skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What does managing a PDF with graphics have to do with it? Is there something inherent in PDF files that capture this behavior?
Err, no.

Apple is bigger than Google, but the others are all smaller, generally considerably so.

Samsung probably gets close, but I can't work out the valuation of the whole Samsung corporation. If I'm understanding the company structure correctly the Samsung Electronics subsidiary is valued at $19B [1], vs $185B for Google. Nokia is $31B.

Edit: Unless you meant bigger on the linked graphic? In that case, yes, you are right. But that only indicates revenue (from mobile, in early 2010), not profits or valuation.

[1] http://www.google.com/finance?q=SEO%3A005930
Actually, to my knowledge Google has no history of ever suing over patents, not just in the mobile space but in search - where Google holds some very important patents.

Or am I forgetting something?
This is my first post on Hacker News. Glad to join you guys and see that you're talking about finances. I'm an accountant who is also a tax and business lawyer, specializing in micro businesses and creative projects. Hopefully I can contribute to the discussion.

This community is full of people who know how to hack code. I'd like to introduce the idea that it's possible to be equally creative with business entity design. Business laws and tax codes are just other types of codes, waiting to be hacked.

Corporations are one way to organize and that structure is well-suited to mature businesses. But it's far from the best format for beginning creative enterprises. It seems to be widely accepted that start-ups need to be corporations to make the transitions smoother as more investors are added down the line. It's time to reconsider that.

Start-ups have completely different needs than mature businesses and should not be strangled by all the baggage that comes with a corporation, in the name of 'making a smoother transition.'

It is fairly simple to start with an organization that is NOT a corporation and, thereby, avoid payroll taxes. Possibly ALL taxes, depending on the structure and the source of cash. This is particularly true if you are going to give equity anyway.

Do some research on entity choice. Examples might be a Limited Liability Company, Limited Liability Partnership (in some jurisdictions), Limited Partnership, Limited Liability Limited Partnership (also only in some jurisdictions), even go naked as as simple Partnership or Joint Venture.

By the time you're big enough to go public, you'll be able to afford the lawyers you need to reorganize. And that will be the least of your concerns. In the meantime, pick a business structure that is well-suited to your current needs, and can even help with some of your current headaches, like salaries, taxes, and cash flow.

So, yes, a good accountant will pay for themselves many times over. So will a good lawyer. Finding a good one is the real challenge.
Iran Says They've Built a 'Flying Saucer'
Data Journalism Developer Studio – Release 0.5.2 » Borasky Research Journal
You really think that your cell phone plan is "easy to understand"? What's your monthly bill going to be this month? I'll bet if you guessed each month in advance you'd never get it right. My bill's usually within about 10% of what I expect... until it's not and I get the pleasure of spending an hour on hold trying to figure out what changed without my say-so. This fuzziness means I'll never be comfortable buying anything from a cell provider, and so I'll never sign up for the $3 roadside assistance, or the $10 replacement warranty, or whatever.

OTOH, when I click "buy" on that 99¢ app I know I'll be billed exactly $1.07 (sales tax), not a cent more or less. A

Apple's completely nailed making me comfortable buying stuff from them. AT&T and Verizon haven't. Guess who gets my disposable income and who doesn't?
A great way to think out of the box, but the "indifference" always has two sides, like a scale. When people have a problem your startup solves, but they ignore it, they are not really indifferent -- they've just found another way to solve it which fits them better than your does.

Competition is not just other companies that do the same thing you do; competition is everyone -- and everything -- that solves the same problem for the same customer base. E.g. Coca Cola's competition is not just Pepsi, it's everything that is capable of ending someone's thirst, from tap water to cactuses.
Whoa. Looks like the Watson ball.
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I'm not sure if I'd call that the "#1 desired use case for Mono"; I don't even think such a thing really exists. I mean, I used to develop Asp.NET MVC apps with mono as the target platform, and my setup was fairly different from the one described in this article.

