skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Acacia has been doing this for years, they have a very big warchest filled with the money from previous extortions.

They simply bit off more than they could chew, you can bet that in the future they're not going to change their game much, they will just go after smaller companies again.

I really hope that this will set precedent in the sense that a future defendant will be able to point to this suit and link this party with their previous loss, unfortunately that is not how it normally works in the courtroom.

It's a pity that the lawyers didn't get reprimanded for bringing this case, that would have been better still. After all, if you can get the legal profession to think twice before bringing bogus lawsuits then Acacia et al will have do a lot of homework beforehand instead of hoping that the sheer pressure of a lawsuit will cause their opponents to capitulate, as has happened so frequently in the past.

Here's a link to a previous case they lost, it doesn't seem like that deterred them much:

http://www.eff.org/files/acacia-patent-invalidated.pdf

and a blog article about that:

http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/200...

Another party that should be in the docket here is the patent office, they should somehow be made liable for the cost of litigation stemming from the issuing of patents that should never have been granted in the first place.
Definitely, it just reminds me of PG's musings on "Art Museums Online" because of my own past (but limited) research into this market.
Home Pages Suck On Google | Search Engine People | Toronto
3rd party hardware can screw things up every bit as much as 3rd party software.
Good job, would love to have that on my Droid/Milestone (Android).
We made the machines, they are our product, and will reflect that. This is at a much higher level than mere machines.

However, I don't think he really explains a great deal. Much of his talk builds up upon itself, without ever seriously trying to back the claims.
Restaurant learns a Web lesson the hard way
I'm sorry - It was TOTALLY my fault that I started my career during the Dot Com days and worked through two bubbles. My fault that I worked for people who couldn't keep their companies above water despite working 70 hour weeks for them. I'm glad to know that it will prevent me from working for someone like Mr. Calacanis because of his narrow world view.
I don't know about rackspace prices, but generally speaking, the margin on VPS or "cloud" services is much higher than on dedicated servers.
Tell HN: Bit to Geopbyte
· 1 Bit = Binary Digit
· 8 Bits = 1 Byte
· 1024 Bytes = 1 Kilobyte
· 1024 Kilobytes = 1 Megabyte
· 1024 Megabytes = 1 Gigabyte
· 1024 Gigabytes = 1 Terabyte
· 1024 Terabytes = 1 Petabyte
· 1024 Petabytes = 1 Exabyte
· 1024 Exabytes = 1 Zettabyte
· 1024 Zettabytes = 1 Yottabyte
· 1024 Yottabytes = 1 Brontobyte
· 1024 Brontobytes = 1 Geopbyte
Yeah, I was hoping for something delving a bit further back in the mists of time. This has a bit of information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markup_language#History
This case at once underscores the good and the bad of the jury system.

The good: surprising as it may seem to many, jurors usually do try to evaluate the facts, and apply the law as instructed, in a conscientious manner - and, probably 90% of the time, the result is sound.

The bad: Red Hat and Novell undoubtedly put up a 7-figure defense to get the case to a jury and then had to undergo the risk of sweating it out to see if this particular jury might be gulled into giving sleazeballs or opportunists a victory - this is something an average defendant just can't afford to do.

Another note for those who can't abide by the idea of software patents: even though an orgy of such patents has been granted this past 30 years, there does come a time when all of the dubious and obvious ones do enter into prior art through lapse of time and, in this sense, the problem is at least to a degree self-correcting (obviously, this is cold comfort for those who have to suffer under such patents during their long tenure). That really was what won the day for the defendants in this case.
That article is as much BS as the rest. Take the first line:

> Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Why should I eat "mostly plants"? He hands out a bunch of advice and never bothers to lay out a basis for his opinions.
Queue everything and delight everyone
The Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill (Visual Schema)
Reminds me of when companies use the skill testing question required by law for prize-winning promotions to self-promote. I'm not sure this would be as effective for non-household-names though.
Unfortunately the typical running race between a human and a cheetah lasts about five seconds and ends with a lot of teeth and claws.
We've held the primer several months ago. Although it wasn't very much blogged about it was a great success!

