skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I read through the patents about paper furniture. It was very descriptive, talking about how to easily replicate the honeycomb pattern, using craft paper specifically, alternative shaping, how to make larger pieces like walls more stable, and how to fireproof it with a borax solution. In a half hour at home I made a stool, worked perfectly. If I wanted to make a business around this, I would probably only have to call them about licensing.
Well, I have the closed beta installed steam (i wasn't accepted) and it did give an error message about Steam being in closed beta, and it would lock everything up. Now, it opens up fine, there are just no games I can add or play.
The sad thing is that full-time individual adoption of a social network requires mass adoption the social network. That is to say, not having everybody and their grandma on Diaspora will be a fairly big downside compared to Facebook.

As for having both, personally, I'm looking for a way to not use Facebook at all and still get the benefits. Right now I just don't use my Facebook account. Having Diaspora would be a small improvement, but if it's a lukewarm thing, my friends will be more active on Facebook, and won't be that active on Diaspora.

Maybe there'll be a Diaspora app for Facebook, ha. I'm not familiar with Facebook, is there a way to do this without giving Facebook all the data you were trying to hide from it in the first place?

Actually, another thing I just thought of. If we could get people to just create the Diaspora accounts, and just connect it to their Twitter, Flickr, and so on, it may be enough. The updates will happen automatically. I'll still be able to browse my friends' pages, which will be updated without them thinking about it.
I haven't heard of any real instance of someone who had their fan pages set to not show up on their profile and ended up in some sort of bad situation when they were made public on their profile. Everyone is assuming this was done surreptitiously, but the reasonable thing for Facebook to do would be to put a huge dialog on the screen saying "Hey, you had your fan pages set to show up on your profile, but fan pages are now going to be public for everyone. Uncheck the ones you want to remove." If there's no actual case of someone complaining about this, then we don't even know if Facebook did anything wrong. Quit complaining about things that might have happened to other people.
Ad campaign seeks to derail US net plan
Our SEO Tactics/Report Potpourri
I'm glad HTC is doing this. Since the iPhone came out, Apple has developed this smug godlike aura and it's time that someone stood up against them.
I partly agree, but this, like the original article, assumes that politicians act as free agents once elected - that is, vote according only to their own best analysis of the situation. However, most political calculus is colored heavily by the question of how it will play with voters via the media.

To take your outsourcing example, it is indeed the case that outsourcing is likely to leave everyone better off overall, and individual negative effects could be mitigated with careful planning. But if a large part of your electorate believes in the lump of labor fallacy, and your opponent's campaign team is happy to perpetuate this mistaken belief while dismissing your attempts to foster local economic alternatives as pork-barrel spending, then the arguments in your re-election campaign are rapidly headed for lowest-common-denominator territory. I made a resolution this past new year to give up my hobby of arguing politics on the internet and have (mostly) stuck with it, by the simple expedient of blocking a few websites whose signal-noise ratio had long since gone to the dogs.

I have no idea how politicians deal with the daily tide of incoming phone calls, emails, faxes and so on, beyond hiring thick-skinned secretarial staff. Not that I'm shedding tears for the political class, who in many cases choose to concentrate on the game at the expense of the results, but it's kind of amazing that anything gets done. I don't think it's a problem of scale (eg the size of the federal government); I see the exact same problems at the municipal level.
I just had to take a shot at it...

(defun counter (numbers)
(reverse
(reduce #'(lambda (acc element)
(cond ((null acc) (list element 1))
((= (first acc) element)
(cons element (cons (1+ (second acc)) (cddr acc))))
(t (cons element (cons 1 acc)))))
numbers
:initial-value nil)))

(counter '(4 4 5 5 5 3 3))
Meanwhile, Hawaiian taxpayers face a $1.2 billion budget
deficit, which is being addressed in part with deferred
state tax refunds and deferred Medicaid reimbursements.

Hawaii doesn't have a sales tax. It's a tourist destination without sales tax. How silly is that? I get so tired of these "but that's a regressive tax!" wails and nashings of teeth.