It pretty much boils down to how much customizing you want and the particular components you select to implement your application. The more customization you'll require the more setup work you'll have to get it. That goes for any platform and any mix of tools you pick, not just mono. With that said, if you just want a basic setup, you can get one just as easily as any of the competing platforms.
... which inspired me to hack up a memento mori for my own startup: http://startupdeathclock.com
Firefox 4 Release Candidate for Android and Maemo Now Available
Reminds me of (and same modes as) http://www.kaleidoscopeapp.com/#image .. same person involved? Very nice either way!
Everyone, especially those on the left of the political spectrum, should read 'Economics in One Lesson'.
Can Bees Color Maps Better Than Ants?
TEPCO reported it [1] and it was picked up by most of the news agencies.

I am really surprised that no one has thought to use an UAV with a camera to do visual inspection near the reactors. I understand the issue of radiation and electronics not working well but it seems like throwing an HD web cam up there would help guide folks. Something that will no doubt be discussed would be better telemetry during events like this. I'm sure secondary systems were in place but it surprised me that without power to the reactor buildings all of the sensor networks were essentially down[2].

[1] http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11032105-e....

[2] One of the news articles on the restoration of power to reactors 1 and 2 reports that this will allow them to read the reactor's sensors again.
Need 3rd Imagine K12 Team Member
I know there are a ton of articles, comments, opinions, etc. out there about how no "rockstar/ninja/superhero/whatever" developer worth his salt would reply to a post like this, but what the heck...it's worth a try.

1. What we're looking for:

- A technical, third co-founder to apply with us to Imagine K12.

We're open to technologies, but I'm intrigued by what I've been reading regarding the Lithium framework for PHP, as well as MongoDB.

Beyond developing our tech. I would love someone who would be willing to help me learn the coding ropes so that I can help with some small tasks down the road. I have a 30K foot understanding of software, but can't write a line of code. I'm a business guy who wants to learn the tech. and I need help.

2. What we bring to the table:

- I have sold over $1.5M in B2B custom software in two years with a small company, graduated from a top ranked college entrepreneurship program, launched a start-up (failed) and currently work as a project manager for a tech company.

My partner is a 3rd year law student who hustles and is an expert on our target market (it's not schools).

If we get in, we'd form an equal 3 way partnership. While finding the right developer can be a critical success factor, so is having the right team to market it. I believe we have 2/3 of the equation.

3. The idea:

- A Web based application that is free to the schools, but provides a valuable resource to our customers when the schools use it.

As it has been noted before, there is nothing at this stage to keep anyone from stealing an idea, hence the vagueness. Entrepreneurship is about calculated risk, and at this point it doesn't seem wise to describe the concept in further detail. Besides, the team is more important than the idea, right?

4. Where we're at right now:

- After a year of trying to fake it before we made it and sell school districts on the concept, we experienced firsthand what PG said when introducing the Imagine K12 program:

"Public schools tend to be the last to benefit from the sort of innovation startups generate, because they are so hard to sell to. Selling technology to school districts is like selling it to big companies, but more so. Which means startups hoping to build things for schools have trouble even getting off the ground."

That was over a year ago now that we had a considerable amount of difficulty "getting off the ground." Since it sounds like Imagine K12 aims to solve the problem of getting into schools, our next biggest hurdle is development.

5. Summation:

- A 2 person team with sales, legal, start-up, PM and customer experience is seeking a developer to be our 3rd, equal partner in applying to the Imagine K12 program (Deadline = May 1, 2011).

If we get accepted, we will commit to leaving our current vocations and working on the start-up full time.

I hope that was brief, but thorough.

Feel free to ask any questions.

If you're interested, please shoot me an email.

(Please try to be constructive in your criticism of this post. I learn a lot from HN and I it continues.)
I didn't know this before now, but apparently you can attach an onload (javascript) handler, and then populate the blank page from that.

(Example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/205087/jquery-ready-in-a-...)

