skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most companies that are based on intellectual property, like software companies, need to maintain ownership of the copyright so that they can continue to sell the IP (software) for money. If someone else owns the copyright, the company has no way to prevent all the source code being released in the public domain, available to everyone for free.

If you don't own copyright on your own software, you'll also find it hard to sell the business in the future. Potential acquirers are usually interested in purchasing the IP owned by a company, not just the company itself.

IP that a company owns can be counted as an asset when drawing up a balance sheet. It is often quite a substantial part of the assets of any major software company, making the net value of the company much higher.

In my experience, companies usually default to owning the intellectual property for everything an employee produces then provide a way to waive their interest on outside projects by employees. The IP waivers require the employee to specify the scope of their outside work and get approval from the company directors so that the company's IP rights are waived on that code.
Read this waist comparison recently. Apparently even the most accurate brands are not correct.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/mens-fashion/pants-size-chart-0...
Yeah, I think more than money, the reason I am actually considering learning development myself is that it gives me some sort of "ownership security" - you know, the feeling that I didn't just have an idea but I own what I made of that idea rather than having got it done by others. Thanks for your advice!
According to http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/07/apple-loses-... jailbreaking is already legal per the DCMA exemptions.
Everyblock's First Major Redesign
I normally defend Microsoft, but then they pull crap like this. This lawsuit dance is ridiculous.
The Common Lisp starter kit was implemented quite differently that the Python and Java kits (who I think were designed and written by the same person). The Common Lisp kit just had one example bot, so maybe it is still being worked on.
The Bible calls bats "birds," that's probably where he got it from.
Nokia is really huge with a lot of groups spread all over the place (world?). The group I worked for/with at Nokia (Qt) did code reviews.
It'd be great to have a signup waiting list for other areas (I passed the link around to a handful of friends and it's something we'd all be interested in trying out but we're all out in NYC).
Though this is clearly political wrangling, I think Microsoft should be careful about claiming publicly that anything patented by them is "natural"... Natural is very close to "obvious"... which is bad for patents:

"natural ways of interacting with devices by tabbing through various screens to find the information they need"
One more use case: "I have to wear different clothes every day of the week/month"
Yeah, I understand that point - but I'm still a bit unsure how to hit the ground running - you know, the initial qualms, what's the point that I start at? Do I just dive in and learn on the go? Or learn a bit, create, learn more and develop and so on.. ?
Glad to have some pros provide some great advice!
Wife encouraging you to spend spend spend on tech toys? You are in a burning building. Run. Run while you still can.
GarageBand for iPad: first hands-on review
Vanity sizing doesn't help any, either. Sure, it might shrink a little in the wash, but some people are a little over-generous with that....
Khan is a great supplemental tool and probably could not replace an 8 hour (different argument as to the effectiveness of such) "regular" school day.

However, why not start even just a year-long study as to the effectiveness of Khan Academy being used within a syllabus for coursework as a supplemental resource or help for the students.

Not all of the many video's of Khan Academy would be applicable to a teachers curriculum (like the category for Statistics as a whole has 66 videos).

Some studies on the effectiveness of lack thereof would put most of the argument to rest. Though a very comprehensive study would include a Bill Gates esque full-online Khan Academy only program, perhaps 50% usage, 25% usage, etc.
An Introduction to the Federated Social Network
It's not that they think they're that easily replaceable, it's that they fear that the decision-makers see them as that easily replaceable.

In other words, they're not that foolish, but they fear that their bosses (administrators, politicians, the general public) might be that foolish.
Slicehost vs. Linode [Blog Post]
Usually companies with a low effective tax rate have lost money in recent years. This is especially true over the last 3 years (I believe 3 years is the limit on a carry-forward loss credit, and 2008-2011 has been bad for business). The net effect is that US companies pay 35% taxes on their 3-year trailing average income rather than income in a given year.

Occasionally you will hear another breathless claim on places like reddit/The Huffington Post/The Daily Kos that some large percent of corporations pay no corporate taxes at all. They are usually counting the large number of small businesses organized as S-corps and LLCs which pay pass-through personal income taxes rather than corporate taxes, and counting all the C-corps that lost money and therefore paid no corporate taxes for the year. On its face it is a true statement that most corporations pay no taxes, but it is a very misleading statement.

In my experience, it is very difficult for the shareholders of a C-corp in the United States to derive benefit from the entity's business activities without the benefits being taxed at the corporate level.
Coinstar invests in health kiosks
I've found myself doing this more frequently. Basic reasoning is that unless I'm at some store that is far outside my normal commuting path, I'd rather spend 20 minutes just grabbing things that look roughly right. Then I can try them on at my convenience and return what I don't like sometime over the next week or two.

This saves me time in the store and also makes the decision less agonizing since I can make it over a few days.

So, yeah, you're probably dead on about how 'wrong fit' can be interpreted.
The question is are these methods general and obvious only because it's been the norm for almost 20 years? I would say, yes.
I'm guessing their support is just that it defaults to display:block and that you can style it.
When I invent something this is exactly what I do. I have no problem explaining everything up to the 'key' that no one else would be able to replicate without me explaining/showing them.

Even then I have no problem telling them 'the secret sauce'... I just don't show them how it works or how to do it.

Now you also have a type of secret sauce called operational knowledge. For example I know how to take an idea, prototype it, and produce it in days. I could explain to someone exactly how to do it and they would still fail because you need the experience and breath of knowledge. In those cases I rarely hold anything back, unless it involves a piece of equipment/technology I've designed that revolutionizes a process.
The same baseless, ad-hominem, assumptive comments about the man in the article, right?

