skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Depending on your product, have you considered taking payment from the purchaser's mobile phone (even if it's just an alternative payment route), that way people without Paypal can still make a payment without having to leave your site while they sign up.

http://www.mxtelecom.com/uk/payforit#about
http://www.mxtelecom.com/uk/tech/cta/webpfi

Just a thought, I work for these guys, so I can't claim to be impartial.
Non Commercial is basically useless. The only non-commercial site I can think of is some mum blogging about her dog. Even if I just have a personal blog it is kind of commercial because it is marketing for myself.
Sir, I, for one, thank you. "news.ycombinator.com" is atrociously long.
Those are bizarre laws.
I'd prefer to live in the society where all people would have unlimited supply of food, water, heath care, wouldn't kill each other, have lots of fun.

Unfortunately this kind of "magical" thinking is a very weak argument, and just doesn't work.

Welcome to the real world.
These two guys come to mind:

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com

http://www.holtgws.com
Yes, but that's what google cache is for.

Now this is wicked cool: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1075366
Maybe avoid getting law involved and see if Apple has a way to arbitrate this sort of thing?
This question is circular.

The potential "technological progress" doesn't exist because it was thwarted by software patents, so there really is no way of knowing what doesn't exist because it couldn't be created to begin with.

So, are you asking us what things don't exist?
>It was a passing thought, not a claim. Pay it no more attention.

Ok, so then I direct you to what I was saying originally:

"the OP has 'good skin' as one of his indicators of quality -- he's clearly not talking about quality in a deep sense, unless you think that having good skin makes you worth more as a human being!"

If you've changed your mind on the issue of good skin adding to a person's worth, then perhaps you'll now agree with me on this point.

>No, it extends further than that. Even judging people on moral grounds is condemned as "judgmental".

Not in my experience. I hear people judging others all the time without being called out on it.
A pity that the article does not include any excerpts from the books or detailed critiques of what's wrong with them.

Examining a Discovering Algebra book at http://www.amazon.com/Discovering-Algebra-Investigative-Appr... suggests that the book is not so bad (though obviously this only allows previewing a few pages)...however, I'm unsure whether this is even the same book, since the OP doesn't mention the name of the publisher.

It's hard to judge whether the books themselves are poor or whether the failure stems from teachers unwilling to adapt to a knowledge-building rather than a purely didactic approach. Education is important and worth spending money on but (as a European) I'm frequently horrified by American teachers, whose union seems defensive even of members who exhibit basic deficiencies in literacy or numeracy. It's still strange to me, for example, to consider that there are teacher's editions of textbooks that include answer keys for scoring homework - I ask myself what possible need a competent teacher could have for such a thing, and why school districts are wasting money on buying them.

I'm strongly against dumbing down school curricula; on the other hand, I think discovery of knowledge by experiment imprints knowledge far better than mere receptive learning (cf. recent HN posts about college physics students who learn the material well but are hopelessly incapable of applying it to a novel context). So I'm inclined to favor the approach of these textbooks (without endorsing their actual content). This article http://www.oregonlive.com/news/index.ssf/2009/01/the_constan... suggests that at least some of the problem stems from parental or school unfamiliarity with the methods, such as complaints about an 'overemphasis on...problem solving'.

Hmmm. I think we need to take a closer look before jumping onto the 'blame the book' bandwagon. The books discussed may well be inadequate, but it's hard to judge that without a more reasoned critique. If anything, this lends further support to opinion of many HN readers that we should be moving towards open-source textbooks instead of the current cosy arrangement between school districts and publishers.
PHP Time Stamp Function
A much needed feature (especially as I don't really want to use Compass). I already coded my way around it though with my "watch and do" script: http://gist.github.com/286060

Auto-building will be cool and I initially thought I'd use it.. but I realized having Safari automatically reload the page I'm working on whenever I save my Sass or HTML file is too convenient to give up my script (for now).
Tablet not supporting Flash would imply that the tablet would also be tied to the app store? That's me losing interest right there.

I'd expect a tablet to be more like a "real" computer than a phone. Where (i)phones would be real computers, too, except they are tied to app stores, which limits their use as real computers.
40TB on a tape
The White House Blog - There is an app for that
I was googling for an algorithm 2 days ago and the first result matched word for word my exact question. Turns out someone in IRC pasted a solution for my question in lisppaste, and google archived it already before I had a chance to read the IRC reply. Freaky.
Programming language investment options,2010: erlang,scala,clojure(no haskell)
Just imagine, children might understand the words they are using.

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

I can see a 'redacted' version of the dictionaries for next year.

