skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Disclaimers: I haven't read the patent in question, I work for facebook, and therefor know some of the engineers whose patent we're discussing..

Most eye-rolling at patents never get past the title. This betrays a misunderstanding about what a patent is. Putting it in terms that are more readily accessible to engineers, a patent's title describes the problem to be solved; the USPTO, on the other hand, grants a patent to confer rights on that problem's solution. If I titled my patent "System and method for offline sorting", and armies of bloggers started scoffing, "Offline sorting! That's been around since the 1950's!", they would be missing the point. The relevant question is whether my offline sorting technology is sufficiently novel and non-obvious.

Applying this to facebook, "System and method for a social news feed" or whatever is not the same thing as "having a patent on a news feed." The patent is on the combination of techniques and systems that facebook in particular contrived to deliver a newsfeed. It could still be the case that this is insufficiently innovative, but the discussion is not as simple as pulling up another example of a news feed and closing the case.
The 90% figure is based on the scant amount of information released by a few indie studios.

http://www.joystiq.com/2008/11/13/world-of-goo-has-90-piracy...
> Remember that "Follow me on twitter here" thing, I don't think it was ever proven that it actually worked apart from the original article, but suddenly, everyone all over the web was using it.

I wish they'd stop writing "You should follow me on Twitter" as well. That's just about the most irritating, patronising thing I've seen in weeks. I am quite capable of choosing how to spend my time, and following the orders of someone whose web site I have just arrived at (probably looking for some actual content, which has been shoved further down the page by some annoyingly over-sized blue bird logo) is not high on my list of priorities. On the contrary, you could just relabel your entire page "Back" and make it clickable to simulate the effect it has on me.

Ah, I feel so much better now. :-)
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The problem is that he didn't reach a new audience with StackOverflow: the people who hang out on SO are the same people who read his blog.
What are the chances of getting this SQL injection attack vector served on a silver plate right when he needed it?

In my experience? Frighteningly real. You could also ask, "What are the chances of finding an application that has quadratic, cubic, or exponential scaling problems served on a silver plate right when he needed it?", and I'd also have the same reply - frighteningly real.

The most fun I've had in my days was not only demonstrating such security holes, but also finding laughably bad scaling issues while I was running amok. The most frightening thing is, I'm not referring to podunk little companies, but wholesalers or manufacturers with 9 and 10-digit annual revenues. And not small internal apps, but their main presence on the web.

Though I'll say, even as a contractor, these gigs are never enjoyable simply because - despite best trying to avoid it - you've managed to embarrass some people on an epic scale. Once you've fixed what you've been paid for, most places don't look to keep you around much longer unless they truly have a "what's right, not who's right" philosophy.
That's where a language's documentation intervenes. Some have a very small and simple core (Scheme) with well-defined behaviour.

Topic treated as well in the famous law of leaky abstractions : http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...
It's not that outlandish of a proposal. The application does not need to be savable at all times; it just needs to be savable at some point, which could be a point when the game state is particularly easy to capture. For example, most applications can go into a minimized background state where almost no code is running and nothing is loaded in the graphics card.
You don't understand… I've seen it. I've seen it happening. The ocean is dying, the plankton is dying… It's people! Soylent Green is made out of people. They're making our food out of people. Soon, they'll be breeding us like cattle—for food! You gotta tell 'em! Listen to me, Hatcher! You gotta tell 'em—SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!!
From the comments on the article:

"Also, you don't hold onto your saved games anymore. They do."

I'm surprised at how many people are making this mistake. Straight from the FAQ:
"Will all my saved games be stored online?
Yes! They will be stored both online and on your PC."
-- http://support.uk.ubi.com/online-services-platform/

That, right there, is why the system will fail. The DRM will be cracked within a week of release.
(I'm with TS)

Keep in mind that attendance at TechStars For A Day is not required in order to receive an invitation to participate in the program. It can obviously help, but there are plenty of examples of companies that didn't attend and were still invited to the program subsequently.

