skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some day, real people (non-techies, non-Westerners, people who are not 20-something males, etc) will almost certainly be about as plugged in as the mean HNer is currently. I cannot conceive of this happening without generating staggering amounts of wealth.

Groupon just invented a new industry with yearly sales which are quickly going to eclipse 10^10 dollars by figuring out how to do distribution for local businesses over the Internet. I think in 2020 that will be remembered by historians with special interest in modestly successful advances. Somebody is going to do something as revolutionary as Groupon/Google/Facebook to a market as big as "healthcare" or "India", and (to misquote an amusing line from Social Network), they'll be able to buy Harvard and use it as their pingpong table.
They would say that at Reddit, wouldn't they.
I don't know about other territories, but in the UK this has been tested in court for ADSL providers.

The claim there is that you have unlimited access where access is defined by time (unlimited being 24/7/365.25) rather than unlimited bandwidth to use in that unlimited time. To back this up as a valid argument, it was pointed out that back when dial-up was king most providers (even those with only expensive per-minute access plans) had limits on how long you could be connected in one session and in total in a given day (this was to reduce the number of incoming lines and modem devices they needed to provide the service). So in this sense "unlimited" would be better termed "always available" or "always on".

Of course this isn't how they advertise the service, the adverts very distinctly imply (but are very careful never to actually state) that unlimited means bandwidth as they talk on end about downloading and streaming and show the happy people in ad-land watching HD content with reckless abandon.

A grey area still not tested to my knowledge is providers who have changed what the work unlimited means where it previously did explicitly mean unlimited bandwidth (when they were naive enough to think people would not find a use for enough to cause a problem).

One legal recourse t-mobile users may have in this case is if their plan previously explicitly stated a cap or fair-use policy higher than the 500MB. If you plan has gone from 3GB to 0.5MB then you probably have a case for demanding you keep the 3Gb until the end of the contracted period or to have your contract terminated early at no cost to you. Of course your original agreement may have weasel words like "unlimited with fair use policy, _currently_ set as 3GB/month", which would give them a get-out clause.
On January 15, 2011, Wikipedia will turn 10
Any court settlement that ended up awarding something that has to be publicly reported. We wouldn't be able to find out what, if any money he was given.
sounds familiar. I was involved around '03, when Polycom and about 25 companies were up against the 4 or 5 biggies over the patent issue. It was like watching a bunch of school kids get beat up by teenage bullies. Very ugly.

MPEG-LA are really just a bunch of thugs. They remind me of Tony Soprano: "Satisfaction guaranteed -- or double your garbage back!"
I find that the text size is perfect in Firefox. It's crappy in Opera, Epiphany and Chrome, but it looks great in Firefox.
From what I understand, switching apps is done using 4 or 5 fingers, so the 3 finger gesture is still free to be used by the app itself.
The invention of money
Please don't take yourself down to their level.
Guide to hardening WordPress
Just get a gaming mouse. They're exactly what you want (sturdy, comfortable and reliable) so don't be put off by a high DPI - you can always reduce the sensitivity. I like the Logitech G9 or MX518. The latter is $35 at Newegg and you can regularly get them cheaper with rebates.
This move might signify changes to be made on YouTube later, which will be significant for a large segment of Internet users.

Also, Chrome is heavily used by early adopters and tech crowds, so it will influence their perception of things and this might trickle down to more average users over time.
MSN specialized content sites doing great
I'm sorry, but it doesn't state they were drunk. They had a party and decided to test other liquids. Wine came out best.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.0666
GarlicSim 0.6.1 released with inplace step functions
Home Equity Loans, Home Loans
Home equity loans are a common loan type people take if they have a large amount of equity in their home and want to make some improvements, buy something large, etc.
Ask HN: How can I improve this game?
http://www.teampinch.com

This is a simple game of Tic/Tac/Toe played between 2 groups over the period of a week.

