skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think so. European courts are generally (for the moment, at least) not too impressed by software patents, you'd have to have an iron clad one to make it stnad up in court here.

We don't have the equivalent of an 'eastern Texas district', where the courts are favorably impressed by anything that carries a patent office stamp.
For the same reason they're not accepting gift certificates... To limit the number of iPads purchased by an individual while supplies are still tight and limited to the US market. Did you not read the email? Steve Jobs is quite terse and easy to read.
Thanks for introducing me to tetration; I had never heard of that before.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetration
This is a relevant point, but
1: that's not their objections
2: it will have to be done sooner or later. If the cost is fixed, do it sooner and rack up more savings during 'later'.

Now, if you can show me that migrating to wind or solar or nuclear will be much much easier, cheaper, simpler and more efficient if we do it 10 years from now instead of next year, then it might be a good idea to wait.
Unless they drop the yahoo toolbar or some other distro gets easy to install, I don't think the JVM has much of a (long term) future at all.
He also clearly knows very little about hammers if he thinks they offer "slightly different features".
True indeed, have a look at http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=160772&id=63091600...
Stories can be killed if they are flagged (as spam / off-topic) by several people, but given that omegasoft is shown as having 17 karma (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=omegasoft) I find it a bit peculiar that there isn't a single submission (http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=omegasoft) or commend (http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=omegasoft) shown.

Maybe the account was marked as being spammy and all of its associated submissions and comments were nuked? I think this is an 'Ask PG', not an 'Ask HN'.
Another option is to use http://SlinkSet.com a hosted version by Posterous.

I'm almost hesitant to recommend it though, because the service is terrible and they have not updated in months.
Who that someone will be ?
Answer : Mr.Time will tell us ;)
Actually, this reminds me of another reason to stop using oil as energy. We use oil for many things that haven't been replaced yet- plastics, synthetics, and so on.

Logically, the best course of action would be to switch energy sources as soon as feasible to preserve as much oil as possible for such fabrication, to give us time to find a replacement for that as well. Or, buy us time to figure out a good way to recycle 100% of plastics.
It's Steve. He's a control freak and would never allow other people to pretend to speak for him. The replies are classic Steve Jobs too so unless they hired Fake Steve Jobs to do a bunch of email correspondence it's almost certainly him.

If a personal anecdote helps, a friend of mine emailed him a few years back and immediately received a quick reply asking for his phone number. A few minutes later a blocked call came in and it was him.
First of all, this is only in effect for like a month. It wouldn't kill anyone to wait it out until the ban is lifted. It sounds like Apple put in place a number of systems to keep people from gaming the rules (they caught that guy who was buying iPads and shipping them overseas).

If it really is a huge deal, you can sell your cards on Cardpool. It looks like they are paying $340, so it would cost $60 for the convenience of having cash that you can use right now...
"Such machines have already been abandoned in Ireland, The Netherlands, Germany, Florida and many other places. India should follow suit,".

Interesting. Was this known pre-election in 2009 ?
you can be 'not crazy about' something, yet still support it. He's not necessarily saying he doesn't support it. Are you saying you love it? That you have no reservations, no wish in the back of your mind that there was something better?

(Not that it's not the right choice, of course.)
Oil man George W. Bush's ranch can run totally off the grid with solar panels. http://www.off-grid.net/2007/02/18/meanwhile-back-at-the-ran...

Inconvenient truth spokesman Al Gore's home uses twenty times as much energy as the average. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/02/28/politics/main25228...
Actually, I think the author's point is that there isn't even correlation in this case.
It does seem a little odd, but this actually is standard practice.

When a company is holding money for you, with the expectation of you spending it on some service or good the company can hold on to those funds for only so long before they need to recognize it as revenue. The reason they need to recognize it as revenue is because if they didn't, they would be subject to an ever ballooning set of obligations to provide service to people who don't redeem their prepayed minutes.

So why does Skype take your money after a few short months of inactivity instead of, say, two years?
1. Part of it is that current tax law requires that you recognize the money as a gain before too long a period (this increases profits and tax revenues, btw)
2. Skype decision makers decided to go with the flow on the issue, at a cost to customer satisfaction. ("Hey, they want us to take the free money, let's take the free money")

As an aside, redemption rates after 3 months are ridiculously low. Since they are going to get to keep the money regardless, Skype's only gain is on the service they wouldn't have to provide versus a longer grace period. Which considering profit margins and so forth, is likely negligible. So like I said, it is standard practice, but it's also bad business.

For more, look into the matching principal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matching_principle
Apple - bringing BRM (Buyer's Rights Management) to your shops since 2010. Strangely - just like DRM - it affects normal customers more than "evil" ones.
> From my external perspective, it looks like all he ever does is interact with the CodeIgniter API and only begrudgingly stoops to writing regular old PHP when he needs to interact with some crazy business logic. The problem here (and the inspiration for my original article) is that there’s no transfer of skills in his development process if he is ever forced to work on a project and ordered to use CakePHP, Symphony, Zend or any one of the bazillions of PHP frameworks.