And endless deliberation over whether 'dick' should be removed completely or whether only one of the meanings should be removed.
Even if you don't take over the desktop, your project has a lot of commercial possibilities in mobile and other gadget spaces.
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/sergey.gif
Daniel Eran Dilger of RoughlyDrafted has a very cogent perspective on most things Apple.

Also, has Gruber ever linked to/acknowledged Hacker News before?

"Were Flash Lite to gain momentum, it might make Adobe the Microsoft of mobiles, and Flash Lite the new Windows. That also makes it obvious why Apple wants to choke Flash to death before it falls into position as the new lowest common denominator in proprietary platforms on a new crop of mobile devices...

And you thought the iPhone was just Apple's way of muscling into the mobile business! No, it’s really a proactive battle against a wide swatch of proprietary platforms promising to plague a new wave of mobile devices."

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q2.07/879DD82D-559...
hg version: enable the [record] extension then do 'hg record': http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/RecordExtension

Also, please never use "f.ex" to mean "for example" ever again.
It depends on what problem you are talking about. Something as general as 'numbness', has a multitude of specific underlying causes; to treat those causes you need specific solutions. If you believe that psychotherapy can be effective in treating underlying causes, as I do, than individuals who have helped develop different specific psychotherapy methods have treated (directly & indirectly) causes on a mass scale.
> I think Scala has the potential to appeal to the widest range of programmers. There is something for everyone there, but without alienating any one demographic.

Just like PL/1.
Making and Breaking HDCP Handshakes
Old, but still quite interesting.
In year-2000-dollars?
For example, the PNG standard still isn't fully supported by Internet Explorer. Who knows what could have been different if the early standard were open and extensible (without patent difficulties)..
Learning something new makes you better at things you already do (if it doesn't, it's not worth learning).
but what's a commercial endeavour? you can't use the term commercial to define non-commercial.
Blackboard's patents come to mind.
Doug Lea Discusses the Fork/Join Framework
I dispute this assertion. When I was growing up, Ireland was ethnically homogenous with poor economic security and hostility to welfare cases like those of single mothers (for religious reasons), but there was still a distribution of ability and academic application. there were poor kids that studied hard and rich kids that didn't give a fuck, though more of the former than the latter, since high schools there employ streaming. You need more evidence for this assertion that the existence of welfare automatically results in poor academic outcomes.

I suggest that the disparity of result may have always existed, but in the past there were fewer women in the workforce and more jobs in manual labor such as manufacturing etc., so that a lack of academic achievement didn't necessarily result in economic insecurity.
Consider the most important thing for visitors who come to this site.. finding jobs that are in the place they want and related to the technologies they know. You can currently go down by tags (though it took me 10 seconds to notice this) but I don't see a location search.

I think you need some sort of search or widget smack bang in the middle under the header that lets people do searches or filter by location and/or tags.
You bring up a very important point.

Some people do associate zero moral cost with piracy. They simply don't believe that music (games, software, etc.) should be paid for, and they're never going to, but they think it has value and want it anyways.

These people make up a loud piracy background noise that companies selling bytes need to learn to ignore, rather than focus on as if it's money taken out of their pockets. They are not lost sales, there's nothing that can be done to convert them to sales, and unless/until they change on their own, they won't stop pirating your stuff.

It's the rest of us, the ones that have a bit of money and feel bad when we take for free something that for whatever reason we feel deserves to be paid for, that need to be focused on.

Fixed price points do a spectacularly bad job at serving the sections of the market that agree that something should be paid, but don't happen to think the charged prices are reasonable. It's these people who are relevant to the argument I posted above, and there's a lot of money there that's being lost.
Cloud computing with Linux and Apache Hadoop
I agree that kids should not have to discover the Pythagorean Theorem. But the way it is now isn't good either. Kids are just told to memorize lists of mathematical facts and taught how to apply these facts to solve math problems. This is supposedly more useful than learning why the facts are true.
Fast contrast adjustment using Perlin's gain function
I guess his point is to make your new competitive advantage something that isn't easily copied - instead of a data advantage, go for a feature advantage. He doesn't have access to your source code, so he'd have to do real work to make a competitor.

But I feel for you. I definitely think you should tell/threaten to tell his school if he doesn't take it off the app store.
The solution in that case is to stop browsing websites that use annoying intrusive ads.
It's not a conspiracy theory - it's kinda-sorta true and is as intended. Some say it's a good thing, others object. In any event, askHN is probably not the best way to get a grip on it. Perhaps, start here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_money
Apple's patents on sub-pixel text anti-aliasing. The text in both Windows and Linux looks hideous by comparison. You can enable these features in certain situations on Linux with extra packages, though.