In this case its between Hacker News and Reddit.

Teams make one move every day.

At midnight Central Standard Time (CST) the most popular move for the day, voted by the this group, will be taken as the group's move and the game progresses to the opponent.

Here is the feedback/criticism so far:

1. the game is too simple. it should be more complex like chess (i feel i will put it out of reach of most users if I do this)

2. it takes too long

3. we don't want to login through facebook

I feel there is a lot of scope for this and would like to pursue this. What direction should I take?
The Italian entrepreneur who moved his team and got funded in 19 days
Strictly speaking, it must give the _gene_ a reproductive advantage, not necessarily the animal. Often, these two advantages are aligned. But they need not be. This is the case in kin altruism. And this is also, why "promoting longevity beyond the reproductive stage of one's life cycle" affords sometimes very much such benefits. Example: grandparents can help raising their children's children (and their children's children's children ;)). Kin altruism becomes even more apparent in ants (or other social animals). Worker ants or bees are pretty much infertile but they help a lot.
Google? If you follow the link at the bottom of the article will lead you to the PNAS paper. You'll learn that the mice strain is called MRL[1].

It can regenerate its ears, cartillage[2], cardiac muscle after cold-induced lesions[3] but sadly not after infarction/reperfusion[4] and digits (to some extent, in neonate mice)[5]. There may be more.

[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/107/13/5845.full

[2]http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2001-08/wi-rit080201....

[3] http://www.pnas.org/content/98/17/9830.full

[4] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1067-1927.2005....

[5] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1524-475X.2007....
I'm sure interesting articles can and have been written about the economics of stripping, this article is not one of them. I'm sure it will get plenty of attention for having the word "stripping" in the title but it is other pretty much worthless I'd say. Unless it really is a revelation to say strippers wish to earn money and do so by engaging the customers most likely to both have it and to share it with them.
Language is more than just words. It's culture, a way of thinking, a new point of view. If you're not interested in those things than you almost certainly never needed to learn a foreign language (English will get you by in most places and if you don't care about culture, why worry about the places it wont?).
So weight reduction (or the ability to eat more food and stay the same weight) and regeneration - now that does sound good!
I don't know, I think I'd rather have a physical button that I can press with the hand I hold the phone with than have to do a four-figured operation on the screen.
Totally agree on using multiple browsers. (Plus ever since Google started enforcing that "one gmail session open per browser" rule I've been forced to use both Firefox and Chrome when I want my personal and work emails open.) I think my time with Chrome also helps me look past Firefox's deficiencies, if only because I'm not constantly frustrated with them.
> (does it count as commercial when they are not charging users for the video, but are monetizing the site with advertising?

Yes.

The license[1] mentions both 'free television' and 'renumeration from other sources'

[1] http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/AVC_TermsS...
Illinois Income Tax Increase: Legislature Approves 66% Tax Hike
Some time ago I wondered if this could be done with a small CCD (Like the one in your mouse, see the mouse-scanner project: http://spritesmods.com/?art=mouseeye). I tried it once, but it's very hard to do this in real-time.
The fact that Sony is bringing the case doesn't really stand in the way, because the DMCA is a government law, so must respect the First Amendment. The government is the one prohibiting certain kinds of activities, via a law passed by Congress; the fact that the DMCA's enforcement mechanism is suits by private parties doesn't change that.

Via the DMCA, the U.S. government prohibits "dissemination" of "technology, devices, or services" designed to circumvent copy-protection systems. The first-amendment generally doesn't allow the government to prohibit "dissemination" of things that qualify as "speech", so the open question is whether any of the things being prohibited qualify.

(Universal v. Reimerdes, one of the DeCSS cases, upheld the DMCA against a similar challenge, so it's an uphill battle. A stronger case would probably be an attempt to suppress a cryptography-research paper via the DMCA, since publishing papers is the kind of activity usually assumed to be protected by the First Amendment. There've been a few potential test cases of that sort, but the plaintiffs seem to always back down before they get to a ruling.)
Microsoft's Firefox add-on simply replaces the browser's <video> player with a Windows Media Player object, so the fees have already been paid for as part of their licence to include an H.264 decoder with all copies of Windows.

