skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This seems like a pretty big deal - not only did the patent troll lose the case, he lost his patents.

I wonder on what grounds the jury found the patents invalid.
Was it a technicality, or prior art or obviousness?

This could significantly raise the risk (cost) of being a patent troll since the pressure to settle out of court is now, at least to a higher degree than previously, on the plaintiffs.
"The universe is clearly using us to understand itself."

We are [part of] the universe. The universe is trying to understand itself.
Kathy Sierra at Business of Software 2009
Apple's iPhone, iPad, et al.: The triumph of toy technology?
My understanding is that he objects to the non-free status of the firmware present on other devices.
I personally have three concepts in my head about stealing - perhaps more, if I were to think about it - because, hey, why have a 1-to-1 binding between words and meaning when you can have 1-to-many?

One concept that I have is guided by the Rule of Law, it's entirely up to the laws of the jurisdiction to define the concept of theft. The phrase "is guilty of theft" in the California penal code, where the event happened, is enough for me. I take no offense, as a Nebraskan, that California law defines it in this way.

Another concept that I have is defined by the mindset of the thief. Certain details of the story makes Brian J. Hogan smell like a thief to me. He had the opportunity to take it to the bartender's Lost & Found, but he did not. He didn't try to contact the owner, according to a recent story in Wired:

A friend of Hogan’s then offered to call Apple Care on Hogan’s behalf, according to Hogan’s lawyer. That apparently was the extent of Hogan’s efforts to return the phone.

After that, Brian started shopping the phone around to the highest bidder. These details paint a picture of a thief's mind, to me. Any thoughts he may have had about the owner were drowned out by thoughts of what he could gain. The only person in this tale that might be said to have a conscience is the idiot friend who made an offer to call a technical support line.

Finally, I have a third, more nebulous concept based upon the owner of the item: I put myself in his place, and imagine how I would feel if it were my laptop, my messenger bag, my wristwatch, my phone. In this case, the only thing I can think of is that if the finder can't bring themselves to take the item to the establishment's Lost & Found so I can come back and get it, then he sure as hell better take action to find me. If he knows my name and knows that I have a facebook page, but does not contact me, I know what I'll think about him.

In the end, though, it's only the law that matters. Sure, California's code is different, but I'm amazed at how well it captures the spirit of theft in this opportunistic edge-case.
Thanks for the pointer. I was looking for something just like this.

It seems to install and work just fine on Win Server 2008 64bit, for reference :)
Type-systems vs. test-suites
He has apparently re-discovered Kant's original claim that time is a creation of our own minds

If by "original" you mean, in response to Hume's earlier statements on the origins of the idea of time. :-)

http://seop.leeds.ac.uk/entries/kant-hume-causality/

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Treatise_of_Human_Nature/Book_...
Introducing the Web Workers API
http://djangoadvent.com/1.2/scaling-django/
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Something for Bill Clinton to do in his retirement?
Many people (including me) see their country as a collective of shared history, culture and tradition they can associate themselves with. If you see your country as a 'bureaucratic + economic entity' then probably you've never lived in a foreign country. Believe me, that would completely change your perspective.
I agree with both you and davidw that loyalty towards a country is wrong from a formal point a view, but since humans are not entirely rational beings one cannot deny that the random entity you happen to get born into shapes a big part of who you are. Hence, the loyalty to the group of other people 'like you', whatever that means.
I feel somewhat passionately about this, and I've always thought this job-hopping debate was extremely skewed.

There are people who want loyalty and dedication above all else -- both from themselves and from their workers and employers. Then there are people who want challenge, risk, excitement, and travel.

From what I've seen, if you want to learn meta-tech (and not just tech in your neck of the woods) you need to get out among a bunch of different industries and job situations and start learning.

Or put a different way: as one of those people, I get approached all the time for full-time jobs. The conversation goes like this "We see that you have experience working in X, Y, and Z, and you have industry experience in A, B, and C. You also have been in G, H, and I job positions. We are desperate to have somebody with these experiences and skills, but all we find are people with a lot of experience in just one of these areas. Would you consider a full-time job?"