For any tourist destination, a sales tax is beautiful, because you get to tax people who don't live there. There is a danger that given two tourist destinations of equal attractiveness, the one without the sales tax may draw more tourists, but this isn't a problem for Hawaii. Where are you going to go, if you want beaches and sun and live on the west coast? Hawaii or Mexico, and there's a lot of people who go to Hawaii that wouldn't be comfortable with Mexico, so it's off the table. For Hawaii to tax their own people but not tourists seems like a strategically poor move.

A homeless program that cost $2M was not nearly as interesting to me as the fact they, of all states, had a budget deficit.
They are still attempting to do this with Midori:
https://careers.microsoft.com/JobDetails.aspx?jid=8160

"The Technical Strategy Incubation team is looking for a senior software architect to lead development of the Kernel for a novel operating system. Because this is an incubation, the candidate must have a high tolerance for uncertainty. Experience in startups is a plus.

Our Kernel is a non-traditional design divided between a native C++ microKernel and additional managed C# operating system functionality which is injected into each independent hardware address space. The system uses lightweight isolation and capabilities as the basis for security, is built from the ground up for safe concurrency, and enforces unusual principles like "no unsafe shared memory." ..."
Good point.

(Though HTTPS isn't exactly an unqualified success. Most people don't understand what it protects or notice when it isn't there.)
It's good to know that there's work being done in marrying LLVM to NaCl. Even 60% performance seems a very fair trade-off for low-level, platform-neutral, sandboxed binaries.
Where is the flaming fireball on the screen?
Ask HN: Any experieces with FairSoftware.net?
My co-founder and I are considering using FairSoftware.net, until we actually set up a C Corp a few months down the road. Any thoughts on whether FairSoftware.net is a good substitute for setting up a C Corp right away? Also, how legally binding is any agreement created in FairSoftware.net. If anyone here has actually started off with FairSoftware.net and then progressed on to a proper C Corp, I would really appreciate hearing about their experience. Thanks.
> So in conclusion, I really do hope that HTML5 isn’t to be the future of the web, for we will have missed a chance to really make the future web great if it turns out to be so.

This final sentence perfectly demonstrates the unfounded, poorly-written, wordy wishful thinking of the entire article. Don’t waste your time.

- - -

He also demonstrates an utter failure to grasp the HTML5 timeline, or why the DOM matters, or that his "alternative" is nothing more or less than requiring all browsers to support a theoretical open-source release of Java applets / Silverlight / Flash / similar.

From one of the author's comments: "I do not see the canvas tag and flash as doing essentially the same thing. Rendering text in a canvas tag would be an odd thing to do for example." Ah! Precisely: one would have to add a shiv to allow <canvas> text to be selected and copied, and it wouldn't quite work the same as it would on the rest of the page; text would be anti-aliased differently than system text; etc. Remind you of anything — Flash, perhaps? He's arguing against himself here.
That's a very nice analogy!
(Conspiracy Theory) Embrace and extinguish? I'm no expert on the numbers but neither seems to be on top of the market. If they can 'work together' they could perhaps change this situation or at least improve it in their favor.

If they're making money licensing patents to competitors, then it doesn't really matter if they have a competing product coming out. They either make money or make money... its just where it comes from that changes.
What is a wantrepreneur?
Gizmodo (http://gizmodo.com/5537316) is claiming they've seen the 5 patents which HTC is allegedly suing with.

"Two are related to power management, two are over personalized phone dialers, and one's over a telephone dialer with easy access memory—pretty menial stuff, compared to everything Apple is slamming HTC with."
I always thought it was strange that you couldn't fsck a mounted volume... that's so unnatural, everyone knows you need to mount something to fsck it!
Checkout these two guides from MailChimp:

http://resources.mailchimp.com/tips/email-delivery-for-it-pr...

http://resources.mailchimp.com/getting-started/how-to-avoid-...
Why You Won’t Be Using Microsoft Office in the Near Future
Out of the 102 games I own, only 5 of them can be installed on Mac so far.

