skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But the whole point of the patent system is that having ideas is easy but implementing them is hard. Patents are there to encourage people to implement ideas as soon as they are widely known, rather than let them wait around for decades for some government, or charity, or perhaps even nobody at all, to pay for their development.

The problem with implementing stuff is that it's a lot harder to build something the first time than the second. It's easy to sit around in a chair and imagine the UI from Minority Report. It is a ton of work to actually design and build that interface, because for every feature and tweak you include in the final product you must test and discard dozens of others. (Unless your business is willing to produce poorly-designed crap, of course.)

Unfortunately, a designed product is much easier to copy than to produce in the first place, so every piece of R&D you do is also R&D for your competitors. The patent system tries to rectify this.

You complain that patents let people have an idea and then sit around charging others money. And this is true, but - importantly! - it is only true for the life of the patent, which is something like 14 or 17 years. That's the whole point. Once someone has has a brilliant idea they must either build it, or license someone else to build it, or within less than two decades the idea will be worthless. (You can also pray that nobody else has the same idea. This is usually a bad bet: ideas arise when their time is right, and lots of things are invented simultaneously by half a dozen people at once.)

In a world without patents, nobody has any incentive to be the first to implement anything bold - your competitors will freeload on your R&D and outcompete you. So you're reduced to tiny incremental improvements with low risk and obvious value (so that they can be sold immediately in high volume, to take advantage of the tiny time window when the innovation is exclusive to your product.)

The problem with software patents is not that patents are useless or don't work in general. It's that they don't work well for software, which has many degrees
of freedom and is hard to understand. It's that the standards of review are broken; far too many obvious patents are issued. The adjudication is broken: by rubber-stamping patent applications and leaving it to courts to adjudicate them, the Patent Office turns IP into a shakedown racket where the team with the largest legal budget wins. And the whole idea is just too new. If software patents had existed in 1968 Doug Engelbart would have patented everything we use today, those patents would have expired in the eighties and we wouldn't be worried about them anymore.
I'm surprised that Ebert doesn't see the importance of whether games are defined as art, given what happened to film. In 1915, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that films were not art, and thus not protected by the First Amendment, and therefore may be freely censored. The decision was not overturned until 1952. I don't want this to repeat with videogames. (I wrote about this in one of my own articles: http://www.pixelpoppers.com/2009/12/im-not-evil-i-just-play-... )

Ebert flirts with definitions of art, but never provides his own. This is the biggest problem by far with his essay. Maybe his definition really is something that flat-out can't include videogames. But when he simply says "videogames can't be art" without explaining what he means by art, we can only fill in the blanks with our own definitions. It's no wonder gamers get enraged by this. And they say, "Of course games are art, look at Bioshock/Braid/Flower/etc.!" And Ebert looks at these games not with the gamer's definition of art, but his own, and says, "Of course these are not art."

It's pointless and inflammatory and it can't possibly go anywhere constructive until Ebert defines his terms and explains just what he means when he claims videogames are not art.
I’m stuck in Europe. No, wait, I’m living here :)

(We were promised beautiful sunsets but I didn’t see any. Nothing interesting to see in southern Germany except perfect blue sky without any contrails. I guess a good many researchers are happy[1].)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrail#September_11.2C_2001_c...
> ..and here I thought the GNU was about freedom and helping your fellow man. Instead, it's about preventing someone from "making a lot more money off of it than you do".

I think you have to consider the sort of equilibriums that are created. If, over time, people observe that the set of people who create software are not the same set of people who are making money on it - maybe not even making a living wage off their work - then people will cease to participate. This is one reason why the GPL is popular: it encourages people to participate because they won't feel "screwed".
The key text is in the first paragraph of the boxed, italicized paragraph. "Induced pluripotent stem cells" can be generated from ordinary human tissue. People have been doing that for a while. However, the stem cells produced this way senesce after surprisingly few generations. Biotime researchers have shown that by overexpressing telomerase, they are able to delay this sencescence substantially. This validates the hypothesis that telomere degradation was the cause of the senescence.

This is important basic science, but unlikely to lead to a silver bullet for aging any time soon.
Hey -- very good questions. This article was a broad overview, and I wanted to get across the fundamental "physics" of concurrency more than specific solutions. Where I talked about solutions it was to illustrate how those principles operate.

I'm also not actually that knowledgeable about concurrency so I didn't want to say anything stupid. :D I'm more journalist than expert.

I've gotten many responses like yours, though. This subject probably deserves another round of research and a follow-on article or two.

