skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Best Major Desktop Browser 2010 - Opera 10
Yeah, Im thinking of just posting them on personal site. The value wouldn't come in the form of money. I'm pretty busy with Genevine but this would be a good suplement to blog posts.
There is something very wrong with the fact that I can only get the 'best' technologies on my phone if I use an Apple product. I really should have the choice between several phones with similar technologies, and each of their respective companies should be spending their time competing to create the next best technology so that everyone can have even better phones in the near future.

But no, my only choice is Apple, because they want to 'protect' their patents. In reality, all they are doing is impeding the natural progress of innovation.
Very insightful, it shines a different light on the spirit with which these filings were made. One thing that's hard to see in a different light though, is how angry Steve Jobs sounds in his quote.
Book online safely at Farm Gricnik - Maribor
This test is a PR gimmick; don't bother.
I'm not a fan of the common sense check. A lot of science is, or at least was, completely contrary to common sense.

However, reproducibility is absolutely vital. If future researchers can't replicate the results of a study, then statistical flukes are going to be a real problem. If studies can be replicated, then statistical error can be handled very efficiently. Each time a given piece of research is reproduced (even if it's only reproduced to serve as a set-up control for a future study), will exponentially reduce the odds of a statistical fluke surviving.
otherwise nobody would have tried to prove them in the first place.

Not really. Sometimes someone sees a bunch of examples and wonders if there is a generalization/theorem. So they set out to prove it and 3 pages of symbol manipulation later you have a proof.
they are perfectly free to use it ....as long as they will be not sued due to 'innovative apple idea' of three buttons on the left side
Turn your roomba into a walking google bot
I'm impressed at the size of your database (from a quick glance - 181 Hotels listed for Brisbane, Australia). However, it will take time for all of those to garner reviews leaving lots of blank entries (of course, once some get reviews the site will rank them higher, which reduces this problem).

Also, not sure if all of those actually have a gym - there's plenty of motors inns and airport lodges in that list.

Would it be appropriate to target individual TripAdvisor members (and similar sites that allow contact between members) and ask for a specific Gym review on your site? Especially if they've mentioned the fitness / gym / pool facilities on the other site?
I always felt that Ubuntu had a very "African" look and feel because of the brown (and the name of course).

I wonder if this is part of a move towards a more global image.
Experimentation: Reality is different from your memory of perception in that one can always go back to re-examine it.
A USD 40 billion broadband plan for India
US lifts lid on top secret plan for Internet security
"Not emulate, but blow right past Apple in the user experience we deliver to our end users"

I fail to see how that by any metrics are related to the new theme and branding efforts.

The user experience is not defined by the look and feel but by so many other factors. It would be interesting if they had actually better ways to deal with certain metaphors such as file browsing.

But as it stands right now although I love what Ubuntu are doing they are a long long long way from being anything close to Apple standards.
PKZip was one that really moved the compression industry forward. JPEG is another. The current H.264 debate is a sound one and the owners of that patent have even publicly stated that it'll be free to use for the next 5 years or so. Imagine how many better methods may be discovered to compress and stream video than H.264 over the next half decade. That's a lot of time in this industry!
Yeah. My wedding ring cost less than that. Though, it does have less moving parts!
Thanks, I'll write that down.
PeekFeed one year later, thanks to HN
One year ago I posted my RSS-to-email service on hacker news (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=702937) and got some terrific feedback!

I relaunched in beta last week incorporating suggestions about scheduling options, multiple digests, and OPML importing. I wanted to share these improvements with you today.

To create an account, add your email address to the waitlist, and you'll receive an invitation to the beta.

http://peekfeed.com/
Patents where created to replace trade secrets.

If an idea is so fucking-obvious in hindsight that you don't need the patent's description to re-implement it, than that shouldn't be patentable.

Yeah, Apple did a great job designing the UI ... but sooner or later somebody else would've done it anyway.

10 years ago I owned an HP iPaq ... with a big screen, a stylus, wifi, sound input/output and no physical keyboard. Sooner or later somebody would've thought to add GSM capabilities to it and replace that stylus with fingers.

Apple did it first, and they have a great sense for aesthetics ... but this whole suing stuff is ridiculous. I was kind of feeling sorry for them when Nokia sued (and I'm pretty sure Nokia has patents more enforceable than Apple does).
That's an excellent idea. One of the things that I really would like is a way to earn money without screwing over a transitional employer by jumping ship the soon as a real job comes along.

Ideally it would be open to anyone and everyone all the time commitment free. At 3 AM, I have no idea how this magical service would work. Ask me after some sleep and coffee ;-)
I've heard the discovery vs. invention argument, and there is something too it, but personally, I'm still not clear on how to distinguish between invention and discovery. Wasn't steel a discovery, elements, or quantum theory?