Good enough for me though. Installing Torchlight, but Steam Cloud didn't transfer my PC characters over.
It must be that there are users using Dropbox to transfer data that is considered illegal in China. I think the best way is to setup an office and servers in China and negotiate with the government for compliance. As a user I hope you can do this, as a Chinese citizen I also know there is a reason for censorship.
They already do: a comment is a response to the blog. You can post the response on the blog, which is moderately public, or you could email the author, which is more private. You could write a response on your own blog, which may be more or less private depending on whether you actually have readers, and you could conceivably go on television and broadcast your response to the whole world.

There's a difference between the kind of information (response), and the method of communication (comment on a blog).
Home Depot has to pay inventor $25 Million for stealing his invention
You're searching the public timeline, much like http://www.kurrently.com
Who do you think will making those Windows 7 phones?

http://www.htc.com/www/press.aspx?lang=1033&id=124244
Tell HN: Another Facebook privacy bug
I just noticed that Facebook is showing activity on my feed from people who have not yet accepted ( or denied) my friend request. Take a look at these screenshots

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1877402/feed.png

That's from my feed, you can see that I have full access to that photo album.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1877402/m.png

If I go to this person's actual profile, I cannot click on anything or see any photos at all.

Has anyone else seen this?
Why isn't Google throwing a line to HTC as well? Maybe they don't have anything to help them?
An OS solves a business problem though. A social network is supposed to solve the fun problem.
If you are a fan of Victoria Secret for their coupons do you want potential employers to see that on your public page?

My girlfriend cut out a couple of "fan pages" like that because now they are all public. That reduces value for the user because they will find other ways to follow these companies (twitter) and to the companies who lose users.
The subtitle of this guys blog is "random utterances." This article lives up to that promise.
Square is meant to be an entry-level credit-card terminal, meaning it's targeted toward businesses that previously did not accept credit or debit cards of any kind. It's misleading to say that Square causes an inconvenience for foreign travellers, since the businesses using it previously did not accept any kind of plastic payment whatsoever. It only adds convenience, though not as much convenience as foreign travellers may desire.
And I suppose you would have had us write down the Bill of Rights after we lose our freedom of speech and freedom of the press? I mean, the government might not want to limit that right? Your argument is BS.

(the point isn't about the extreme of freedom of speech, but your idea that we should only worry about things that have actually happened is total garbage)
Like adding mirrors to reflect more light at a regular solar panel?
Is it too much to hope for that there will be a back-room mediating deal where, essentially, both companies drop their existing patent lawsuits and grant one another license to the patents in question? I think that would be better for everybody.

Then they can compete on the merits of their respective products. What a novel idea.
> //HTML5 by itself offers very little as it simply defines a few new tags. //

He forgot that HTML5 now defines, in detail, error handling, and adds new APIs for interaction with javascript. Or maybe he's ignoring them. Doesn't sound like he much cares for javascript.
Yeah, I wanted a cross, but couldn't find one in the famfamfam icons. I originally had a no entry sign, but that felt totally wrong.
That which cannot be owned, cannot be stolen.
go from 0 to A.E. Housman

Piqued. Lessee, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Edward_Housman ... colleagues were unnerved by his scathing critical attacks ... they "were often savage in the extreme."

Also, for other reasons: A fellow don described him as being "descended from a long line of maiden aunts".
I contend that without the FDA we would merely have different ways of telling the difference between actually effective medicines and snake oil (for example, the advice of a doctor). Indeed, how do we determine the difference in effectiveness between various FDA approved medicines today? Most medical research is not done at the behest of the FDA.
How about grabbing stuff out of the ground?
Excellent! This is perfect for what I need now. Thanks Terretta.
More than that, OS X got boring. When's the last time they added anything interesting to it?
Looks like you need to be registered at facebook to make 1) work.
note to self (post is too old to edit): apparently Facebook does have a lists capability: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1341787, http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=768
If you have a case-sensitive filesystem don't bother downloading.
Or it shows that he's freaking out, because some people are telling him he's hitched his cart to a dying horse, and trying his best to rationalize them away.
Thanks:-)

What's more, you'll never catch me making these silly statements about how Visual Forth ++ has surpassed ActionCobol 3.0 in April 2012 or things like that.

