skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Would it be possible (and IANAL so I've got no idea) to simply not make your products available in this whacked out district of east Texas?

Just refuse to ship by mail or retail to any address in the district in order to make sure the trolls can't force you into this venue?

It would be no small measure of poetic justice if in return for making themselves an enormous public nuisance and doing irreparable harm to the patent system, all of their residents had to drive a hundred miles every time they wanted an ipod.

Edit: Moved from the thread about this that didn't take off.

Edit: On downvote: I actually wasn't trying to make a snarky point etc. I really would like to know. Is it possible, if some venues just become too hostile, to simply not sell to them or is it an "anywhere in America = everywhere in America" kind of thing? In other words, is there any way at all to keep patent trolls from dragging you down to their funny little puppet court in nowhere-ville east Texas? Give me my -4, I'm cool with that, but could someone take a moment to answer?
The economy is saved!

Oh, maybe not...
Epic Demonstrates Unreal Engine 3 for the iPod Touch/iPhone 3GS
Microsoft is a company made of very smart people; they're not going to let one of their flagship products simply disappear.
I own a coffee mug with a similar problem !

http://www.zazzle.com/css_is_awesome_mug-168716435071981928
Things I'd like rolled into an OS:

- version control + mini database in file system.
- forward and backward debugging.
- HTML rendering windowing system (not a browser but the guts needed for a browser among other things of stuff, something like XUL).
- Safe, fast Javascript interpreter.
- The usual unix-y networking and such but cleaned up a la perl.
- Fast, safe sandbox for low-level stuff
Sounds like a combination of FS-level VC (implemented several times) and GoboLinux or Zero-Install (probably more Zero-Install.)
Two main reasons: 1) BT does not work quickly or reliably for ad-hoc connections. Have you tried using GameKit? It takes >45 seconds to ad-hoc pair (if BT is cold) and does not always work and 2) BT is very unreliable across platforms.

But requires an internet connection but is fast and reliable compared to the alternative. Time will tell if that is a more compelling compromise.

A lot of the applications using the Bump API are built on the cloud, so they would be useless without internet anyways.
I don't see this that often at Georgia Tech. The one class where I know someone who asked for extensions, extensions were almost always granted, however, you took a 30% grade deduction for an extra day.
No; other people read the article, and have heard the news that Microsoft plans to have a modified (compliant) version for sale as soon as this injunction takes effect.
Contrarian overviews like this are what the Economist does best.
Also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=994075
I need some kind of controller I can mount the iPhone to -- maybe better speakers, a d-pad, a couple buttons, extended battery pack.

I would pay for that (maybe you could even bundle some games with it!).
I suppose it depends on how you define "expensive," but they really aren't. I believe the application fee is on the order of a few thousand dollars (in the US only, of course; you can easily rack up a hefty fee if you need to apply in multiple jurisdictions). Doing the actual application and enumerating the claims isn't trivial, but I do know laypeople who have successfully applied for and been granted patents with minimal help from a lawyer (that's where patent applications can get expensive).

EDIT: It's even less than I thought from the USPTO side; see http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/qs/ope/fee2009september1...
While this algorithm is very simple it doesn't seem to take into account critical periods in memory formation.

Just choosing which card to show next is only half the battle. If you're learning X cards you need to review all X within the first hour, then the next period of 24-48 hours, etc. The forgetting curve which underlies spaced repetition has some biological tipping points (did you sleep between your last session and this one) which are not easily approximated.

I strongly support software like this, but would prefer a complex accurate system, to a simple elegant one.
People keep forgetting that keyboardless computers suck for ergonomics. Keyboardless screens such as the iPhone are brilliant if you use them for only seconds at a time, and only enter the occasional txt msg or URL.

Try writing even a modestly nontrivial Python program in them, and the hunt and peck of a touchscreen keyboard becomes real tedious real fast, not to mention the error rate due to relative lack of tactile and visual feedback. Hell, even joystick-style game controls become dodgy and frustrating on an iPhone.

In short, a keyboardless tablet is great for Twitter and ebook reading, but its value for the sort of deeply interactive learning machine the OLPC is supposed to be is a bit less certain.
Isn't that what 4chan is for?
Sounds like very shakey ground. I would quite vigourously avoid pissing anyone off who has proof you (or anyone else for that matter) was directly involved with these materials. Literal interpretation of the law could see you registered as a sex offender + jail time. What a rediculous concept :/
That's a little misleading. The article claims that the break-even point is $12-40mn in gross sales. That's a bit of a weird way to put it that doesn't really illuminate the actual cost of patenting something at all.

