skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I bet you don't personally know a single "little innovator guy" who has successfully been protected by a patent."

I know plenty. My last boss being one of them. His product was copied by a competitor (the entire design) and sold under a different name.

It got so bad that people were calling up think we were this company and it hurt sales overall. He sued them in court, won, and actually got the entire company as a settlement (in addition to around $500,000.

His product was simple enough to copy and without legal protections, a much larger company would could easily steal his entire market share.
They may be part of the landscape but that doesn't mean taking them at face value is good journalism. And I think the reliability of journalism has a large impact on how aware and informed it's even possible for a reader to be.
You know, I really never wanted to join Facebook in the first place. I only got involved after a couple of friends invited me. After about half a year blowing way too much time on Farm Town, Mafia Wars, etc., I pulled way back, and only drop on occasionally now, usually just when I get the odd notice in my email. If FB started trying to charge me for anything, I'd give 'em the Holy Water and Silver Cross for good. Of course, there's still the matter of what personal information I've actually given them, and the challange of getting it removed, which brings up an interesting thought:

How likely might Facebook try to monetize its 'assets' by charging users for its privacy protections? Maybe they'd start offering to close/scrub accounts... for a fee? It reminds me the old joke about the school band's free concert. Admission costs nothing, but you'll pay ten bucks to get out!

Given
Interesting... but, um, what does "micro" mean again?
Cutler is definitely under appreciated, but I agree he is a one man army in terms of what he has created.

I say under appreciated, because he seems like a rather quiet figure who does not do a lot of showboating or seek attention and because of those things he tends to be forgotten.

Also, is he not the lead developer on the Windows Azure Platform?
Where in Idaho is as unhappy as Central California? I ask because I'm thinking about taking a job in Idaho.
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I agree; and it's not like people have never received an email while sleeping before.
This is pretty awesome, but doesn't PHP have some framework or library for running webapps with their own web servers? I really dislike trying to get PHP working and then have to get nginx or Apache working.

At the risk of sounding too stuck up, Ruby and Python have many frameworks for running themselves as web servers.
Dada mail lets you specify a max per hour for batch sends. Never tried it with huge mailing lists however!
Property is both tangible and intangible.

Peititio principii. Many argue that even the phrase "intellectual property" is disingenuous; a term invented by the entrenched stakeholders to gain support for the laws they would like passed by creating a false analogy between physical property and knowledge.
This falls squarely into the "buy on the rumor sell on the news" pattern we see shortly before every Apple announcement. There was a run-up on Nokia stock in the preceding week, quite possibly out of the hope that Nokia was going to make a drastic move or sell outright to Microsoft or Google.

You can't interpret stock signals on such a short-term basis. A better snapshot of the market's confidence in Elop would be to look at NOK performance since his hiring (since many have been predicting this move for MONTHS) - NOK is up over %15 since September 2010.
The amount of risks that Bill Gates would have (supposedly) been wiling to take (due to his superhuman ambition) doesn't make a difference. The support he had allowed his risks to actually come to some end and would have helped him survive failure should it have come to that. There is nothing in the history of Bill Gates that suggests that Microsoft was successful due to it's competitors' lack of ambition.
Android in the works?
"what the actual cost of education would be and remove all the useless excess courses added to the curriculum unnecessarily."

couldn't agree more.

i am currently in college, and i have to take 3 engineering electives (classes, outside of my engineering major), 2 social science electives, and i get to take 3 "any/free" electives.

one could make an argument that it broadens the educational experience or whatever, but from experience, half these classes are BS, and almost all of these just suck up a lot of time, which could be better spent focusing on one's chosen field of study/ or other interests.
Sounds more like a Poll...in which case #1 is no doubt the correct answer.
I mean how about considering other places like Singapore
Well, it's not actually a genome, it's just 1 million snp locations. Genome is about 3.1 GB. For humans, at least.
No, but the thing is some people have their device of choice set to emit audio cues when receiving an email. This was 3:30am EST. Fortunately, said device was downstairs.
Elop gives a very credible answer to why Nokia shunned Android: http://video.allthingsd.com/video/nokia-ceo-on-choosing-wind...

In short: Nokia would give Android so much market share that Android would be unstoppable. Which sounds nice, but it would mean that Nokia would very quickly have almost no leverage over the ecosystem.
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Personally, I don't think my followers would mind me sending 2-3 tweets within 5 minutes if they contained informative, non-robotic messages. I still just don't see the point, unless I'm missing something. shrug

I think your design looks real good, though.
If only we could truly activate noprocrast mode in our genetic code by simply changing 3 base pairs...