Thanks!
Moral judgments can be altered ... by magnets
Webkit has used Quartz on OS X to do accelerated drawing for a long time, and Apple's port to Windows had basic hardware compositing. The GTK+ port uses Cairo for drawing and gets whatever acceleration Gecko would on those platforms. Google wrote a library called Skia to do that on all the platforms they support (using OpenGL directly, Freetype, GDI+, etc.) — it was integrated into mainline Webkit a couple years ago, and is used by several of the forks.

Mozilla is very late to the party. It seems like they're following Microsoft's lead here after they released builds of IE9 that use Direct2D and started dropping talking points about 'accelerated graphics'.
It certainly does for me.

Now I wonder whether that always works, or whether there's something special about the last twenty years that makes 1990 seem surprisingly recent. To me it seems that culturally not much has changed since the 1990s; the fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties all have distinct cultural vibes, whereas the 1990s, the 200xs and now our new decade have all sort of blurred together. You wouldn't look _that_ silly today wearing clothes that were fashionable in 1990, and as for 1999... well actually some of my clothes are from 1999.
Telomeres are on the ends of every chromosome (strand of dna). They contain no genetic information themselves. Every time your cell splits, special enzymes attach themselves chromosome, copying everything as they go, including the telomere. However, the enzymes, due their shape, can't actually travel all the way down a dna strand; they don't actually copy the last little bit of dna. If there were genetic information on the end of the dna strand, it would be lost. However, there are telomeres which act as a protective buffer and it just so a little bit of the telomere is lost instead of genetic information. However, because a little bit of the telomere is lost with every split, eventually the telomere shrinks and vanishes. At that point, the cell can no longer copy itself without losing information, and so it doesn't.

This company seems to have found a new way to regrow the telomere in young cells.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere
Half life 1 is an old classic.

Quake 1 is down-right retro.

I remember being surprised the first time I heard someone refer to Duke Nuke'm 3D as an old game (if I can remember getting it when it just came out it's surely a modern game!)
As far as I know there are no standards, but people are currently working very hard to figure some out.
Has the website been "Hacker News'ed" ? Are we driving this much traffic ?
Should Tech Startups Outsource Product Development?
HN: a festival of broken links for the past few weeks.
The author of the article do not realize,
that his e-mail may be public for many reasons,
such as:
- Somebody have enormous idea and want to share it;
- Somebody found mistake in his work;
e.t.c. I mean, the authors thinks that
the reasons to have public e-mail is to have _public_ interactions, which is not true obviously.
This one?

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5620835202130688048
Assuming both parties are using Mac OS X, you can try iChat screen sharing. It's awesome: you have a voice chat + ability for both parties to share and operate the screen.
Recently some cities and certain addresses have been actually moving, as well. There were a couple of months where it decided my house was actually about 5 miles from where it is, which made giving directions more complicated. (I had to specifically tell workmen and visitors to make sure they used Yahoo Maps or some other map source to avoid misdirections).

More amusing, for the last couple of weeks Google Maps has placed Randolph Vt right in the middle of Lake Champlain.
Short term, yes.

AT&T wireless, Time Warner internet, Ticket Master, etc. are also doing well financially, but as soon as they lose their monopoly power and there's a good alternative, they're toast. I know 0 people who would pick them over a good alternative if they knew of one.

I love Apple products, but I would say they're heading down that same road with developers. If they ever lose their dominance in the app world, I think they're going to see a lot of defection.
Please don't use spreadsheets for statistical analysis (even the simple kind that the spreadsheet claims to support).

http://www.jstatsoft.org/v34/i04/paper
Startup lessons learned from Warren Buffett
In one case I know, the founders wanted the company they were working with, solve/improve their product using a new way of solving a problem. The company management didn't think the idea would work. The founders had enough courage to prove they were right, pitched in many, many hours to build a prototype and demo, convinced a few seed investors and VCs for small amount of money, and they were right. They then picked up enough market share for the competitors of the original company to take notice, and acquire them. You may find this path very common.
"Multi-platform support: BootCamp, The only system capable of running the three major desktop operating systems easily and legally."

I don't think this one should count. Apple intentionally blocks other hardware from running their OS, while will allow officially support for other OSes on their own hardware.

It's almost hypocritical if you ask me.
Tumblr: 'We're pretty opposed to advertising'
The LA Times does a quick take with David Karp.
Traffic spikes - The Hacker News Effect
This is exactly the mentality that makes many Americans so paranoid about immigrants.
No, it's not impossible, they've paid back the loans, so it's not coming out of that money, period. Goldman in particular:
a) didn't want the money, they were forced to take it
b) paid it back as soon as they were allowed

So yes, they would have gotten those bonuses regardless, and no, you can't say they would have failed without it.
MBA: Excel

CS: {R, Python, Matlab, Mathematica}
Or else they're just going off some combination of population size and avoiding clutter/overlap.

