skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Patent lawyers working on standards like H.264 actually have incentive to make them cover as little as possible. Making the claims narrower may reduce the chance of invalidation in any potential dispute. Meanwhile, the patent needs only to cover exactly what's in the standard in order to participate in the licensing pool. As long as they match the standard carefully, implementers can't work around the patent while also remaining compliant.

Gregory Maxwell points out that this is likely applicable to H.264 and VP8:

"As we’ve pointed out before, many codec patents are exceptionally easy to work around: They specify every little detail because it makes it _much_ easier to get through the examination but doesn’t harm the patent’s ability to read on the final standard because the standard specifics exactly the patented behaviour... We can assume that in cases where VP8 looks similar to H.264 those would have been exactly the cases where care was taken to differ in the right places. I’d expect the primary risks for VP8 to be anywhere _but_ there."

http://blog.gingertech.net/2010/05/20/vp8-adobe-is-the-key-t...
It's even provoked at least one advance in game theory. Some mathematicians at (iirc) the University of Alberta tried to use game theory to analyze poker, and found it was intractable. That led them to invent a systematic way to approximate complex games. (They built some good poker bots out of it, too, and sold one version as a training tool.)
Football (sorry, Soccer) is not the kind of sport which enables high scores, it never was. Actually, in the past, goals seemed to occur more often, but that was mostly because of the huge discrepancies between the opposing teams.

I think it would be much more easier to embrace what Rugby does, and get a referee analyzing TV footage to help the field referees when doubts arise, than changing the one thing that makes soccer what it is, the act of scoring a goal and what it represents, reducing it to nothing, turning Soccer into one of those sports where in each attack there is a point taken for the attacking team, being the game decided by those few attacks that weren't successful.
I'm from austria and I've never heard "mensch" used in a negative context.

As a native german speaker I absolutely read it as positively as it was intended.
Yep; which is why your point is something of a straw man - because it is the extreme interpretation of his point that doesn't stand up.
There are huge areas away from the main coastal population centers, this is a really big continent. But you might have to live without easy connection to the grid, drill your own well, handle you own electricity generation, deal with some long distance wifi connectivity. But there are folks with their nearest neighbor several km away.
Show me the magic (in your product)
Here my take on it, from the blogpost I wrote about it:

Finding lyrics has been a longstanding pet-peeve of mine. A lot of music players don’t allow to you easily copy the title and artist so you have to manually type them into Google. Once you’re there, most sites are cluttered and spammy. Way too annoying.

As for posting lyrics To facebook or Twitter: This is something a lot of people (mostly teens) do. Having to do the above, copy and paste it (if the website doesn't use some stupid iframe-trick!), formatting it and then going to facebook or twitter to post is annoying, Lystener is a nice shortcut. :)
people working below minimum wage are "employed" in name only.
"A defaulting and clearing of billions, maybe trillions, of unsustainable debt in the system is required."

Seriously? What you propose would be the economic equivalent of a nuclear winter. You can't cure a disease by killing the patient.

Besides that, it could even come back to bite us. Think of how many other countries are indebted to us. If we can default on our debts, why can't they?
This topic doesn't make any sense. Linux has many file systems. So which file system specifically has "broken" file locking?

So having read it. Seems this guy takes issue with the POSIX standard and it's flock requirements. Which of course makes this topic make even that much less sense.
Both mechanisms operate over a persistent TCP/SSL/XMPP connection that Google maintains between its servers and Android handsets via a service called GTalkService.

What? That's rather naughty if it is true (the article doesn't give any more details than this).

Does this mean that for non-technical users you cannot turn off a Google connection?
Also, after watching a little more football, I can now watch a 2-0 match and see how that result can be just as decisive as a 35 - 7 victory.

(One more tip for the Amercian Football fan: multiplying every score by 7 is a good way to convert to something more familiar, kind of like converting Celcius to Fahrenheit.)
Does anyone have any ideas on what exactly can be done to improve scoring?

I think increasing scoring would take something away from football (soccer) rather than add to it, but it will be interesting to hear how exactly people think the rules should be changed.
To reply to the first paragraph of the article-

>Earlier this week, CNET ran an article critical of the permission model of the Android Market. Google’s response to the criticism was that “each Android app must get users’ permission to access sensitive information”. While this is technically true, one should not need a PhD in Computer Science to use a smartphone. How is a consumer supposed to know exactly what the permission “act as an account authenticator” means? The CNET opinion piece “Is Google far too much in love with engineering?” is quite relevant here.

Is it?

Just to be clear, it is my belief that on the iPhone all apps have the run of every bit of functionality provided by the sandbox. Meaning if one app can access contacts, all apps can access contacts. If one app can get your location, all apps can get your location. If one app can pull your contacts and your location and send it to a web service, then all apps can do the same.

