skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, I don't think it does and I don't think simply stating that it is without providing any evidence for your case is going to change my mind or anyone's mind who agrees with me, but it looks like I'm the only one. Anyway....

The legal system is there to figure out if a patent is absurd and if you read the whole patent for the swing, at the end, it was ruled out. At least claims A, B, C and D. That same review process exists for software patents too. The patent office is taking steps to fix some of the problems, at least it is being pragmatic about pre-approval review processes that still protect the inventor.

Lots of arguments all the way to the echelon of the judicial system have taken place over software patents and it was ruled they are valid, so if a claim is to be made that they should be abolished -- it better be a very good one.
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To auto or not to auto?
My Haskell skills are practically non-existant, certainly not good enough to jump into that project and understand what's going on. I was hoping for a more high level explanation of what he was doing.
I know very little about the topic, but I believe that various transformations and simplifications in lambda calculus are relevant when it comes to compiling functional programs.
Get on a panel, ticket's free. Look on Craigslist, lodging for the week is less than $500. Or if you're going for business purposes, just expense it.
Nothing wrong with Mcafee enterprise. :-)
Ask HN: Is there a comprehensive list of start-up incubators?
Over the past 4-6 months I've seen quite a few new incubators pop-up, some of which even sounded interesting and I've since forgotten their names or lost track of them. There have also been a ton of "incubators" that are really just co-working schemes enabling intelligent landlords to charge a high premium for shared office space.

It would be awesome to see a community-maintained google spreadsheet or a wiki that lists all the relative details (incubator name, location, application deadlines,urls, comments, and classification, etc). Is there anything out there like this which is actively maintained?
Twitter Metrics and Baseball – (My Suggestions PART II)
Your question reminds me of something I read about Larry Ellison:

"Ellison claims his greatest lesson while from Gene Amdahl was never to take venture capital money. Amdahl took vc money, and they fired him."

http://www.businessinsider.com/ceosfirstjobs/larry-ellison
They are having it!

I wrote a list of 10 awesome things for n00bs to do, too: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/sxsw_2010_for_noobs.php
Hmm... Well I admit some of the free fonts are awesome... but I have not found them to be quite as pleasing... Maybe it's just my own taste... not worth arguing about since Ubuntu is awesome and the free fonts are certainly good enough for most purposes...
I can understand this. Interface Builder is designed to transparently map to the underlying Cocoa calls. It doesn't introduce any new abstractions that aren't already present in Cocoa.

While this is a great feature for reasoning about your xibs, it can probably seem unnecessarily confusing to someone new to Cocoa.
There's this:

http://kaljundi.com/2010/02/19/upcoming-startup-incubator-de...
Don't over-plan. Half the fun of SXSW (for me, at least) is the near-random and quite serendipitous meetups, bump-intos, and unexpected invitations.
Okay, then the problem is not software patents, or patents in general, but that they unfairly tip the scales in favor of the big corporations.

How do we fix that problem? That problem exists outside the world of patents and software. Monsanto patents seeds and those are just strings of DNA which are essentially just four characters repeated in a seemingly random order. And yet farmers lose their farms over those strings of four letters. Not because they were even choosing to use the seeds, corn is just pollinated by the air and some of that code got into their crop as it blew in from the neighbors' field -- a farmer who did use Monsanto's DNA. It's absurd, I know.

One case on the not absurd side of the spectrum, is, as it turns out, the original case that ruled software could be patented in the first place. It was by a guy who had to fight, iirc, all the way to the supreme court to protect his right to patent his software invention. I'll try to find a link, but is a true story indeed.
The Steam client and Valve games run great under Wine, so if a native port is too much trouble, they could license the Wine libs and it should work fairly quickly.
Steve Jobs is just going senile
"I know patents cause trouble, but what about the case where a patent helps an entrepreneur get the value out of an invention when big corporations steal it, market it, and make money without giving the inventor a dime?"

Patents don't protect against that. Problem is, filing a patent takes time, money, and attention that are in very short supply in a startup. You can file to protect your inventions - but if you do, that takes time away from more important things like getting the money you need to stay in business. And patents generally need to be filed before the invention becomes public (you have a year grace period in the U.S, but no such boon in the EU). If you gate your launch process on the speed of the patent process, you won't be launching much.

That's why Google's first patent wasn't filed until 2003 (http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT6526440 - the PageRank patent is actually owned by Stanford, since they were Page & Brin's employers when it was invented). And many of the initial EBay inventions - online auctions and reputation, for example - were never patented, because the 1 year grace period had expired by the time they got around to it. Patents are something you get once you become big and have extra money lying around, not something you can afford as a startup.
Why isn't there effective enforcement?

Is it:

-- Incompetence? Leadership, technical, other?
-- Low visibility to law enforcement? (In which case, why?)
-- Priorities? Well-placed? Misplaced?
-- Strategic? For ethical purposes?