It is also a really fun day filled with a lot of smart people looking to help. Plus Boulder is a fantastic place to visit (and live).

Let me know if you have any more questions or anyone wants some offline answers andrew@techstars.org
I agree that documentation is useful and important, but too much programming languages documentation really doesn't answer some fundamental questions about the semantics of a language.

All too often, this is because the programming language designers/implementors don't know what the semantics are.
"Task Pooper" could revolutionize GNOME desktop
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1120356

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=778108

(P.S. thanks, searchyc!)
(These are very good :-))

Not that I'm becoming jaded by the Internet or anything, but I can see this being turned into a book by some fad-hopping publisher..
Huh... that's annoying. 95% of the time, I use the laptop in my home office and don't really want to mess around with plugging/unplugging it:-/
Answers.com Essay Scholarship Online
It costs money to run servers, and they would have to run much more powerful servers in order to be running game logic for each player.

Heh... This is assuming that they do not realize that the more players are connected, the bigger the distributed computing cluster they have available.
"Screw input validation, love output normalization."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=785549
George Orwell - Why I Write

http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/wiw/english/e_wiw
Nah, it'll ICanHazAmazonReviews or something like that. Pictures of Amazon products with distinctly non-pithy reviews below them.

All ad-supported with lots of user generated content. That's the future, donchakno
US Economy Grows at 5.9%, Strongest Showing in Six Years
Like the interview. He definitely comes off as generic. Somehow I wish one of us could of asked the questions, rather than Businessweek.
Everyone hates DRM but I feel like we're not giving the pirates enough blame here. My unscientific conclusion judging from BT sites is PC game piracy is really off the charts these days. A new PC game release often blows away popular TV shows and movies in seeders/leechers. I have some sympathy for the game makers here. If you're already facing declining PC sales and you're releasing a console port months after the initial console release the piracy factor could make a huge difference. I feel like anyone who doesn't like this DRM scheme needs to talk to their friends/family who pirate PC games and explain to them how much they're screwing up the industry for everyone. DRM isn't effective and just ends up punishing honest customers but those honest customers may have to face the reality that they just won't be getting nearly as many PC games in the future if this trend of massive piracy continues. DRM and PC pirates are the enemies here.
Videos on YouTubes are located at http://youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxx. youtube.com

On Amazon, your content is at http://example.com/ . Your domain. Your site.

This is not about content. If YouTube allowed any content, that wouldn't change anything. If Amazon would only allow videos (but let you have your domain name), that wouldn't change anything either.
Any details on this ? : "After getting permission to use a tool we here at the ASC lovingly refer to as the SQL Injector"

What's the tool ?
May 4th Day Against DRM
Sounds like a plan to me.
Of course--but at least for me, I don't have enough spare cash flow to outsource all the handyman stuff. And if I did, I've found that the time cost of finding someone and managing them can be at times almost as much as doing it myself. So I end up paying more for a very small savings in time.

Actually, our current strategy is to stop watering the lawn and have a big patch of dirt in the front (our area has a drought). :) Disadvantages: dirt tracked in the house, neighbors hate us.
If a technique was publicly known, it counts as prior art.
You can say that Flash is crappy, all right. But it certainty isn't a monopoly.

If someone is not satisfied with Flash, they can go ahead and build another Rich Internet Application Plaftorm, as Microsoft is doing with Silverlight and Sun is (was?) with JavaFX. So everyone can, in principle, have access to the part of the Web that Flash "conquered". It is hard, but possible.

Apple, on the other hand, is the one true gatekeeper that ultimately defines what runs in their systems. You can only have access to their platform by abiding to their terms. They are just impossible to bypass.
Where I stay in Bangalore, we have about 3 one hour power cuts per day. So my laptop battery is getting good exercise!
P(Amen | That comment) > P(Miracle)
T.J. Campana on the Waledac Botnet Takedown (mp3 podcast)
NYC vs Silicon Valley
a take on this from the Founder's Perspective...
Flight radar - air space above Europe live
Cloud Problems Foreseen are Opportunities
Dude is continuously trolling for hits. Startups are his market so he writes for founders. His subjects are SO obvious pretexts.