BjornW [http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=BjornW] was so kind to host this meetup in his office. There is a site and mailinglist. BjornW already wanted to organise another one. So I guess we should do so.
http://hackersnl.nl/
Rhodes 2.0 Is Now Free Under MIT License
I submitted this yesterday and it got [dead]ed. Weird.
Ask HN: Where has the number gone?
Recently checking on something an I noticed an odd thing. Here's a usual listing:

5. What Hackers Can Learn From SF Fandom: ...
3 points by RiderOfGiraffes 3 days ago | 4 comments

See how the number of comments is given.

Here's another:

8. Terrence Tao: "Hooked for Life" on math (cnn.com)
1 point by RiderOfGiraffes 6 days ago | comments

On this item the number of comments isn't listed, even though there is, in fact, a comment.

I suspect it's an odd interaction between features, and perhaps the item has been killed or something, but it didn't seem to be consistent, and seemed to change when I reloaded a page. I was wondering if someone else has noticed, and if they know the reason.
ODF at 5 years
Some examples of mistakes with founder's equity would have been helpful.

I've read that Craigslist made a mistake with early equity allotments that it's still dealing with now, but I am not sure if it is founder's equity.
Pepsi's Zeitgeist - Thomas Fuchs Using RaphaelJS
Indeed Schopenhauer quotes them...
This absolutely cannot be the first time a prototype has turned up in some reporter's hands via dubious means. So here is what I would like to know: When Apple is NOT involved, what are the reactions? Not just of the company and reporters, but people who don't really have any stake in it? I am genuinely curious how much of the "apple did nothing wrong" crowd is just apple fanboyism, and how much of the "gawker was in the clear" crowd is just anti-appleism.

Another thing I would like to know: Gawker returned the phone when apple finally admitted the phone was theirs. During the denial stage, why would anyone be responsible for returning property to someone who claims "that isn't mine". Forget apple: if someone sees a $100 bill at my feet and says, "Hey did you drop that bill?" and I say "Nope, not mine", I can't later claim "that guy stole my $100!".

Final question: since apple did get their property back, why are all these people outraged? A large number of them have probably downloaded leaked movie/tv/music. Many of them have railed against IP law in the US. But now that it's Apple they are talking about the "terrible damages that come from Apple not getting to talk about the phone on their own terms". I call shennanagans.
It's the patent system that fits the 'un-American' bill here, when you get the government to grant you a monopoly on an often straight forward and obvious technique as it's the case for software patents, it's the opposite of free and competitive market.
Balsamiq Mockups Review
Basic Mac OS X Security You Should Follow
The cost reduction going from dedicated to cloud can be enormous on the order of $30,000 a month down to $5,000(for us + restructuring our architecture). But this idea of 100,000 customers not exactly great because many of them might all be $15.00 a month clients, which is not the same as their previous clients.
And the RUNOFF manual from 1964 mentions that it doesn't implement the FOOTNOTE and COMMENT markup commands from a predecessor called "DITTO"...

http://mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/CC-244.html
"Surely the answer isn't the guy who was super productive for a year and then moved on."

I've been that guy for my whole life, and not a single employee has tried to convince me to stay with better perks, none.

A couple of times I stayed and got not even enough to compensate for inflation, so fuck em, I moved on.

If you want better perks, every year you have to move on.

ps. But you have to be good, and I mean real good to play the diva card.
Where does it say what countries they ship to? I couldn't see any such information on the site.
Sounds like you have it covered.

I use pwm (precursor to ion) since I configured it years ago and it has served me well since then. One benefit of using such an old wm is speed; it does so little that it is blazingly fast on a modern computer. If I were to switch, it would probably be to ion or xmonad.
Google Ventures Casts Wide Net In Search Of Next Google
Google Ventures invests in Corduro
What's up with the rendering of html on said site:

><head
><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"
><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/theme/default.css"
><title
>Happstack - Frequently Asked Questions</title
></head
><body

Is the reason for this behavior to make markup like:

a
<a href="#">
link
</a>
.

to render as "a link." in stead of "a link ."? Either way, it looks awful.
Too bad the article has a flash ad covering up the text with no close button. :/
I second the thanks! I thought that I had read every bit of Heroku documentation, but I managed to miss this.
I'm glad to see a haskell web framework. I'd be very happy to use Haskell rather than Python.

