skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This i found to be the biggest drawback of squat toilets . When you pee from standing position you pee all over the steps .
AJAX Just Got Easier: HTML5 allows Custom Data Attributes
Social Media Guide for Early Stage Entrepreneurs
I would presume he has in mind more pixels, regardless of area. see http://xkcd.com/732/
Probably because the 'imminent' bit is questionable. Matthew 24:36 - "No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father."

Certain preachers have seen 'signs' of the rapture's imminence - Hal Lindsay's made many ridiculous predictions over the years - but these have all been based on Biblical interpretation, while the 'no one knows about the day or the hour' passages are quite clear.

Of course, the rapture itself is based on some rather interesting interpretations of something in the Book of Daniel. Widespread belief in it is less than a century old.
Probably whatever the guy who originally sold it for. It's like the millions of other domain names that get bought or traded everyday. To know, perhaps 10 years in advance, that the next buyer is going to turn it into a $500M+ valued business is ridiculous. This exercise of looking back and asking that question of what you would have sold it for is really pointless.
As long as those patent numbers are on a product, people won't be as likely to do anything similar for fear of patent violation.

I don't buy that. At the very least you'll want to look up the title of the patent before getting scared off, which is an easy google request. And those patent documents all have issuing dates - if the data is 50 years ago, why worry?

What really gets me about the article are the claims about misleading customers. Unless I'm mistaken, customers don't care about patents. The numbers are only there so that if there is an infringement case, the patent owners can get more cash. The chilling effects of patents still stand, as you can never know if some product you think you just invented is covered, even a little bit, by some obscure patent. And they are all obscure, because it triples your damages if there is evidence you've read the relevant patents. But now I'm just ranting.

At least these guys have a product to write the patent number on.
Reddit Cofounder Alexis Ohanian To Join Y Combinator
How is this not an appropriate application of the patent system? The placing of patent numbers on products causes many people to not create imitations, clones and whatnot. If the patents are expired, there is no protection, so the placement of the patent number is an act of intimidation.

When the patent numbers are removed, people can start imitating, introducing competition in the market, and even commodifying things. Basically all the things patents prevent. This allows for increased overall market efficiency.

Since the patent system is in place, perhaps instead of feeling sorry for the poor companies being sued for abusing the patent system, maybe you should try to appreciate that some people will do this. Maybe they are scum, maybe not -- do you actually know anyone who does it? Most likely some are just looking for a quick buck. Some are doing it because it needs to be done. Some may be doing it because it is exciting new lawyering. How is this any different in terms of motives than a random sample of tech startups (replace lawyering with tech...).

Related: Do the people who launch suits to get patents invalidated make you sick also? Do you call them "just another form of patent troll"?
I'd add a huge one to the top of the list:

1) Pick the wrong mentor.

Quite simply, if a mentor hasn't graduated a student in the last three years, serious red flags should go up. Professors can get a ton of work done relying on research assistants and post-docs. But students need to be nurtured and many mentors just aren't up to the task. Their track record at graduating students is the best evidence you can ask for. Look for potential role models in that history.

If the mentor is a nontenured professor, ask for their advice but don't make them your lead mentor to sign off on your work. Tenure has many stresses and some are orthogonal to your interests as a student and future researcher. The nontenured need to be focused on themselves until they get tenure. They can have a lot of energy and novel thoughts, but since your results will be tied to their future prospects, your work will get undue pressure.

The edge case is the newly crowned associate professor. Fully interview the prospective mentor and get references. Your career will literally be in this person's hands. Make sure you know that this is a person who will challenge and inspire. Associate professors can be really, really great mentors, but you just have to be careful if they haven't graduated any students. If they have, and those students are already on tenure tracks, you likely have an excellent candidate.
Well much like you I relied on empirical information. I don't know anybody who uses it or who is likely to even knows that it exists.
Haha, no, that's the default scheme with slightly tweaked console colors. The difference is in content--some of them are mostly comments, others are HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Ruby.

Good find on the color scheme page though; I'm gonna have to play around a little with those!
Canadian Startups kick ass
Is Consumerism Killing Our Creativity?
There are two things you may not be considering, though.

1) Mislabeling products with fake or expired patent numbers can be pretty hostile. I'm sure it happens by mistake in many cases, but I'm also sure it's malicious in others.

2) A few lawyers might make some cash bringing these lawsuits, but it won't last. Companies will quickly fix these problems if they're on the hook for more-than-tiny damages. It's pretty clear that $500 wrist slaps weren't doing any good.

Intellectual property laws create weird instances of deadweight loss. This one's just obvious and visible. Less obvious and visible are excess profits a manufacturer might take in if they manage to scare would-be competitors off with irrelevant patents.