I believe the question here is whether this event handler runs synchronously with the new window or iframe opening (causing the opener page rendering to hang); or fires off a bit later (asynchronously); or apparently in some browsers whether the event happens at all.

I'm sure someone who knows what they're talking about will correct me where I'm wrong ...
In the US it seems that most people are wearing clothing that's several sizes too big compared to in Europe, so it might work there because there isn't much of a difference between big and a bit bigger.
Intellectual property is an asset. If you are forming a company, then you want it to have value and the value is the IP and the contracts it has with the developers. As radu_floricica points out investors want to see more than a coffee pot and dead palm tree as assets.
On bad day for patents and law suits - when it rains, it pours.
I believe Thanasis gives a good insight of his efforts to find the right path. Great article. As in most situations there is no "right" path.

For people asking on what is the big difference to do something outside a major innovation hub, this is something been discussed so many times. In fact this question is self-contradictory, because the guy that wrote it, reads HN a SF news incubator, which in fact started off from another city and moved to SF! They should have an idea why they did that. In fact they explained how beneficial this move was.

Now off course there are other hubs of innovation, but everyone has his own reasons for deciding.
Time to trot out the Jeff Bezos quote again, from when authors were complaining about Amazon allowing used book sales:

"When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this."

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/1291
Could there be hope in arguing that "app store" is now a generic term for an online software shop?
Emoji on GitHub
The funny thing is that I actually understood what he was talking about. Very well explained and undeniably one of the coolest things you could have in a garage.
The mens rea for hypocrisy is that the alleged hypocrant believes one thing and is acting in a way inconsistent with that belief. They may be wrong about their belief, but that is irrelevant.

You assert that Microsoft's claims are questionable. Assuming that is so for the sake of argument (I have not looked at the patents so cannot say), I see no reason to believe that Microsoft thinks their claims are questionable.

In your first case, they likely believe that they have valid patents which they are asserting against an infringer. In your second, they believe that invalid patents are being asserted against them.

There is simply nothing hypocritical here.

EDIT: had the word "patentable" in the second paragraph where it should have said "questionable".
I like the swipe feature, but it's harder to grab and drag that tiny handle than to just roll over an image. With rollovers, I'd be able to flip through the two much more rapidly and simply.

Also, I should mention that Kaleidoscope is one of my favorite apps: http://www.kaleidoscopeapp.com/
I think Kaku is a sensationalist and often uses his bloated public image as a physics genius to pretend to know much more about certain fields than he (probably) does. That said, the cessation of the effects of Moore's law would of course have economic consequences, but the economy is adaptive. Further, consumers have become much more interested in technological aspects other than computing power, such as form factors and UX/UI advancements. I don't think it's necessary that if Moore's law became unproductive the tech industry would fail to make advancements that they might promote along the same fast paced life cycles of their current products.
Here's the actual link, instead of the badly broken hash-bang version that doesn't work reliably for me:

http://uk.gizmodo.com/5784074/iran-says-theyve-built-a-flyin...
Some more interesting data here. 12% of subscribers invite their email contacts, and on average they invite more than 10 people each.
Well, certainly it's an awesome move on behalf of Github—none can say the opposite, but I don't think it could attract designers (or at least, yet). Github is very code-centric; I mean for to "upload" new content in your repo you have to go through terminal commands and stuff. Not appealing for the designer. If and when Github can also be maintained through visual app(s), then it'd a cool tool for designers to use. But as far as I know, there are lots of professional designer communities out there already.
AMZN: Buy
What's the advantage of this over going shopping with a fashion oriented friend?
Ask YC: Patent Lawyers who work on equity/fee deferral
So I am somewhat new to patents, but I am working on an awesome fitness startup. We have been testing our equipment and software, and our hardware advisor says its time to file at least for a provisional patent.

I am not a fan of stealth mode, but luckily here in the US you can get away with talking to people about what you are doing, and have some testing ( we are currently in a gym already ), but we need to file before we start collecting revenue and go into the appstore.