But, why pair Happstack with Macid, some haskell serialization format that appears to not work very well?

http://tutorial.happstack.com/tutorial/why-happstack-is-cool

http://tutorial.happstack.com/tutorial/macid-stress-test

It's not a major issue, since it looks like you don't need to use it. However, once Happstack gets a few batteries included (e.g., authentication), I don't want them to be tied to Macid.
Just so we're clear, there is no real physics in this talk. There is no information in this talk.

It's true that the value of the speed of light depends on units that are relevant to humans. To suggest that this implies something about physics is absurd. Physics is in fact independent of the actual value of the speed of light.

The idea that the speed of light in vacuum is constant in all reference frames is a postulate of special relativity. Both special relativity and general relativity are confirmed by numerous experiments.

Edit: Note this is also a TEDx talk, not regular TED.
Misplaced Concern: The FTC, Google, Apple & United Airlines
A warning for those of a sensitive nature, that's some disturbing reading about animal experiments, mostly psychological torture of young primates.
Your mobile App. in minutes
My own view on "lifetime" anything is that I'm taking a gamble on whose lifetime is longer, and consider that when choosing that option. Ultimately, the amount I pay comes down to how long I think the company/product will last.

Anecdotal, I know.
Not true. Poorly written device drivers can damage hardware. I'm a freetard and apple hater, but I think apple has every right to void the warrenty on stuff like this, for the most part. It would be a support nightmare for them to cover modified devices.
Facebook is the new Microsoft, but that may not be so bad.
"Much of Harlow's scientific career was spent studying maternal bonding, what he described as the "nature of love"."

Apparently he was not very successful with his research - did he try to research that because he had no feelings to begin with?

Probably horrors like that and worse happen every day in a lot of research institutions. Some of the research is probably important and interesting. Still I have a hard time imagining how anybody can come up with and conduct such experiments.
Ask HN: Which SSL Cert to Buy?
For past projects, I've always used GeoTrust, because of their combination of price and browser acceptance.

Today I noticed that GoDaddy, Entrust.net, and instantssl are all cheaper.

Does anyone have any experience with those three?

I.e., is there any reason I shouldn't just use a $30 per year SSL cert from GoDaddy?
> The flash RAM and the li-ion battery can actually be physically harmed by incorrectly functioning software!

Long ago, there was a computer that had its databus wired up in such a way that reading from a '0' location in the ROM eventually fried the processor. They saved on a single buffer chip that would have avoided this and the design was 'fixed' in the next release.

Software should not ever be able to 'damage' hardware beyond slightly accelerated wear, such as when ordering a harddrive to repeatedly seek across the whole drive and so on. Tricks like that should not result in stuff burning up or dying, if it does that is just bad design.

The wear on the flash ram is just whatever it would be if you packed that number of writes in to a much longer amount of time and the li-ion battery discharge would simply mean that you get the same number of cycles but over a shorter life-span.

That doesn't count as 'physical harm', after all, then normal use also causes 'physical harm', it just takes longer.
This strikes me as incredibly cruel.

"With the pit of despair, he placed monkeys between three months and three years old in the chamber alone, after they had bonded with their mothers, for up to ten weeks. Within a few days, they had stopped moving about and remained huddled in a corner. The monkeys were found to be psychotic when removed, and most did not recover."
Well, we can find or create equivalences.

