skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I must confess that I was very surprised to hear that Apple initiated a lawsuit against HTC and I am wondering if there is some backstory that we don't know.

I am not going to try and argue that Apple is some kind of altruistic, saintly company. But Apple's recent history lead me to believe that they viewed patents as defensive, not offensive weapons. Yes, they sued Nokia, but only after Nokia sued them first.

So questions that come to my mind include: Why HTC? Why now? Why hasn't Apple sued Palm? (Surely the Pre infringes on something!)

And is there any significance to the fact that the suit was filed with the ITC?

If Apple really is going to go on the patent offensive, I will be very disappointed.
Exactly. I think that could very well kill it for most people, but he already has an ipod and a computer fast enough to run itunes to sync. But those folks that don't? Hopefully Apple wises up on this one. Of course we all know why they won't. - they suport you playing mp3s on your iPod, but they'd rather you bought from them through iTunes, which you certainly will be able to do on this device.
I hear this advice a lot and I've implemented FB Connect on dozens of sites. But I have yet to see hard data that FB Connect increases signups. I'm not convinced that this is the best use of effort for early startups.
I thought about it, but withdrawing an existing RFS is a more drastic step. I'm not trying to start some kind of boycott; I'm just personally not very pleased with this move.
Not a lie: Valve updates Portal with secret radio broadcast images
We'll, it's just my gut opinion.

I will read more on this, I may be very well wrong.
January 2010 warmest January on record
This was wonderful. I'm a guy but I can definitely relate to never fitting in with the typical CS-crowd. I don't game, I don't play D&D or any RPGs, and I don't watch/read Sci-Fi. All of this is completely orthogonal to my skills/knowledge. I like reading celebrity gossip and watch cheesy movies that geeks despise. Sure, I watched and liked Primer but I also liked Wanted. People need to stop stereotyping. That's also kinda why I like HN and reddit because there is such a huge amount of diversity on these sites that transcending past stereotypes is an everyday occurrence.
I have two top level questions for Kyle if he's still around (even though this isn't an Ask HN or Tell HN or anything).

First, what is the problem you are trying to solve? Second, what do you think are/will be the key components of your approach?

At least to me, the problem I have is that I'm a developer who isn't any good at design. I'd love to be able to make small (and big) projects that look professional. Unfortunately, while I know lots of good developers, I don't know any good designers.

Furthermore, working on a web site with someone seems to involve a lot of trust: there's a lot of asymmetric information involved. How does the web designer know I'm really doing anything? How do I know that the web designer is really doing anything? Doing things iteratively can help, but it's obviously not possible to do everything iteratively.

I could also try to learn some design skills, but ultimately I think that I'm unlikely to be able to match a decade of specialisation in my free time.

It seems like most attempts at solving this problem amount to either portfolio sites or dating/outsourcing style sites. But these approaches don't seem to solve the trust problem.

Forrst seems to be trying to make a forum/community for designers, developers, and designers/developers, but I wonder if designers really want to learn about Common Lisp web frameworks, or whether developers are really interested in design problems. I also wonder whether trading links, code snippets, and images can produce the same kind of trust as that produced by working side-by-side on an actual project. That said, this may not be the goal.
My first reaction (and I assume most people's) to the CS barbie was along the lines of "... really?" but the more I think about it, the more I'm ok with it. Let's be serious here, barbies aren't realistic. To expect the CS barbie to give some sort of objective perspective of real computer engineers would be delusional, and out of character.

The big idea was to get girls excited about something related to computers. The execution was about as far off-base as you could get. The only redeeming quality is just that initial idea... but it may be enough to have an impact on its own. The point is, it helps break down the subliminal barrier that computers are a "guy thing." That's what the article is talking about at first, and then takes that point and goes even further.

Actually, that's the type of barrier-breaking that I would prefer more of. The whole "we'll give you the help you need" type of barrier-breaking seem in outreach programs implicitly reinforces that "you need the help." The implicit message with the CS barbie is the exact opposite, and that's a good thing.
goes the other way. most rich people are small business owners even if most small business owners aren't rich.

also depends on what level of liquid vs total net worth we're talking.
Use Random Passwords Which You Can't Remember
Flightcaster (YC S09) and the Future of Asymmetric Intelligence as a Product
I believe more importantly when people got all huffy about it was disallowing dtrace to attach.
Keith does a once a year comedy show on his birthday (Apr 15) in NYC and they get fans coming in from all over the world to see it. He's not headlining Madison Square Garden yet, but it's impressive regardless.
shoemakers' children, and all. The same complaint is regularly registered towards Jakob Nielsen (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/) although it looks like his site is significantly more usable than it used to be.
Modern horse powered vehicle, Naturmobil
In the Beginning, You Know Nothing
I don't know if you can read 100 good things daily, but you can easily get the equivalent of 20 really good books a year just by reading occasional links from Arts & Letters Daily at http://www.aldaily.com/.