Imagine how much money the people who discovered it would end up making!
I hear you.. I'm using a PHP framework to be sure, but it doesn't come with a web server yet. I have a kind of love hate thing with PHP myself - distributing it isn't all that easy. That said, I made a debian linux image all set up if you'd like to just try it for a while before taking the plunge into a custom install. http://code.google.com/p/streeme/wiki/InstallingStreemeHomeS...
And he wrote one of the first JIT code generators for Smalltalk-80 while at ParcPlace.
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I would say it should make us realize we are no more than mere simulations in some huge computer about to have the power cable pulled by god's boss before he tells him to get back to work. (scifi book idea )
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> "Denatured" implies there has been some chemical alteration of the alcohol, but in fact it is just intentionally contaminated with toxic solvents like methanol or acetone.

That's not true anymore, at least in Poland and probably other eastern European (heavy drinking) countries. Due to denaturate usage by very poor alcoholics (they drink it through a slice of bread to filter the taste-altering substances), it's no longer intoxinated with deadly liquids.

So it seems our alcohol regulators understood the issue described in the article many years before.
Colleges don't give a damn about tuition costs. Students don't give a damn about tuition costs. The cause of all of this is the federal subsidies of student loans.

If the direct result of a university raising tuition by 10% is that 5% of the student body drops out because of costs they would damn well find a way to make schools cheaper. As it is right now the incentives lie in making fancier student housing and more expensive programs to compete with other schools funded, ultimately, with federal money.

On the other hand, if the main costs are salaries it might not be so simple. Good people are expensive.
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I'd be great if you (or someone else) happen to have a couple of enlightening ones, and would you like to share them with us?
Can someone explain to me what "sorted by foxpoints" means?
Wouldn't it be great if articles like this one actually included a useful link, like to the actual 8th Circuit decision, instead of useless internal links?

Here's the decision:

http://www.ca8.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/new/getDocs.pl?case_num=...
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Just out of curiosity, where can I find out about your game? I clicked around your profile & portfolio links, but I can't even find out the name of it, unless it's there and I'm just not recognizing it. You have me curious.
Cool.

Do you recall the title of the book? I am unable to find any reference to it.
They want your source and will almost certainly pirate it:)
I went to college at the University of Iowa in the 1990s.
In-state tuition came to about $2,000 per year.

Even adjusted for inflation, that would be maybe a little over $3,000 a year today.

The costs of higher education are out of control.
It is also an easy way to earn karma.
And how about iPad in the works?
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I had to choose between MIT and the University of Iowa when I graduated high school.

My tuition was paid by a small amount of scholarship and a combination of Pell Grants and student loans. I could have gone to MIT and ended up with a massive debt, but decided that I didn't want to be saddled with that.

You better believe I gave a damn about tuition costs.
While this seems to be mainly a headline grabbing talking point that is lacking any path to implementation, Rick Perry (or at least one of his speech writing advisors) seems to have some interestingly disruptive ideas about using technology to make education both better and cheaper. The call for a $10,000 bachelors seems to hinge mainly on utilizing web based technologies and distance learning.

During the recent election he also advocated replacing elementary school textbooks with laptops. The laptops could be used to provide students with electronic copies of textbooks that were more up to date, cheaper, and able to be supplemented with educational games and multimedia. (http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9EUFAVG0.htm)

Then again if they come from Rick Perry those laptops might have several gigabytes of creationism along for the ride.(http://salon.glenrose.net/default.asp?view=plink&id=1312...).
> Their claim is that there shouldn't be liberty restrictions placed on software, but what they really mean is there should be different liberty restrictions placed on software, specifically the ones they happen to like more.

Of course there are different takes on this issue, but you make it sound as thought the GPL is a conspiracy by Stallman. The FOSS ecosystem encompasses a wide array of types of and takes on "freedom" and there is a place for all the different licenses developers can choose from to open source their code.
#1. if raising funding is not your concern, and just receiving additional feedback.. then I would think just pitch what you know and are passionate about.
This whole idea of "let's move to online learning and AP classes as a substitute for learning at an actual college" is going to seriously shortchange students. AP classes are nowhere near as educational as taking a college level class (even if you ultimately 5'd the exam), and I'm skeptical about online learning because I feel like a lot of what I learned in college I learned outside the classroom.
Without knowing more about what your company does it is hard to give an answer. In the state the question is in now you are asking if you should pitch company A or company B, but not telling us what either company does.