I opened up google maps to stare at it for a while, and one thing that jumped out at me is that I think they might be using different algorithms for different countries. Using what comes up as the default zoom for me (four notches from the bottom, enough to make the USA about 600 pixels wide) I see that the US has cities marked relatively sparsely, whereas they're much denser in Mexico.

Scrolling down to Australia it looks like the algorithm is far from perfect; it shows all the state and territory capitals except Adelaide, which is an odd omission.
So how did it go; When will the interview come out?
"irrelevant to [your] day to day life"? Given the market share of Apache on GNU/Linux, I highly doubt it. I think the FSF has great (though indirect) influence even on you.

I think you are right about people being repelled by the lifestyle Stallman advocates. It's a pity.
It would be interesting to see the absolute numbers i.e. how many unique visitors have come to your blog entry from HN's front page.
I understand your point, but I'm not worried about an illegal immigrant taking my Sys Admin job. And that's the general argument that I try to support.

"They're taking our jobs"

Correction, they're taking the jobs Americans are often too lazy or too elitist to apply for, when out of work. Manual labor isn't beneath anyone, present company included-but statements along the lines of immigrants taking jobs seems to indicate that's how people really think.
You don't have to login to gain the primary value, which is finding the best education content. You can click on the links as they're sorted by the community.

To join the community, you create a username and a password. That's it. Which is exactly what you had to do to create your account for Hacker News...
Almost as funny was this line: "The statement posed a brief obstacle for the media, analysts and others hungry for Google’s numbers."

Yes, a hyperlink is a "brief obstacle". You'd have thought financial analysts would have learned how to use a computer by 2010.
If you're going to convince me that the sky is falling, you need to show me bits of falling sky. Arguing why it makes sense that the sky is falling is not the same thing and also not convincing.
doo doo doo. doo doo doo.
Experimenting on the Edges of Your Product
May I ask you to be more specific? I would like to know what you disagree with, and why.
I hate PR newswires with a passion. Die. Die. Die.
I just can't see this ending well. I actually <3 tumblr, but I don't know what their options are:

* They've raised a decent amount of money, which means they can't stay a strictly small 37 signals type company.

* 4,000 for virtual stickets isn't too encouraging.

* The themes are a nice revenue stream, but I don't think it's enough to keep them going.

* They've nixed premium accounts which could have been nice.

* They're 100% opposed to ANY form of advertising, even something that's innovative. I don't think they should be doing adsense, but I think there's actually room here for something innovative. They have an interesting audience and there's a certain sense of style on tumblr blogs. They could do advertising that doesn't suck.
I am with you on this one. No iPhone/iPad for me and I try talk anyone out of it if I think they do not know yet what the AppStore-necessity means for customers and developers. But I would still recommend Macs until Apple decides to make an AppStore mandatory for them too. When that happens I will have to switch (probably to Linux). That makes me sad.
Processing.js Mini-IDE for iPad, iPhone, Android, Chrome
“What I’d heard from ex-on2 folks was that there is some philosophical disagreement about how to optimize [encoder] tuning, and the tune for PSNR camp mostly won out.“ Apparently around the time of VP6, On2 went the full-retard route and optimized purely for PSNR, completely ignoring visual considerations. This explains quite well why VP7 looked so blurry and ugly."
-- http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=292
Unfortunately, diigo did not save the item for me, but I recall reading several months ago that telomerase was no longer thought to be a central aspect of anti-aging. So I can't reconcile that with this new item. Anyone?
This was a bit obvious and yet surprising:

> That may be because data show that people are more trusting and comfortable working with people of their own sex, says Toby Stuart, a Harvard Business School professor who studies the topic.
> He says that some men are reluctant to invest in women’s start-ups because “there are enough things that can go wrong with a high-risk, early-stage venture that if you’re worried about any interpersonal dynamic issues, why not do a deal that takes that out of the equation?”

From what I've seen in some large companies though, women get far more easier into middle management, while coders are mostly men (that also don't really want to be into management, mind you). But upper management is male-centric.
I don't see the incentive within the patent system to implement an idea. The price of getting a patent is cheap enough that you can just get a few patents, and wait until someone does the hard work and sue/get licensing payoffs.

I never suggested a world without patents, not at all. I certainly see the usefulness of patents for areas where you genuinely have to put in years of R&D, where problems are hard, etc. But software/UI certainly isn't an area like that.
This has been covered million time before, but even though Goldman repaid the tarp loans, they are still getting loans through the fed since they decided to buy a consumer bank for that exact purpose.