Regardless, suggesting that it costs $12mn to patent something is ludicrous.
This is one of the most inspired pieces of writing on programming I've read in quite some time. Acknowledging the difference in preference for code density among noobs vs. seasoned programmers will be really useful during any annoying meetings on programming style I have to attend in the future.

Edit: It got less inspired as I continued to read but the initial idea was good.
If they were to do so, beyond merely making people agree to terms of service that prohibit such things, they would very likely open themselves up to a lot more legal liability. If they did claim to review and filter projects, and they missed one, they could then be liable for whatever horrible things happened as a result of someone performing the task. I'm pretty sure being a neutral exchange, where both buyer and seller beware (though each has processes for remedying lack of performance or lack of payment), is a safer model for Amazon.

On top of the seeming additional liability Amazon would be inflicting on themselves, I can't see any upside to Amazon going to extra lengths. It would anger project creators to have to wait for human approval for every project, it would likely reduce the number of jobs underway at any given time (making it less profitable for them and less lucrative a market for service providers), and it would increase the expense of running the market at human scale rather than computer scale (even if they somehow figured out how to use Mechanical Turk itself to provide the vetting). In short, vetting jobs would be a recipe for a fiery death for Mechanical Turk.
OpenSolaris does a lot of nifty things in this area. Closest to this is their Image Packaging System: http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Project+pkg/WebHome

Check out the links to Zones (sandboxes) and ZFS (filesystem with cloning/snapshots) at the top if you aren't familiar with them too.

While most of the heavy lifting for something like this would happen at the operating system level, you also want to rewrite/fix up many apps to be aware of what's going on. One of the big lessons from BaseShield was that these abstractions are very leaky. Things get confusing to users fast when all apps don't necessarily see the same view of the filesystem. If you want to see this sandboxing/contained apps thing done right, look at the iPhone.
First of all, I still think Google is a cool company and contributing a lot to the open source ecosystem.

But Google advocating openness and doing so by talking about data, protocols and software is disingenuous. Google's core business is pushing advertising using search and data mining. Things that they are anything but open about. Also, Google regularly open-sources software (which is great), but doesn't make any real effort to further develop that software using open-source communities. Have you tried to push a patch back into a Google open source project? (If so, write a blog post and link it here, please). Development on open-source projects in Google happens inside Google, with changes periodically being pushed to the outside world. For the most part this is a one-way street. Still not complaining here, btw - community development is tricky and I don't see other companies really make an effort to release control to 'communities' (hello Sun/Java!).

Google's open-source efforts only indirectly affect their bottom line. What they really do is make it harder for their competitors and garner public goodwill.

Google also makes a big deal out of control. That users control their own data and can take it out of the Googlesphere at any time. Great! Can I have Google remove all the personal data they've collected on me that I didn't explicitly give them? Uh, sorry - no go there. All that really personal stuff doesn't fall under your control.

I'd expect any company to behave in such a manner (or worse, actually), but Google presents itself as a beacon of goodness, openness and generally never Evil. As such we hold them to a higher standard which they can't live up to. So a sanctimonious sermon on being good and open just hits some people the wrong way.

Not me, of course. I'm a bit of a cynic and get a few giggles out of a shot of blatant hypocrisy.
F# Survival Guide - free eBook
Awesome.

I just need one for marketing my indie book, though this advice can be looked at as a general strategy.
IIRC, MPEG Layer-III isn't a single patent. So it's a bit of a misnomer to say that 'MP3' is a patent that a competent programmer couldn't come up with on their own.

On the other hand, I've heard some audio people say that MP3 wasn't necessarily anything 'new' to audio engineers/producers. It was just translating into software what people in the business already knew.
GPL licensed--not so useful for many purposes.
Contests With Cash Prizes and Other Rewards Stimulate Innovation in Hard Times
I guess I should clarify a bit: every modern browser (and in this case IE8 is also counted in) has support for display: table-* property.

On the other hand, 2003 was the last year when I did layout using table. I did pixel-perfect cross browser layouts with CSS five years ago, and they had to work in IE5 back then.
So yes, I do know what I am talking about and stand by my position.
I don't think horses would have a very good time in the jungle

It was clear by the end the whole planet wasn't jungle; there was nothing to imply the horse-like creatures evolved in the jungle.

I suppose the whole world would have to be an artificial creation by an ancient high tech race or something

Shhh! No spoilers about the sequels!
To offer a contrarian view, I have two friends from India this semester who got caught for plagiarizing in their English class. This is just this semester.