The problem needs fixing, but it seems important understanding why we're at this point today when enforcement seems to obvious and simple. There's more than enough enforcement power available, at least in the U.S., to deal with the brazen criminals and make it much harder for them. Are those honeypots?
Wow. That method of swinging on the swing actually is innovative. At least for me. I never did that by pulling one chain and the the other. I always sort of balanced my whole body to start and keep swinging.

I'm eager to try this new method. Should I apply for some kind of licence to that guy? I don't live in US is that patent valid in other countries?
That's a very reasonable position.
Even with 9.10, booting up takes very little time. It's very impressive. I don't even think of using suspend now.

And v10 is supposed to boot even faster. Yay! :)
I've always put those in the same bar, reducing the ubuntu menu to just an icon (instead of the separate applications, places, & system) in a setup similar to Windows, with open windows in between the application launcher button (start or whatever) and the notification area on the right side.
At the Daily Bruin all interns were unpaid. Typically after 6-12 months of part-time work (in any editorial department) there was opportunity to move up to senior staff positions and earn a stipend. That staff would put in 40-80 weeks on top of a course load, earning $2-3 per hour. I think it's very fair to bring on an unpaid dev intern and then let them work towards the stipend just like editorial positions. I wouldn't be surprised if the paper also employs a full time sysadmin/dev, for a real wage.
I suspect, in this case, it's more a play on the word Valve then anything. But is there

word : leak :: astroturfing : grassroots ?
Whatever happened to programming?
I've seen the quote "Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal." attributed to Igor Stravinsky, and I understand like this:

Artist A creates a good work that acquires a certain degree of fame. Whistle the tune and people think of A. Later artist B creates a derived work, perhaps B orchestrates it or adds words. For example Gounod's Ave Maria based on the Prelude I from Bach's 48 Preludes and Fugues. It gets more interested if B moves things along in a big way.

For a while the new version eclipses the old. But has B borrowed A's work, or stolen it? Time passes. Time's cruel erosion of reputation wears down both A and B. Eventually only one is widely remembered. If it is A that is remembered, the cognoscente think that B was the lesser artist who metaphorically borrowed A's work. If it is B that is remembered, the cognoscente think that B was the great artist, who metaphorically stole A's work.

Borrow/Steal is the verdict of history, choosing to remember a single artist. It is not a comment on the morality of the conduct of artist B.
Valve did a 2nd update to portal and added an ending where Chell is being dragged away for "Asset retrieval" by a robot.
Leading Coupon Site Tjoos Acquired By Internet Brands
Interesting that they chose to save 3 characters on their short URLs via the tiny domain name, but are wasting 4 by using only numeric characters in their story slugs.

Nine numeric characters provide for a possible set of 1 billion unique story IDs. You can get roughly the same size set with five alpha numeric characters (even more if you toss in a couple of symbol characters).
That's hilarious. Doubtless they'll be offering a smaller share of the profits as they're bringing their all important idea to the table.

I think I'm going to try this stunt with every service I consume. "Yes, you see, you give me a haircut for free and then we split any resultant profits. 70-30, because the haircut was my idea".
Most of the content is read-only, so we really had no excuse for it being slow. Previously we relied on .NET object caching which created issues due to the way dependencies were structured. Even if we were to solve that problem (which is solvable), Akamai would have presented a better performance gain to us.
Work Clean
"Stars in search replace SearchWiki."

SearchWiki ended up being a flop. I'm not sure Stars will be any different. Personally, I rarely have a desire to interact with the results of a search.
Twitter Metrics and Baseball – My Suggestions (Part III)
Most non-game use of Flash is obtrusive and makes no sense...
Timex/Sinclair 1000 Emulation in a Browser Window
Yahoo CEO indicates turnaround could take years
Useful code snippets to develop iPhone friendly websites
Zend_Search_Lucene Tips
Awesome. However I've been working on sqerrel based slgorithms. Rodents seem to be able to multiply faster and thus provide better scalability than pidgeons. The problem is that my competitor who's doing feline ranking keeps sending cats to my farm with disasterous consequences.
Why did they do it?

From the CTO: "Flash eliminates iPhone users."

Point to Apple.
Fun with Oracle Sequences
The "original" 9-bit fixed-point encoding isn't widely used; most formats use a 32- or 64-bit float, or the number encoded as a string. One of the Matroska developers posted on the HydrogenAudio forums[1] saying they use a 32-bit float, but the spec he quotes later[2] is different than what's on the actual Matroska site.

Do you know if the cover.jpg standard is documented anywhere? Searching for "matroska cover.jpg" just yields a bunch of bittorrent sites.

[1] http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=7294...

[2] http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=7294...
Entrepreneurs offer their life’s future earnings for an investment
Wait-wait-wait. So is every other company doing this or aren't they? You're moving the goalposts pretty fast here.