My reply is this: if I were the type of person to consider a full-time job, I would not be the type of person who had all those things you want. Full-time jobs are stability -- stable platform, stable work environment, stable job position, stable insurance, stable retirement. Things may start off chaotic (as in a startup) but the goal is to reach stability.

I've been parachuting into situations where the building is on fire and saving the baby. It's like startup work all year round -- and for dozens of different highly-rated companies. And by the way, the rates are great too.

Do that for a while. Learn what you like and what you don't. Then start looking for stability. Don't sell yourself out too soon in the name of loyalty and stability.

EDIT: And I know a lot of folks from those companies who only wanted stability and loyalty and ended up on the street after ten years with very little in the way of marketable skills. Don't fool yourself: IT is a risky and always-changing business. Stability and long-term jobs are an illusion.
Google has so much money that I can believe in anything...
Or curly braces. Did they use tabs?
I'm amused at how high/low-tech the method for passing on apps recommendations to friends is (generating a 2D barcode encoding some kind of URL that the other phone owner photographs, presumably with a special app?). Sound like something Google should standardize on.
Surely you can. Wouldn't you be loyal to your own startup if it turned into a corporation? Any way, you should be loyal to your employer while working there, but that shouldn't be mistaken for selling your soul to them.

I don't see the problem with being a job hopper except it sounds really hard to jump jobs once a year or more often considering it takes about half a year to get settled into a new job.
Personally I've set myself a 5 year limit as max time to work at one company before moving. This is part of my not-form-lifelong-habits program.
So even if I do have my dream job I force myself to leave after 5 years.
Forced perspective is good for you, you should always try to push forward and you can't do that by sitting tight in a job.

I would be skeptical about hiring someone who switched jobs 6 times the last 5 years, but I'd be even more skeptical hiring someone at 30 with less than 5 jobs on their CV as that might suggest them being lazy sods who didn't have summer jobs etc.
Hacker News Meetup Netherlands
There's a lot of HN readers in NL (and Belgium & Luxembourg) - we should meet up.

If we were to host one this Saturday in Amsterdam or Utrecht, how many would turn up?

There was talk of getting a meetup going a couple of months ago, but it doesn't seem like it happened in the end - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=998352

Why Saturday? Why not - let's do it fast and get something going.

EDIT: Please post where you are, and whether you'd be up for doing a short 5-minute demo/talk on something you're working on.
A graphic explaining Minimum Viable Products
You are loyal to family, friends and country if said entities are worthy of it - i.e. if they reciprocate it. I can think of plenty of reasons why someone would choose not to be loyal to family. Someone I know is gay, his father never accepted, or even respected that, during an entire lifetime, and the guy didn't even show up to his funeral.

If a company shows genuine respect, compassion and, indeed, loyalty to an employee, there's no reason they couldn't be shown the same in return - even if it's ultimately for the profit of the company (if said values are expressed, the profit of the company should also positively reflect on the profit of the employee).
"'X Killer' Considered Harmful"
The follow up basically has Gruber accepting Apple's stance. He's critical to a point, but he works hard to make Apple seem like the good guy.

Your quote, if anything, demonstrates that the guy doesn't really offer anything compelling.

"Every time I think I’ve seen the most outrageous App Store rejection, I’m soon proven wrong. I can’t imagine what it will take to top this one."

Really John? With Apple's history, you're surprised? Since we are talking about dictionaries, let me introduce you to http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/gullible
New module for Brightcove video hosting in Drupal in progress
if someone is to "kill an iPad" they must greatly outperform Apple in all these areas

The key is the ecosystem. If anything "kills" iPad, it will be the Android ecosystem.

Google should publicize a few Android millionaires. Right now, greed is on the side of Apple.
I thought we were going to run out of IPv4 space last year. Or was that 2008? 2007?