Reeks of desperation. Let your PRODUCT speak for itself.

Have a little subtlety. Learn from Joel: he seldom blogged after Fogbugz, and he rarely blogged about bug systems anyway.
What about running it through a 6 outlet switch that you can readily turn on/off?
simpler solution than constant plugging and replugging for me was to remove the battery if I'm not going to be moving the laptop for an extended period.
this is a great freaking post. smart notes on all points.
Complete w/ a quote from pg:

"When people write the history of Silicon Valley 20 years from now," says Graham, "the true impact of Google could come more from all the things that Google people go on to do after they leave Google."
I thought the MBP battery switched off charging when it was full, so that it charges up the battery and then disconnects it if you are plugged in. When the battery has self-discharged some amount, it tops it up again. But maybe I misunderstood.

The flipside, though, is that Li-ion batteries also age from discharge cycles. So I really don't think it's better to run the battery down, charge it up, and repeat. The number of charge cycles is limited, so I bet that will kill it faster. If you really want to save the battery, you can take it out and put it in the fridge when you are plugged in.
"It looked like a few hours of data was lost from the database for some reason"....eh, what? Was this the application's database? Losing a couple hours of data because of a traffic spike is not something I would find remotely acceptable.
Ex-Googlers have invested in 200 startups since '05 & are just getting started
I'd love to know this too.

Edit: looks like Webinspect: https://h10078.www1.hp.com/cda/hpms/display/main/hpms_conten...
Good quote from pg (last paragraph):

"When people write the history of Silicon Valley 20 years from now," says Graham, "the true impact of Google could come more from all the things that Google people go on to do after they leave Google."
I'm sure some people have seen this, but there's a product on Amazon called the Laptop Steering Wheel Desk. The reviews on it are hilarious. http://www.amazon.com/Mobile-Office-WM-01-Laptop-Steering/dp...
Under different conditions this would be an easy backdoor for a recruiter to sneak in for free as a candidate to quietly gather resumes at the event. But since you only permit 20 candidates and 20 jobs, the event is small enough that you should be able to recognize this if it happenes. Of course, whether you could do much about it is another issue, short of physically ejecting someone from the room.
This is why I think the author supports the idea of giving the power to share videos to everyone, rather than the current model of having someone else share your videos for you once you upload them. You certainly can afford to know that the videos you alone share are legal or not.

It's not about making a competing service, its about self-service.
For desk use, it's best for your battery to remove it from the laptop once it's fully charged. You don't want to continuously plug/unplug your laptop because that would just cycle the battery a lot, and that's not good for it either.

As for me, I usually just leave the battery in: it's a nice UPS, worth the expense of perhaps a few months of lost life.
The problem is that I shouldn't have to do anything. The computer should be able to figure this stuff on its own - after all, that's the kind of task that they're good for.
The Google Stance..Perfect example of Aggression
I know it's not too polite to talk about flagging posts here, but come on, this is a no-content jpg on the front page of HN? Repeating a years old argument? That I saw on reddit a week or two ago?

Please guys, lets not do this to another good community.
...thanks to his early investments in Facebook, Zynga, and LinkedIn—three of the most highly anticipated IPOs, with equally high valuations.

"Equally high valuations"? I don't think anyone expects them to have similar market caps.
Reasons to go:
- Meet new entrepreneurs in your physical location or technology space.
- Get free advice from great mentors.
- Be involved in the community.
- Increase your chances if you apply next year by learning about TechStars.
- 5% is significantly more likely than life happening, and yet here we are.