Anyone know/have experience of a good IP law firm out here that works with startups?
I seriously think companies wait for another lawsuit to appear before suing. To try and minimise bad press.
Ask HN: Can someone please send me a forrst invite?
I just applied for membership on @forrst, mind checking out my application? http://forrst.com/i/77M #joinforrst
None that I can recall. The closest we ever get to this behavior is some light chiding.
I hope Microsoft succeeds in derailing this ridiculous trademark. "App Store" is way too generic. It's a "store" where you buy "applications".

Apple is claiming Microsoft has a generic trademark too, for "Windows", but Windows does not generically describe the OS itself so it's valid in my opinion. "App Store", however, is not.
Drunk On Licensing Fees And Patents, Microsoft Has Become A Joke
Nintendo to ‘Hobbyist’ Developers: No Thanks
How is this even legal in the US? - in the UK you can only sue the producer of violating product and not the distributer, and even threatening a distributer without having first won a court case against the producer is illegal (to stop companies strong-arming distributers with patent threats regardless of the validity of the patents which the distributer can't reasonably expected to be knowledgable about).

It seems in this case the lawsuit is against functionality in Android and B&N are merely the distributer.
I don't know of one. It would compete with "stock" image services that sell PSDs, AIs, etc. If you can find 10k+ free, "worth owning" PSDs that people give you royalty-free, the right person could definitely make some money with it.
Unlike a patent, you have to actively defend a trademark for it to remain valid.
And AppHarbor is making it even easier to deploy .NET projects (YC funded) http://appharbor.com/
Trusts are a coercion, and a crime greater than a bit of government trust-busting. (Or, in really far-out versions of anarchist theory, non-government trust busting. I don't know of any real-world examples of that, though.) I do not naively believe that an economy can be run completely without coercion, but that such coercion as is necessary should be turned to keeping the market free. The optimal ideal case for free markets simply doesn't obtain everywhere. Spectrum is at least dubious; perhaps now we could just run it as a free market and it could work (people with far more knowledge about radio issues than me have argued both sides of this, I can only sit on the sidelines of that one and wave genially) but that certainly wasn't the case in the analog radio era.
No I don't. As mentioned above, I think cellphone plans are incredibly complex. But typically it is clear what the difference is between the $40 plan and the $50 plan (usually some amount of minutes). I know I pay $30 for data. I know I pay $15 for texts. At least I know what I'm getting, and I can decide if I want to spend the money. And even when they're wrong they typically have some sort of basis for what they're incorrectly charging. In the software company example I gave above, even their own sales people could not articulate why I should pay for the higher product / what I would get.

And for what it's worth, my monthly bill is usually the same with Verizon. I did however have those same headaches when I was on AT&T.
I forget the exact names, but go with it. :-)

ZFS has two tables: A Block Pointer Table. This is your hashes of blocks and stays in RAM to let you know where on disk you'll find a particular block. It's also referenced during writing to ensure that the COW operations are transactional.

The DDT (DataDedupeTable) is similar, but points to de-duped blocks. You need enough RAM to keep this in memory at all times. Otherwise for every write you'll have to scan through the entire table on disk, find matching blocks, then modify it. You'll also have to scan through it for every read to see if the block you're looking for is de-duped.

I've probably mixed up the details. I haven't read the source, just used it. But that's my (maybe flawed) understanding of how it works.

Bottom line though, you DO need enough RAM to keep the DDT in memory. If you don't you'll see SEVERE thrashing and SSD or no SSD your disk performance will slow down from thousands of IOPS to tens of IOPS or lower.

This exact thing happened to us with Sun's 7310, loaded with the Sun specified SSDs. You need to be very sure you have the hardware for de-dupe, and even then the payoff is so small...

