skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Utopic lets you see what content is trending amongst your friends
I made this into an easy-to-follow Twitter list: http://twitter.com/DHS/telegraph-top-investors
Don’t let go..
A patent troll is a company who sues over at least one patent, but does not produce any products. As a result, the company cannot be threatened, because you cannot impact their "sales" in any way (e.g. by threatening with other patents) -- they have none. This is in contrast to the typical situation where two companies threaten each other with patents and then (usually) hammer out a cross-licensing deal.

This is an industry term, not an insult.
Scaling A JavaScript Codebase
Disney acquires gaming engine startup to build HTML5 games outside of App stores
I think gst's comment makes a lot of sense, although it might or might not apply to this particular case.

The assumption is that the patent system is one that is fundamentally broken, resulting (among other things) in such patent trolls who exploit it to their own benefit.

Suing them for patent infringement can be seen as fighting "within the system", in effect legitimizing the system, instead of calling it out for being totally absurd in the first place.

With the danger of falling under Godwin's law, here is an analogy: imagine someone is persecuted by an oppressive regime for being part of an ethnic minority. Someone might oppose this persecution by pointing out that the person is in fact only 25% part of the ethnic group (one grandparent), whereas the law applies only above 50%. This could be seen as a worse response than taking to the streets to protest against the regime.

EDIT: I am explaining what I understood to be gst's point, I hope I am not totally misrepresenting it.
Not to make modifications, but, as far as I understand, to merge/integrate patches to the vanilla kernel from other sources.
Whereby this again now is not about the idea but the implementation.

But in many cases, this is also right.

See Amazons 1-Click as an example. I haven't really looked up the implementation details they describe in their patent but I guess it mostly follows the straight-forward implementation of this.
that is kind of the idea right now.

alpha release. there will be early adopters who "get it". others won't. that sucks, but instructions / FAQs and whatnot will come later.

releasing is a feature :)
As mentioned on the page we've had the letter for a long long time in the alphabet, however since almost no swedish words started with it, V and W were sorted together in dictionaries and other word lists like phone books.

The best part about that was that even though it has a separate pronunciation (V: 've' and W, 'dubbel-ve'), when used in abbreviations it is common to say 've' instead of 'dubbel-ve', so when the web came along everybody said 've ve ve dott' for www. instead of 'dubbel-ve dubbel-ve dubbel-ve dott'.
Which is nice.
That makes the effect much less impressive.
Sorry, it was a quote from the TV series Red Dwarf. I have nothing against IF or corduroy!
"who's only commercialization of their technology is to sue other people"

There's a very good reason for this behavior:

If you are a small company that sells a product, enforcing a patent related to this product is nearly impossible. If you try to enforce your patent your opponent will present ten other patents related to your own product and destroy your company.

For big players this is typically not an issue, because they often exchange patents with each other - and thereby also prevent new players from entering the market.

But for small companies the only viable approach in regard to patents is to sell your granted patents to other companies (instead of enforcing them yourself). And it's very obvious why the companies buying the patents are so unpopular amongst the big players: As these companies don't have any products on their own, they can't be extorted when trying to enforce a patent.

Disclaimer: Personally I'm against any patent laws because I think that patents just hinder innovation. But I don't see any reason to blame companies that play by the market's rules (especially when your own company supports those rules).
I would also appreciate if there was even a shortest FAQ somewhere, so I can at least know what to expect before I sign in.
This applies to ideas too I think - if I have a general 'idea' of how to perform a task, that can be expressed as an algorithm which I then implement in [whatever language]; I could then be unwittingly violating a patent on the idea.
Pretty sure it started as an insult and became an industry term after the fact...
I've seen this friend map on Facebook in the last few days and noted it as one of the very few naturally spreading apps I'd seen on FB of late.

I think the last one was the "what writer are you" thing, which was also a HNer.

The plural of anecdote is data, so my new assumption is that every viral app I see on FB is a HN project!
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I'll be writing a FAQ on my blog tonight.

(I'm the creator)
- You only consider one development scenario. It takes 15 mins to download/install/configure/set up vhost at the very minimum, that is: when you've already done it so often that you know all steps and download location by heart. In all other cases it takes a multiple of that.

- All unnecessary steps to get a task done creates friction. Having to set up Apache for the 100th time is downright irritating. Eliminating friction = good.

- "And I think that lots of people (myself included) already see PHP as a pretty bloated system" Yes, well because "lots of people" think its true doesn't necessarily make it so. "Bloated" usually means to complainers "has functionality that I don't use", more often than not followed by a euphemism for "please take away functionality that others use so that I don't get confused by all the options".