So yeah, I don't really have much problem with the lawyers who are exploiting this.
I have to wonder if the Linux desktop would benefit from giving up the ghost that is X Windows. I don't think you'll ever have that elegance that you see on OS X and Windows 7 sitting on top of X Windows. I tried Ubuntu last year, well I'm still using it, and I had some of the same feelings described in this article. I was impressed with how far along the Linux desktop had come, but still sad that it just isn't quite as good as OS X or windows. I think some of that quirkiness comes from X Windows.
I realize that the copyright date is only advisory, but if you're future-dating your work then what should that be seen as advising? Since future-dating your work is essentially stealing from the public domain, I think that any future-dated works should be legally seen as advising that anyone is free to copy and redistribute that work until the future date. That seems like fair compensation to me.
The fees are higher than I expected: http://www.the-business-of-patents.com/patent-maintenance-fe...
If, hypothetically, a rape had actually occurred (which we can't speak to at this time), could a genuine prosecution occur without accusations of a smear campaign? What if he really is a rapist? If that were the case, should he not be prosecuted because of the work he does with Wikileaks?

But I agree that Wikileaks has been editorializing too much. I liked it when they were acting as journalists, not activists.
> It is a qualification to conduct research... it is not about creating something cool/interesting and/or useful (particularly not the last one). It's about the journey not the product.

Yes. Yes, yes, yes. New PhD students should have this tattooed on their arms as part of the admissions process. I wasted an entire year trying to come up with a dissertation project because I didn't understand this fact.
Yeah, I hadn't see it and this is right up my alley.

I think once something is around a year old it really isn't a dup anymore, but rather a "classic" if it gets the votes. The classics I post in my Hacker Newsletter each week usually get a lot of clicks because of this.
I'd say this isn't the norm. Some of my colleagues who've been funded this way only got the money since they were unable to get other scholarships at the time. So their supervisor managed to scrape enough together to 'hire' them.

This has downsides since the student is effectively an employee of the lab. I've seen examples where conflict arose between what the lab needed from it's RA and what the student needed in order to progress with research work.
Man, as a grad student, I can't disagree with the first two points enough.

This is OK advice if all you want to do is finish a PhD as quickly as possible (ignore course work and any studying not directly related to your dissertation), but it's terrible advice if you want to (a) become a broadly smart individual or (b) do research later on anything else besides the tiny topic of your dissertation. Grad school is the only time in your life where you'll have the freedom to study all sorts of incredible stuff. If you leave academics, you won't have access to the resources, and if you stay in academics, you'll be constantly scrambling to crank out publications as a post-doc or professors.

> In the interest of personal disclosure, I suffered from the "want to learn everything" bug when I got to Ph.D. school. I took classes all over campus for my first two years: Arabic, linguistics, economics, physics, math and even philosophy. In computer science, I took lots of classes in areas that had nothing to do with my research. The price of all this "enlightenment" was an extra year on my Ph.D.

Only a year? Sounds cheap to me! When else in your life are you going to have the opportunity for this kind of enrichment?

Yes, taking linguistics classes is probably not going to help your future physics research. (Though it can still be worthwhile). But taking chemistry, math, and physics outside of your particular niche is incredibly helpful for teaching you different ideas that you can apply later.

Also:

>Einstein's Ph.D. dissertation was a principled calculation meant to estimate Avogadro's number. He got it wrong. By a factor of 3.

Yea, well, for their PhDs, Bekenstein's discovered black hole thermodynamics, Feynman came up with the path integral, and Hawking proved the singularity theorem. Yes, you can go on to be successful after a modest thesis. But you can also kick ass young. (Also, finding a method to calculate a theretofore empirically-measured universal constant based on elementary principles--and only being wrong by a factor of 3--is pretty incredible!)

Frankly, I just don't know very many grad students who come close to "shooting too high". I'm sure this professor has met a few, but is his concern really that they are shooting themselves in the foot, or is it that grad students who take chances for big breakthroughs (and hence, usually fail) are not very useful for advancing the career of professors?
What a wonderful story. Thanks, KoZen.
I've never worked anywhere that had so much politics as a University - and that goes for everything from start-ups through to multinationals.
Well, I'm back at the homescreen without obvious problems.
From their FAQ:

We are a bunch of friends... some of us are writers,
programmers, artists, .... Among our writers are two guys
whom you may have heard of: Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear.

http://www.mongoliad.com/faq

So it sounds like they are a whole bunch of people and Neil Stephenson is just one of many contributors.

Not sure whether there is a market for "buy one chapter per week for a year" books - Stephen King tried that a few years back, but gave it up due to lack of interest.

Still, it's an interesting (and natural) experiment. I don't think this particular implementation has much chance for success, but if they keep it up they may find some variation that does.
What would be most reasonable is "brand owner". Not manufacturer or retailer (unless they are the same as brand owner). The owner of the brand is the one who sends the designs for manufacture, including the patent number labels. The manufacturer just executes on that.
And he should know - Intel used to be in the RAM business, remember. Why did they switch to CPUs? Because they couldn't compete on RAM with the Far East fabs.