Correctional update: Microsoft holds patents in this area but Apple has a cross-licensing agreement on them.
I think it is a perfectly valid question. If someone got sued by the holder of a patent and withdrew a piece of software or an application then that's proof positve.

http://brej.org/yellow_star/letter.pdf

Would be a nice example, in http://brej.org/yellow_star/ there is a bit that says "There are instructions which are patented by MIPS and have been removed.".

That's a clear impediment to progress, once the MIPS instruction set was documented and people started to write software for it anybody ought to be free to re-implement these instructions for the express purpose of interpreting MIPS object code.
There are counterexamples too. I feel like my C has gotten worse in some ways (and not for lack of practice) because of Lisp -- I tend to make more expressions and assign fewer temporary values. C code often benefits in clarity from named temporary variables, but my Lisp style tends to eliminate them.
Elliptic curve cryptography and LDPC codes are two that come to mind.

Though afaik the latter hasn't really been improved since ~1960 and were only patented after rediscovering them in 1993, and I have no clue whether progress in elliptic curve cryptography stalled due to patents or because they don't offer any practical benefits over RSA.
I've traditionally licensed my stuff as NC-BY-SA (photos) under this logic:

I want attribution for the work. Seems to be a fair ask.
I want people to keep sharing the work as it changes.
The last thing I want is for my photo to be on the front of Newsweek, or worse- used in a commercial campaign that I don't want, but without getting a few dollars out of it.

I know this isn't a startup- but for my photos, I don't simply believe that a major commercial/newspaper/etc using my photo will give me enough publicity to make money from other photography efforts. I've had photos used in the NYT and other large publications- it doesn't automatically happen.

That being said, when I am contacted about commercial use I am HIGHLY permissive and allow 98% of businesses to use my photos for free.
By analogy - name a great business impeded by corruption in the government. Unm. We know there are great businesses in America and not that many in (more) corrupt countries, but we can't point at killed businesses themselves.
Scott Adams - 'People often ask how I get into the writing frame of mind'
Paramiko : Native Python SSHv2 Protocol Library
That page has two giant animated Google Search ads and one shows someone typing "impress a french girl." Does Google have a macho sexually repressed Asperger's marketing team too? I think I dislike Google a little more today because of that ad.

Google is running scared in oblong circles and they don't know what to do about it.
I'll back this up. Been banging my head against a brick wall because WindowsCE doesn't load .pngs properly..... sometimes (it's one of _those_).

Convert to .jpg and everything is fine.
The notion that smartphone and netbook users are merely passive consumers of commercial content strikes me as somewhat elitist, or at least not fully thought out.

Taking photos and videos is a major use case for phones, dumb and smart variations alike. A substantial portion of that material ends up being published one way or another, even if just to a circle of friends. That's content originated on a phone.

Similarly, Windows netbooks quickly displaced the early Linux-based attempts mainly because people wanted to run Office and other familiar apps. What is writing a Word document if not content production?
If we're being hard-headed, we should also consider the possibility that intelligence is just not evenly distributed, and while schools should seek to improve as many students by as much as possible, we need an economic infrastructure that can make productive and self-sustaining use of less intelligent people as well as smart ones.

In short, dumb people are not going away, so there needs to be a means for them to earn a legal living.
I can name you a great business from one country that was impeded by corruption (or at least a connection to industry that should not have existed) in the government of another though:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enercon
I would point to the current HTML5 video element debacle:

http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-Jun...

Patents are playing a large role in ensuring that what could be a wonderful thing for the web will almost certainly not be.
:-(

I asked WooRank about the only website on earth that it has the most accurate information on: itself. And the result was an unprofessional Rick Roll.
Mozilla Firefox Gets More 'Agile' with Lorentz
There certainly have been cases where alleged software patent violations result in lawsuits. There the lawyers get rich while very senior engineers cool their heels in court or give depositions in places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant.

I don't know how measurable this is but it is patently obvious it is preventing progress.
when I see how much flash content of the web is useless advertising and I combine that knowledge with the currently available limited traffic plans available here in Switzerland, I think flash on the iphone would only work if I can selectively chose which flash applet I want to see which is probably too complicated for apples taste.

Even worse: While I'm sure it's possible to create optimized flash-content that is not too taxing on the hardware, I'm not quite sure that the various ad agencies take their time to optimize their output for small devices. Why should they?

So flash-ads would probably really diminish the overall browsing experience - just look at the flash-enabled android phones out there: The moment you hit a page with flash ads on them, they slow down to a crawl.

Would you want to have that experience on your iphone?