- The practical merit of a programming language is not defined by its syntax, or even library. It's defined by those things plus its ecosystem plus its tools plus it community plus all things around it. Ease of use is one of those things too, and a simple way to run scripts is a great boon to this ease of use. Python has an interactive shell, should that not be part of the default package? Some languages come with a build-in debugger, should that not be in the default package? All these tools increase the practical use of the language - one can debate where the line should be drawn, but an argument along the line of 'it's not strictly a part of the language or core functionality so it shouldn't go in' does not make sense.
Great comment, and from my perspective a view that is perfectly complementary to Joel's post. It could very well be that the same people who are firing off hundreds of resumes are also hitting up dozens of their connections to try to find work. As you mention, hiring even one of these people into a role for which they are not qualified, whether through resumes or private placement, could really damage a small company.

When people make a statement like "xx% of all hires are made through private placement," my first thought isn't "wow, networks are such an effective hiring mechanism!" Rather, it's that our other alternatives are frequently so lacking that we rely on "known-unknowns" in the absence of a better method.

Networks are both a strength and a limitation. When you rely on them for hiring you might be able to attract the best candidate from within your set of connections, but if there are 100 people outside your network who are objectively better then you will have missed out. Unfortunately, limitations in our current tools make it very difficult to determine whether those 100 other people are actually out there and, if they are, how to find them.
Melody RC1 released
Wouldn't they just attempt to withdraw it from a now empty bank account, leaving you with overdraft fees?

EG let's say you have $100 in your paypal account, which you send to bank account A. From there, you send it to bank account B, leaving bank account A empty. Paypal decides to withdraw $100 from bank account A, leaving you with -$100 on A, and $100 on B?
They wanted software patents on trivial ideas.

Now they have them and don't like them?

Well, I hope the "troll" wins, maybe the big ones then start lobbying against "patents on ideas".
I feel generally dazed and confused. Have played many a MMORPG in my time but this one is ... it's a bit more confusing than even Ultima Online.

Which is to say, bravo, you've finally made a MMORPG for power players! Kudos for that.

Now, the thing that confuses me the most is that, I start a quest and by doing absolutely nothing, the percentage of its completeness goes up ...

Another thing that baffles me is that, ok I can tweet. But it doesn't seem to do anything more than act as a farming mechanism for my stats and a virality factor for you ... I dislike farming with a passion.

edit: and there are other players in the game who seem to be people I follow on twitter ... but I'm not sure they're actually in the game or just randomly on twitter. Therefore I can't tell if I should interact with them or not ... or what that would even entail from a game point of view.
It's not as simple as you make it seem! After installation, you still need to edit your DocumentRoot, enable mod_php, maybe set up a virtual host, maintain which document on your machine corresponds to which port on your machine, ...

Your scenario of running a simple test.php from the default DocumentRoot is a very contrived one, one that only the very first beginner will ever use, and even then only because he doesn't know how to configure Apache. Plus it assumes a lot of things: that it's on Linux, that it uses the distro-supplied packages, that they use a setup that is the very basic one, ... OK for beginners, but serious friction ('friction', not 'unsolvable problem' - that still doesn't make it unworthy of being addressed) for many experimentation scenarios.
My case too. I don`t have it in Picasa either, but I do in Docs.
farming mechanism for your stats? please explain.

I'm just a dude who made a game - there's no evil corporation behind this...
Well next to my stats it says "Tweet to make your stats go up"

So does this mean that if I just start spamming like crazy my stats will go up like crazy? That feels like the general farming motto behind MMORPG's.

As in, "kill 5000 wolves and gain a level! yay!"

(don't worry, I'm not calling you evil, just trying to figure it all out, I generally like the idea)
I'm really looking forward to where this will go. I can't wait for the FAQs just because I don't really know what to do with the items that I've collected so far. Is there a possible way to navigate through my followers' timeline other than what has been tweeted in that "5 minute update"? And are you going to add the @ reply feature where a drop menu will show?
> Why is someone abiding to the patent law a "troll"? What's wrong with suing 397 companies if (i) you have a valid patent (ii) the law says that those companies violate your patent?

The lawyers prefer to call them "NPEs" (Non-Practicing Entities). Part (i) has been called into question by prior art. Part (ii) has yet to be determined and may never be in this case.

In any event, even were those true, with respect to Non-Practicing Entities, even if their actions are legal, there are serious questions over whether and how those actions "promote the progress of Science and Useful Arts" as per their Constitutional mandate. I'm sorry if that's a US-centric justification, but this is a case involving US-based companies in a US court, so it's applicable. Software simply isn't very patentable subject matter outside the US, to my knowledge, though there are a lot of laws out there and I'm sure I don't know the half of them.