I won't make any big judgement calls about international students based on observing my few friends. But hey, it does make me believe that international students are less aware of the consequences of things like plagiarizing. I think they are a little behind on it. For American students, we went through the "dumb phase" of plagiarizing in 6th grade when I remember 90% of my class using the same one source for an assignment forcing the teacher to give an hour long lecture on plagiarizing. She also canceled that assignment. International students, unfortunately, don't seem to have gotten that lesson before coming here. Really unfair for them -- but a win for American education(rare as that may be).
Sigh, is FUD really what you want to see all over discussions on HN?
"Grades correlate reasonably well with ability."

... as measured by grades.
Yeah. I wish someone else would do that.
If anyone is interested in this sort of thing, another application which uses a slightly more complicated (but open) algorithm is "mnemosyne" (mnemosyne-proj.org). Its algorithm is based on an older algorithm from SuperMemo.

Another one is Anki (ichi2.net/anki/).
Ask HN: Please review my webapp for Twitter over IM
Would love to receive comments on my app: http://www.twimapp.com/
What a disappointment... I was waiting for the XO2 to come out in a year (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO-2), but from the article, it sounds like it's been abandoned.

I think the XO2 is a better form factor in terms of usability than the XO3 shown here.
I'm sorry, but I don't understand how I should "keep this in mind." She teaches at a college which focuses on business. How does this explain the difference she sees between her American students and her international students? (I'm not trying to be difficult - though I'm told it comes natural to me. I just don't see your point.)
> Of course, it would be wrong to suggest that all American students are the same.

...

> Success is all about time management, and in a globalizing economy, Americans’ inability to stay focused and work hard could prove to be a serious problem.

<sigh>
is that a bit like puppet?
On Web, Workshops to Create One-of-a-Kind Gifts
New Device Desirable, Old Device Undesirable
Increasing human longevity will assuredly produce new economic opportunities
Well, that seemed to have worked :)
Full details on Motorola Sholes Tablet (XT701) | Android Central
Federal Court so afaik enforced nation wide.
v2.0, slated for delivery next year

Ha! It's no less fictional than this most recent press release of poorly-considered renders.
TypeRacer with open source code snippets
Health Care in the United States
He might be intoning the stereotype (which may or may not be true) that there are more "slacker" students joining business programs, whereas engineering students tend to be more focused and disciplined. Therefore, you might see a very different article from an instructor at MIT.
Joking aside, it is an interesting approach to spending non profit dollars. Exerting pressure on the market.

A market opportunity to create the best cheap educational PC is more robust then a single company/non-profit with that at its goal.
It doesn't explain any difference between American and other students, just that Babson's student body is different than most.

From personal experience i've found the hardest working students to be those needing to get into professional school (law or medicine) as well as low-income/disadvantaged students who couldn't afford the $50k tuition/year to attend a private college.
Indeed the results are enforced nation wide.

The question is; why do trolls seem to always be able to force the venue to be this tiny court in Marshall Texas where all the cards seem stacked against the defendant? Is there any way to prevent this?
Good criticisms.

(1) You can only pickle generators that generate the same sequence every time they are restarted.

I don't know how you can persist state if you do not make this assumption.

(2) All the work the generator did prior to pickling must be performed again on unpickling.

Something faster would be to use file.tell() to get the state and file.seek() to set the state. Since the "unpickling" is not a bottleneck, I didn't optimize this.
I like it, it was easy to sign up and worked first time (and I'm not a big twitter fan). It's good that you solicit ideas in your forum...but take some time out to do some graphic design so it doesn't look like a student project.
A clean slate, something that just works and tons of polish.

Apple fails a bit on all those counts, but until now I have only seen PCs that do considerably worse on all or practically all those counts.

(Style question: Can you fail "a bit"? I don’t think so, but I quite like like the expression :)
I think using the phrase "IP terrorist" rather than "patent troll" would make it much easier to sell to congress why these patents are a bad idea.
"Big-head mode" halloween costume / self-portrait
> it's difficult to decompile object code

This is getting easier and easier with languages like Ruby and Python becoming more mainstream.
With a range of classes from remedial, normal, advanced, and honors and a selection of electives I think most people's are intelligent enough to get a 4.0 in HS but few people can get there without significant drive. Compare that with a medical program where you really do need to be fairly intelligent, knowledgeable about your subject and willing to work your ass off to get a 4.0.
I've shared Yegge's disdain for static typing for quite some time. One of the best examples of how awful it can be is type hinting (optional type constraints on parameters) in PHP. Many times I've explained to people why type hints are awful thing deserving banishment to hell — along with Facebook suggestions and Microsoft product recommendations — but so many PHP programmers seem to love them! Now that I read this I can see why that sort of thinking is bound to exist for a language like PHP (read: noobs).