Also, the bailout of AIG was really a bailout of Goldman. In other words, AIG got bailed out so that they could pay Goldman their enormous losses on securities that they bought from Goldman.
To provide a counterpoint, when my laptop was stolen a few months ago, I spent about three weeks using a borrowed Mac Pro. I had a similar experience - a hundred little things drove me nuts. Among them were:

The lack of a package manager. Sure, I installed Macports, but it wasn't integrated in to the system, and there weren't ports of popular cost-free commercial applications like Skype.

No way to change the focus/raise model. I want a click inside a window to focus it, but not raise it. I want a click on the title bar or boarder to raise it.

It didn't properly detect when something was plugged in to the headphone jack (that may have been hardware).

Customization of the visual appearance is very limited. I want light on dark for most things. I really don't understand why it seems that most people prefer to stare at the equivalent of a light bulb.

I'm sure I could think of more. I'd expect OS X to be a nicer experience for most users, but it isn't for me.
It's odd to imply that the quality of something being a work of art is related to its level of interactivity.
I guess you could have a system where you were required to pay the patent holder if you made money off of their patent, but the patent holder couldn't outright prevent you from using it. You could also set some upper limit as to what they could charge, so that the patent holder couldn't set the fee to some prohibitively high level. Maybe some ratio relative to the cost of production and documented cost of development? It would bureaucratic and annoying for patent holders, no doubt, but at least this way the people who develop technology could be rewarded for it while not squelching other innovation.
Good list, i'd be interested to know how much you've made off the links to amazon in a couple weeks.
It would be awesome to get even more in-depth perspective. I'll keep a lookout for your post.
Swirl: some sugar for Tornado (a web server that powers FriendFeed)
Yes, in a true plane-free world you'd probably get from London to Sydney by taking a train to Shanghai or Bangkok or something and then catching a ship to take you the rest of the way.

Or with a bit of high-speed rail development, get a train to India, a boat across the Indian Ocean to Perth, and then a two-day high-speed train across Australia.

This actually sounds like fun the first time, but if you had to do it regularly you'd be missing the 23 hour plane ride pretty quick.
Psst, there is a link element missing in your head when displaying single blog posts. It’s there on the main blog page. I just wanted to subscribe (there’s your strategy: write about subscriptions to get people to subscribe) and had to go looking for a link instead of being able to just click the RSS button in Safari.
I had a similar thought the last time I watched "Office Space", that movie is over 10 years old now and the clothes they wore would work well today.
It sure was a great way to attact investitors to Google's site. More of a way to market a google product (http://investor.google.com/), than anything else. Conventional media may not like it, but that is understandable, as the product marketed by google competes with such conventional media (without charging for it).
Huh... odd... Cilantro leaves are not used much at all here in northern Italy (to my knowledge), although the seeds are used, occasionally.
That's interesting, because I'd say I value RSS for exactly the reasons you disclaimed. A dozen or two authors online are sufficiently good writers & so well in tune with my mind (or an area of my interest) that I am interested in almost anything they have to say. I use RSS in order to not miss their material. Without RSS, I would have to visit a ton of bookmarks every few days in order to scan for new posts.

Like you indicated, I don't see any value to a site like HN or Reddit having an RSS feed. The main page is the RSS feed. For me, RSS feeds excel at keeping me up to date with authors that only post every few days, or every few weeks. A couple dozen carefully chosen feeds gives me tremendous pleasure in the form of a few great posts a day. I've pretty much used RSS like this for five years, occasionally rotating in and out new blogs and authors.
After being a long-time python guy, even with this syntactic sugar, I still find the node.js asynchronous callback paradigm to be more elegant.

But Swirl is a lot cleaner than Tornado's original async_callback. Nice work!
Addendum: It looks like Cocoa-bindings are alive and well for Ruby and Python. Only the official Apple Java bridge has been phased out.
I slightly disagree, but I see your point.

Tumblr has done an outstanding job of building a community both on and off the web. They host and sponsor events in New York all the time, and they foster quite a creative harbor for creative individuals. That said, what I think tumblr will pursue for future funding involves tapping into that pool of creative talent.

Quite a few tumblrs have signed book deals, and if anything, I think tumblr could quite possibly end up partnering with publishing houses, and other mainstream outlets. In fact, they just recently had a partnership with Cartoon Network (through TimeWarner) to integrate cartoon characters of some new program into the design of their theme garden for a week.

Advertising isn't and shouldn't be a revenue option for every single web startup out there.
I have some weird virus that redirects Facebook to Myspace
You can say to Social Security that you wont be earning a salary so that you don't have to pay taxes for some period of time.
You really need to say to them that you will not earn a salary because even if your startup doesn't have any revenue, they will still require you to pay the tax...