In other news, f5 has some sweet new IPv6 enabled routers to replace all that obsolete IPv4 stuff you're still running.
I agree. I would not encourage people to be automatically loyal to any company which they might happen to work for, unless that company has shown loyalty to the individual in return. If the only consideration is profit, then just think of working for a company purely as a business transaction and nothing more than that. Loyalty need not be part of the equation.
Thank You, good Sir.
Sounds a lot like the Magnuson-Moss act. From Wikipedia:

"Warrantors cannot require that only branded parts be used with the product in order to retain the warranty.[2] This is commonly referred to as the "tie-in sales" provisions[3], and is frequently mentioned in the context of third-party computer parts, such as memory and hard drives."
(prefix edit: I am railing against their demo, not the technology itself. Worked fine on chrome/vista ultimate. Does anyone know if it works for icecast streaming audio?)

Really, really don't like the interaction design of the thumbnail chooser. It's quite annoying to use. Other than that, neat toy I suppose...

If I've said it once, I've said it a million times: if you roll your own scrollbars, make sure they work like the scrollbars everywhere else on every operating system you plan on supporting. E.g., if a container is scrollable, it should listen to the mousewheel. If you can't get your special custom scrollbars to support the mousewheel, DON'T BUILD THEM.

The auto-scrolling-when-highlighting-the-top-or-bottom-thumbnail is also quite annoying. Think about this:

1. I see the bottom thumbnail, want to click on it

2. Thing moves automatically. Whoa.

3. All of a sudden, the thing I wanted to click on is no longer under my mouse cursor. Now I have to think and move my cursor yet again

4. Rollover actions like this do not work on touch mobile devices (thank god)
I must cite Programming Collective Intelligence from Toby Segaram (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529321). Altough not entirely focused on search engines, it's an awesome book for anyone who wants to get their hands on some of the most useful algorithms for web apps, without having to deal with the math.

I downloaded a torrent version, then bought the paperback version straight after.
“Like it or not, real journalists make these distinctions all the time.”

It‘s their job. Finding stuff that’s worth publishing, checking all the facts and writing it up nicely. That’s journalism in a nutshell.
The Psychology of Free...(Or Why I Won't Pay for a Song)
That doesn't really change any arguments on either side at all does it? "OF" space? Where did that space come from? etc. etc. etc.
Nothing, this applies only to UK users for the moment.
Use slideme.org - http://slideme.org
What an exceptionally well argued point. I particularly like the author's argument, because the only behavior that apple would have to change would be its warranty policy; it wouldn't force apple to tear down it's walled garden, apple just couldn't void your warranty if you chose to leave it.
Of course it's always easier to kill off something that has its own built-in self-destructive weaknesses.
A slightly modified version of the hardware could make a great graphing calculator...
Gizmodo did not buy the phone. They paid for the chance to look it over before turning it over to Apple, which they did once Apple told them it was Apple property.
Hint: you won't find the answer in the post. Just some speculation based on (wierd, IMHO) assumption:

This is problematic because if there were no fear of voiding warranty,
undoubtedly many customers would jailbreak their iPhone, There would be
alternate markets for iPhone software, and there would be a truly
competitive marketplace.

Are apps in Cydia all coded in Flash, or Haskel? What does he mean by "truly competitive"?
Is it all because of the warranty clause, really?
You can put mp3 on your iPod from any source without voiding the warranty. Does not hurt ITMS a bit.
This blog article gives a good illustration of why I built InstaCDN. Getting your js/css/image assets combined, minified, gzipped and served from a CDN is tedious and error prone.

The article describes how to install some prerequisite minification software and perform series of configuration steps that span python, html, apache/lighttpd. It seems likely that his instructions will provide improved performance, but there's no CDN integration, some configuration details are left up to the reader to puzzle out and the comments already include some "gotchas" from real world configuration interactions.

InstaCDN is an alternative approach that does all the right stuff through a trivial REST API.