The solution then was to move up the value chain - why's now different?
> the international copyright treaty whose name escapes me

You're probably thinking of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention_for_the_Protec...
These deals are structured to lock gullible startups into a funding structure that returns the most amount of money for the "angel" investors for the least amount of risk. Obviously $6000 isn't enough to run a startup for very long (it can take years to build a successful company), and pretty soon the founders will need to ask for more money, and give up more equity in return.
HN Men: Art Urinals
Does git have the equivalent of "hg serve"?
Justin.tv Broadcasts Live From Your Android Phone
curl -O http://www.kirkhammotorsports.com/book_aoe/aoe_[00-23].pdf
Yeah, I know the feeling you're talking about. There's still some ideas that I'm not ready to let out for free yet.

Oregato is one I've had for quite awhile. I like the idea, but I'm not so passionate about it that I can envision working on it full time for multiple years. So it's easier to put it out there.
It sounds like he's trying to solve the problem that desktop Linux, in its current state, is used almost exclusively by hackers, and not at all by 'normal people'.

While 'normal people' may desire a clean look and fancy animations, there is a more fundamental problem. Linux is not easy. It's not easy to set up, it's not easy to use, and it's not easy to maintain.

A normal person can go into a store today, buy a computer with Windows on it, start it up, and be on their way. You can't do that with Linux. And if a normal person somehow discovers how to download and burn a disk image, once they get it on their machine, they will be presented with the inevitable task of getting everything to work. I have never installed a Linux distro that had functioning drivers for all of my hardware. I usually have to spend a few hours just configuring everything to work properly. It is ridiculous to expect that a nontechnical person is going to be able to do this.
Let's not get over-excited here. The WSJ article didn't seem to pick up on a June 2010 appellate holding: Someone suing for false patent marking must prove that the patent owner had a specific intent to deceive the public with the false marking. See http://www.townsend.com/Resources/legalupdates/Pequignot_Sol...
"and to boldly split infinitives that no man has split before" is one of my favourite Douglas Adams quotes ;-)
> To learn as much as possible before you irreversibly change it.

That's valuable too. But Mars's main value to humanity will be as a second home, not as a geologic curiosity.

We'll be much more secure as a species if we have a second planet where we can walk outside and breathe the air, even if the temperature will be stuck at ~250K.
I'm studying entrepreneurship at a Norwegian university (http://www.ntnu.edu/).

I will probably write up some blog posts along the way and post them to HN!
Socialists advocate a method of compensation based on individual merit or the amount of labour one contributes to society

The thing is, this makes no sense at all, especially not here on HN, where one of our core assumptions is that people should be compensated on how productive they are, not the hours they put in. Why should anyone care about the amount of labour, as opposed to the value of the end product?
Maybe I am just bitter because I feel like my PhD was a waste of time (and I did finish), but I feel like doing a PhD is a failure in itself.

On HN a lot of people seem interested in Doctoral study and seem to praise it as a good thing, but I am wondering, are there many people out there who found their years of a PhD helped them much on their start-up?

I feel my years of PhD study and the degree have not helped much.
Perhaps it's an act of intimidation, more than likely it was placed on the product years in the past and it would cost the company a lot of money to take the patent number off.

Also, if I'm looking to make a competing product, and I see a patent number on a similar product, would it not make sense for me to check if the patent is still in effect? I'm not just going to see a patent number and say to myself, "oh shoot, they already got it, guess that's the end of that."

And from a consumer perspective, do I really care if there is a patent for this product or not?

My compromise would be to say the company would be required to have the patent numbers taken off and perhaps a fine to the USPTO, but why should this lawyer get money?
How does Apple feel about WebKit being used in their competitors' phones?
If students in the bad environment are incapable of realizing significant gains regardless of their teachers whereas students in the good environment are likely to manifest gains no matter how bad their teachers are, then comparing deltas won't help.

In that case, good teachers will avoid such students, and bad teachers will seek them out. This is actually quite a highly desirable result - we won't waste a good teacher on hopeless students, and a bad teacher can't harm them much.

As I said, VAM gives teachers an incentive to target the students that they can help the most. Now that I think about it, it also gives bad teachers an incentive to target students they can't harm.

The more I think about it, the more I like it.
The initial momentum that these kinds of programs provide is huge...you're right 6% vs. 0% is a big difference but so is an actual company vs. one that might never have been.
I tried for a while to use variable width, but I do a lot of data driven work in Lua and find I make 2 dimensional grids quite frequently, and unfortunately, there's no good way to line them up with a variable width font in a text editor if the field sizes change row to row.