Google is young (>10 years), but they have a large portfolio. But you can't find a "pattern that would argue they would never do so"? And that proves that Apple is doing really just the same thing everybody else are? The fact that others really aren't, but you can't find a proof that they never would?
I don't think that is exactly true. A good patent from a very good firm in L.A. will run you about $20k. Yes, it's a lot, but I a computer engineer could sock that much away in a year. Work on the software at home at night, patent it, sell the patent to Apple or Microsoft or another big company for a couple million dollars. The corporation makes $100 Million of the device. Great, the inventor got $2M and can innovate for the rest of his or her life.

That's a good story in my opinion. Is that any better or worse than a social media site that gets 1,000,000 users and sells itself to google or whatever? How is that better?

Seriously, and with all due respect, a lot of the social media sites that do that add little value to anyone but the investors. Sometimes they take money from their customers in nefarious ways that maybe the world would be better off without -- especially right now.

So I'm a staunch supporter of software patents, because I see them as a path to freedom and a mechanism to publish ideas into the population and allow them to be built upon and improve the quality of life in the world.

I think the world could use a little improvement in its quality right now. There are probably millions of people who will agree with me.

When it comes down to it -- you gotta make money. That's what it comes down to and patents, any kind of patent, whether it is for wind shield wipers or for a software revolutionizes the solar energy system.

If something like that saves the world, I don't see a problem with an inventor getting a little bling out of it.

When it comes down to it, I just don't see the difference between gears spinning in the real world and gears spinning in a 3d model. That's every bit as much software as the algorithms and hardware behind some of what the iPhone does.

Some little company patented a film that goes over glass to make it much much stronger, but still transparent with UV protection and over a decade later, a car company used that material in its windshields without ever compensating this small individual owned business. It just turned out that when the material was invented, there was no market for it. No one could figure out what to do with it.

But it was within the 20 year period for the invention, which is essentially an arrangement of atoms in space, which could all be described by software. But I digress.
When the contributions program started, I enabled contributions for a number of my add-ons, with the suggested donation set at $1. Over the next two months, I averaged $1 in donations for every 5,000 downloads.

After Add-on Con, I raised my suggested donation amount to $5, and since then, I've averaged about $4 for every 5,000 downloads.

Note: Relevant add-ons include TwitterBar, Feed Sidebar, and FireFound, which was a grand prize winner of Extend Firefox 3.5.
Moderating this event in SF tonight. Anyone can come: http://lifeinvestment.eventbrite.com - trying to get some discount codes for HN users now
Last year was my first year and while I paid for a pass ($425 early) and airfare (I think I found $320 ATL -> AUS last year), I ended up splitting a loft with 5 guys above a bar on 6th street. They were all Internet/hacker types so it wasn't random. We paid about $300 each for the week. This year I'm trying the other side of things and am getting a room for 4 in the Hilton.. should be just shy of $500/person for the week.

Those that haven't been to SXSW before might like this post of mine about it all: http://paulstamatiou.com/thoughts-on-sxswi-2009-from-a-first...
Actually it's because of Harj that all these things are happening. We've been meaning to do them for a long time but we were always too busy. Now that we have more people working on YC we can finally do them!
I agree. Last year I was all about signing up for all these cool events, panels I wanted to attend and so on.. and none of that happened. I just ended up going to wherever my crowd was going. They all seemed to know about the cooler private stuff anyways.
A computer that reads your mind
There is a guy who built a spreadsheet as part of some research as well here: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AkkhSN3vaY4jdF90b1l...
Cloud Security Announcements Dominate RSA
Responsible Estimation Tool
Assignee Name and Address: Halliburton Energy Services Inc.

Wow, Halliburton is just synonymous with evil.
Ubuntu Desktop in the cloud
I'm using the Droid Sans font for the UI. It's a great improvement in conciseness and should be the default interface font.

Regarding spacing, the space in the toolbar and status bar is being used a bit more efficiently than before, but cutting off the status bar skews the balance, and overall, the layout looks a little haphazard.
Looking at his profile: http://phonalyzr.com/

For a few other examples of things you can't do on iPhone:

http://www.twofortyfouram.com/product.html allows a background service to change phone settings dependent on conditions like your current location, time of day, or battery level.

http://slidescreenhome.com replaces the standard home screen with a completely different, and information-centric view.

http://pandora.com is the most obvious example, or any media player application far that matter, for when you want to listen to something other than your mp3 library while using your phone.
Try www.Message-Media.com
Ask HN: Review my Mac App - WindowFlow
http://windowflow.com

It's kind of a keyboard driven application window multi-tool..

It lets you move, resize & tile groups of windows from the keyboard. It also works as an alternative window switcher.