Would love some feedback, and to find out if/how it's breaking any of your complex css/js.

http://www.instacdn.com/
It might not be rocket science, but it's not straightforward either. "Eat less", but less of what? You throw the baby out with the bathwater on some cabbage soup diet that wastes away your muscle mass and slows your metabolism.

Let's say your maintenance intake is 2500 cals/day and you want to lose a pound a week, that's a 500 cal deficit per day. Which you could do by diet. Or you could up your diet to 3000 cals/day and burn an extra 1000 cals/day through exercise. The latter is almost certainly going to work better as it boosts base metabolism, and you won't have to fight hunger with pure willpower.
I dunno - I bought some flypaper last year on the promise it would kill flies. And it did!
I just looked this morning. It looks much better, "easy on the eyes" as they say.
Some links I've gathered on the subject: http://www.blackhat-seo.com/2010/captcha-advertising/

I found 4 companies that are currently providing some kind of captcha advertising. It's an old idea that is being rediscovered from time to time.

I don't think you need an enormous amount of words/slogans/phrases. You can use different non-linear transformations on your content, different fonts, different layouts and so on. You can also fall back on a regular captcha, either for effectiveness or to not annoy users too much.
Germany isn't a part of the UK, so things will work exactly as before. There's an existing mail service in Germany called G-mail, and the agreement (after a court case in 2007) is that the owner of that trademark can use it in Germany, Monaco, Norway and Switzerland, but nowhere else.

The English trademark was owned by someone else, and wasn't in active use, afaict.

Update: http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/03/gmail-uk/ says Google reached a settlement after "engaging in legal proceedings at the trademark office" (read: pointing out that it wasn't in use, in order to get it revoked).
Wrong, God wrote in Lisp: http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/eternal-flame.html
You can eat as much chicken and broccoli as you want!
Ultra-satisfying Nelson laugh @ all wannabe patent whores.
according to this video, not quite yet:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ
My apologies. I went to bed shortly after posting this.
Bad movie? It's worse than that. It sounds like a classic Internet "open sore" troll.
Exactly. This is definitely not a one-wins-all situation.

I have dreamed of a tablet device ever since I've seen Star Trek. And while iPad is the closest thing to it of all the projects currently for sale, it is not the one I hope to have.

The tablet I desire would not require iTunes or a similar program binding it to a PC, for instance. Nor would it center around a specific set of marketplaces.

Personally, I'm keeping my fingers crossed for something like ChromeOS tablet combined with faster and better Internet.
I built a little hobby poetry editor on Heroku in my spare time and I was really concerned that, although I have no ads or anything, the poems were hard to focus on with everything going on around them. So, I made a little button called "Reading Mode" that hides every element on the page except the poem text and a button to return to full mode.

I think it definitely improves things--at least for the types of people who actually read poetry. Would love to see this approach on a lot more sites. I'm sure there are great examples out there.

Here's the URL: http://poetry.heroku.com

EDIT: Heroku currently has a DB issue, which they're working on. Link still down, but hopefully up soon.
http://www.doxdesk.com/img/updates/20091116-so-large.gif

?WE NEED MORE JQUERY ERROR
READY.
I operated a bar once. I hated dealing with this sort of thing. It was annoying, frustrating, and dumb. People would leave crap, and they'd turn it over to the bartender. Then you'd have people coming in asking about it and wasting our time wondering if we had it. Sometimes we did, sometimes we didn't. Even if you had a "Lost and Found" box, as we did, they'd always ask for you to check here or check there.

This doesn't sound all to bad until you realize that people would come in all the time asking about a missing cell phone. The girl would pull one out of the box, and ask "Is this it?" "Yes!" And they'd take it, and be done with it. Only it wasn't their phone.

Now, we could have required them to tell us the phone number, and some girls did, but frankly, you do this during happy hour, and you're taking the girl away from the customers, and the customers aren't being served while you attempt to verify the story.