Someone I knew did a master thesis on the male reproductive system, he told me that males have 10-15 largely independent biological pathways to produce sperm. From nature's perspective the point is presumably that if you can still breathe, you should be able to reproduce :)

If we were to put the same level of effort into a file reading module, we would have the files replicated over 10-15 different systems with file reading code written by a dozen different people in a dozen different languages, all using different heuristics to locate a similar file (or a backup) if the original wasn't found. Add some sort of selection mechanism to pick the best result from the 10-15 return values, and you would have a very resilient file reader :)

I can't imagine we will ever want to write code like that by hand - drawbacks include development cost and maintenance hassle, and the system becomes very hard to understand and debug.

But it's still an interesting approach. In computer systems I suppose we could bring it about by some variant of evolutionary programming. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_programming )
The Ingenic 4720 is a nifty little device to run Linux on, but good luck getting any decent video out of this thing. I'm working on a 4740 @ 330MHz and the performance is...um...non-optimal.
!

Since when did any content creators, HN included, support stripping non-offensive ads from ad-supported content?
Plus, we still aren't 100% sure if the red shift is due to the Doppler effect, or something else and then the Universe is not expanding at all. I always found it strange that there is such a simple and straightforward correlation between distance and speed. It should have been more complicated than that, shoudln't it?
The Ferengi Rules Of Acquisition
I doubt it. We are desperate for anyone who can answer our interview questions correctly. We would not care at all where you have worked, how much time you have taken for yourself, etc. Just know something about programming.
This looks like an interesting project with alot of potential, but with Chrome on OSX the video for Theora wouldn't play past the opening title, the mp4 was jerky and sucked up most of the available CPU and the others didn't work at all.

For this to be useful for websites to embed they need to make the player easily theme able, like jwplayer for flash (I didn't look at the docs, so this may already be in place).

Good luck to them, they have a nice start!
I live in Limburg, I'd love to come but it is too far for me... sorry!

This is probably one of the first times that I'm genuinely sorry that I don't live in 'Mokum' any more.
Chrome is only worthwhile because of the speed not only of its JavaScript VM but also the speed (and to a lesser extent, design) of its UI.

It's a night and day difference from Firefox on my machine. It's been _years_ since Chrome made it on the scene and the response from Mozilla is still abysmal; Firefox is still at least twice as slow than Chrom(e|ium) for me. Firefox's UI is still clunky and huge and slow; dragging tabs takes forever and breaking them out forces a page refresh (bad when watching videos etc).

If Mozilla doesn't want to get crushed by Chrome they need to put together a serious response and fix their issues. The only thing keeping users on Fx would be extensions, but equivalents are quickly showing up for Chrome. Mozilla is going to completely lose its relevance if they don't get real about fixing things.

I started up Ubuntu 10.04 and was disappointed to see Firefox as the default browser. I think Linux distros should use Chromium as the default.
Don't leave a job until you are sure that they are the problem and not you.

When I was younger I used to think that my boss just didn't get 'it' -- whatever 'it' was. As I hung in there I started to see that I had been sold a bill of goods in school.

You get paid for the job you do, not for the job you think you do.

When you are sure you are doing what you thought you were and still are not getting commensurate pay; that's when you leave.
What incredibly creepy experiments. Makes you glad we have ethics committees these days.
OK, I didn't watch the entire thing, but I skipped around for long enough to satisfy myself that he was setting off a lot of the old crackpot detectors.

1. There's a bit where he puts a quote from Descartes next to a quote from himself.

2. "You might think you are cosmic. But I hope to convince you you are not cosmic, you are Earthlike. And it's all because of a hypothesis I had..."

3. And the inevitable "conclusions" slide where it turns out that his hypothesis solves (in some way which can't be explained in a twelve-minute talk) all the major problems of physics today (dark matter, grand unification etc)

So, Dr Ockels, I'm sticking you in the "provisional crackpot" bin, but if you'd like to explain your theories more carefully, on paper, and with a bunch more equations, I'll have a look at 'em.
Geometry Wars on Project Natal
Nikola Tesla predicted mobile phones in 1909
I would add that Free Software is the final step for software and capitalism: it commoditizes software.
> Microsoft led the dawn of the personal computer and Facebook did the equivalent for the Web

Puhleeze, really. Facebook did not in any way shape or form lead the 'dawn of the web', at best they launched a very successful social network.