When I read this, I hear

> From my external perspective, it looks like all he ever does is interact with the PHP API and only begrudgingly stoops to writing regular old C when he needs to interact with some crazy business logic. The problem here (and the inspiration for my original article) is that there’s no transfer of skills in his development process if he is ever forced to work on a project and ordered to use Ruby, Python, APL or any one of the bazillions of PHP frameworks.

Abstractions are one of the most fundamental and useful concepts in computer science. The author realizes this, he's built up his own abstractions! Decrying other abstractions doesn't make much sense.
Or get yourself a mouse with extra buttons (I bought a Logitech over 5 years ago), and map those buttons to minimize/restore. Or even better, use a stack that remembers which windows you've minimized, and quickly restore them in the reverse order.
With shift to web, Microsoft's future becomes cloudy
I'm guessing these WordPress installs were not updated?

Is it confirmed GoDaddy issue or all dated WordPress installs?
More important to me; as I understand it the possibility of relapses at a much later date are not a myth. As such, I feel it's totally reasonable for law enforcement and similar jobs to immediately reject anyone with a history containing LSD (and I understand at least some do). So, if you want to work in law enforcement, you might want to avoid LSD.

(If you think LEO's should be allowed to have a history of LSD, let me ask you- assuming relapses happen- do you really want a guy with a gun and the authority to use it tripping on you? It may be million-to-one, but I sure don't)
someone needs to study how to hack memetics
There are citations for each of those abandonments in the paper:

Ireland: announced April 2009

California: around 2007

Florida: also 2007ish

the Netherlands: 2008

Germany: March 2009

So, it looks like the answer to your question is "in some cases".
ECG Machine On The Cheap
They've said repeatedly that the iTunes music store runs at break even, with basically all their profit going to the record labels. I haven't heard anything about the app store, but I'd be very surprised if at least 27 of the 30 cents they take on each dollar isn't pure profit.
Also with all that money it would be possible to research and developer the nuclear technology that Bill Gates mentioned in his TED talk.

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/ex-microsoft-sci...
I guess he decided it would be kind of rubbing it in if he included the usual "sent from my ipad" sig line.
I've emailed him before and gotten a reply from an assistant.
Open Electronics Prototyping Platform
It's been approved, so the fight is nearly over. Of course, the not-in-my-backyard types will appeal, but, according to news outlets, will probably lose the appeal.
Make sure to look at the comments about isolation before trying to build this!
Perhaps it was an "awful" analogy. I was not saying one language fits all.

For example, I wasn't saying that you shouldn't use a language with good intrinsic support for concurrency on projects that are heavily concurrent. However learning many languages that adhere to a CSP-style concurrency is not going to be as beneficial as learning things such as algorithm design.
> there exists a danger of conflating learning new languages with learning new ways to solve problems

Example: When you come from a C background and you discover declarative or more specifically functional programming, how is this not a new way to solve problems?
Fair enough. If you've taken the time to organize the icons, you probably know where everything is. But when I think of some one with a zillion files on their desktop, I picture a disorganized jumble of icons. Plus the second monitor probably helps. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.
Contacto : SONIC.FM
Between http://www.dslreports.com/ and http://www.voip-info.org/ you should be able to find all the information you need.
You have been banned.
Fritzing, go from physical prototyping to actual product
I built a house and the off-the-grid installation that went with it, it's another 20 to 30 years to payback time for the new occupants at the current prices. Solar panels are expensive, and so are small scale windmills.

I take it that George Bush and Al Gores houses will not be that far apart in total energy consumption.

Al Gore should be ashamed of himself and his energy footprint, but that goes for every joker that went to the climate summit by plane.

If there was one place where they could have shown that they were serious about the subject matter and invest a bit in video conferencing that was it.
Well I tried today, but it was a little harder than I expected.
And this GUI method is also very usefull for most people.

But maybe the news value is that there are a lot of people searching for methods to place the buttons right again...

edit
By the way, you will be missing the maximize button...
The biggest problem I have with them is that they're prone to accidental presses. Also, there's no feedback of any sort--soft touch-sensitive buttons at least offer some visual feedback.
"Hacker News"
Correct - but it does appear to be growing significantly - presumably the outrush is further damaging the pipeline. As it will keep leaking until pressure can be relieved, unlike the necessarily limited spillage from a tanker ship, it wouldn't surprise me if the WV comparison become true by Monday :-/

This is an epic environmental disaster. A similar marine rig spill in Australia^ last year took two months to alleviate by drilling a relief well and pumping mud into it; as with all drilling, several attempts are usually necessary to hit a suitably high-pressure part of the field. And the largest estimate for the output of the Montara spill was only 2000 barrels/day; this one is thought to be leaking between 3-5000b/d (1 barrel/~40 gallons).