After two years of heavy iPhone use, I might (direly) miss background applications or real over-the-air podcast download but I certainly don't miss the flash support. At all.
One thing that's difficult to measure but probably not trivial is the overall cooling effect. What I mean is that the tangible cases in which patents really ran into conflict don't indicate the number of cases in which technologies were never researched to begin with because of the risk of infringing a patent.

The cooling effect probably isn't significant for the mythical basement hacker who does it for love, but decisions about what research to pursue are made all the time in larger companies, and one of the factors is potential for legal trouble.
Max joy + max anger = raging psychopath. Try it and see.
No APIs for hardware h.264 decoding? What, you haven't seen OpenCL? You can't write a GPU-accelerated video player? Mplayer's been GPU accelerated in h.264 (well, x.264) for a relatively long time, on both Linux and OSX. Are you saying a behemoth like Adobe can't learn a trick or two from someone else?

There's no excuse for Flash to be so bad.

edit: for a better, in-browser example, tried Unity lately? In-browser GPU accelerated 3D graphics. And it's never crashed any of my systems, in any browser. ( personal favorite: http://blurst.com/ )

edit again: hah, check this out. Note the "helloracer.com" link in the top article, and that Unity works on the iPhone. http://drawlogic.com/category/unity3d/
The Mac implementation of the Flash player is awful, it regularly pegs my CPU. I'm assuming that HTML 5 in a well coded browser will not do the same, no matter how annoying the ad.
280 North (YC 08) is Hiring a Developer and a Designer
However when one causes a bug that you discover a few months later, being able to isolate the commit quickly could save you hours or days.
I still don't know what the issue with supporting multi-touch devices in North America is but I strongly suspect it's because of software patents. Anytime a corporate rep is asked why their device doesn't support it they hem and haw and say that it's complicated but never give a real answer.
I looked at that link. I admit that I only read the preface, but when I got to this passage:

America’s transition from a sovereign constitutional republic to a socialist democracy would not come about through warfare (bullets and tanks) but through the implementation and installation of the system” in all areas of government—federal, state and local. The brainwashing for acceptance of the “system’s” control would take place in the school—through indoctrination and the use of behavior modification...",

I gave up.

American schools may be many things, but only the delusional can claim that they are a plot to socialism. They do have a certain totalitarian bent compared to the schools I remember, for sure, but I'm not sure what that has to do with social democracy...

There is also a certain irony in the fact that the schools in "socialist democracies", by which I assume they mean countries like Sweden, consistently show better results than their American counterparts. I'm not sure how the "system" would think that dumbing down the school system will help them achieve that.
If Apple follows the DMCA (and I'm sure they do), they must publish an official address at which copyright violations can be sent. So you shouldn't have to guess how/where to reach them.

(but I'm too lazy to look for it myself)
YOU might not. But you might actually be nice to your coworkers (or open source project members) that do.

It's just a matter of basic politeness to others.

And in fact, I would reject a patch to any of my code out there that doesn't clearly separate different things into different patches.

Too many times in my SVN days I witnessed strange bugs appearing in some commits that otherwise only contained whitespace changes labelled with the all-famous commit message "fixes".

Never again.
Not an example, but there are many cases of people "working around" a patent. In this case, it is a spur to technological progress. That is, preventing progress can encourage progress.

There's a "prospect" theory for patenting (which with this student is probably familiar), that a patent is like staking a claim to minerals, with a samilar effect: that it encourages others to stake claims nearby, and so explore that region. If others could use the same area as the patent, they wouldn't be encouraged to explore, and you'd get a technological monoculture (in another sense, this would be greater progress, in that it is more widely adopted).

I've been trying to think of an example, but I can't. I think the main way a patent can block progress is if the technology is not exploited well by the owner (like smalltalk being too expensive), and in such cases, we don't hear of it. When a patented technology is exploited successfully, money and time is reinvested in developing it, so that progress on it is accelerated.
I love these long nyt articles.

Me too, but if everyone followed Mr Kiyosaki's (sincere and wise) advice, then we wouldn't get them, viz. Seth Godin's capsule-blogging approach of 'one good idea presented in 3 quick paragraphs'.
A Tradeshow Checklist, born of experience
Community Manager's : You need great hair :)
right. I wanted to add that after writing my comment and before posting it, but I got distracted and then forgot.

Thanks for the pointer.

(small anecdote about git bisect: I was talking about "git bisect" at work and a comment of a coworker clearly not interested in the marvel that is git bisect said: "bisect my ass". I probably don't have to explain you how often we are now using that phrase in various non-git related contexts)
Thanks for providing such a comprehensive summary of the "opposing" view. I'm kind of at a stalemate re. how to reply but appreciate your considered responses.