The web is far larger than facebook and always will be.
FDA Approves a Cellular Immunotherapy for Men with Advanced Prostate Cancer
I guess I have a younger point of view, but it pains me to see people stay with a single company all their lives, it just seems like such a waste. They've dedicated their lives to making someone else richer is what it seems to me.

The last company I worked for went under, and when I was searching for a new job, I interviewed with the corporation Conn's (similar to BestBuy/Fry's). I met one well paid executive there who had worked there for the last 25 years. While well compensated, he looked beaten down, way older than he really was, and unhealthy.

The point of life is not dedication to one or multiple companies. That just sounds horrible to me.
Did the cost reductions come from your server usage varying over time, allowing you to scale up/down?
Shit, it's making me depressed just reading about it.
CSS3 recreation of the intro to the 1967 Spiderman Show
> this is something an average defendant just can't afford to do.

Every time we don't, we fund the trolls even further. Acacia won't die because of this one and will live on to extort smaller companies.
Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories is quite good (http://www.amazon.com/Good-Calories-Bad-Controversial-Scienc...).
Fighter pilots have traditionally painted small flags or the like on the sides of their aircraft to commemorate the planes they shot down. I've long thought D.C. bureaucrats should do the same with their desks for the companies they've killed.

One interesting and important point made in this essay---note that I'm paraphrasing and extending the thesis a bit---is that to the extent the FTC blindly stops Google from buying companies there will be that many fewer companies spawned, since M&A are about the only way most startups can cash out nowadays.
From the article itself:

In 1971, Harlow's wife died of cancer and he began to suffer from depression. He submitted to electro-shock treatment and returned to work but, as Lauren Slater writes, his colleagues noticed a difference in his demeanor. [6] He abandoned his research into maternal attachment and developed an interest in isolation and depression.

His wife died, he got depressed and switched to the unpleasant experiments described in the article.
Just use PayPal. I've been using them for years with zero problems. Their fees work out to be about the same as I'd pay for a merchant account, but without all the development hassle. There is also a new player on the block, http://www.gunpal.com, which I'm looking to add as an option just on principle -- they don't discriminate based on what you are selling or buying like PayPal does.
I allude to that elsewhere in this thread. :)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1317736
Could the person who down-voted me explain why? What's the problem with sharing my experience with Chrome?
Apps on Wheels: Developing Mobile Apps that Work at 70 MPH
In the general scheme of things this is an example of a failure. Software patents are a failure - full stop.
WSJ: Federal antitrust probe about Apple's iAd service, too
Failed Bomb Could Leave Trove of Clues
Time is simply a perception and measure of movement right.. If there was no movement (at all), there would be no way to measure time..
Reminds me of his Mixergy interview http://mixergy.com/brad-feld-interview/. He's the kind of VC I'd like to do business with.
If US consumer law was stronger, these things wouldn't even need to be debated.

In the UK the manufacturer's warranty is a nice bonus, but we have a legal right from the _retailer_ the item was bought from to a repair/replacement/refund.

If the act of you jailbreaking the phone caused it to stop functioning, you'd have no claim.

But if the issue is a hardware issue, and the phone happens to be jailbroken, the retailer would still have their obligations. You haven't damaged the hardware, it's broken, you have a right to a repair.

UK consumer law also dictates that any product you buy should last for a reasonable length of time, which can be up to 6 years. I think it'd be reasonable to expect luxury electronics to last several years.

So the 1 year warranty? Sure, Apple can give you it, but it's in addition to your consumer rights, which it can't change.
I agree completely regarding LoL. Their matchmaking system is supposed to give you a 50% chance of winning any given match (according to their wiki). I usually pre-made with 2-4 friends, and we almost always lost. We were low levels (10-15) being matched up against five level 30's. Needless to say, we were getting crushed every time. I think I had a 15 game losing streak or something when I pre-made.

Their wiki says they make the matches harder when you pre-make with friends because they figure that you will be harder to beat. I got so tired of the uneven matchmaking that I can't bring myself to play it anymore.