I stand by my results and think they're broadly accurate, but it's silly to make statements like they do - "Ruby drops out of top 10" - because there's just too much fuzz involved. I guess it makes sense for them because it gets them lots of traffic:-/
I must admit, I have a morbid curiosity to see what would happen to Apple's stock price if they were ordered to cease selling the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch.
I haven't seen The Wire, but I have achieved similar insight from The West Wing. Would anybody agree to West Wing's accuracy (at least relatively) to American political reality?
This will change your life- Are you an Asker or a Guesser?
Privacy is the new anti-virus.

The question is who is going to move into this area and claim a market.
Not yet. It's still way too Ruby heavy to be a good source of information. I'll probably give it another year or two to let things even out and then throw it on, maybe with StackOverflow, which will hopefully undergo the same process of broadening out from their initial community of .Net people.
C should die, but only when a better alternative is available...
My point is, that people become a 'fan' of something, in part, if not often solely to announce to other people that they're a fan. It's inherently social.

Maybe if you're a fan of something deeply unpopular - Java for example, then you'd want to keep that as private as possible.

I think it'd probably just be best for facebook to make the leap and say "OK you privacy nerds, SHUT UP. From now on, everything is public apart from private messages. Now quit your incessant whining."
Apple patent application depicts direct payment iPhone app
Wow. That's big. No mitigating platitudes for that one. C4 is (was?) a great, great conference.
If the patents are what HTC says they are then it will probably come down to a cross-licensing situation. I would expect Nokia / Apple to happen the same way. People are adding a little too much drama into this stuff.
Dup:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1341757
Looks like a great app. I'm a dev for Rackspace Cloud Files, and I'd love to see Cloud Files support in OneWay. Let me know how I can help. My email address is in my profile.
Ask HN: is ec2 mishandling your requests right now?
Pretty much one out of every two requests to our site at hotpotato.com is being redirected to another site called yourtango.com. This behavior started about fifteen minutes ago so far as we can tell, and from poking around I see that both of us fall within the same Amazon IP block (174.129.*).

Is anyone else experiencing behavior like this? The AWS status blog shows no issues, but I'm waiting to hear back from support.

This is really stressful.
I'm learning it now, and although nothing is confusing me yet, the un-named first argument to each method is a pretty amazing wart. The designers never saw "nameOfMethodWithFirstArgument:(Type )arg1 secondArgument:(Type )arg2" and decided to rethink things? Why not?
If you can't tell the difference between circa 100 people and circa 7 billion people then maybe you are just not very good at mathematics.
All is fair in love and war. Where one can not win with a better product, marketing, or price, one can legislate the outcome thereby removing the outcome of failure. Doesn't it make you all warm and fuzzy inside?
The Pros and Cons of One-Page Checkout
I didn't realise the link in the topic would cause a download (I opened it from my RSS reader and was surprised to see a blank tab!). Would you consider adding a [DMG] or similar to the title?
ActiveX has no verifier.
Disappointing to hear that Steam Cloud data isn't currently (won't be?) portable across all supported platforms.

Doesn't currently affect me as I use Steam games via Wine or on Windows directly, but I'm rather excited about the possibility of a native Linux implementation so I'm watching the Steam for Mac news closely.
"So, Tony Stark gets to choose: disclose the details of the invention in a patent and correspondingly get superior civil (i.e. monetary) relief if someone copies it, or try to keep the invention secret himself and hope that criminal law dissuades people from stealing it."

This implies something that isn't true: that Tony Stark has to choose between the two strategies. In reality, he could choose to patent parts of the Iron Man suit and keep other parts trade secrets. As we software developers well know, you are allowed to patent each individual innovation, not just the whole of a product.