Supporting H.264 makes sense for Microsoft as a licensor of the patent pool.
This. Look who are major patent holders at MPEG-LA: Microsoft and Apple. Do you trust your blood enemies to a gentleman's agreement? MPEG-LA has been decidedly vague and "don't worry, be happy" about their long-term royalty plans. One might assume they would never increase the price, but can you be sure?

In fact, MS and Apple could even pull out of MPEG-LA at some point and charge exorbitant fees. Google simply does not want to be at any risk for that sort of FUD in the marketplace. I think that, combined with their ideological DNA (Patents BAAD, open source GOOOD) explains the decision pretty well.
Ask HN:what do you think about the cad market?
Hi
i respect this group allot , now my question to you
i was looking for dxf online viewer that let me share and collaborate with other users , but i didn't saw any real sulotion for this , there is something in the Autodesk that lets to see it as soom in/out image.but i needed more then that.
what do you think about the idea of cad dxf online viewer and collaborating app?
That's why 4.3 is beta, so the developers can test it with their apps. It's not for everyday use at the moment.
Oddly enough, I asked 3 people in the office what they would do to close an app on an iPad and they all did the finger crumble gesture.
Or better, have the plaintiff cover all legal expenses on both sides. I believe this is already done at the judge's discretion but it doesn't get enforced often enough.

Surely, this would be one way to prevent patent trolls from suing and hoping for a quick "Cheaper to throw money at you than see you in court" settlement.
I grandi viaggi da fare nei piccoli mondi in miniatura - Blog Top Sites
Ask HN: What I need to know when registering a Delaware Corp?
I am planning on registering a Delaware Corporation soon and have some question.

If I plan on having angel investors and venture capitalists in vest in to my company what is better? C corp or S corp?

When I register a corporation does it register also a trademark for the name of the corporation? so it _can't_ be used by any entity but this corporation?

Is there anything else I need to know?

That's all the questions I have for now.

Thank you for your time hackers.
The Cambridge professor was Ross Anderson. He replied to a letter from UK Cards Association requesting the university to take down a research paper by a PhD student. The issue was about the chip-and-pin no-pin vulnerability.

HN Discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2039117

Take down request: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/20101221110342233.pdf (pdf)

Professor Anderson's reply: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/ukca.pdf (pdf)
That is more accurate. In terms of hardware + software it is closest to the Sun storage appliances which are Solaris or Linux with ZFS plus management tools.

The Sun promotional literature[1] refers to 70%+ cost savings on their units over comparable systems from EMC (the old school market leader). It was the fastest growing product at Sun, as it allowed companies to cut down storage costs using a model similar to what Google pioneered with Big Table and GFS.

[1] http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/storage/un...
I was thinking about this yesterday, about how useful it was the visited links are down-played!

There's always monitor setting differences too, I guess.
In the nicest way possible, this is probably just an ad piece for his service (http://www.wpacracker.com/) It has been possible to brute force WPA-PSK for ages, you just needed a lot of computing power. It appears he did this with a dictionary attack, not bruteforce (see: http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Cracking-WPA-keys...) and, so, it is no wonder it was fast - but that is limited.

EC2 is an option, sure, but it's going to get expensive for commercial purposes. (I have issues with their costings... if it took 20 minutes, even using just one instance that would be.. $5.60, and other sources state he used many more than one :D EDIT: ah, sorry, he did use one instance and they are talking about his "6 minute" promise. Still, nothing you couldn't do on a decently fast "local" machine for cheaper)

We ran some trials with EC2 and the cost starts to mount for anything complex. A few of racks of meaty servers is, if you have a volume of work, is a cheaper investment.