(I'm not affiliated with the site, I've just found it to have a good signal-to-noise ratio.)
Whats so bad about this they are still using android? I don't see this as a problem since google still gets to own the handset market by using their software.
I am a New York Times best-seller and I would be happy to answer questions about how I went from blog --> book --> products, especially about the challenges of getting people to pay online.

My book: http://www.amazon.com/Will-Teach-You-Be-Rich/dp/0761147489

My blog: http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com

Let me know if you guys have questions about monetizing content, book sales, or the psychology of getting people online to pay. There is so much interesting stuff I've learned over the last few years.
As far as addictions go it is one of the more positive ones. I think it's great that I can sit here and get excited about spending 12 hours of a day doing thesis work or programming.
Wow. The sound of the Katholnig really adds another dimension.

I don't usually bother about 'original instruments' much, but here's an undeniable example of how much 'modern' can mask intent.
February’s Fresh Photoshop Web Layout Tutorials
This roundup includes 34 Photoshop tutorials which deal with creating web layouts, plus 10 fully editable psd templates, all published in February 2010.
Because now people are buying a lot of HTC's (Android-powered, I'd wager) phones. Duh.
New Movies In Theaters This Weekend March 5-7, 2010 - Alice In Wonderland
> all electrical appliances are approved by UL

You sort of prove my point ... there isn't a market in improving/modifying electrical appliances by third parties ... especially since they also come with an EULA nowadays.

> To get to drive in the US, everyone is approved by their State.

That's not the same ... the government is (theoretically) working for the people. Getting a license is required for driving on public roads only ... and they do that to insure that the public roads are safe within reason.

The difference here is one of great importance ... the government is (theoretically) trying it's best to give licenses as non-discriminatory as possible. And if they aren't doing a good job at that, you can fight back.
I remember reading a post similar to this on here recently... Ah yes: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1145648

There is a woman in my CS department that I met in a Bollywood Cinema class I was taking. She's totally non-geek; I see her in the lobby talking the fairly standard social drama banter of college students, not about this week's ACM programming problem. At first I was kind of dismissive about her, since I didn't feel she was /really/ a CS student (I remember thinking once, "I wonder if she's here to meet a boyfriend"; I'm really ashamed of that thought). Reading Patrick's piece made me reconsider that view. Regardless of what her motivations are for joining the department, I respect the fact that she's here.

It also makes me wonder about our Women in CS initiatives. Here we have a woman who, from all I can tell, does not define her identity primarily in terms of her field of study (which is something I feel like many of us do). She is not a CS woman, but rather a woman that happens to study computer science, kind of like a man who happens to study pharmacy. I'm still developing my thoughts on this, but meeting her and the discussion around this new Barbie have ironically enough really challenged my existing beliefs.
David S. Johnson Named 2009 Knuth Prize Winner
Chatroulette 87% dudes 5% genitals
It would be nice to link to the original pdf rather than scribd. Their buggy website wouldn't work under Chrome, so I had to fire up Firefox to read the article. Which let me page forward through the article, but not backwards.

Yes, I know that scribd is a YC company, is what the cool kids use, etc. But. It. Doesn't. Actually. Work. The pdf reader I have does.

That said, I liked the article. Once I actually managed to read it.
I don't understand how the author concludes from the article he or she links( http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_facebook_social_... ) that Facebook exceeded all of Google's properties in traffic in December. That article says that peak social networking traffic exceeded peak search traffic in that month. It then goes on to point out that even that is questionable, given that the traffic figures count Youtube as social networking.
i really applaud this type of approach. and i do think it's completely appropriate given the ratio between legal fees and the money changing hands in smaller rounds.

i do wonder how well this will play out globally. the world is increasingly global, and a lot of companies end up taking rounds from investors in multiple countries as they expand and enter new markets.
> there are good reasons why intent plays such a large role in our conception of justice.

Actually, the reason that we consider intent is that we think that intent has some bearing on outcome. The argument is "but for {unexpected}, the outcome would have been good".

However, if {unexpected} is not actually unexpected, that argument does not apply.

> I'm wary about assigning excess blame to people responding to the incentives placed in front of them, even under ideal conditions.

In what universe is it "excess" to blame someone for the expected outcome of their actions?

They got some benefit for cooperating with evil - why is it wrong to blame them for that?
why have any auth at all?

Agree fully on the explanation... like I said it was a test for something else and we just threw it up on the server to see how it worked.