Reasons not to go:
- You miss 8 hours of development, of which you'll probably work for 4 at best.
- Might catch a cold from all the hand-shaking.

Seems like a no-brainer to me, but I'm biased because our company got in to last year's Boston program.
Matt, I'm reprinting my reply on your blog here:

Duuuude, NO! Or at least, that's what I want to scream at you after reading this. But it is hard for me to refute your logic around investors. Of course, SV has a larger and older network. Can't deny that. But, of course, in SV there are also waaaay more entrepreneurs vying for VC dolla bills. Having spent time in both locations, I wouldn't say it's any easier to raise funds in SV, although they do have more smart money for sure.

But now with FRC, Flybridge, and Founder's Collective (among many others) stepping up in NYC, I think we're just seeing the beginning of an awesome growth curve.

Plus, haven't you been reading Dave McClure's blog? It's not about the tech, it's about the design and marketing. Which NYC has in SPADES.

Alright dude, enjoy SV!
Wellness Hotel Alpen Karawanserai Saalbach Hinterglemm
Who’s Winning the Cloud Marketing Battle?
The user uploaded images on that product are good too.
orange you glad i didn't say yellows?
I say, nuke that iceberg! It will melt like a marshmallow :-)
It's not bad to leave your laptop plugged in
First Glimpse of Nokia’s Symbian 4 Operating System
Then flag it? I only submitted it because of the other piracy post, but it's not like my heart is very much attached to it. I only saw it on Twitter yesterday (and did not submit at first), not a year ago on Reddit.

Although I admit, I also tend to swear when trying to watch a DVD.

Another interesting experience is trying to explain a DVD player to your granny.

It's maddening that they spent lots of money on creating fancy menus that only make usability worse. Every DVD has a different menu, so there is no way to explain how to use it in a consistent way. Unless the DVD player is good enough to somehow get around it reliably.
I'll tell you what you gotta tell 'em! SOYLENT GREEN IS THERMODYNAMICALLY INEFFICIENT!
I have published a couple of games with PopCap. I think we were very fortunate to work with them. They have immense attention to detail and don't stop working on a game until it's perfect (at least for their in-house games - my own games were not as great).

So, PvZ is an awesome game to begin with, and the game-buying public knows they won't be disappointed by a PopCap game. Add to that a huge fan-base for the existing PC version...
I don't it helps that most startups here in NYC are pretty lame, ripoffs of yelp or really weak ideas. I have been very unimpressed and stayed away from both startups and wall st.
Links probably should have safe harbour anyway, because there is no way to control the other end of the link. So your lolcat could be find via a search engine, or other aggregation service you may have subscribed to.
another case of "catching a botnet by the tail"

http://www.emailsecuritymatters.com/site/blog/all-about-spam...

although really essential and important, what bothers me is that, due to some misconceptions about botnets, this kind of effort keeps being presented as a big step towards "less spams" or "less malware" which is wrong on the longer term ...
So, why don't laptops completely bypass the battery when the battery is charged and the power is plugged in? If the laptop can work when the batteries are removed, it should be able to cut-off power to/from the battery when fully charged as well.
Output normalization: solves various problems like log injection and XSS

Input validation: solves SQL and other injection issues.

If you're not doing both, you're probably vulnerable somewhere. There is no magic bullet.
Humanity's Other Basic Instinct: Math
Taxonomy of Logical Fallacies (2006)
I went on an interview like this already, some of the recruiters in NYC are already doing this. I found it pretty impersonal and not very effective.
Civility has nothing to do with it. It was a not-so-clever pun. I wasn't actually using it as a pejorative. That should be painfully obvious.
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Can you think of any improvements to what you experienced? Or do you think the whole proposition is flawed?
RepRap: the self-replicating 3D printer
I've had Apple laptops going back to the release of the Titanium PowerBook and I've almost always used them plugged in for the vast majority of the time and I've never had this dreaded battery death that articles like this talk about.