My second question is you say that your friend says that he told you "investors would never give us money for the reasons I had outlined." However, you never outlined any reasons why investors wouldn't give you money. All you have said is that you are happy about your company in the current state/direction and that raising money would fill in gaps.

You also say your friend suggested a "slight pivot", which to me implies a few minor tweaks to the business model, not an entirely new model. Further along you say that the pivot creates a whole new set of problems, which to me implies that these are more than minor tweaks to the business model. In my eyes, a slight pivot would be something along the lines of a different or expanded target market with the same product, but it sounds like your friend is suggesting a completely different product.

Finally, I don't know you or your friend, so please do not take this personally or the wrong way. Just because someone has raised money before does not make them an expert in funding or in what investors want. That's not to say, that the advice he gives shouldn't be considered with weight. But he may be relating your product to his investors and believe that his investors would not fund it. That is not to say that other investors may see the product in its current state as a win. For validation of this theory all you have to do is look at a VC like Bessemer. They even list their "anti-portfolio" on their website of companies that approached them and they turned down.

What is more valuable to an investor is if you have a MVP, traction, revenues, IP, etc... Personally, based on the info you have provided, I would pitch the current company as it is. You don't need money because you are "inexperienced". Reasons you need money could include, finishing development, sales, marketing, etc... Prior to pitching I would outline how much money I am looking for and how I would spend it. The investors are going to want to know what their dollars are going to and for so you might as well have that info ready. Pitching your idea in its current state at an event like this can be an invaluable experience. You may find that your friend's advice was right on and begin making the adjustments. Just because you pitch isn't a guarantee you are going to raise money either way, so use the event as a chance to gain experience pitching. You are not going to burn any bridges with a bad pitch, and either way you will walk away with connections. You can use those connections later to reach out for further meetings. Investors like to see resilience and determination in entrepreneurs, and by taking their advice from the pitch event and applying it to your business model, it will only make you stronger and more valuable to them in the end.
No problem... P.s. I'd love to help add some things if you'd like, as I'm the "planner" of my group! Make sure you have things a bit north too (Tree Top Trekking, zip lines, old steam train, steam ship cruises, etc - I split my time between the city & Barrie )
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Wikileaks publishes what people send it. There has been a bunch of non US stuff in the past.
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I heard this story about a Tsar in Russia, who was told that the province with the most doctors also had the most illness. He promptly ordered all doctors executed.

I'd say that bad schools get more money because they need it. In a school that's practically a war-zone, you need lots of money just to replace the essentials that students wreck.

Bad schools often have good inputs (students per teacher, facilities, etc), but they also have things like ex-students lurking outside the school gate (dealing drugs? signing up gang recruits? heckling the students? who cares); and many of the parents don't exactly help the kids get their homework done.

There are programs (cash transfers to poor parents, if they meet certain conditions) that have been proven to work (through randomised trials - something that Mexican politicians are better at then US ones), but it's more expedient to look for "root causes" (play the blame game) than look for empirical solutions that work (even if you don't understand why).
So Matt, is this link profile not complete spam?

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/www.couponover.com%252Fcoupo...

Yet this page ranks #1 for "chegg coupons" weeks after reported as spam in GWT. For every one JC Penney there are 100 "couponovers." Sickening.
It remains to be seen whether or not this move will help Nokia or Microsoft at all.

There are at least 2 huge things in their way, as I see it.

One, a lack of developers. If few apps exist for Windows Phone, the platform will suck no matter what else these companies bring to the table. The Windows Phone platform might be innovative, but please...it still lacks features that its competitors have (and uses yet-another-language-and-API). For developers, this means that writing original apps may be harder, and porting apps certainly will be harder. The platform won't grow quickly without quick ports. And with just a few thousand devices sold, apps may not make much money. Since this platform is essentially unproven, it seems particularly insane for Nokia to gamble, because they've created nothing but uncertainties for new developers, and alienated the entire base of developers that they used to have.

Two, especially without apps, about the only way to woo new customers is to compete on price; and by now, how can they offer a low price without hemorrhaging losses for a year or more? This "worked" for the Xbox, but if Microsoft were any other company it would have gone under using that strategy. Microsoft hasn't bought Nokia, either, it's just a partner; so how much of the throwaway cash will come from Nokia, and how much from Microsoft?
A major factor is the Baumol Effect - we can't easily apply productivity increases to labor-intensive tasks like education. I mean, robotics and better tools has greatly increased blue-collar productivity, and computers and networking has greatly increased white-collar productivity, but at the end of the day, teachers can still only teach the same number of students and doctors can only see so many patients per day.