For example, Stark Industries could get multiple patents on the suit software. They could get separate utility patents on the thrusters, the briefcase fold-up design, and some of the suit-specific weapons. Additionally, they'd try to get design patents on each of the suit designs. But, they could still keep the power generation unit and the navigation software secret.
Robot arm controlled by the mind
TomDoc 0.9.0
Dear $deity yes thank you Valve. :)

edit: No TF2 makes me cry.
You realize it's just the patent system doing what it normally does, right?

A sues B, generally to achieve some tangentially-related goal. Then B counter-sues A, to try to shore up their position in the inevitable settlement and cross-licensing deal. All of this, regardless of the relative merits or correct-ness of either side.

About the only time these things diverge from the normal path, is when one side is suing to essentially put another out of business. And that's hardly the case here.

From our position it's as irrational to say HTC is "standing up" to Apple bullying as to say Apple is standing up to Google/HTC "ripping off" their technology.
See also http://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/05/11/tomdoc-reasonable-r...

There's been some follow-up on Twitter, and Loren Segal has already written a blog post defending YARD and a YARD plugin so that you can use TomDoc and YARD together:

http://gnuu.org/2010/05/12/whats-missing-from-tomdoc/
http://github.com/lsegal/yard-tomdoc

Lots of thinking about documentation in the Ruby world lately - a good thing. See also ronn and gem-man on Github.
Except you know, when there's mental illness, physical disease, drug addiction, or some other pretty major reason that they can't just "snap out of it".

You are right that people who don't have that kind of barrier should, and mostly do get back into society after a period of hard times. The chronic ones are homeless for a reason, and it's pretty insensitive to just say that they should live "pro-actively".
<snip>
Gary Phillips purchased a $400 airline ticket to Hawaii three months ago. He was homeless in San Diego for years, but is now earning cash from Hawaii's 5-cent redemption program for plastic bottles and aluminum cans.

"I recycle here," he says. "I make money doing that." Some days, over $40, he says.
</snip>

So, he collects roughly 800 recyclables a day to earn an average of $40/day. He obviously uses some of that $40 in the local economy as his social services are only costing him $3/day. He receives: "And he sleeps at the IHS shelter for $3 a day, with three free meals, $200 worth of food stamps and the state's free health care program." I'm assuming the $200 in food stamps are per month.

Perhaps this system, at least for this anecdote, is optimized. Could the state have state employees with all employee benefits doing collections of recyclables for this amount? Could the state manage a prisoner work program to collect recyclables for less? Is this homeless person taking money from someone else in the local economy that otherwise would have collected the recyclables?
There is ExtJS as well.
For those not familiar with Objective-C, the title is an allusion to manual memory management (i.e. no garbage collection).

When you are done using an object, you call its 'release' method. Once everyone using the object has called 'release' on the object, it is deallocated.

Depressingly poetic.
Quite the opposite: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....
I would love to find out about programming contests earlier. I missed a few other contests that I found out about only when the time period was almost over or completely finished. Anybody know a good way to stay on top of these?

I'm a big fan of programming contests. They force me to stop dallying and get something done.
ActiveX's controls are nothing at all like NACL's.

NACL restricts the actual ABI. It enforces constraints that make disassembly to basic blocks deterministic (regular x86 isn't). It then uses the X86 MMU to prevent control flow blocks that could escape the sandbox.

Say whatever you want about ActiveX security (ActiveX is, for what it's worth, not secure --- though at some point all of IE might be), but they aren't doing basic block analysis, an MMU-enforced sandbox, or requiring special compilers for everything linked into the controls.
People who call JavaScript a toy don't know how to use it. And there are a LOT of them.

What JS + CSS + HTML5 are missing is the tools and frameworks that make Flex such a great development platform. The tools will come, and it will not take 12 years. Detractors love to scoff at that number, but we all know that we're never going to let it take even close to that long.

If I were Adobe I'd stop fighting it and start building those tools now.