On Android this isn't the case at all. On install you had to explicitly confirm the required rights.

The Android model is a thousand times better, at least assuming they avoid user fatigue where people simply OK anything.

It could see improvements for sure, though. For one I'd like to see optional permissions. When I installed Barcode Scanner I was a bit perplexed as to why it asked to access my contact list. Turns out it's because it can create barcodes from contacts. Nonetheless, that should be an optional permission that I could set to yes (checked), no (red x), or ask on demand (cleared), defaulting to ask on demand. It would make me far less nervous about apps that seem to unnecessarily ask for the kitchen sink.
I think this is actually something Microsoft did "right" in regards to C#. One of the first things I read on C# back in 2003 was "C# Programmer's Reference". It was available directly on MSDN, it was easy to get to, and it was a no-holds-barred, for-experienced-programmers-only, introduction to C#. It didn't go into any philosophical discussion on why you should like C#, why you should like its features, etc., it just assumed "you're here already, so you must have reasons for being interested, let's just get down to business." It didn't go into explain "what are integers" or "what are classes", it just assumed you knew what these common concepts were and explained their specific details as they related to C#. After reading that and working for a while, I then read the technical spec, which filled in the gaps around the edges. I was a competent debugger in a week, a competent developer in a month, and an expert in a year.

Mastering the .NET class library took a lot longer, but that is a different issue, and I'm actually rather glad it's a separate issue (but that's a story for another day).

With Lisp and Python, I've tried to take a similar approach. Some of the PLT Scheme documentation -- excuse me, it's "Racket" now -- was very clean and concise. I also tried concurrently reading the R6RS spec, which was productive, though not quite as much as I wanted. Python, unfortunately, has full-programming-noob intros and a technical spec. The spec isn't bad, but it's difficult to parse down into the most important features. I scan through the tutorials, skipping most of the text evangelizing the language. That seems to work for now, but it's taken a lot more conscious effort on my behalf to stick to it.
I would still say, though, that the better side won in each match.
This is something node.js has done very well. Anyone with basic javascript experience (and really, isn't that everyone?) can go from zero to fast, functional web server in 2 minutes. Then hit github and figure out which simple web framework to play with (the fragmentation is either a problem or benefit depending on your view) and voila, another 5 minutes later, a full, integrated, single language web stack. Very good for noobs.
The Runaway General
I've been keeping up on your unfolding story and it's inspiring. Please keep the updates coming!
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It looks as if you could've sold the google page rank e-book for more than $510. At least for monthly revenue x 12 months...
Lessons learned: Halfway through DreamIt
> Balanced-budget orthodoxy? Man, the guy's got huge cojones, at least.

The tone he takes about other economists is a little scary, really. "We've made all this great Right progress. But here come these people who are trying to destroy all of it, daring to go back to the clearly discredited old ways of Wrong-Think."

I'll say it again, I suspect this man is a paid propagandist.
My company was B2B, so it might be different for us then you. However, I'll still spell out what worked for us.

1. Tradeshows. We went to industry tradeshows, and our sales guys really worked the shows. We didn't know anyone in the industry, either. They worked the shows, really got out there to know the people, and worked the people covering the shows (magazines, photographers, etc). Basically, it was all about networking.

2. Advertising in print got us coverage. We bought ad space which came with a write up in the mag and online. Is good because it gave us presence.

3. Presence is important. We'd go to trade shows all over the place, and really mingle. Tradeshows seemed to do well, and was the place for face to face meetings.

4. Incentives to get word of mouth advertising. We would pay commissions to clients who would bring in other people. It wasn't merely a link to click on. Rather, it was direct referrals. "Hey, here's a guy who could use your services..." and we'd give him a fair cut.

But really, presence was the big thing. Being out there, being seen, being apart of the environment was big, and really allowed us to get out there. If you present yourself as a successful company, people assume you are. Obviously you need to back it up when they sign on, but it's getting them to call you back that is important.

Should also stress that most of this was between 2003 and 2006 when we started this and really pushed.
This is an extremely intuitively satisfying explanation to me, and I've been on both extremes.
Pretty much. Apple is a public company... have you seen their profit margins?
Closing the Digital Frontier
200+ Cores, 40 People, 24x7 Hours, 1 Task
And CP/M-86, and DR-DOS, and GEM, Geoworks...

IIRC Gary Kildall special on The Computer Chronicles show mentioned the case when DR agreed with IBM to bundle CP/M-86 on IBM PCs only to discover IBM set the price of MS-DOS at $40 and CP/M-86's at $240...