That's not to say that there have been no productivity gains (laparoscopic surgery, for instance), but that those gains have lagged behind most other industries. The best way to control costs in industries like education and medicine is to find ways to create productivity gains. If we could either make it easier for teachers to impart knowledge to more kids simultaneously or make the imparted knowledge stick better, we'd be easily able to solve this problem.
It was ineffective for the author of the article. That doesn't mean it's ineffective for everyone.
That articles is light on details. Renesys, who did a great job reporting on what was happening with Egypt's networks, is keeping an eye on the situation. Hopefully they'll have some details tomorrow:

http://www.renesys.com/blog/2011/02/watching-algeria.shtml

It sounds to me like Bouteflika might be volunteering to be next.

edit: I should note, as the renesys link above, that all of Algeria's prefixes are still being advertised publicly, so if they are blocking the internet at this point it is some kind of internal filter and not an Egypt-style total cutoff.
http://modernistcuisine.com/docs/ModernistCuisine_About%20th...
Also, remove gyms, college team, etc.
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> As for SQL Server, it's a decent platform.

... and purchased from Sybase. Though, to be fair, it has come a long way since then.
Ask HN: Looking for an older post - Predictions
There was a post on Hacker News some weeks ago about a company/org that had done an amazing job of making predictions. They were reviewing their (mostly tech?) predictions in the article.

I've searched in multiple places, but can't turn up the post or the article.
I don't read HN much, but I thought that in theory that's something you would expect of reddit and not HN? Isn't HN supposed to be above that kind of stuff?
Unless by computer you mean programmable computer or general purpose computer, which most phones aren't by the time they reach consumers.

For example, would the inclusion of the use of a cell phone render a method patent invalid under the machine-or-transformation test? Can any process implemented with a microprocessor satisfy the particular machine half of the machine-or-transformation test if the inclusion of the microprocessor makes the device a computer?
Nokia to cut thousands of jobs, Google reminds it is hiring
1. I do not like thinking about how badly they smelled.

2. I am very much enjoying OhLife's ability to make me write about my day, and this gives me a standard to shoot for.

Saturday, 17 September 1994, 2pm.
If I hear someone imitate Beavis and Butthead one more time...

3. I've got bad news, Bea- I mean, Jamie.
How much of subsidy is the state government providing? Utah also has very low in state tuition, but only because the state income tax subsidizes it.
I'm visiting Morocco in about 10 days. They seem relatively stable compared to Algeria, but I've seen reports of marches being organized there as well. It will be interesting.
Whenever there is a new web framework released there is the requisite number of people that role their eyes and say "why?"

I love the fact that folks are still innovations and trying different patterns and approaches, even if that means fourfteen web frameworks for java.

Checking out the tutorial, just wanted to Congrats the JWt author on the release.
> Different people have vastly different experiences of freshman physics. For kids who are pretty good at calculus, freshman physics is amazing

Absolutely. For me, freshman physics was one of the easier classes in college, and I could not for the life of me understand why so many people hated and complained about it. Then one day it hit me: the reason most people couldn't do physics is because they had a hard time doing the the math part and the mental "back of the napkin" calculations required to solve many problems.

Exploration is most fun when you are just about to get to your destination. Ninety percent of the time, however, exploration means enduring shitty weather, eating canned food, sleeping in tents and whatnot, and suffering through the terrain.
There's a great discussion of this project in Deep Time by Gregory Benford, which is where I first learned about it.

http://www.amazon.com/Deep-Time-Humanity-Communicates-Millen...
And the time matters how? The internet doesn't run on one time zone, it runs on them all. You should never expect to not get an email at night, that's just foolish.
Is it funny because it's funny, or is it funny because this will probably happen (in all seriousness) for real one day?

(rhetorical musing question)
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Actually it is, he assigned it in the parent post, == is the equality test. :)
It seems like Unix tools could be used to chop this up fairly effectively. For example, if you had a single text file with all target addresses in it, one per line...

- "split" could be used to cut the list into chunks (separate files)

- delays could be set up in tools such as "at" or "crontab", so that E-mails of each sub-file are attempted at entirely different times (e.g. an hour apart)

- a script written in shell or almost anything else could iterate over a given file's addresses and send messages
Usenet archive going back to 1981