skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I read somewhere about how this is an attempt by Nintendo to control "quality". I would almost believe that claim if there wasn't so much shovelware for the DS.
You probably couldn't trademark the name of a company that made glass windows as "Windows". Nor could you name a product that was a glass window as "Windows". That's the difference.
> PC gaming never really took off in a big way.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/207358/world_of_warcraft_subs...

Nothing more than an outlier exception, I'm sure.
The javascript: http://toys.euri.ca/nyt.js (which is really 3 lines).

The NYT does have a really hard problem to solve though. How do you securely police the "20 free articles a week" system if you can't trust cookies, can't put validation on the page itself, and ip addresses change all the time without requiring even a free account to read the content?

They are trying to come up with a modern pay solution to journalism and for that I give them props. It's not going to be an easy road though.
Lesson: Don't get into conflict of interest with a monopoly that you rely on. If you are strategically threatening or simply unprofitable for them, they will kill you off.
It would be great to see if Reddit can buy it self from Conde Naste
The article describes the path in detail. It gives US government regulation as one of the reasons for "underexploring" the design space.
With most startups, the (usually very small) team or individual who develops the original implementation doesn't stick around once the business has achieved some level of success; they typically cash in and leave.

But if the business is going to continue to operate, the new development team needs to be capable of tending to the product, as it will need bug fixes, security patches, and perhaps be updated to scale better.

If the product is built on an uncommon platform, finding new developers, especially senior ones, to tend to the product will be difficult and expensive. If a sufficient number of qualified developers cannot be found, the business may have little choice but to rebuild the product using a more mainstream technology. In the meantime, the business takes on a higher risk of continued operation if the current implementation (which is no longer maintainable) is surpassed by its competitors.

TL;DR: short-term optimizations create technical debt, which screws your business in the long run.
Tell HN: I just bumped into PG and Jessica
Want to know why everyone recommends moving into the Bay Area?

I just went to lunch a couple of hours ago here in Mountain View at Castro St (4 blocks from my apt) and on my way back bumped into PG and Jessica. I've never met them before, but kind of recognized PG from pictures and Jessica, also, because I've been doing some work with Wikipedia and had seen her image as well.

Anyway, I passed by them with a friend and convinced myself that it was them. Then, I had this sudden rush, ran back and caught up to them at an intersection. Luckily the pedestrian signal turned to red and had a chance to introduce myself. I have no idea (don't remember in all the nervousness) if I also shook Jessica's hand or not, but if I didn't and Jessica reads this, I apologize--I didn't mean to be rude.

PG admitted they hadn't started reading apps because they're busy with demos, so for anyone out there still considering whether to apply or not, do it! It's never too late.

Both were very cool and very approachable. It's not every day you get these opportunities, so it was definitely a pleasure meeting both.
Or just fanboyism and shiny-new-silver-bullet-ism.
Why (in relation to this)? Curious, because I just bought some.
Although the point about simple pricing might have been an overwrought Apple-specific intro, the real point is: dayum, what was NYT thinking with this weird, expensive pricing structure? And not even a discount for getting both subplans together?
what's the algorithm used in "difference"? delta-E? subtractive blending?
Lighten up it's Monday.

Edit: The first one was actually a compliment to the wife. The second one was meant as a joke, just as all women joke about men not being too smart.
Anthropomorphic Talking Robot at Takanishi Lab
Maybe my judgement is clouded because I really like Amazon, but this seems like something the publishers forced on Amazon.
Pretty sure a joke just flew over my head. woosh

Anyone care to explain?
A large part of it is that in geek circles (or male circles in general) it's fashionable to say that you don't like to shop. I didn't like it until I tried to enjoy it. It's not the best but it's fun once in a while.
None of that has anything to do with the science or the validity of it; you're bickering over whether the appropriate red tape was followed in the political process... who fucking cares, they didn't do anything unethical and nothing that was done or shown showed any of the science to be incorrect so using the incident to somehow doubt climate change makes zero sense.
I have 2 computers/2 monitors side by side w/ one keyboard and mouse via synergy. 1 computer is linux, other is win7. Linux doesn't have creative suite, and I'd prefer not to use VMWare or screw with wine for something like that. And no, linux does not have real replacements for creative suite applications. I also do a bit of flash/flex/as3 development, not recommended on linux unless you have lots of free time on your hands and want to fight an uphill battle. There's a handful of other stuff that works better/faster on windows.