Music and poetry are covered by copyright, currently. But the same problem exists there and Larry Lessig has done a lot to protect culture in an environment of copyright litigation.

Re: Mathematics and formulas. A lot of the discoveries or inventions in mathematics are patented. Three dimensional protein folding is a huge industry in pharmaceuticals and math is almost 100% of that knowledge. It's applied math, but nonetheless, still patentable mathematics and a lot of it too.

I think one differentiator here is that the multi-touch and the one click amazon patent as another example are something that seems obvious to try to achieve given the current environment. There are other ways as well, like a space elevator or gloves to help protect astronauts in space.

Is math a fact? I don't know if facts can be patented or copyrighted, though collections of facts surely can.
Remember DLL's on Windows? Having one new app upgrade a shared DLL was the source of so much pain in other apps. In a perfect world where interfaces are rock hard and apps code to them perfectly rather than how they actually work, shared libraries are a fine idea. In the real world of desktop software, though, independently tested, self contained packages are a much more robust solution. OS X's application installation system works wonderfully, and the libraries they provide to enable publishers to push updates works well enough.

And, disk space usage from redundant code is a non-issue.
There are several options at this fork. A) go back to work with owning a patent on your resume. Lots of companies would hire you. Use the patent to make money and support yourself and avoid the need to sell at fire sale prices.

More success keeping the invention secret is precisely why patents are a good idea. It lets the inventor release the idea and still protect it.
I agree. The GTK font looks big. The button color and the GTK app color is not matching well. Giving same color to Title bar and menu bar is not a good Idea IMO.
But I feel, the new look is better than the previous default brownish theme.
Like the new logo of ubuntu. The font is minimal & elegant.
Good question. I guess there are several philosophies of city architecture, and when you build an algorithm you are embedding and choosing some of that knowledge.
The real problem is that you can't tell inside from outside in a polygon that wraps the antemeridian.
Well ... you should be grateful that the stack you're using doesn't suck so much. Python/Django is a piece of cake to work with, and it has many extensibility points (stays out of your way), while also giving you lots of stuff for free.

Ever worked with Spring / Hibernate / Struts / EJBs / Oracle? If pain should have a definition when related to programming, then that's it.
Have you used Quora? And/or seen who is using Quora? :) They have built what is simply the most addictive Q&A site. It remains to be seen if the usefulness persists once users start coming en masse. However, the potential is definitely there.

Also the team is very well-respected (previously at Facebook) and I think A LOT of people would love to work and learn from them. Maybe even for free for a limited time.
Coelacanth: Lessons from Doom
Book Review - Meatball Sundae by Seth Godin
"Trying"?

>Date of Patent: Apr. 11, 2006
We rarely see youtube videos on HN. Yet today, there have been at least 2. And looking at this one, it looks like an ad. Has anyone looked into this?
jsomers is the best writer I have found so far on Hacker News, short of Paul Graham. I tried to think of better, but it turns out that he is just more interesting and thoughtful than your average front page blogger.
How to Start a Business with No Money
I think you're missing the point. You can have as many virtual desktops as you like - and Windows does support multiple desktops, moreover there are utilities that emulate virtual desktops - but that doesn't let you display lots of information all at once.
It's 3600. 1920x1200 on one screen, 1680x1050 on the other.

There's a trick to window management - I use cascading windows on the second monitor, as I detail here:

http://blog.barrkel.com/2009/11/on-difficulty-of-setting-win...
I don't get why some people keep praising SQL like this. SQL is great for complex queries that contain valuable logic, but it's not expressive at all when you want to do something trivial. Getting all the attributes of user X is so much more work, and harder to maintain, in SQL than it is in any ORM.

"select name, pass, hash, email, realname from user where id = ?"

versus

session.get("User", x)
Is status.net a rebranding of laconica, or a fork of some sort?

edit: looks like a rebranding http://status.net/2009/08/28/laconica-is-now-statusnet/
I think your assertion of patenting a way to do something vs. just patenting doing something is really the core of the problem.
I'm trying another take on this idea: http://www.squeezedbooks.com

The idea being that, instead of having a walled garden, to open everything up and try and create a community around it, that is interested in discussing the ideas presented. Reading something passively is fine, but when you talk about it, it often brings you to another level of understanding.

I would be very open to formally sharing a large chunk of this project with the right person to help get it off the ground; let's talk.
I have to agree with this. If you have to process 10k submissions in a very short space of time, why have overhead of storing it in the db right then and there when you can asynchronously process it later.