Ultimately it looks like he is dealing with dictionary work - which is fine (and does work well). But will quickly fail with anyone competent (I going to hazard a rough guess of about 25% of the time based on my experience), which is where work with pre-computed tables and bruteforcing comes into play.

I'm not sure there is much substance to this story, sadly.
India Has Its First $1 Billion Dot-Com
Any other Python devs still going to stick with 2.x despite this? I know I will be, for the foreseeable future.

This was a big step for 3.0 adoption, but there is still a long way to go. It reminds me of PHP4 v PHP5, but with far less clear benefits (and far less support).
I'm in my late teens. Makes me feel old too :)
(function foo() {
console.log("hello world");
setTimeout(foo, 1000);
})();
And since you've reminded me. I've seen Mr. Garret-Glaser argue several times that B-Frames aren't under patent any more and haven't been for a few years and that therefore the Theora devs are "retarded" not to use them. Clearly he's started listening to the people who were telling him otherwise since he notes it as a patented technique in that link but it's worth noting if you're holding him up as an expert in codec patents.
Meh, as long as you're only picking your own locks, who cares? (And yes, there are people who pick locks for fun.)
Current design is very transparent, it's like there is no design. Logo is very small (truly, why do you need a bigger logo?!), navigation is placed on where we expect with the size we even don't notice it's 14px. Font type is as simple as possible. I wish I did not see this topic because from now I'll think about design of the site while I read it.
> This. Look who are major patent holders at MPEG-LA: Microsoft and Apple.

Do you have a source for that? I've read quite a few times that at least Microsoft pays more for licenses than they get back.
OpenJDK is the Sun (now Oracle) controlled distribution under open source terms. GCJ (which isn't really a "Java" as you'd normally think of it) was put on the backburner by RedHat once OpenJDK became available.
There are for sure strong cultural problems in Italy that are blocking innovation, but unfortunately it's not just a matter of getting money. Most of the time the real problem is in the founders. People usually don't like the idea of working very hard for something with a big amount of uncertainty about what the outcome will be, many are still very focused in getting a 'stable' position somewhere.

Another problem is that in general there is no trust in the idea that you can create business in the Internet. In part this is due to the fact that the online advertising market in Italy is smallish at best, that users are rarely willing to pay for services, and other stuff like that.

But... I think italians too often overlook what is good about Italy, and if there was not this cultural brake we could do much more interesting things. For instance there is a model where it is normal for a son to stay in the home of the parents up to 30 years old or more, without the need of earning at all. This means that you can use a few years to develop your startup without any required money.

Also in my opinion Italy is a place with many talents. It's not hard to find good people, there are many programmers as in the 80s home computing and electronic was a real boom here as an hobby, and schools are still in decent shape.

So what should Italian entrepreneur do? It's hard to focus on the italian internet market as it's small, but it is either not very easy to penetrate the US market from Italy. It's a very hard question. I would say that probably it makes sense to still beat on the US market for a technological company, but perhaps not just with finished products for the end user, but also with business to
business technology, or electronics (things like Arduino).

Unfortunately some fields where we could be very successful require money that is hard to find, otherwise Italy could be
the "Apple" of all the things apple is not doing, mixing
good design and technology. From alarm clocks to other kind
of appliances that are usually poorly designed and ugly to
see.

Well just a number of random ideas...
What I'm saying is, unless you're coming in as an executive, I doubt the 2 year clause is enforceable and I doubt the companies would even try.