For the most part, I use each system equally, but would have difficulty choosing just one. My laptop is windows. Never tried apple much for varied reasons I won't go into.
Windows is a branding of an OS based on one specific element. It isn't like Microsoft sues Apple for any references to a window in Mac documentation. App Store is a branding of an application store. The operating system equal would being someone trying to trademark Operating Sys or something of the like, not trying to brand a generic word.
Wonder what were apple thinking when they used iphone which clearly belonged to Cisco. http://gizmodo.com/#!227504/cisco-is-expecting-signed-agreem...

These names are so common and apple fighting over is lame.
Ask HN: feedback on an idea - code reviews site
How bout a website where people do code reviews? For example a development team posts their code each day and others comment on it. This is not StackOverflow questions and answers - it's code reviews, suggesting problems, bugs, improvements, better ways of doing things.

I'd be happy to pay to have great developers comment and make suggestions on my code - better, more reliable, more secure code - that has a tangible value to me.

Maybe www.codiscussion.com (get it - discussion about code?)

Could this be a commercially viable idea?
> and who then takes those arguments so far to the extreme that it's laughably silly.

That sounds like another opinion. I don't find what he said to be laughably silly. Do you have examples of such things he said?
6 Ways to Integrate Hacking in Newsrooms
Congrats. How long did you have the old design up before the revamp (and success)?
This is the best SEO project I've ever seen a YC company do. (Brief rationale: it is much more linkable than Wufoo proper, targets a link-rich audience, is beautiful, is evergreen, parallelizes over a sizable basket of keywords, is squarely topical for the business, leverages earned rep as domain experts, etc.)
So... joking about blacks being [racist stereotype] on a majority-white website is ok because (a) it makes the majority laugh and (b) it's not making fun of any one black person individually? Please explain your logic here.
what is this ? just random music player ?
A while ago there was a comment here on hackernews which mentioned a designer talking about how much better git maps with a designer's workflow. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2268004)

The basic gist was that designers like to keep around lots of versions and this gels well with git's easy branches.

That coupled with these kind of great tools really give me hope for a version control strategy that is useful to both designers and hackers.
You drank the Kool-aid.
Camera patent suit targets Apple, Nokia
Now I can solve all those 'spot the difference' games. Bwhahahah!
The problem was that it changed a little at a time. First, the about:blank instances. Then, the headline. Then, random sections of the paragraph.

It didn't kill my family or send me into a migraine hell or anything, it was just distracting - I'm trying to read here. (I wonder how well it would work on a very slow connection.)
If people wanted to pirate books they would just go to bittorrent or irc rather than trying to mess around with kindle hackery, I mean what would the point be?
It's a reference to this saying: http://cdixon.org/2011/02/05/selling-pickaxes-during-a-gold-...
Your question is a very good one. A term that is primarily descriptive cannot be registered as a trademark on the primary register with the USPTO. However, if a vendor spends a lot in advertising over a substantial time such that the public comes to identify the relevant term with one vendor and not as a primarily descriptive term, then that item is said to acquire "secondary meaning." Once a primarily descriptive term acquires secondary meaning of this type, it can be registered on the primary register. Context matters here as well because marks are registered in revelant "classes" of goods or services. Thus, for Microsoft, "Windows" eventually acquired secondary meaning in the world of computer software (but not as applied to window installation in the building industry). Others can freely use "windows" in most any category of goods or services they want in the building trades but, given that the term "Windows" is now exclusively associated with a product from Microsoft in that class, not in the class of computer goods to which "Windows" belongs.

Other well-known secondary-meaning marks: "Holiday Inn," Subway's "Footlong" sandwich, many others.
Ask HN: company in US a bad idea regarding patents?
I am in the process of starting my own company, it is a one man show, I have several ideas that I want to try out, but dont expect to make any money the first year.

I am NOT based in USA, but it seems like a good idea to start up a company there for a couple of reasons:

a) if i need investor money later on, it would be easier to get it in US, and they want to give it to a US company

b) my potential users will probably be US companies, and they will probably be more comfortable dealing with a US company. (is this correct, or just in my mind?)

c) an exit where i get bought is more likely in US. not that aiming for that at the moment, but would be bad closing that door.

however, what makes me nervous are patents.
if I would actually manage to go somewhere with my ideas, it seems unavoidable that at some point someone will claim you infringe their software patents.

from that point of view, I would rather set up a company in for example Sweden, but then I think I am closing doors (regarding investors, users, exit).

what are your views on this?

if you got to choose where to setup a company, where would it be? (regardless where you live).

Are my fears regarding investors, users, exit just in my head?

Are my fears regarding patents just in my head?
Exactly, because he is likely to return those as well.
I think you're overestimating your ability to note a small security bug in a diff.