If nerds ever tear down MS's walls, it will be well deserved.

http://www.archive.org/details/GaryKild
But wouldn't knowledge of Google Go be beneficial for me when there are less developers for Go than Python?
Very interesting take on the problem. While everyone is clamoring for goal-line refs or technical solutions, he proposes changing the rules somehow to enable more scoring, which would reduce the consequences of wrongfully allowed or disallowed goals.

I've always wondered what the game would be like if you simplified it even more and removed goal keepers, so that no player on the field could touch the ball with their hands. Replace goalies with another defender, or not.

That would likely open up scoring, as long-range shots would have a realistic chance to score, and short-range shots would be almost guaranteed if they were on-goal.

I'm sure there would be cons as well, but can't think what they might be.

Edit: One con would be more breaks in play, though they could probably mitigate that by allowing the scored-on team to restart with a quick goal-kick instead of a center kick-off. Center kick-offs often end up pushed back to the defensive line anyway, to open up the other team.
I used lyricswiki's api to get the url for the lyric's page, then parse it's html to get the lyrics. hope that helps ;)
I would very much like to read a case study where you walk through your entire experience from initial idea to cash-in-hand... for each of the two types.

Congrats on your overall success. Keep it up dude!
Entrepreneurial Happiness Has Five Ingredients
Even though having any source of income is great, building a predictable, sustainable source of income is key to eventual success. Currently, it looks like iStockPhoto is the only source of sustainable income. And now he is focusing on the Andriod app, which is great.
Ask HN: How to help teach a friend advanced python concepts?
I have a friend who is learning python. He is learning fast and getting the basic concepts down. When he looks at higher level code as part of bigger systems he is getting a bit overwhelmed(django source). How can I help this person bridge the gap. I went through this too when I was first learning, the easy stuff online was too easy and the hard stuff online was too hard. I'm trying to ease the transition from being able to write a few scripts to becoming a django contributor
New Ruby shootout on Windows
Java 4-ever movie trailer
The actual article:
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2010/tc201...
"The gyroscope chip, for example, apparently costs Apple $2.60 while it costs $2.90 in quantities of 200,000. These disparities pop up in a number of places, which, sadly, lends an air of WTF to the proceedings."

I'm not sure I understand this last statement. Should Apple not be getting a higher volume discount? I assume they're buying over 200,000 single parts.
According to this...no (from BW article): In 2009, iSuppli estimated that the components and materials used in the iPhone 3GS cost about $179. The materials costs on that device have since dropped to $134 as the prices of certain components have declined...
Gen Stanley McChrystal was sacked after this article by Rolling Stone. The back story is here ~ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8044899.stm

"... The embarrassing stasis does suggest it defined one potential purpose of the website as selling magazines. And the best way of selling magazines, or newspapers, in the minds of some publishers, is to establish a web presence but to stop people reading your content. ..."

A story by the Guardian how Rolling Stone failed to capitalise the scoop online ~ http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jun/28/emily-bell-mcchr...
Insight, "Zigtag: In Need of Tagging Assistant"
FWIW, I'm not dyslexic and still had to read this a couple times before I saw something other than "FartMusic".

Also, "frat" is not a positive word in most people's minds.

Two good reasons for changing the name before you do anything else.
> doing jack shit economically except putting it in savings

I'm not an economist so maybe I'm missing the bigger picture, but by putting the money in a savings account, aren't they increasing the amount of capital available and thus helping to lower interest rates? If nobody hoarded, there would be nobody to borrow from.
50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers
I've been staring at the title all day and debating whether it would be worth my time or not (I'm at work) and tried to make sense of it. I finally decided it was about an alternative mouth-to-mouth technique in India and clicked here... just to see this!
The question is: why do you let your car have many dents?

Why some people fall deeper into poverty and some other get out of it? Is it just a question of luck? Of help? Of energy? Of will?
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Speculation against sovereign debt is the root cause?

Have you considered profligate government spending? Using currency swaps to hide deficits with the help of Goldman Sachs? It wasn't speculators who pushed Greece's deficit up to 13%. "Speculators" is the straw man of European politicians, who don't want to admit blame (not something confined to European politicians).

Then there is also the fact that when traditionally high interest-rate countries like Spain and Ireland entered the Eurozone, cheap financing was available for the first time. This resulted in a housing/construction boom and then crash. All the taxes from property development and services evaporated, which makes it harder to service debt.
Most importantly, the spec really is a straight copypaste of the decoder’s source code. As a specification, that’s not very useful or professional. We hope that over time, this will improve.

This still baffles me. Why hasn't Google spent the effort to write up a decent spec? Are they waiting until the inevitable litigation with MPEG-LA to make their file format generic? Would this help them in litigation?
This is a strawman argument. Krugman isn't trying to say that the debt isn't important. What he's been saying is that normal fiscal policy doesn't apply in the current crisis: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/14/opinion/14krugman.html?_r=...