Thanks for the feedback!
I bought your book months ago...great content. It was easier to have you translate the content to family than for me to do it - I'm not a published author, so I am much less believable. :)

I would love to email you some questions about my book project and where to take it from where it is. I am blwatson at gmail
From – to + : The Power of Positive Thought
Negative attitudes can crush an artisan as a lumberjack would an ant. We’re caught in a perpetual spin – too much work, too little time. We rapidly get overtaken by the immediacy of every situation, instead of auditing our incredible contributions and spending more time where we belong, on Cloud Nine.
I have heard of at least one story where an employee-programmer was compensated for his work and later claimed copyright-ownership over the code he was hired to write, and was successful in getting some kind of court decision or settlement, so I don't think the mere existence of compensation alone is sufficient to prove transfer of ownership. But the MIT license part you suggested is reasonable.
the other boxes are other people who did not turn on their cameras or didn't have one.
I don’t think a problem has to be significant to be useful to someone. I just think it’d be ideal to work towards a product (no matter how trivial) that the beginner could feel proud of and actually appreciate how it’s helping them.

Learning programming “for learning’s sake” sounds great, but it also sounds damn hard without goals.
The Best Invoice Payment Terms
Thanks!

Let's do it here so others can benefit from the back-and-forth conversation. You can email me your super-private questions separately.
Chile Earthquake May Have Shortened Days on Earth
Very talented partners! World of Goo, Braid and other great titles...
Chile quake may have shortened day
How to Keep Blogging: Motivation Tips from Top Writers
What can google do? When you release under the open source license they did anyone can fork it and create whatever they want from it. This is what exactly what AT&T is doing.
don't we generally need to be both crazy and disciplined?
You're right. Java originally used UCS-2 and later switched to UTF-16.
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/first_edition/html/3.doc....
The problem is that dealing with surrogate pairs is so awkward that most developers don't even bother.
Hopefully it works out pretty well - I haven't heard back from her about it yet what with school and all, but hopefully she'll have some questions in a week or so, and working through them would probably be really educational for both of us.

I think she was probably interested for a couple of reasons.

* First, the house we live in has a strangely high proportion of coders, and so she hears us get really excited in our discussions about programming on a pretty regular basis. I think this is probably one of the main reasons that other people who live in the same house have, in the past, asked me the same question she did.

* Second, she thinks coding seems pretty practical; it comes up in a bunch of fields, so it's probably a pretty useful skill to have.

I think that most of the people I know either have no idea what coding is and see it as a foreign and scary thing, or, like her, they think that it must be pretty useful, and are curious about it. It'd be pretty nice if we were able to convert those in the former camp to be in the latter, but I think that what's even more important than that is that people who are already curious about programming should immediately be made aware of the fact that programming is fun as hell.
This place seems like Second Life - yet I only just heard of it. Maybe that's the problem.
You know a product is bad when people prefer to PDF...

(apologies for going off-topic - I just couldn't resist this one)
How a web design goes straight to hell
Yay for anecdotal evidence! The people I know eat (for the most part) quite healthy, don't drink any soda, don't eat junk food, etc.

As was mentioned by someone else, if the average American ate 3800 calories a day they would continually gain weight until they reached the equilibrium point of maintenance calories.

The average height of America males is 5'10".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height

The average weight of American males is 191lbs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_weight

Given those numbers, and an age of 35 years, with a base metabolic rate, calorie maintenance is 1809kcal/day and 2488kcal/day for exercise 3 times/week (surely more than the "average" American)
http://www.freedieting.com/tools/calorie_calculator.htm

The equilibrium point for 3800kcal/day and 3 times/week exercise is 400 pounds!

Methinks you're still fudging the numbers.
You spelled _Microsoft_ with a dollar sign, nyuck-nyuck. How's Slashdot these days?
Then maybe just a set of common libraries is a better way out... There's just a problem of a difference between a common "authentication library", "unified storage library", "messaging library", ... and a global clusterfuck with more inter-dependencies than your brain neurons have.

If you can keep them separate, they don't become a required framework for everything - but changing anything in one of them still requires retesting a lot of applications that could've been affected. Keeping the libraries as simple as possible (maybe even as separate language-independent rpc services if it's only for internal usage) could be a solution.
In practice, I use a slight enhancement. Not only does the url contain the ID to the element, but changing a part of it can tell the site how to display the data.

For example: http://www.shellcompanyfinder.com/ShellCompanies/7845/11/Nat... Is a url that shows the data for a human.

http://www.shellcompanyfinder.com/ShellCompanies/7845/35/Nat... or http://www.shellcompanyfinder.com/ShellCompanies/7845/json/N...

Will show the data in JSON format. Or you can get it in CSV if you prefer: http://www.shellcompanyfinder.com/ShellCompanies/7845/csv/Na...

Makes it easy to show human forms and also keep it accessible to automation and integration in an easy and consistent manner.
From my point of view the anti-cs view in many girls forms a few years after they stop playing with Barbies.