If you want something interesting to work on, you could have nginx for the front end (faster than lighttpd), accept a form submission which gets written to disk and maybe pop an id on a key-value store like redis, and another poller app in ruby which pops id's off the queue and processes the files on disk.
This has happened to many industries, not just programming

A Pharmacist (not sure what you call them in the US) spends years at Uni learning all about drug manufacture, how the body works etc, and now all they do is type script in the computer and hand over bottles of tablets

What does a signwriter do now? It used to be a skilled craft, now all it requires is typing text in a computer that then cuts the letters from a roll of vinyl sheet

Or Carpentry or any number of other trades?
I can think of one way: don't put new drivers in your distro until they're at least as good as old drivers.
Smart people, have bad ideas.http://paulgraham.com/bronze.html

I'm not saying this app is entirely a bad idea. I had Zuckerberg telling me for 20 minutes that this site is awesome. I just became ridiculously bored after the first week of using it and I'm concerned the founding team isn't gaining real-life perspective as to whether or not the idea is any good.

Perfect example: Someone asked a question the other day "What does Max Levchin look for when hiring", and guess who responded to the question? You guessed it, Max Levchin himself. In the real world, this wouldn't happen and as the user population grows, the celebs roll out and the people looking for questions about brushing their dog's teeth roll in. I don't see the value beyond it's current elitist state.
growth growth growth. what do we do when population growth is no longer sustainable?
I'm a grad student currently working for a startup in the bay area and let me say you need to be QUITE lucky to get sponsored. Most startups don't have the time or experience to drive the h1b process and, on the other hand, somebody mentioned it is a pain to have your work stability depending on a young firm that cab easily and quickly go underwater. If the company tanks, you need to get responsored immediately or leave.
I love what I'm doing, but it IS quite stressing...particularly if you have a loan to repay.
Nobody "invents" lifeforms. They hack a few strands of dna cobbled together from other sources and wait until a batch actually grows.

Which is what the plants do all by themselves. Copyright, maybe. But not patent.
What? This type of test is commonplace in many other species, especially livestock. Are you saying that our genes have nothing to do with how we absorb and process food?
Programming for the sake of programming and programming to solve real-world problems are two different things. The first is more fun, the second is more profitable. Since most people want money rather than fun, most programming is of the second type.

If you want to program something fun, nothing is stopping you. Thanks to the libraries, you can concentrate on what interests you, rather than the details of how some standards committee thinks the word "referrer" is spelled.
It's also the poster's first submission.
Piet is a programming language, whose programs look like abstract art.
The SQL statements are not the problem. The problem is turning the list of tuples you get back into a usable data structure.

Also, abstracting away SQL doesn't mean you abstract away set algebra. It means you write "$current_user->messages( text => { -like => 'foo%' })->recipients" to get a list of people the current user sent messages containing the word "foobar" to, instead of some 200-character-long embedded program in another language. A good ORM is an essential abstraction.
I was shocked years later when I worked with some MSM how amateur they were compared with the fairly "best practice" stuff we invented ourselves for our university paper.

Personally, the best learning environments I've ever been in were when I was at the sharp end of the problem, and had to work it out with other people from first principles. I'll never forget what I learned with sweat running down my forehead.

More traditional teaching like tutorials or apprenticeship-like things aren't so memorable for me, and the apprenticeship model (apart from the positive side of implicit learning of many intangible processes) tends to lead to repetition of ages-old worst practices by the learners in later life.
Look at Newton's Second Law Could Explain Away the Existence of Dark Matter
Research Casts Doubt on Forensic DNA Technique
Why? "Ordinary" non-techie people don't have questions that their friends/others can answer?

Bootstrapping with a targeted and "elite" crowd is pretty much ideal. Then you get the community to be self-sustaining since it has both an organically narrow focus (avoids being spread too thin) and gets attention within that community through a mutually recursive process of being useful to them and attracting people respected in that community.

The one main potential objection is that this site has no value to non-techies (even when the community grows beyond just techies), but I have no idea how one could possibly argue that.

And no, it didn't catch my interest right away either, but I see its utility. (I want fewer "distractions" in my life, not more.)
It doesn't abstract away the fact that your application is written in terms of polymorphic objects, rather than opaque relations. It also doesn't abstract away the fact that people like to represent their data with data structures richer than "set". SQL works reasonably well for CRUD, but most web applications are not CRUD, they're online transaction processing, where relational databases just get in the way. A good object database is a much better fit. (And no, I don't mean CouchDB.)
Cool, thanks PG... roll on next Saturday :)
Blind gamer speedruns Zelda with help of 100,000+ keystroke script
Ouch. These sorts of job puzzles actually serve double duty as great quality filters for both employer and employee. Employer gets to find out which candidates know their stuff and enjoy solving interesting and challenging problems (and most of the rest don't bother applying). Employee gets to learn that this employer has a smart and passionate engineering culture (as opposed to a corporate drone "engineers just serve a clerical function" culture).