If it was as easy as you seem to think, we probably wouldn't introduce such bugs by accident in the first place.

It can be as innocuous looking as using strncpy instead of strlcpy.
Help Heyzap (YC 09) make the biggest Android/iOS Games Social Network
It's not all that different from when MS used to license OSs to vendors by the number of machines sold, total --- not the number that had windows on them.

Parasites.
I was in a similar position three months ago. I had an idea for a website that I was incredibly excited about, but no programming experience. (And no business experience, either! My major is creative writing.) At first I did the natural thing for a "non-technical co-founder": I asked every programmer I could find if they wanted to build the product for me in exchange for equity in my unfunded company. Needless to say, this did not work out.

I decided to teach myself how to do it, which meant starting from the very beginning. I bought a "For Dummies" book on HTML, CSS and JavaScript (Yes, it was really that bad! Back when I took a web design course in high school, they were still teaching us to format with tables.) and worked my way up to more serious books on MySQL, PHP, and jQuery, all the while working on my website. I now have a beta version of the site online, and I'm testing it with friends and family. I've also learned enough about programming to get a part-time job as a developer at another company. (Not the highest-paying developer job, but still! Real US currency, and the beta version of my website was my only resume.) There are still tons of things that I want to add to my website that I don't know how to build yet, and many aspects of the design that I'm not happy with, but that's okay! Only three months ago I didn't even know CSS! At least now I have a working demo that I can show to potential team members, investors, and future clients.

If you're already programming as a hobby, you'll probably love programming as a job, and you're a lot further along than I was when I started. The only way to build a web app is to build it. And I promise you that until you start building it you have not even begun to conceptualize it! Don't underestimate the difficulty of the intellectual challenges you're going to face.

But don't be daunted by the challenges, either. I can speak as someone who started with literally "just an idea". I think you'll be surprised by how much you'll be able to build in just six months.
I pretty much agree with you, but right now we have four options that all mostly suck. I think that's partly because of the tech/bands. If it were two companies with handsets that worked on both, I think it would help.

But you're probably right that the subsidization/contract model is a bigger problem.
Microsoft claims that the patents infringed include "natural ways of interacting with devices." I checked my thesaurus and alternative words for natural include: normal, ordinary, everyday, usual, regular, common, commonplace, typical, routine, standard, established, customary, accustomed, habitual.

I thought patents were supposed to be issued only for "novel" innovations?
It's wise of them to keep the old solution around while they're experimenting with a new technology. At some point they'll have an urgent need to deploy something that they can't figure out how to do on the Java stack, and they'll be able to fall back on their Python expertise to get it done by the deadline.
Sendoid (YC W11): Finally, Sharing Big Files Isn’t A Huge Pain
Firefox 4 beta 1 was released in July, and the Chrome 6 beta was released in August. One could easily argue that the Firefox late betas are better tested than Chrome releases. (I'm not, but you could). So it's apples and oranges no matter what you do, there's no possible way of comparing apples to apples.
Diversity? Maybe. Widely available diversity? No, not really. Going out to any random (non-brewery) bar, I see the same local breweries: Widmer, Deschutes, and Rogue. They all make rather hoppy beers (roughly in that order of increasing hoppiness). Plus, a lot of the smaller places follow the trend (e.g. Old Market in Multnomah Village).

I will admit it's probably easier for me to find beer that makes me happy in Portland than in almost anywhere else I've been. Partially this is a indication of how little I've travelled, but it's also a testament to the variety you can find here.
I suppose I must have a blind spot in my web programming knowledge. I see sentences like this:

The problem that prevented us from using the HTML5 parser for about:blank is that a bunch of test cases assume that when about:blank is parsed from a stream, the whole operation happens as a single event loop task.

Why do you need an HTML parser to render nothing? Gecko's test cases? Then why don't they fix the test cases?

This is OK for parsing streams from the network...However, it was a major problem with data: URLs in test cases and it still is a problem with about:blank in test cases.

Why?

[lots of stuff]

Why does this matter? about:blank is blank, right? "initially create the DOM of about:blank there synchronously?" What DOM? Is there some meaningful takeaway from this article besides "the Firefox codebase is twisted up" and the ancillary "different browsers handle iframes and new windows with different threading models?"

EDIT: Oh, OK. rwmj's comment above helped explain. I deleted my parent comment, which may have been unfair, then.
You can copy and paste snippets from it, for one. The page turning is less psychotic, for another. Speaking as an iPhone owner who uses both apps.
they're licensing options don't seem friendly for me to want to use it.
Content-free article linking to another one at Reuters (http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/21/us-nokia-tablets-i...) the gist of which is that Nokia might or might not use Microsoft's OS for tablets. And making a stab at B&N lawsuit.
Amazon's always played hardball with their API (see also Delicious Library mobile). They're like the Oracle of the generally-cuddly API world, but at least they've always been clear and upfront about it. Don't help them to sell things? Bam.

