. It is the only software I use that crashes regularly.

The name is similar to Threadsy, a funded startup.

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/threadsy

When I worked at Big Generic Company with a firewall blocking gmail, threadsy still worked. So I set up an account with only gmail and could use gmail in my browser. Seemed less likely to get me in trouble than installing Tor.

> I've never heard the "Elite Programming Language" term before I saw it deconstructed in this essay.

Google search for "elite programming language" -"elite programming language fallacy" [1] (to avoid links to this post) yields eight results. It seems the term "elite programming language" was coined by the author in order to knock it down, which is one type of a straw-man argument. [1] https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=%22elite+programming+l...

Will participants be evaluated solely on their code? Or will you also consider what school they attended, years experience, etc.?

I'm Irish-American doing a (pre-funded) startup in Brooklyn. Living in Manhattan would be an extravagant expense for someone doing a startup. If you want to be around other Irish people, there's a great community in Sunnyside, Queens.

On Monday there's a YC meet up here in NYC where PG is going to deliver comments on NYC as a startup community. I'm looking forward to what he has to say, he criticized New York in the past as a startup hub, but since YC is having a 500 person meet up here I'd expect his feelings have changed.