I suppose one answer would be to have a smarter editor that could imbed tables, ala a word processor, but that's certainly not a workflow I'm used to.
Bootstrapping: The Secrets of Great Entrepreneurs You've Never Heard Of
Congrats Alexis! From my time with you at the Awesome Foundation I know you'll do great things with YC.
Why don't any nyc incubators rent a shared live work space for all founders?
Hire a chef to cook and save founders time.
All founders live under one roof.

This makes a lot of sense in new york when the rental market is so fierce.
Here are the chapters I recommend you read first...

* Introduction

* Chapter 3: Billet Chassis http://www.kirkhammotorsports.com/book_aoe/aoe_03.pdf

* Chapter 4: Main Frame Rails http://www.kirkhammotorsports.com/book_aoe/aoe_04.pdf

* Chapter 17: Testing http://www.kirkhammotorsports.com/book_aoe/aoe_17.pdf

* Chapter 18: Aluminum Body http://www.kirkhammotorsports.com/book_aoe/aoe_18.pdf

* Chapter 20: Photo Finish http://www.kirkhammotorsports.com/book_aoe/aoe_20.pdf

* Chapter 22: The Book http://www.kirkhammotorsports.com/book_aoe/aoe_22.pdf

The craftsmanship of the body is mind boggling, realizing it was pounded by hand out of flat sheet aluminum into a body that is entirely compound curves and then polished to a mirror finish.

The machining is also mind boggling, the time that went into programming all the tool paths so that the tool marks left after the machining operations were "right" (mentioned in Chapter 10: Machining) had to have been immense.
I don't buy the analogy. Even if you work for a company that fosters what he refers to as a socialist work ethic that company is still operating in a capitalist system, subject to the usual market forces. What he is describing sounds more like a collegiate environment. The nature of software development, and other similar knowledge economy industries, naturally demand a more collaborative & collegiate approach to getting things done, but they are all fundamentally driven by market forces & constraints such as funding & sales.
That's actually a significant reason I am a capitalist. A capitalist, free-market system is one in which you are free to set up whatever little organizations you want, and they live and die on their own merits. There is no contradiction in running a highly socialist or even actively communist co-op in a capitalistic society, because it is not part of the capitalism idea that you must run that way from top to bottom.

This is not a conventional definition of socialism or capitalism. I don't have a problem with that per se, since the terms have long since become so fuzzy as to be useless without definition within an essay, but it is a little odd to see you proudly labeling what would more conventionally be called libertarianism or capitalism as "socialism". In this context, I'm not sure this makes any sense.
one of our core assumptions is that people should be compensated on how productive they are, not the hours they put in.

I must have missed that in the FAQ. Where is the list of things we swear we believe when we decide to hang around here?
Having a separate break area is often overlook in office layouts but it is essential. It doesn't have to be anything more than a partitioned area of the office where people can set themselves to 'feel free to have a conversation with me' mode.

In an open plan office, you are most likely to eat at your desk, which means you are distracted by email or news infront of you, and are also probably distracting other people who are trying to work.

In a private-office office, you take your food back to your desk and not talk to anybody.

Having a separate or designated lunch area, even in the smallest offices, sets aside a part of the day where you can mix with your co-workers without distractions and without distracting others. I can specifically recall great features and ideas that teams I have worked with have come up with during these little sessions in break areas.

You can also cut down what would usually take 5-6 emails copied to half-a-dozen people into a 30 second conversation over pizza and red bull. Like informal mini-meetings but without the scheduling, agenda or pressure to say something that makes you sound smart.
Smood it - share your mood with your friends
I suppose YC's answer would be Alexis :-) http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/01/reddit-cofounder-alexis-oha...
> why not just throw some stuff up there and see what happens.

Martian atmosphere is a good classroom-grade vacuum. Considering the enormous cost of sending stuff there (and landing it safely) we would have to be careful not to send stuff that would die in a couple seconds of exposure to water-freezing temperatures, water-boiling vacuums and ultraviolet that would give the average human a Röntgen tan in about 10 seconds.

Colonizing Mars will not be an easy undertaking without several breakthroughs in access to orbit, deep-space propulsion and radiation shielding.
PG's essays return to this theme again and again.
All I see are a bunch of tetris, two upside down deltas and a tank.

(BTW, what's the plural of tetris?)
From the article:

"The law on false patent markings is similar to whistle-blower laws. Anyone can file a claim on behalf of the government, and plaintiffs must split any fine award evenly with it. "

Blame the system, not the person.
I wonder if this is what Harjeet meant by the new announcement http://twitter.com/Harjeet/status/22654064109
I met Alexis in Thailand. I approached him not knowing who he was because he had a Reddit t-shirt so I assumed it would be cool to chat with him. We didn't chat very long but he sent me a Reddit bobblehead when he arrived back from his trip. He's an unpretentious all-round nice guy.