By contrast, Twitter's now suffering as it tries to retro-fit a hard-ass approach (though of course with a similar stance from the beginning it's hard to see them getting where they are now).
"What would happen to overall customer satisfaction if instead of simply refunding his money, we sent an Ipad2 and added a funny note? Could that story go viral and create enough buzz that we could not get for less than $400,000 in marketing budget and countless meetings?"

That sounds like hacking to me. But hey, I am no hacker, so....
You must be one of the few startups launching with ASP.NET! ;-) (assuming you aren't doing anything funny with extension rewrites!)

How to help grow? Well, it looks like you've already got link sharing for facebook and twitter - how's that working? Seems that would be a great way to get more exposure and people interested. You've got the sbux gift card, you've got bonus points for referral...how long have you been up and running??? It seems to me you've done a lot of things right! Oh, and the site looks great too!

Have you reached out to those who have listed on your site to get their feedback about the experience? Or, have you gone to garage sales or the like and asked people what it would take to get them to use your product?

How about this: Have you scanned listings on craigslist, reached out to the seller, and offered them free listings to give it a shot and get feedback? Maybe target a specific area, like cars, or iDevices, and really hit it hard.

How about mobile apps? Native iOS or Android app that initializes the camera, records, allows me to provide the meta data (description/price), gets from the phone my location to save me that hassle, and then post it all from the app? That would be pretty convenient!
Ask HN: techniques for recovering a stolen laptop?
So my house was burgled last night, 2 laptops were taken, a mbp and a windows xp netbook. :(
I have prey source http://preyproject.com/ on the mbp so that should help. On the win xp machine I don't have much, aside from dropbox.

Does anyone have any good ideas for geolocating or some other technique perhaps even social eng. tricks that might help me point the police in the right direction and maybe help me recover them?
Unified codebases with Dojo, Node, and RequireJS: the holy grail of DRY code
Hi. This has all developed in the past 10 days.
I am pretty sure it doesn't bother them. They don't actually go through the data, otherwise encryption would defeat the surveillance.

There are many other more useful signals (and the fact that you use encryption is probably one). The goal is to find outliers, not people using scary words
Furthermore it would be probably quite easy for them to filter that kind of "DoS", it is just too simplistic. If you come up with something more clever they probably are interested about knowing more about you anyway.
Prior to that, fab.com was an entirely different business/website with marginal traffic. The numbers below are of new users only.
How do you securely police the "20 free articles a week" system if you can't trust cookies, can't put validation on the page itself, and ip addresses change all the time without requiring even a free account to read the content?

You assume that the number of people with the ability and desire to circumvent your defenses is a small fraction of your total audience, and ignore them.
Hackernews And The ‘dirty’ Black Founder Question
So if someone praises their wife, your reaction is to twist it around into an insult against women? This isn't even a joke; it's just sad.
The Web Application Security "White Elephants"
The Wii too. I wish that they'd bring back their "Seal of Quality" to try to curb that kind of practice. Always helped produce fantastic quality on the SNES until they killed it around the time of the Gamecube.
So far as my personal experience can be extrapolated, it's not just advertising. Sometimes it is lost sales. That said, so far as my personal experience can be extrapolated, the lost sales are an almost insignificant slice of the new sales.
I think the biggest misconception with the global reach of the web is that everything on there should be targeting the masses. Some sites, like GetFounder are focused on building business relationships between people who live near each other, as there's something about meeting people face to face that builds a more solid foundation for trust than emails/IMs.

By limiting the private beta to just one city, I'm able to gauge the effectiveness of GetFounder, without having to manage a wide-spread userbase that probably won't be able to see the true value/potential of the service. I personally feel that the reasoning behind this decision is anything but silly.
Usually the OS or browser vendor chose them, so it is normal that they differ between computers. But the CA trust chain really sucks, as one compromized CA compromizes everything (the security of the system relies on the security of the weakest root CA).
what is your site
A place to counter-argue (in a intelligently good way)
There's also not a wholesale attack by an entire political party and news network against either of those professions.
the "Seal of Quality" did nothing but force companies to license carts through nintendo
Github is pushing so many envelopes. I don't pay them any money monthly yet, but every single time I see one of these updates - it makes me want to open my wallet to just make sure they don't go out of business.

I have a mancrush on Github. Really!