> If you don't like how the patent system works lobby your government to change the patent laws, but don't blame the companies who utilize those laws to make money.

I have advocated against them to the best of my ability, but I don't see why I shouldn't call out people who inhibit progress in pursuit of money.

Would we really be better off if science had been retarded more? The average person in the US is better off than ancient kings. For all their gold, they couldn't buy the things we take for granted. And yet I fear there are people yet today who would trade away an even better future for thirty pieces of silver.
"I think it's better if the devs run something close to the production environment."

I used to think so too, but I changed my mind a few years ago. Have diversity in the environment in the phases leading up to staging/testing leads to many problems being uncovered early - hardcoded paths, platform assumptions, potential performance issues that only show under some circumstances, ...

I think it improves the code if various devs use different installation paths, DB's, development tools and even OS's. I've seen many deployment issues that would have trivially been detected if devs had different environments.
Update: I've created a very simple site you can refer people to.

http://thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com/
I imagine your feelings run deep enough re: vendor lock-in that you certainly don't own a PS3, Xbox 360 or Wii, right? If you really don't want to be tied to one vendor and you're not also thinking about the biggest "locked-in" platforms on the planet then you're being hypocritical.
I used to wake up in the middle of the night and sneak downstairs with my brother, lugging our family's first computer, a Compaq Presario all-in-one (similar to the gumdrop iMac) onto the dining room table so we could connect to the internet. With a 486DX2/66 and 4MB ram, we'd load up Tabworks and use the /worst/ browser in existence (don't recall the name, but it was probably a rip off of Mosaic) and dial out to IDT.net to connect to the internet.

Later on, after saving money to upgrade to a whopping 12MB ram and Windows 95, that same computer allowed to to play multiplayer Diablo, which was my first taste of IRC. Naturally it was all downhill from there, and I played Diablo for two years straight.

There were a lot of fights in our household over phone bills and busy dial tones, and I'm sorry that my sister was left stranded at school with no ride because I was busy downloading FreeBSD, but now I'm a successful software engineer and budding entrepreneur in the education space, and it's all thanks to those formative moments panicking at 3 am, trying so hard to muffle the sounds emanating from my 9600 kbaud modem as it connected me to an exciting new world.

Thanks, Peter. Thank you so much.
So does this mean that if I just start spamming like crazy my stats will go up like crazy?

Well sure, but that's up to you. It's only spam if you make it spam.

FYI the game does not append any hashtags or anything like that. Your tweet is exactly what you type. There's no viral benefit received by the game just by tweeting normally from the game.
Build me a JIT as fast as you can… [Squeak COG VM]
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quicktime. really?
With WebGL on the very near horizon, I think making HTML5 games with the 2D canvas is going to die before it even gets off the ground.

With that said, I'm sure the guys at Rocket Pack are insanely talented and will be on the forefront of WebGL development when the time comes.
So, uh, you destroyed someone else's property just because you didn't like it? I hope I never need to work in the same office as you, then.
Part of it is IP self-defence. If a big tech company does not have a corresponding patent portfolio, it may trigger legal action from likewise big patent holders. Usually someone like IBM already has related stuff to whatever you're doing and building up a portfolio is just making sure you may have something to make counter-claims. It may not always work (see Oracle vs. Google), but it's expensive to sue and the stakes are very high.
Nah, that's not how it works. You're misunderstanding the research in question.

What they found was that paying larger performance-related bonuses caused bad performance. I don't think the finding applies to base pay.

That said, you're probably right that working conditions will be more important past a certain salary level.
I had an app for iPad day one as well and I was competing against a hell of a lot more iPad apps than Honeycomb developers are currently competing against.

And despite being outside the Top 100 paid apps in the iPad app store, I still made a few hundred dollars per day for the opening month. I wonder how many Honeycomb developers will be able to say the same.
no , first i've heard of it
Ah, good point of course. For that reason, I really hope he used some kind of completion in the IDE/editor.
Actually I'm more worried about things like scrolling.

Dropping offline storage is such a big deal there would be a major outcry (plus it would destroy their marketing claims that Safari is the best browser - regardless of whether that is true or not).

But if the mobile safari user-experience is just a little bit worse than a native UI then that would cause real problems - especially on an Apple platform where there are large numbers of developers who notice and find that kind of thing important.
* I'll happily defend the use of the term dysfunctional programming. Using this term serves quite a lot of purpose, in particular, among other things, to break a false dichotomy that regularly misleads. Your next question emphasises this, unknowingly I assume.

* Yes, there are legitimate complaints about functional programming. However, there are many "arguments" that are "not convinced of the merits", which simply argue from ignorance. I am not interested in discussion at this level, unless it's ultimately constructive i.e. teaching.