And what do you mean "failed"? Like these guys? http://itasoftware.com/careers/hiringpuzzles.html I wouldn't mind "failing" like them.
The Neo Cube: a new puzzle made of magnetic spheres
Lisp has libraries?
mores the pitty :(
Lords copyright change 'could block YouTube'
No there aren't many, i've totally given up on my Symbian phone.. so should Nokia imho
The whole point of libraries and higher level languages is that they allow you to work at a higher level of abstraction.

As the languages and libraries improve, difficult problems become trivial, while impossible problems become merely difficult. Given enough time, problems eventually become trivial enough to be solved by non-programmers.

There will always be a frontier - problems that have barely just become solvable thanks to improvements and technology, and these 'very difficult' problems will be what the best and brightest will be drawn to.

Maybe the author is working on problems that aren't challenging enough.
You're assuming that the product is not going to evolve past its current state. There are many features to be built, and I'm sure they haven't even scratched the surface yet.

Regardless, the primary feed is set up so you're following things you want to follow and your relevant network. This acts as a crucial and necessary filter to avoid too much noise.

Also I've browsed around many topics, and it's definitely not limited to technical subjects. If done correctly, I really think this could be a nice complement to Wikipedia.
I would rather have decoupled components that improve in quality independently and are the best at what they do.

If you really want a more unified development method, look into Pyjamas http://pyjs.org/ . It's a port of google web-toolkit to python. You just write everything in python and then it compiles the javascript front end for you.
"Copying ideas is how progress is made. It’s copying implementations that is wrong (and illegal)."

Distinction between ideas and implementations in software? Impossible. In my opinion it is one of the reasons why software patents will always be broken.
Recently I took my Debian/Ubuntu Linux-only laptop to the Philippines to see in-laws on a vacation with my wife; she had never used Linux before. In SE Asia it's a WinXP world, almost everyone runs pirated copies so there's not much interest in FOSS or knowledge of Linux, OS X, or any alternate OS.

The first thing she said upon logging in to the guest acct was, "Linux is FUGLY!", but I think she's started liking the fact that it boots quickly and can do everything she needs with OpenOffice, evince, Skype, &c. While she is not particularly committed to FOSS, after this trip away from home without Win she has come to see the light. To ease the transition I installed Chrome, added all her contacts to Pidgin/Jabber (all her old friends from the Philippines use Yahoo! products) and I don't think she misses WinXPProSP3 at all.
My current project has so far required me to know about Python, Django, Google App Engine and it's datastore, XHTML, CSS, JQuery, Javascript, JSON, and a clutch of XML schema, APIs and the like.

This is the price you pay for being able to work with other people. If you never wanted to reuse anyone else's code or talk to anything else on the Internet, you would not need to know any of this. To stand on the shoulders of giants, you need to speak their language.
Since that interview, a lot of interesting developments have happened on the web, e.g. proliferation of VoIP, mobile dev, microblogging and real-time search.

It does seem like the fields you mention are ripe for innovation, though. I wonder if CS will be playing a significant auxiliary role.
why do I get the feeling that ring would pull all of that dudes knuckle hairs out.
SQL is not particularly nice for complex queries, either. The underlying model is good, but the particular syntax they chose is verbose, confusing, and non-portable.
The problem is ... all innovation is moving in the direction of software innovation.

For any given field, it is simply much easier to have a single, general purpose machine into which special instructions for special circumstances are programmed. You can see everything from 3-d metal printers to synthetic genetic computers on the horizon. Software will fuel all of these.

So if any future patent system is going to be a software patent system. And we've seen how evil software patents are.

There isn't an easy middle ground.
Experimental SOLR and Cassandra
I doubt a college newspaper would rake in the moolah with online advertisement. I remember my college paper getting most of their paid ads from local restaurants and businesses

They don't look very smart by not taking Viacom on their offer and then asking for a volunteer web developer to work on the site.
Given that this is a site for 'hackers', I would think that a lot of the effort involved in using Linux is something that will eventually be repaid in terms of a better understanding of how your computer and its operating system work, and increased freedom. Also, as others have said, Ubuntu is rapidly improving.
I think you missed the main thrust of his complaint: back when everyone was hacking in FORTRAN and COBOL, you really didn't need to know much more than the language, its standard library, and stuff specific to the problem you were solving. At worst maybe you'd have to learn BLAS and LAPACK if you were doing numerical stuff. The APIs/overhead/junk memorization situation has been steadily worsening since then.

But at least now we don't have to take a stack of punched cards to the Priest with an Offering (bribe) and wait a day just to get a printout saying that the damn thing dumped core.
Typo: low-power GPU.