Recently, however, I've been getting into Haskell and in doing so I found my opinion on static typing left a little beaten in the legs and suffering some obvious facial wounds. Static typing works in Haskell, I'm pretty sure of that. The question I'm left with is, why?

I think it might have something to do with the fact that type checks in class-based OO languages don't even begin to insure the program correctness that novices are often foolish enough to think they do. Everyone else recognizes the need for all manner of testing, and that's how correctness is proved (albeit, approximately) in imperative languages. In Haskell, I've found that type checks go quite some way to proving correctness, no really! (They don't actually prove correctness but proofs of correctness would be impossible without them). Without even bothering to do any proofs or testing you get a much more rigorous check for correctness in Haskell than you do when a Java program successfully compiles.

I can't emphasize this difference enough. To me static typing in Java is an annoyance and a lie. And so when I program in a language that teeters between static and dynamic typing, such as PHP, I go out of my way to write libraries that make things more dynamic (I've got one GitHub) and I call men who advocate aforementioned type hinting, girls names. In Haskell, it's totally different; it actually works; it's actually useful. Not to mention the clever stuff that you can do with types which I couldn't begin to do justice here given my inexperience.
Agreed, I do recognize that patenting physical things has benefits. My earlier post was with respect to software patents only. I'm against patents and copyright for ethical reasons, but software patents have no excuse for existing.
i was actually starting to think that microsoft was done with their shady activities. clearly thats not the case.
Several years ago I wrote a little utility called "clump" to compile C code and I still use it to this day:

http://fexl.com/clump/

You just run "clump" with no args and it builds your C code minimally based on time stamps. A lot have people have downloaded it over the years and seem to be happy with it. Works on Linux, Mac, Windows.

I use it to build Fexl, a functional programming language language based on combinatorics. Fexl aims to be a minimal layer over C code for those who want functional programming but want to stay close to the iron.
Background Checks For All With BeenVerified’s iPhone App
That is exactly what companies would do, with the resulting loss in the knowledge of how to make these drugs to society.
Hahaha love it!
Isn't the stereotype that India is more "lazy" than China?
Stupid or not?: Filesystem jail/bubble for Chrome Extensions
A bubble (or jail-like filesystem) where a chunk of the filesystem is assigned to the extension so that it can interact with the media safely, similar to a jail
And it's equally idiotic on your blog as it is on hundreds of other blogs. What is the point of having the same "content" posted over and over again in a multitude of venues?
The imbalance is likely because of the introduction of soft majors designed to appeal to women, like communications and human resources. You don't actually need to go to college for this stuff, and it's probably a waste of time and money. However, it does enable women to command a higher salary like the men that go into trades do. Anybody that's ever been in a nice neighborhood should have noticed the number of work trucks.
FYI, $1 is insignificant in Singapore. Average household monthly income probably around 4000 USD (personal estimate, I live there, didn't look for official data)
Data sources?
sure target the American students. easy targets. there are lazy American students and hard working American students. always have been and always will be. who cares? what is the point of this article? what did it say that everyone didn't already know? what a waste of time.
Based on your experience of two friends from India, you started believing that international students are less aware of the consequences of plagiarizing. Your point is nonsensical on so many levels.

First, since when did 'two friends from India' begin reflecting the attitudes of millions of students all over the world (international), only a fraction of which end up in the US in the first place.

Second, how can you conclude that they were unaware of the consequences of plagiarizing. Maybe they were aware of the consequences, but decided to take a chance anyway.

It seems to be that you are subtly implying that the American education system inculcates some sense of ethics (discouraging things like plagiarism) in the students, which for some inexplicable reason the education system of these international students doesn't. That IMHO is bigoted.
I would settle for being able to simply use a bluetooth keyboard - that would be sweet - just put on some headphones for audio. I do quite a bit of itouch gaming, and would love to be able to do that.
Six Lawyer Lessons Learned
http://xkcd.com/570/
http://whoadata.appspot.com/healthcare/notes.html
Thanks, I appreciate the note. I spent a lot of time on the signup. I'm glad you found it easy.

One reason I kept the website barebones is that users of this service will rarely visit the website. But I know first impressions are important.
Flagged as political.

The US Senate passed the biggest ever piece of health care legislation yesterday. The debate has been angry and has been going on for more than six months.

How is it not obvious that this is flamebait?
Internal memos appear on publicly accessible blogs all the time :)

But in this case they put it on the official company blog, and that makes it PR.