The only real use-case I can think of is if you're running a VPS.
Microsoft: competing in the courts.
because jokes are now accepted on HN

and S/N for jokes is frequently low

and jokes are frequently divisive

and lots of people will give a quick upvote to something that gives them a reward for reading (i.e. makes them laugh)

and evaporative cooling

and yadda yadda yadda
Upvoted. Ignore the moronic haters. (throwaway because i know i'll be downvoted into oblivion for disagreeing with the majority of HN users)
Curious as to what this was.
That's a great policy. Ironically, I wish reddit had this in their reddiquette.
But do you have a girlfriend/boyfriend? ;)
Why is this here?

To show the hidden complexity behind such a seemingly simple operation, I presume. To also show what sort of effects leaky abstractions can cause. I found the cache-dependent cases particularly interesting in that regard.

This article is trash.

The article is fine. It's a little Firefox-focused, but any Web developer should be able to follow it. Web developers deal with iframes, window.open and onload events all the time.

The author is either a Markov chain or indecipherable to anyone other than his co-developer in his little corner of the Firefox code.

The author is most assuredly not a Markov chain, and I'm not a co-developer in his little corner of the Firefox code, yet I understood around 90% of the article.

How did this get 14 points?

Presumably because at least 14 people found it interesting and worth their time.
I think saying that FP is bad for "manipulating state" is misleading.

FP is great at manipulating state. A pure Haskell function (State -> State) manipulates state.

What's being discussed is whether or not the state is manipulated destructively. And personally I don't see any real benefits to the destructive method, except performance issues in some cases, and arguably stylistic ones.

Returning new values instead of in-place updates may seem cumbersome before you get to know the abstractions that make it easy to use.

As an example, in Haskell, if you want to update a value deep inside multiple nested records, you do something like:

movePlayer :: (Pos -> Pos) -> GameState -> GameState
movePlayer f gs = gs { player = oldPlayer { position = f oldPos } }
where
oldPlayer = player gs
oldPos = position oldPlayer

That looks horrible, compared to something like:

gs.player.position = f(gs.player.position);

But then, if you discover the Semantic Editor Combinators abstraction (http://conal.net/blog/posts/semantic-editor-combinators/), then you can write that as:

movePlayer :: (Pos -> Pos) -> GameState -> GameState
movePlayer f = (atPlayer . atPosition) f

or just:

movePlayer = atPlayer . atPosition

Then you can use:

movePlayer (+delta)

to add delta to the position.

Now one nice thing about the return-new-value approach is that it is more composable than the destructive update approach. When you compose state manipulation functions, you get transactional state changes.

So paradoxically, I believe functional languages to be better at manipulating state!
"Windows" is a trademark (http://www.microsoft.com/about/legal/en/us/IntellectualPrope...), so how do you explain that? If windows is not a generic word, it must be because it's applied in a specific context (a window manager). So then, possibly an "app store" doesn't just mean a store on Main St, that happens to have applications on its shelves, but a novel concept worthy of a trademark?
Radiation leakage from Fukushima, by date, with comparisons
I don't think anyone's saying blacks are being discriminated against either, rather asking the question what are the factors driving the change.

British Asians on a whole tend to come from lesser educated poorer backgrounds than average, do less well in school, etc. That they're well represented in the developer and startup community despite that makes an interesting data point.
Ok, fixed a null ref bug. http://reddit.com/.json now works, just a little ugly
One problem Apple has is that Jobs has used the term "app store" to refer to non-Apple app stores. The point being that its such a generic term that even Apple uses it generically.
And, in the 1970s & 80s, if you were together in a room with your 10 real friends, odds are that at least 9 of them were actively engaged in some form of meaningful social interaction. In 2011, 4 of them would be checking email, texting, twittering on their smartphones, another 3 are playing Angry Birds, 3 are talking about an insipid reality TV show that they watch in order to avoid contemplating their empty isolated existences, and 1 is waxing nostalgic about how, circa 1982, people used to have genuinely meaningful conversations and how intrinsically rewarding that was. Not all that glitters is gold, including technology.
Messy Javascript code, indeed. Nice work-around.