And that spill was considerably farther from shore, with a continental shelf limiting the amount of oil that reached south-east Indonesia. The Mississippi Delta, on the other hand...I don't like to think about the damage.

^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montara_oil_spill
Some ideas on how technology can be used to enhance the security and accuracy of elections:

http://blog.reinventdemocracy.org/2004/10/about-electronic-v...
I tried to eat an apple but chipped my tooth on the monitor. A descriptive name doesn't necessarily make it so.
I think that the more information people have while making decisions the better, so I love the idea. However, I could not find an about page on the site and I have a few questions.

1) Why one would want to use your site instead of other sources that are already available? For example, US News and World Report (http://www.usnews.com/sections/education/worlds-best-univers...) or Princeton Review in the states (http://www.princetonreview.com/college-rankings.aspx) have a lot of information about universities.

2) Where do you collect your data from and why should one trust it?

- Are students interviewed or polled somehow?

- Do the Universities cooperate and provide access to their databases or provide the data in some other form?

- Is there a method for students to provide feedback directly and if so how can you verify their enrollment at the university they claim to attend?
I run several major websites, and if I would pull this kind of stunt I'm pretty sure it would hurt my business tremendously, either in the shorter or in the longer term.

So it's not overly idealistic, it's born from experience that you do this kind of thing at your peril.

I used to think those were 'my sites', over the past decade I have come to the conclusion that my fortune is that I hold stock in a company that owns a bunch of domain names and operates some servers that other people are good enough to stock with interesting content free of charge.

The second I start to pretend - even to myself - the content is mine to do with as I please I might as well shut it down.

The community of users owns the site, not the people nominally in charge of the data center and the domains, they're just along for the ride, as stewards, as guides and occasionally as enforcement.

If you don't believe that with all your heart do not get in to hosted content because you will eventually have a very rude awakening.
The problem with nuclear power nowadays is not so much the safety, but the cost.

It's not clear what nuclear power costs[1] and so it's difficult to say if it's a better investment of public resources than wind, solar, geothermal, etc.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_...
However, once you are familiar with the broad paradigms, there exists a danger of conflating learning new languages with learning new ways to solve problems.

By paradigms, I mean programming language paradigms (e.g. functional programming, class-based object-oriented programming, generic programming, etc.) The danger comes from learning many languages of the same class for the sake of learning them. There are other areas of programming that would be more beneficial to learn, given limited time.
I'm no sure it was properly launched yet, you still need an invite (although anyone whose interested already got in) and it has a 'preview' sticker, if they would tweak the UX and somehow integrate it with docs or something it could be a valuable addition, the potential is still there.
He said 'support', not licensing.

Sure the licenses are cheaper, but in the end the license is only a minimal part of what it costs to keep a server in the air over an extended period of time.
That first link is filled with lie's and half truths.

EX: H - H fusion in our sun is a vary slow and stable process. But that's simply based on the conditions of our sun, under other conditions H - H fusion can be extremely fast.

EX2: Under specific conditions the Uranium in a fission power plant can generate an explosion equivalent to a similar mass of TNT. It's not what we think of as a nuclear explosion but it's not exactly peanuts either. The basic problem is creating a film of boiled water see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjsMV1MglA4&feature=relat... for some simple related experiments.

EX3: Lithium isotopes are either stable or far to short lived to be radioactive. At worst your dealing with a half life of 840.3 ms which means it does not accumulate in the reaction chamber and within 1 minute of shutting down the reaction it's hard to detect.
FWIW, I actually do find the buttons to be better positioned now. Ubuntu's default layout puts the power, email, date/time and network tray icons in the top-right corner of the screen, within a quarter-inch a maximized window's control buttons. I am constantly clicking the wrong button when I'm in a hurry, sometimes closing a window (requiring me to answer a dialog box before I can work in that window again) or minimizing it when I'm just trying to set my IM status, and sometimes opening the calendar when I want to close a window. Top-left is better for me since the worst I can accidentally do there is open the Applications menu for a second, and it disappears when you click outside it, unlike the calendar.
While I believe your reasoning seems logical, it is flawed if you are singling out LSD or other "drugs". I'm not saying I do not agree with you.

But, alcohol abuse is estimated to be twice as prevalent in law enforcement (in the U.S. at least) than in the general population.

Alcohol Dementia is caused by long-term or excessive drinking (I don't believe it's long-term drinking, instead long-term unmoderated (excessive) drinking) that causes serious cognitive problems--in fact, 10% of all dementia patients reportedly have a history of prolonged alcohol abuse.

And if you know about dementia / alcohol dementia, that is just as scary a thought, and a much more imminent and likely danger compared to someone "relapsing" from prior LSD use.