And yes, if you did end up giving the phone back to the wrong person, then you could get the police involved. Yes, this has happened. It's stupid, wastes time, and is a hassle.

If you don't want to lose something in the bar, don't get drunk, or leave it in the car out of sight. And if the phone was stolen, it wouldn't be difficult to discover. Bars have cameras. If they don't, they are asking for trouble.

If you looked at the California law regarding this, you'd notice that "Giving the found property to the bartender" isn't an option. And from experience, this isn't a sure fire way of getting the phone back to the person. It's report it to the police, or attempt to get it back to the owner.
Happstack 0.5.0 released (Innovative web application server written in Haskell)
Me never understood how someone could of possibly mixed up they're words that much. Is it just because they sound alike? But then again, a lot of people just don't get the plural s/ apostrophe rule in German as well (it is different from the English rules, but still consistent).
I have both a tc1100 and an iPad. I find that Windows XP Tablet's text recognition is phenomenal. However, my text input is faster one-handed on the iPad in portrait mode than it is on the tc1100 writing with the stylus. My text input with the landscape keyboard two-handed is almost the same as on a physical keyboard.

Also, the user experience on the iPad is much more refined.

When the iPhone/iPad ecosystem matures, I expect Apple to reintroduce the stylus. Either that, or someone will develop a bluetooth stylus. (Which would exploit the capacitative touchscreen, but add pressure sensitivity.)
I totally agree. To ask an employee for loyalty is nothing but moral cohertion. Employess should be comitted, yes, to their work, to the quality of their work, to having good relations with team and colleagues.

Where do employers get the idea that a job contract is a soul contract? Unless you are offering significant profit sharing, why expect to be normal that people simply sacrifice themselves for the sake of your company? And seduce you into believing it's nothing more than your moral obligation?!? It's a moral harassment policy!

Want people to work overtime and not complain? Pay them fairly for that! Want people to stick with your company and not leave? Provide a good workplace and a deserving salary!

The only ones that should have unconditional loyalty to a company are the company owners!

Besides, wake up and realize that there is no longer such a thing as a carrier in a single company. At least where I live, you shouldn't expect and IT employee to stick around longer than 4 years, and most leave within 1-2 years.

Stop thinking you hire loyalty.

And employess, realize that your company won't be any more loyal to you when things get rough and they need to make cuts. In fact, when that time comes, they usually go for the fat paychecks of those that stuck around.
Much better. I might make the text a bit larger. My eyes are probably older than yours. Flipping back and forth between HN and HM it feels like less work to scan HN.

I wonder if you can predict the age of a site's creator based on text size? :)
Linux Mint 8 released
That reminds me of what my lecturer said... "Do not start writing functions before knowing what they're going to do, hoping you can massage them into doing something useful." It was a `duh!` advice but now the converse seems appropriate if you're going to design a living organism.
Just delete them by usb then :)
The one issue I see with this line of reasoning is that Apple might make a convincing argument that with a jailbroken phone, users could somehow disable the hardware protection software that prevents the phone from being damaged when used in excessive heat. I'm not fully up to speed on what other protection mechanisms they have built into the phone (and whether or not you can override them by jailbreaking), but I wonder if that isn't one of the main reasons they would have this clause in there to begin with.
Based on the number of clone elements in that list you could extrapolate that Facebook has the best UI ever conceived. Strangly, I consider almost every aspect of it to be poor and frustrating.
General relativity remember? In which the spacetime is a simple manifold (okay, not so simple), if Einstein's theory is right or wrong in such a large scale (the entire universe) we must confirm or reject this with experiments, but I see Ockels's theory as some form of solipsism that does not mix comfortably with my worldview.

But I agree with you, we do not understand the nature of space.
It happened: http://bluwiki.com/go/Hackersnl and it was a lot of fun :) Try contacting Beeker http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=beeker because there were talks about doing this more often.
Rackspace redesigns Webmail for Rackspace Email