So I wonder if this could really make a difference. I have seen my nieces playing with barbies and I don't think they really notice if Barbie has a computer, a bikini or a purse.

Could be reading things wrong tought
I've never been able to successfully use Hackety Hack, as back when _why was still actively developing it and I was still on a Windows box, it would always insta-crash on my machine, but it's always sounded like a great idea, and I'm definitely looking forward to 1.0!
I hate scribd too but it seems she uploaded the slides there herself: http://twitter.com/pamelafox/status/9873479432
PDF is not that bad as long as you have an good enough reader (i.e. no acrobat)
Have you designed other card games?

What do you think of the other internet-published esoteric card games (e.g. Ambition, Ludic)? Any favorites?
Wanted is a terrible example, since it's a comic-book movie. :)
Looks like the original author actually chose to post to scribd, so the reposting isn't to blame: http://twitter.com/pamelafox/status/9873479432

But I'd always rather have a PDF too.
Great idea on leaving the content for others to share.

I had put together an outline a year ago for a book. The working title is The Failing Point. I started writing, and built up a good head of steam. I knew that getting a publishing deal as an unknown was almost impossible. Since the content is in essay form, I started posting them online in blog format at the url www.TheFailingPoint.com.

I got into a 2x per week posting rhythm, and the strategy was to do this for the first 2 chapters, over the course of 2 months, and then stop. I had planned on taking the "success" of building traffic to a publisher. I didn't want to keep posting all of the content that would eventually be in the book at the risk of putting off any potential authors.

In the second of 2 months, I generated 20K uniques without spending any money. Links were posted here and Digg. I also tried to incorporate TweetMeme (great) and Yahoo Buzz (useless).

Well, the few publishers I was able to get the proposal to have either passed or taken their time in getting back to me (which is the same as a pass). So now what to do?

Based on the feedback I saw in the comments here at Hacker News, and emails I got, people appreciated the content. My "why" for doing this is not to say that I am a published author. I'd love to make some extra money, sure, but mostly because I feel like I have a unique set of experiences and am a decent enough story teller that the content is useful to those who would come after me. It's the content I would have liked to have seen before I embarked on my startups.

This project is well outside of my comfort zone, and perhaps I relied too much on a "if you post it, they will come" strategy. Now that the first two chapters are out there, and I have no traction with the few publishers I have approached, what would you suggest?
If you enjoy that game, you might be interested in Reiner Knizia's High Society. http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/220/high-society
It's the loyal fans that will pay your bills, but the loyal fans aren't likely to get you on the NYT best sellers list (unless you're Stephen King).

I would be interested on what percentage of his online readership purchases his book on pre-order/first week vs how many of his readers are buying it in 6 months to a year.
What is this for / how will it help me?
No matter whether you agree or disagree with JC, Mike Arrington or anyone else in this debacle here is what really pisses me off

As a person building a startup and startup products there is no room for behavior in which both sides of the bribe get a free pass.

S Odio is just as guilty as Daniel..

We do not need this type of fraud in our tech industry as it leads to bigger fraud crimes.

Okay back to code..rant mode off
Bank Run, an iPhone Game With Real Video Footage
I couldn't agree more on Adwords vs Facebook ads based on my experience using both. The targeting on FB is fantastic and you can really play with it to get maximum CTR.
I agree bad reasoning.

Still the point is good that people have put less attention into optimizing websites for Facebook, so getting traction there may be an easier target than Google. Therefore that may provide better value for effort.
It's true for me anyway.
Woot! Found an alternate: http://www.slideshare.net/wuzziwug/im-a-barbie-girl-in-a-cs-...

I can't even view the scribd page properly. All the scripts and CSS are broken.
I don't buy the "you can do it if you set your mind to it" recipe for success. It's the airport literature approach.

The opposite is obviously true: You can't to it if you don't set your mind to it, but it takes more. Madsen and von Bengtson are brilliant and talented engineers who's applying their skills to unusual projects.

If I were to "put my mind to" building a rocket to take me into space, in the first part I'd would look like Ralph Wiggum, and in the second I'd probably blow myself and three buildings up.

Success takes will, but it also takes skill and a realistic assessment of those skills. Find out what you're good at, and execute the heck out of it. If you're not good at something, find something else to do.
I haven't used the device itself, but a friend of mine that works at a microsoft shot has. He took snapshots that I wish he would share. It runs on a very similar processor as the nexus one, an arm snapdragon.

According to him, the device is actually quite nice. It is surprisingly fluid and very snappy. He currently uses a G1. From the screenshots I've seen, it looks very nice indeed.

I guess this is where it pays to be a bit ignorant of design- I liked the design and the home screen seemed great to me. I guess it's because I wasn't aware of all the "negative space" they were wasting.