However, I have a friend who seems especially apt at killing the very same batteries in the very same laptop models. My rather uninformed theory is that there's a specific kind of behavior that adversely affects them - but whatever it is, I don't do it and he does. I think the key is that he uses his without power a lot, running it down frequently, etc. which seems to be what this article is suggesting (and most articles about prolonging battery life suggest).

Given my own experience, I'm continuously confused at the pervasiveness of this advice given how counter it is to my own experience - but perhaps there's some intelligence in the batteries/charger that's protecting me from myself?

I mostly think of my battery as a built in UPS and not as a gas tank.
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use nuclear bombs." Now they have two problems.
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I believe the sentence means that the valuations are high, similar to the anticipation level of the IPOs.
Industry's Parting Gifts
What does this have to do with global warming? The new iceberg was dislodged by a collision. Nothing in the article indicates temperature as a factor.
The first solution costs you the memory of a pointer, though it does not modify data like the 2 others. If one wants some sort of referential transparency, one kind of solution can pose more problems than the other, depending if scope is lexical or dynamic.
the most important book about the internet in a decade. and the internet is about a decade old really. so this must be the most important book ever.
Ask HN: inspirational startup sites
I have started my own web-based startup, nothing special about that.

I registered a domain and install wordpress. I'm now stuck, what shall I write in the front page, about page... I mean i need some templates that helps me, give me inspiration.

I have a small startup, I'm looking for sites like

http://www.davidville.com/

I want to make a similar content, so does anyone here know another website, like this one??

Thanks for your suggestions!
Not to mention the credit card fees, which is what actually funds the miles.
Nokia can not enter the game at this stage by merely imitating Android and iPhone. They need a game-changer, and judging from this video, they don't have it. Series 60 and 80 were decent for their time, but Android has them beaten on every single front, IMHO.

There's still time to enter the high-end hardware market for Android, Nexus and Droid are so far unchallenged, but they'll have to move fast. If they insist on Symbian 4, I predict they'll be wiped out from the smart-phone market.
Here's a solution no one seems to consider: make video games cheaper. $50-$60 is an outrageously high price for a game, especially when most of them are of forgettable quality. The people over at Valve/Steam have been saying the same thing, and they would know, they see the sales numbers; cutting prices for their weekend deals greatly increase sales. If companies brought game prices down to a reasonable level, say $20-$30, I bet a significant amount of piraters would start buying games. The music industry is struggling to learn the same lesson, but iTunes and streaming services have shown that making content accessible and cheap means people stop pirating.
I'd say that having "a very small and simple core with well-defined behavior" is the exception, not the rule.

Off the top of my head, the only languages I can think of with small, precisely defined formal semantics are Scheme, SML, Joy, and Prolog.
PopCap is not afraid to throw away a game that's simply not excellent. They've developed a real reputation for quality, and they guard it really carefully. I've heard stories of games being developed in-house for months, only to end up entirely scrapping them in the end.
Agreed. DRM in music becomes annoying eventually - when you want to copy your files or use them in a different player.

But DRM that makes your game suck whenever your internet connection is flakey - that's going to make paying customers very angry, very quickly. It's a terrible idea.
Valve: Are Games Too Expensive?
This is a bit more technical, but still somewhat on topix. Andrew Gelman did a great "criticism" of Bayesian analysis on April Fools 2008:

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2008...

Followed later by his response to himself with some other statisticians:

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2008...
Oh, the "computer" (read: the manufacturer) has it all figured out already, rest assured. They just don't want to give up on a few performance percentage points.
The article mentions that Thinkpads come with a utility to set the charging cutoff point. Has anybody figured out how to do this on Linux?
Right. So, don't run it down a lot, and don't charge it to 100% unless you have to.
with an attitude like that, you wont get very far with your business. Figure your startup has an even smaller chance of being successful but you still want to pursue it, correct? Have faith in yourself because no one else will.
See also:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1030038