Just food for thought.

And, mind you, a person can have a "flash-back" regardless of drug use if it was traumatic--e.g. post-war.
The Bugs In Ubuntu 10.04
Exactly. No-one's going to call an API openBackdoor(). It'll be something like the vmsplice exploit on Linux (which despite being Open Source yadda yadda made it into a lot of running production systems).
Ask HN: How can we make networking more awesome in a weekend?
There's actually a reasonably intuitive reason this one works. (At least for me, the Taylor expansions just look like a crazy coincidence).
If you try to think about complex powers using the normal definition of exponentiation, you'll just get a headache. Multiply e by itself i times?

However, there's another way to think about exponentiation. An exponential function's derivative with respect to the exponent is proportional to the value of the function, with the base determining the constant of proportionality. This fact can be intuited. Consider the following non-rigorous observation: x^(n+1) = x * (x^n), so x^(n+1) - (x^n) = (x-1) (x^n).

Now think about y = e^x, where d/dx (e^x) = (e^x). In words, the growth rate of y is the current value of y. Start with e^0=1, so the growth rate is 1. If we increase x by dx, we increase y by dx. If we increase x by idx, we increase y by idx. So, if we draw a vector from the origin to the position of y on the complex plane, the vector will be in the real direction, and y will be increasing in the complex direction, perpendicular to said vector. So the absolute value of y isn't increasing.

Now, in general, whatever the value of y, an increase of x by idx will increase y by iydx. Multiplication by i has the effect of a ninety-degree rotation to the left in the complex plane; try some examples if you don't accept this. So, whatever the current value of y, a small increase in x will move y perpendicular to the vector pointing to y. This results in a circular motion on the complex plane, as long as the i component of x is increased. When y gets halfway through this circle, it's back on the real axis, at -1. When does it get there? Well, since y has moved in a circle of radius 1, it has traveled a distance (not displacement) of magnitude pi to get through a semicircle. Since |dy/dx| started as one, and hasn't changed, that means the absolute value of x has increased by pi. Since we have only increased the imaginary component of x, then x must be i * pi.
So y = -1 when x = i * pi. e^(i * pi)= -1; e^(i * pi) +1 = 0.
The point is whether they are less secure than paper ballots. Is it more trivial to tamper with these machines change/destroy valid paper ballots in a similar situation. I think the machines are put in a secure location when they are being use and the time between election and counting
Is there a "tl;dr" equivalent for an article that's completely buried in initialism soup?
This is a StartupWeekend project, we'd love to find out more about what motivates you to network at events and the problems you have. Personally I always feel there are awesome people I'm just missing in the crowd, and I want to fix that using the magic of technology.

Comments on HN as well as in the form are fine.
Peer to Peer video chat with friends online (flash)
I helped a client set one of these up yesterday. It was OK -- I didn't find anything super impressive about it. The client also has an older Blackberry which was able to play video about as quickly.

One thing to note though: it comes with a different mail application than Droid's, and that mail application silently bombs on self-signed SSLs. So, if you want to use SSL with your POP or IMAP account, in some cases you'll hit "Next" after setting up the server information, the mail program will go to "Verifying account information" for a bit, then come back to the same screen you were already on without any warnings.

Otherwise -- honestly, having used iPhones and an iPad recently, I found myself thinking that it still wasn't an iPhone killer, which is sad. I'd really like to see a solid iPhone killer on the market.
Ask HN: Do you click "comments" on Hacker News?
Curious to see how some find value in the link at the top that shows most recent comments--"comments" at the top of HN.

Of course, the front page and "new" are handy to discover what is popular and what has recently been submitted; and "threads" is handy to see how some respond to your comments, but what about "comments"?

Since all of the comments are new, it doesn't seem as useful to me as looking at new submitted links. Now if there was a "front page" for trending popular comments (and if I'm missing it, let me know), I could see that having the potential to drawing your eye to a possibly hotly debated topic.

So, do you click it and how do you "use" it?

Help me find the value.
A Google Wave enabled sidebar for group editing Google documents would be great. The prevalence of "widescreen" format for monitors actually makes this more comfortable.
Forrest Gump's uncle does something in fruit ;)

Maybe this site needs an 'about'.
> Of course, if we had fusion we could easily solve this problem, but that's a good 40 years away.

Funny, I've heard people tell me that's what they said 40 years ago.
The page fails gratuitously in Namoroka (Firefox 3.6) saying that I need Chrome, Safari 4 or Firefox 3.5...
Ask HN: What do you wish Twitter could do? Free app ideas.
I posted a few app ideas on Twitter this afternoon, but I thought I would pass them along to the hacker community to see if anyone would actually take interest and build them.

I would like to open the topic to anyone who would like to freely share their Twitter app ideas.

What do you wish Twitter could do?

See my two ideas below: