skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You didn't do it in less than an hour, you did it with your whole careers worth of knowledge acquisition + 1 hour of implementation.

If as you say your steps were a priori obvious and trivially implemented and were at the time that the relevant patent was applied for (or relevant invention made in the US) then the patent is very weak and a citation against it should be easy to find.

What appears to be the case is that professionals working in the field for a substantial time were not able to solve the problem easily (eg 2Bdecided's comments).

In short you should give yourself more credit.

TIL: AVIsynth is a script based video editor.
"the suggested default step 1 for MongoDB is to acquire 3 servers?"

At my previous job, we suffered a catastrophic RAID failure. The controller died while trying repair a degraded array. At this point, we valued the data enough that we weren't going to screw around with replacing the controller and restarting the recovery. The whole RAID array went out to DriveSavers, at the cost of several thousand dollars. Now, DriveSavers are really awesome folks, but my goal is to never do business with them again. :-)

After this incident, our policy was simple: If our data mattered, it had to be replicated.

A 3 server configuration is, admittedly, pretty high end: Even if one node is down, you still have redundancy. You can keep the remaining 2 nodes live while rebuilding the failed node.

I know lots of people who care _deeply_ about data integrity, but who keep their databases on a single server. I find this a bit mystifying: Even the most expensive hardware can die in ugly and unrecoverable ways. And RAID arrays are some of the biggest culprits: Their striping formats are usually undocumented and proprietary.
Assholes. I am living in Ukraine, and I am willing to host any patent-infringing code or documents on my Ukrainian servers.
I just made a Gosper Glider gun

{"w":200,"h":200,"cells":"A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/ANMAfDA/A/A/A/AqDgAeBEAfggAeIIAfQAfRAfDgAfQA/AhDgAf4AfRA/ADGA/A/A/A/A/ALMAfDA/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/A/At"}
Startups: Learn the Difference Between Cowboys and Professionals
Looking at one of tcdent's links (bacon!) it seems pretty well balanced and plainly reported to me:

"However, experts urged caution over using the results of the trials on mice to predict the effect of phosphates on humans.

Professor Stephen Spiro, of the British Lung Foundation, said: 'The authors claim that in mice with lung cancer a diet high in phosphates increases lung cancer growth rates.

'While this may be a relevant observation, it has never been assessed in man. Further study would be required to ascertain any link in humans.'

Dr Kat Arney of Cancer Research UK added: 'Smoking is by far the main cause of lung cancer and quitting is the best way to reduce the risk of this disease.'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1102368/Additives-... [link added by copy-paste]"

They stated the limitations of directly applying the result to humans, they interviewed 2 professionals in the field. Stirling. If you're right this must be an aberration?!
I find it extremely funny that when he says, "Let's check out my site" he types in "nexusonehacks" into the google search box, instead of typing "nexusonehacks.net" in the address bar. I guess this problem isn't just grandma's, it's spread to at least semi-informed engineers doing stuff like putting Ubuntu on a Nexus One.
I'm not forgetting that at all. Of course they make enormous profits. But they would make no profits if they did not have a temporary monopoly on the drugs they invent, because others would sell it for cost price (next to nil) and they would never, ever recoup the money they spent developing the drug.

My point isn't that pharma companies don't make money. It's that if you took away patent protection, they wouldn't invest in new drugs, because they would never earn anything on those investments.
Yes, the alternative to this is the patent scheme the pharma industry uses. Think about it - a drug may be trivially simple to manufacture, the hard part is developing it in the first place then shepherding it through the FDA approval process. So they rely on patents because secrecy at that scale is impossible.

For an example closer to home, did you never wonder how RMS working alone was able to put Symbolics out of business? Because he waited for them to discover what users wanted, the hard part, then he simply copied the implementation and gave it away for free. If they'd gone stealth, maybe we'd all be using LispM's today. Now we'll never know.
It depends on what you want to build. Keeping it simple helps.

I designed my last web site in about a month: dev time + learning an MVC framework (CakePHP), not working full time. Prior background of php web dev (non pro). Also, the framework has evolved, and a lot of things I had to do by myself at the time are now in the core.

In the end, what took me time is: back office stuff (end of day jobs, tracking user actions), design integration (we brought a designer in, though), UI (caching and ajax calls to speedup the site, and effects using scriptaculous), having our email platform good to go through spam filters.

Also, even when it seems straightforward, it takes more time than you may think. And coding is just the beginning.

tl;dr: Depends on your requirements and experience. Also, next time you'll be faster.
The Daily Mail is more than just sensationalist. Not quite as bad as today's Daily Express headline though:

http://www.express.co.uk/ourpaper/view/2010-07-08
STARTER-PACK - A Common Lisp "newbie" guide
At last. This is starting to make some sense. Thank you.

Now, there still a problem. Hcho said that while programs could not be patented, algorithms could. So, imagine you patent some algorithm, and later I write and commercially use a program that implements that algorithm.

How the hell could my particular use of your algorithm not infringe your patent? Yet it is my understanding that it doesn't, on the grounds that software is somewhat immune from patent infringement.

Either I missed something, or something is amiss.
Please just explain how it is that you think we would get new, expensive-to-develop drugs, if there were no guarantee of a limited monopoly for the inventor.

Forget the abstract arguments about corporations being "encouraged" or whatever you think I think. Just tell me how it would work.

If it helps, imagine that you run a pharmaceutical firm, and you have the choice to spend hundreds of millions of dollars researching a drug which, once perfected by your researchers, is not owned in any sense (even temporarily) by you, but rather immediately becomes a generic commodity worth fractions of a cent per unit, and which cannot possibly earn you back the money you spent developing it. In that situation, would you start the research? And if not, where will the new drugs come from?
Because you are not a lawyer. What makes sense to an engineer has nothing to do with the law.
Most Daily Mail readers are incapable of reading past the headline, so stuffing balance near the end of the article usually elicits the desired effect.

We have an acronym for this sort of thing: FUD.
http://iamthewitness.com/books/Henry.Ford/The.International....
Awesome to see an xterm on such a tiny device - all it needs is a bigger screen and a keyboard, and I can replace my eee PC.

Where are the ARM-based 3G netbooks?
Article text ...

"

For over 10 years, Skype enjoyed selling the world security by obscurity. We must admit, really good obscurity. I mean, really really good obscurity. So good that almost no one has been able to reverse engineer it out of the numerous Skype binaries. Those who could, didn’t dare to publish their code, as it most certainly looked scarier than Frankenstein.

The time has come to reveal this secret. http://cryptolib.com/ciphers/skype contains the greatest secret of Skype communication protocol, the obfuscated Skype RC4 key expansion algorithm in plain portable C. Enjoy!

Why publish it now? - It so happened that some of our code got leaked a couple of months ago. We contacted Skype reporting the leak. Only weeks later, our code is already being used by hackers and spammers and we are abused by Skype administration. I do not want to go into any finger-pointing details here, but naturally, we do not wish to be held responsible for our code being abused. So we decided that the time has come for all the IT security experts to have it. Why let the hackers have the advantage? As professional cryptologists and reverse engineers, we are not on their side. Skype is a popular and important product. We believe that this publication will help the IT security community help secure Skype better.

However, for the time being, we are not giving away a licence to use our code for free in commercial products. Please contact us if you need a commercial licence.

It is not all security by obscurity of course. There is plenty of good cryptography in Skype. Most of it is implemented properly too. There are seven types of communication encryption in Skype: its servers use AES-256, the supernodes and clients use three types of RC4 encryption - the old TCP RC4, the old UDP RC4 and the new DH-384 based TCP RC4, while the clients also use AES-256 on top of RC4. It all is quite complicated, but we’ve mastered it all. If you want to know more, come to Berlin for 27C3 to hear all the juicy details on how to use this function to decrypt Skype traffic.

With best regards,
Skype Reverse Engineering Team"
For auxiliary hardware for the Arduino, use a breadboard, and get components from a salvaged electronic device - an old pre-2000s TV is best, but anything will do: a radio, stereo system. They should ideally be pretty old so that they contain enough discrete components. Newer stuff is all SoC - System on a Chip - just a big proprietary non-reusable chip and very few other components.

You can desolder and reuse pretty much any component: connectors, passive elements (resistors, capacitors), switches, active elements (diodes, transistors), LEDs, speakers, relays. You can even reuse bigger functional blocks like power supplies or power amplifiers. I used to do this all the time when I was a teenager.

Nothing like having an idea at midnight and scavenging the components to try it out at once, and not having to wait next day to buy them. Plus, it reduces e-waste, which is horrible to recycle, despite what we are told.

And stay safe, learn you electric safety rules!

PS: nice first project idea - light alarm that wakes you up in the morning, like the fancy, pretty expensive Phillips Wake-up Light Alarm devices. Later, make the light able to fade-in using maybe a thyristor. A nice enclosure is hard to make though - that's where Phillips has the advantage.
Pirate Bay Hack Exposes User Booty
Ironically, this blog wasn't benchmarked either:
504 Gateway Time-out
nginx/0.6.35
The main page works though.
If one guy working from a closet at MIT can destroy your multi-million dollar business, then you are in the wrong business.
I would be willing to bet your Atom notebook has a chipset in it that would support an ISA device were it present on a non-existent ISA slot. But it does not actually have an ISA bus in the sense of something actually connected to those pins.
For typists, 60 words per minute is about 60x6=360 key presses per minute (6 = ave word length of 5 + a space).

Watch a guitarist's or pianist's fingers, and it's quite amazing how fast the movements are (even or especially when the fingers are your own). Writing with a pen requires surprisingly rapid movements. It can be quite hard to even follow them - the hand really is quicker than the eye. We have amazing engineering.
Hey, did you read me? New drugs are invented even when there is no patents around! Necessary investments are made even when there is no patent system! Introducing patents does not benefit pharmaceutical innovation. It has been observed empirically, in the real world.

Your point here is wrong. Unless you can tell why the empirical evidence I speak of is inconclusive or non-existent, I suggest you accept it.
Divvy on Reddit - the aftermath
HN London Meetup next Thursday
Since the last HN London meetup was such a huge success, we decided it would be a crime not to do it again! We'll be at the same venue as time, so please join us next Thursday, 15th July at

The Water Poet,
9-11 Folgate St
London, E1 6BX

We've now setup a meetup group to help track numbers, so if you'll be attending please RSVP at http://www.meetup.com/HNLondon/

We look forward to seeing you all there,

Ben and Dmitri
A New Data Center in 4 Months
Early this year the regulations for H-1Bs were significantly tightened, which had the effect of zapping one of their most abusive uses.

The government is being sued on the basis that these new regulations where not created properly (there are laws and rules to follow) and I saw a hint that they're claiming there's no basis in law for them anyway.
You just keep saying "it has been observed empirically".

Name the drugs.

edit: Also, explain (as I keep asking you to) how it is that the companies are to earn back the money spent on the R&D investments, if there are no patents. You say there is plenty of empirical evidence. Tell me how it is done.
Here's a link to the meetup group: http://www.meetup.com/HNLondon/

And the google group: http://groups.google.com/group/hn-london

Hope to see you there!
It's not that hard compared to other skills. Anyway web development includes a lot of stuff, and you can really go low level if you have to implement algorithms and address scalability.
Many companies recruit and retain good people by not being shits. They want you to be successful while you work there and after. I have little doubt these guys left with good blessings.
How can they afford to offer that at $5? It is a scam?
I knew what Conway's game of life was and had implemented cellular automata before, but when I first saw this symbol I did not recognize it as a gilder even though I knew the concept of one.

Actually, I thought it was an incorrectly drawn portion of a Go board.
Buffett recounts the best advice he's ever received
Coldest Antimatter Ever Produced
Is java copying something from the .NET world?
I am basically a .net developer and i know most of the things in c# come from the java world.But i am a huge fan of some of the latest developments in .net like Lambda expressions,LINQ,Extension methods etc.
But by seeing this http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~briangoetz/lambda/lambda-state-2.html ,i get the feeling that the trend is reversing.Or am i being obtuse?
If you have something constructive to add to the discussion, you're not irrelevant. :)
Very Cool Search Engine: Parallax - Watch the Video
> They're missing a much-needed feedback loop. Alpha users, and beta users.

That's true, but they've learned. Windows 7 is a massive success and Office 2010 is a great product. Both had extensive testing and user feedback.

Windows Phone is getting a lot of traction before it's release as well. Developer tools, getting devices into the hands of developers, releasing information very early long before it's release and getting it out there.

MS in the past few years has started to ramp up it's outreach to developers and the community, and it seems like they are working that way with their consumer oriented products.

And let's not forget that they have gone into markets not #1 and taken the spot. Linux was supposedly going to be the Netbook OS, but then in practically one year, MS took over that market.

It's not like Apple doesn't ever release underperforming products (see Apple TV for a recent example).

MS is struggling, but struggling from a good position.
Stackoverflow(includes sister sites) dump: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/creative-commons-data-...
That is true (and I am very happily typing on one right now. Yeah IBM) but lets face it - they were sold to Lenevo because IBM couldn't make a profit on them.
How to analyze C-code for parallelization
Tweaked by the packager, who thinks the hinting patents are still valid and hence disables decent hinting during compilation.
it's really good to know that. thanks a lot for an information.
Companies have their ups and downs (thats the funny thing about the runway start ups usually talk about, there is normally another in the end that you go down on).

But Fog Creek and Y combinator aren't near big enough for them to collaps like that, so I doubt that they will fall that far.

Remember the bigger they are, they harder they fall. And lets face it - Microsoft is insanely big.
Hover on iPhone/iPad
You read a visionary interview about the fundamental labor reforms that made the pursuit of happiness a reality, from three years before the depression started, and your comment is to start the old saw debate about the causes of the great depression? And it's top comment?

Are we voting for goodness or troll points? I get confused.
You're right. I've had a whole datacenter lose power. I am definitely not comfortable with assuming that multiple servers somehow magically makes it safe.

I think the word "durable" implies that the data is written onto a disk. I think of what they are talking about as "redundant". Redundant not-necessarily-durable data.
I dont understand the constant desire to replace the relational model. It works great to store most types of data in it, and its very flexible to do ad hoc reports if you have a good understanding of SQL.

I &#10084; ORDER BY, GROUP BY, DISTINCT, SUM(), COUNT(1) etc ducks
LoseThos is done. I wrote it all myself. My next step is to fix reality. That's daunting.
Simple expedience. This way, he avoided having to thumb ".net", a non-trivial reduction in aggravation.
When probability gets in the way of understanding: The boy problem
Sorry but I doubt that holds - MS produced their worst software even during that time, Windows Me.

And Win7 is miles ahead of XP, although XP is better than Vista.
You're absolutely right, obviously.

And I'm sure that if your children developed some terrible illness, you wouldn't want to use any pharmaceuticals to keep them alive longer, because - as you say - the disease might get them in the end anyway.

"Stuff that makes you not die" is, as you point out, obviously worthless to everyone.
Same day as Google London Open Source Jam (http://osjam.appspot.com/)..
Exactly: Like some guy who creates software that wins a lottery or horse races or whatever and is raking it in. What incentive does he have to share that with anybody?
L-Theanine: Anxiety Reducer and Mood Enhancer
And instead had to wait for his 3G network to make a bunch of round trips. Typing .net on an android phone really isn't that bad, and if he typed "nexusonehacks" with no problems, I don't see a problem with ".net"
"Remember Paul Graham's words:"? Seriously? This messiah thing has got to stop.
Do you find it unusual the letter was sent by the CTO and not the legal representative of the company?
Code Complete

Programming Pearls

The C Programming Language

Effective Java
Creative Entrepreneurs Less Selfish
Just a thought here… there might be a difference between a development box that's mostly idle shutting down unexpectedly and a production server that's under heavy load, maybe starting to fall behind on some writes, freezing and crashing.

Just saying that you might want to test it in a ways that simulates an overwhelming workload, before you trust it.
I doubt anything will happen. Stories with similar elements don't usually end with an underdog victory [1]. If the software was already released, people could create "I'm mirroring the Shazam code, come and get me Shazam!" blog posts. The news cycle would have been well-fed, and might have generated enough hype to cause the Shazam CTO to learn to leave the issue untouched.

However, now someone must develop the code. It'll take time. When it is done there will only be passing interest in the whole issue. This is interesting enough that it'll get some action on blogs over the next week, but I don't see this becoming a long-term win for the original author. Just Shazam and the blogs.

[1] One example is "How I Got Sued by Facebook". http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/04/how-i-go... . It combines elements hackers love: the rights to your information, an underdog, free speech, and an interesting technical problem (indexing all of Facebook). But no public databases of Facebook user data sprung up as a result.
Your program would infringe my patent.

I think Hcho meant that when you draft the patent, you draft it in terms of an algorithm - though I also think he was speaking tongue in cheek. You could draft a patent that was specifically of one particular implementation, but it wouldn't give you much protection.
Sometimes, people will describe the algorithm, and also supply a particular implementation (to prove that it really works). A long time ago, it was actually a requirement to supply a working model with each patent, and there's a museum of them somewhere.

Aside: Actually, pure algorithms aren't patentable, because they are too abstract. For a software patent to be valid, it has to be inventive (non-obvious to one skilled in its field) with respect to the state-of-the-art (at that time it was invented). Bilski, the recent (US) patent case, held that you have to assess this inventiveness of the algorithm and its application to a problem as a whole. It's not enough to apply an algorithm in an obvious way (no amount of "post-solution activity" helps, if it's not inventive). I think this distinction of algorithm vs application is similar to product vs market. An algorithm is a solution, but it's not patentable unless it is a solution to a problem - and that taken together, is not obvious.

A famous patent law case (whose name escapes me) involved a well-known chemical that was patented as a fertilizer. It wasn't previously realized that it could be used as a fertilizer - this was a non-obvious application of a known thing.

OK, I'm sure that was more than you wanted.
Managing Conflict
Within the context of the discussion, vi is horrible.

What benefit does vi provide for a user that will only ever use it once? Why should he bother learning it if he's not going to use it but one time?

However, vi is good when you plan to use it often. The skills learned will benefit you years to come. It's worth a learning curve.

Both these ideas were noted in the article, and from my take, expanded upon by the above commenters.
Twitter Launching Analytics Product Soon
Augmented reality taken to the extreme
Crackpots in computer security: The neighbors are looking at me weird
im NOT ON DRUGS.
Ok. So we are almost 100 years from the last significant reduction of work burden on humanity.

How many times industrial technology has doubled its efficiency since then?

Why Americans still work as much as then (or even more)? Where the benefits of having better industrial technology went? Is your daily life that much better than life in 1926? Does cost of any advanced piece of equipment that you use now in your life that did not exist back then justifies all of your effort multiplied by our incredible technology that seems to be be missing?
Firefox looks terribly hard to use this way. I also enjoyed how his popup on his site blocked everything he was doing and he had to go and close that.
Peter Norvig's Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming. The most awesome programming book ever (imho).

To quote Darius Bacon [1]

"It's not just that Norvig is smart; he's specifically skilled at writing really good code, apparently because that's something he cared about and worked on. ..

Norvig's book _Paradigms of AI Programming_ has 900+ pages presenting code as instructive as that Sudoku solver; I've never seen a better collection. http://norvig.com/paip.html "

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=863660
Browse products of ebay, amazon, bestbuy in pictures
It was very common in all communist countries, which pushed hard towards industrialization. They thus transformed rural farmers into suburban industrial workers.
'Robin Sage' Profile Duped Military Intelligence, IT Security Pro