In particular, there's a reason interest rates are adjusted regularly: in different economic situations, you need different interest rates. Were interest rates too low before the current crisis? Probably. That's mostly academic now though. What matters is what interest rates should be at now. And our economy is in totally different shape since before the crisis. What made sense then isn't necessarily good policy now.
I'm guessing that people post it as a physical hack. Hack in the sense that they're doing more with less than "should" be possible. Add that it's mildly counter-culture and environmentally friendly, and people vote it up.
I'm chalking it up to the fact that Wienerisch can make anything sound dirty. ;)
Probably making the goalkeeper unable to save with his hands. To avoid injuries for the goalkeepers you could then reduce the height of the goal to something like 0.7 meters, so that saves would be done with the legs and knees. Then you could bring back the old heavy balls.

And then it wouldn't be Football anymore...
Just curious, what for you are the shortcomings of Python?

By the way, I completely agree with your main point here. When programming in Clojure, the availability of the Java libs is a very useful thing and that makes Clojure itself useable for me.
This seems low, even compared with Apple's usual high margins. Do they bump up the standalone price to make the contract prices look better?

On the other hand it explains the iPod Touch prices which have always seemed cheap by comparison.
I think that was probably what my friend meant, "whore" was dict.cc's idea.
I hadn't thought of it that way actually. Being remote poses its own challenges though.
I have a similar setup. Add anything I am interested in to Google Reader, consume via Reeder on iPhone/iPad, or consume via Feedly if using a browser.

Reeder and Feedly both rock, but the key is eliminating low signal to noise sources.
The video was posted in 2008.
Followup question: Where do you find buyers for website flips? How do you approach them?
When people realize that they can vote themselves more money, they will.

I would agree had you said "When people think that they can vote themselves..." because who are they kidding? There is no "Obama Money." The government's money comes from the people, as the residents of Greece and California are discovering.

I suppose you can vote yourself more money if you can vote and yet pay no taxes, which might be the true problem. Perhaps in order to have a say in the direction of the country, you need to have skin in the game.

I don't think that chucking democracy is really the right reaction. I stand with Winston Churchill: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
Thats not the point - this isn't an attack on Apple's pricing it's a typical industrial teardown BOM. You can get them for everything. Retail price is typically 2-4x BOM depending on how complex the product is and how long it will be in the market

It's interest to the consumer is when a cell phone company is charging you $500 for the phone AND locking you into a contract.
I'm a Common Lisp (CL) zealot and use it through Emacs but I have always disagreed with the suggestion a lot of experienced Lispers make to newbies that to get started with CL you should use a commercial IDE, Emacs+Slime or at least some kind of Slime clone for Vim. I understand their reasoning but it is simply too big an obstacle if you just want to check a CL out.

I do suggest picking a CL implementation with Readline support on the REPL and that usually means CLISP (http://www.clisp.org/) since it offers just that on the most platforms without a hassle. Then you can just edit "whatever.lisp" in your favourite editor and go through the command history for reloading, evalling, etc.

You can even skip the Readline support and pick other implementations and just start your script from the commandline. Just check the commandline options and CLISP even has #!/usr/bin/clisp (hashbang?) support.

So you can do a hello world in an IDE independent fashion. Hope that helps, mail me otherwise :-)
i'm pretty sure it's only apps installed via the market.
Or perhaps the gentleman at the board games evening had a point -- how much of an app store app's sales is due to word of mouth?
The video is from 2008? Probably wasn't so antiquated then.
I've been in a temporary situation where I faced many of the issues I think poor people face. What happens when you are that poor is that you realise the huge mountain above you that you have to overcome to going back to where normal people are, and you just kind of accept where you are now and potter along and try to survive everyday without considering all too much how to get out.

For example, I had $4000 debt. There was no way in hell I could ever pay that money back, considering that I made $900/month which did not cover my monthly expenses. So let's say a month ends where I spend $800 and only have $100 left. Am I going to stick it towards paying off the debt or just buy some new shoes or so? That debt is so huge that I know that saving $100 will still take me so many years, that I just accept the debt and go buy myself some shoes.

Poverty starts when you resign yourself to being poor. A friend of mine is poor - I called him to lunch and brought out $5000 and I told him that if he can think of any idea at all for a business, I would invest these $5000 in his business. I would not check his idea, I would not bother him if it was viable, I would simply give him the money.

Up until today, he has not come to me to pick up the cash. But he still complains about how he has no money. That's the thing - he is resigned to being poor. Becoming rich will mean a lot of work, it's an ardous and long task, and I really don't think he wants to do it, even when the money is offered to him in that manner.
Is it really? How about the US comeback after going 2-0 down? And it does happens a lot.
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