But if you adhere to them by coincidence (i.e. never turning down something you want to do because of them) then I suppose they are as irrelevant to you as they are to me.
Ask HN: Any PHP devs interested in working on Squerch?
My name is David and I am a London-based interaction designer in my day-job, but I have been working on a startup idea for a while now, and would really like to take it to a more serious stage, hopefully getting onto a program like YCombinator. I launched my startup - http://squerch.com - a couple of months back to get some initial user feedback, which has so far been good, even though the algorithm isn't performing as I'd liked. A programmer friend of mine has been doing the PHP coding up until now, but he is so busy with the day-job, it's slowing down the development of the site, when I want to push it forward. I really really want to make a success of the business, but at the moment I'm pretty much a one-man band, and need to build a team to take it forward. As I have no funding, I will be looking for a developer who sees real value in the concept, and will take good equity in the business. Work on the project will be part-time to start with, but will be growing with every tweak of the search algorithm ;) Loads more ideas planned, but need a dev to help it grow quicker. Get in touch :)
Luck
You'll need it
Point taken, but I think there's a difference between casual and professional, extended use. For casual use I can see touch taking over more and more, and for professional use - such as for graphic designers or compositors - the mouse isn't always the best input device to begin with.
http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avc-att1.p...

Microsoft:
US patents: US 6,563,953
US 6,735,345
US 7,289,673
and a number of foreign filings, likely of the same IP.

Apple:
US 7,292,636
US 7,548,584
US 7,551,674

US 7,339,991

doesn't matter if they pay in, the point is they are patent holders, and have a say in licensing terms.
Well I'm totally jealous... I'm around his age trying to get my stuff out there... no luck so far though
Is it possible/practical to program android in a language other than Java?
So the quick and dirty back story of this question is that when I originally read Google's response to the Java lawsuit by Oracle, Google made reference to the fact that android doesn't use the Java virtual machine (it uses some other VM, but the name escapes me at the moment) and went on to say essentially that Java isn't the only language that can be used with the OS.

So when I read that it really got me thinking about how great it would be if I could program android apps without using Java. This is relevant to me because I know plenty of programming languages but I really haven't picked up Java or its predecessor C++ (technically I did make a basic android app essentially using what little I have learned of C).

Anyway its been a few months since I read that story and I have been digging around here and there (not too seriously) and have come across a few posts/blogs/ect affirming that it is possible and there is a tiny bit of documentation out there (for instance I found some python users out there using "Jythonroid")

Anyway the question is, is it really practical to program android in another language (yes I realize android utilizes XML in addition to Java) and if so which is the language(s) of choice?

Additionally, any bread crumbs that can be left leading to documentation would be very much appreciated.

Thank you.

Student

Daytona Beach, FL
Great site!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
> it is normal for a son to stay in the home of the parents up to 30 years old or more, without the need of earning at all

Yes, instead of needing to be "ramen profitable", many Italians have "pasta investment" from their parents.

I also agree about the quality of people here - I've never felt "lonely" in Italy, in the sense of not having good people to chat with about tech stuff.

I think one strategy that has worked out very well is what Fabrizio Capobianco has done with Funambol: company HQ in Silicon Valley, with sales, marketing, and that sort of thing, and then R&D in Italy. Pavia, in their case, which is a far nicer, cheaper, and more livable city than Milan. One of the "P cities", as Severgnini, an Italian writer calls them, the mid-size university towns: Pavia, Padova, Perugia, Pisa.
Is the problem with Flickr or Yahoo? I feel Yahoo management has let down Flickr users.
Is there an HTML renderer example for this somewhere? I'm not sure how can I make a graph interactive with canvas?
http://imgur.com/VFLOs

I went the opposite direction and went with Georgia (a serif font that was designed for better online legibility) and made the following tweaks:

- Tested out a block style button (1st listing) and adding more horizontal padding to make it harder to misclick on upvote.

- Made the header a neutral grey because someone said their eyes always moved to the top.

- Added more padding to the top just to give it some breathing room.

- Made the font underneath the titles slightly larger and made links turn "black" when hovered over.

I messed around in Firebug for this and in doing so realized the whole HN site is a gigantic table. Very interesting...
Causing quite high CPU usage in Firefox, is this generally true for HTML5 animations? (60% of Core2 Due @ 2.66Ghz)