There's a screencast on the site giving a demo. I'd really appreciate any feedback on if it: does it make sense to you and what new features would be most useful?
“Just in case” versus “just in time”
Comments to the post show that almost everyone regardless of age sees the couple first and dolphins later.
As a vegetarian, when someone with science training asks me why I'm so, my answer is, "The 2nd law of thermodynamics." This is the 2nd law writ large.
A direct link: http://windowflow.com
It depends on the sentence. And I know where you are going.
I'm at UCLA now, and over the last few weeks I've seen front page classifieds for DB hiring front end and backend devs. They're definitely paid hourly (I think I saw 14/hour, but I may be wrong)
Archive of early Mike Wallace interviews from 1957 and 1958.

http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/collections/film/holdings/wallace/

Wallace has had an amazingly long career.
Why is Google storing source code on 3rd party servers?!
The new ending was just uploaded to you tube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_45oK0AIb8
What the efficiency gained? You're still spending the same time, you're just exerting more effort to choke down your food quickly and go walking.
> Okay, then the problem is not software patents, or patents in general, but that they unfairly tip the scales in favor of the big corporations.

Agreed. Legal issues (patents included) tend to favor big corporations because you're more likely to win a case if you spend more money on it. I don't know about all the factors contributing to this, but I think a big one is that law (in the U.S., anyway) is difficult to understand for laypeople, and so you need lawyers to defend you, and the lawyers that cost more have higher success rates.
$1,000 a month per person? Really?
The reason this has been low on their priority list is that their organic SEO is amazing. Have you ever searched for a Google product and not found it on the first try?

Google is the one company in the world for which SEO doesn't matter, because they can change the rules at any time. A query for "google finance" that doesn't bring up google.com/finance as the first hit will be recognized by all internal search engineers as broken, and relative weights of signals (and hence rankings) will be changed accordingly. A little uptweak on organic SEO plus a little downtweak on premeditated SEO and voila.

This isn't even wrong, it's just the way it is.
It's not really stealing if Google still has the source code. Unless reading a book is now called "stealing a book".
patents apply only to things that are:
anything made by man
new
non-obvious
commercially useful

i think a sentence, even Shakespeare, fail one or more of those qualifications. which is why we have copyright for sentences.
Exactly. For the aspiring journalists, working at the college paper is a sweet way to get an edge in the journalism world, something very few other jobs at that level can provide. For the web developer, this is merely one of thousands of opportunities, and holds no special lure for being the school paper. Clearly, the journalists/editors here are looking at it from their limited point of view. Given that, the tone of the ad is somewhat disrespectful ("you have to know everything, but we'll pay you nothing")
Second Iron Man 2 Trailer Debut Set - March 7th, 2010
Encryption technology
Company reaps $25,000,000 hacking TicketMaster & others . . .
Is the X really an issue? That's where it is on Mac OS X.
Both of those websites, like the Blizzard sites could be completely done in HTML5. Is there a specific element that you believe could not?

I already explained why I cannot give you an example of a AAA HTML5 website (Internet Explorer doesn't support it).

If you'd like to discuss the technical aspects of HTML5, feel free to email me at jeff@wolfire.com - I am going to stop checking this thread.
Google, Kansas? Duluth responds.
Maybe web developers can sell themselves as "Marketing specialists". There seems to be a higher expectation of good pay with that among the non-tech savvy...
Dear God, it's an unholy union of Windows and OS X.
Ha, I actually went out to grab a paper because I recalled seeing this too. Those ads were for Student Media which I guess Daily Bruin is a part of. It advertised "pay competitive with any on campus."

As for other other jobs on campus, I saw that the Volunteer Center was hiring "Wordpress programmers" for $19/hr a couple months ago.
I am somehow reminded of those cars from the nineties with the now outlawed purple ground effects lights.
If this were a movie, Apple would be the greedy figure that eventually gets left behind by every who believed in him when he winds up with a gun pointed at his best friend's head.
I don't think it is fair to criticize patents on DNA and defend patents on software with the argument that DNA is just a combination of four characters - you could say the same thing about any piece of encoded information, software most notably in binary.
I see where you're coming from, but I think you're overlooking a few things.

Apple basically showed the labels that selling music online was "good", they pressured the labels to drop DRM and regularly pressure the content owners (music and video) to lower prices.

Basically everything great about Amazon MP3 (prices and lack of DRM) is there not because Bezos insisted on it, but because the labels are eager to (re)gain the upper hand against Apple.

Besides, Apple is objecting to Amazon getting a day of exclusivity in return for featuring new releases, I don't see how that benefits anyone other the label and Amazon.

Not that I approve of Apple's tactics here, just saying that painting Bezos as the good guy is not exactly correct and while Jobs has freakish control issues, he has historically focused on providing the best experience (in his eyes) for consumers.
Split test on more ads vs. less ads
Now I wish I had paid more attention in PIC 40A this quarter... By the way, UCLA HNers need to do a meet up