None of the points made in the original post are compelling. They can all be easily over-turned. I can also make predictions about how much is understood based on the points made (there are many examples of this, raising my confidence that this is simply a very far-out misunderstanding). These predictions would help for teaching.

I am offering an invitation to remedy the misunderstanding. I do not care to address arguments from ignorance.
What does the average unlocked Android device cost there? In Thailand, most Android phones are still USD $400+. Oddly enough, last-gen Blackberry devices are the most popular smartphones (semi-smartphone) here since they're often USD $150-$200 unlocked. The HTC tattoo is cheaper, as are a couple others, but for the most part, Android is nearly as premium as iOS here.
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I FIGURED IT OUT!!

Apple signs with their own certificate when posting on the MacOS store. We were checking for OUR own certificate (the one we used to sign when submitting to Apple.)
WHY DID NO ONE MENTION RTM? It's by far the best list out there
> I literally have not had a resume since I read this

Every job I've had has been through personal connections and recommendations. That doesn't mean a resume isn't useful. You will likely be interviewed by at least some people who don't know much about you. A one-page summary of your experience and background is a good way for them to prepare. It means you can spend your interview time with each person more effectively, and you don't have to keep repeating the same ten-minute spiel over and over.
It was legal at one time to kill Mormons in Missouri. It was once legal to expel a man from your restaurant because of his skin color. In some places, the law will fail to stop you from abusing gays. You are still a bad person if you take the law up on its offer. I'm not saying any of these are equivalent to the issue at hand or even to each other, but they demonstrate one thing very clearly: Mere legality does not convey morality or even social acceptability. Patent trolling perverts patents for an unintended purpose and usually depends on duping the Patent Office to do so.
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Yes, that was my first impression too. Looks much cleaner, info displayed better. The old ones look a bit stuffed, they highlighted simplicity in the new ones.
I find that people who are truly good actually love what they do. I don't know if I fit in that category, but I remember walking to work a few weeks ago thinking about one particular project: 'if I wasn't here I'd be doing this for free'. That said, I'm paid above average for the industry.

The best combination of passion and reward I've ever seen has been small hedge funds and quant shops. They're smart, love what they do, and have equity and fat bonuses. I've been lucky enough to be both work with and be rejected by these guys and it's one of the few cases where I truly believed the 'one percent' angle.
I was going to add how I thought Half-Life given its military bases is probably the only major shooter of its era that actually had a reason for all the crates and barrels. I think the circus you end up in (if I'm remembering the original game and not an expansion or total conversion) is actually the only other place I saw a genuine crate. Incidentally it was filled with food for the animals and not headcrabs.

My problem with most shooters is that the crates are placed randomly. At least in Half-Life the crates were more often than not in a storage room/area/rack than piled in the middle of a room or in an obscure corridor.

Fallout 3 resolved the box problem too, in that most items were actually found on shelves. Something I hadn't seen since the days of isometric RPG's where tables actually found their heyday.
Apple was pushing HTML5 as much as anyone else if not more.

Agreed. I would say they still are pushing as hard if not more.

To claim that it was only ever because of Google is unfair at best.

I certainly never made that claim so I don't know where you're getting that from.

My point is that Apple is pushing HTML5 hard right now and if they ever stop, I'll get nervous. How will I know if they stop pushing? If/when the Google team is implementing features developers care about and Apple doesn't. Competition is good.
Unless you describe the entirety of your obligation to society as "force" (All taxes, the requirement to abide by laws, facing ostracisation for failing to be polite/deferent where society deems appropriate) I think your use of the term is disingenuous. I could equally say that "I do not wish to replace a system dedicated to the public good with a system motivated purely by greed" if I wanted to be equally disingenuous.

Personally I believe that the current US educational "reform" movement is presenting a false dichotomy and that education can be reformed and made better without falling back on "Free market makes it better" because demonstrably in many cases is does _not_.
I mean my social graph. The one that's easy to use and immediately useful to me :)
I think this is the same in Germany (www.google.de is pronounced vay-vay-vay google de).

I could be wrong though, I'm basing this off a net radio advert I heard in german once.
Actually I am pleased to admit I do not own a PS3, Xbox 360 or Wii. I play all my games on my PC. Although possibly I am being a bit hypocritical in that I generally use Windows.
Is that a feature or a bug that texts from downvoted posts are greyed down to unreadable but not the hyperlinks?
Its like how being diagnosed with cancer is a sign that you're still alive. At least temporarily.
Of course, we say "punkt" rather than "dot(t)".
1-4 yes, 5-10, there to make up the numbers :-/
Yes it seems like they will be:

Hardware accelerated 3D

Coming with WebGL support

source: http://rocketpack.fi/engine/