You're jumping at ghosts - and IMO there's something concerning about reading that far into so little information. The fact that he had a disagreement with his wife and returned the iPad doesn't imply being castrated, obedient, dominated, or otherwise enslaved. The fact that you would jump on this possibility as a default is a bit concerning.
The <output> element doesn't have many additional semantics on top of a non-semantic element like <div>. All it supports is a special "for" attribute that doesn't require any additional behaviour [1]. IE9 is the first version of IE that doesn't barf on unknown new elements in the DOM, so I suppose they got support for this "for free" without any additional development.

[1] http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#the-output-elemen...
Loopholes for Paywall News Sites
How to circumvent the WSJ (and potentially the NYTimes) subscription paywalls.
What is and isn't REST
Citation map shows top science cities
Kind of OT, but does anyone have any more info on official 1.3 release date? The last I heard is they were expecting to release around PyCon...
It's called "spook". In Emacs, "M-x spook":

cryptanalysis Roswell blackjack Exon Shell Ruby Ridge NORAD Al Jazeera world domination Becker cybercash
nuclear csim SHA Leuken-Baden BLU-114/B
Opera has always been ahead on forms, they had implemented most (possibly all?) of Webforms 2 before it became part of HTML5.
Ask HN: new dating site, where do the initial members come from?
Consider the option:

Choose an appropriate free software license. I would suggest AGPL v3.0 (or later). Assign all code to the company but include an escape (consult a lawyer) so that each of you has enforcement rights should the company go away. Explicitly agree that all of that code is, by understanding, considered to have been distributed to each of you as individuals.

Such a choice does not obligate your company to share source however it gives any of the three of you the right to share source. It gives each of the three of you freedom to use the code.

Some investors, I would think, might have some trouble with this. For example, a founder could quit, fork all of the code, and start something else. For reasons like that I think the suggestion might inflame some. I suggest that if you presumably all trust one another enough to get to a point where that threat is no longer particularly significant. And that threat ought also to be weighed against the degree of difficulty of someone else doing a clean-room substitute for the code, anyway.
I meant to write GIL, obviously. Errors like this happen, when you type "git" about 200 times a day.
Whapee: The app market is stone dead for deviations from the norm
I actually took the time to read those patents, and as broken as I thought the US patent system was, I didn't realize it was that bad. One of the patents is actually a patent on displaying a temporary loading animation when a browser is downloading rather than having a dedicated loading status indicator. Another patent is for displaying a document while the background image is downloading rather than waiting for the background image!
Their message is clear: embed android in your product and we will sue you. Without indemnification from Google, people will be very hesitant to touch Android I think. Not good at all.
Good point. That that their lawyers are freely using the word "natural" just shows how egregious they are.

They don't really care if the claims have merit, all they care about is the legal expense and risk it imposes on the defendant.
And you're saying she's never talked you out of a frivolous purchase, and you've never talked her out of a frivolous purchase?
I think if Microsoft wanted to declare "developer friendliness", they would unilaterally declare that they won't engage in offensive patent actions, and encourage all other companies to do the same. Or, just make it entirely opt-in; they promise not to sue anyone who won't sue them.

I suspect it would cost them not much more than their current startup outreach efforts, and would build a lot more goodwill.
Finding great ideas for your startup
That's why Google should help B&N in invalidating the said patents (something that doesn't look that difficult, provided you have the resources)
Similar to something we made at Disqus: http://readthedocs.org/docs/sentry/en/latest/index.html
VOTE KANG
The 10 best music tech products of NAMM 2011
> There's a startup that does 3D scans of shoes and allows users to determine the perfect fit by asking about shoes they already own (can't remember the name). IIRC, they plan on doing clothes, too. That would be the ideal.

It would be really cool to hack a Kinect (or more likely, several Kinects) into doing something like that for clothing.
There is probably a hefty break up fee in an acquisition this big which would make this scenario unlikely.
That's a fair point, but people of Asian (subcontinent included) descent are pretty damn ubiquitous in the industry, and I don't think anybody worries that they're being discriminated against.

I feel like something more relevant to the OP would be including Latinos, or talking about how rich the parents of programmers are.
I'm somewhat disappointed when charts like this use pre-release browser versions like Firefox 4 beta. If you're going to compare apples with apples, you have to use released, production versions of each browser for comparison charts.

Otherwise, why not include Webkit nightlies and the Chrome dev version? Maybe that would just make Firefox look even further behind.
The NSA are drowning in data. They have a constantly changing target list from the other intelligence agencies, and whatever crisis is, or will soon be in the news is keeping them quite busy.

They really have more important things to do than monitor the geeks. Unless you come up with some nifty new crypto.

p.s. SPLITTER!
If Ebay decide to adopt this approach, wouldn't that be a sign that this startup has merit?
Mentoring Organizations for Google Summer of Code Announced
I was at an airport a few years ago and the plane was delayed. A mother pulled out her iphone, gave it to her kid and said he if he wanted another game he could only spend $1. The kid was entertained for the next hour while we all waited for the plane. I knew then that dedicated portable consoles were dead.
Brightening up your business with cloud software
Thanks, my BS meter just exploded.

[from another comment http://www.geekwire.com/2011/microsoft-cites-new-patents-vs-... ]
The idea isn't to spew data at AT&T like a DoS, just taint all your boring communication to make them have to sift through more junk. For example, add extra "scary" keywords in your outgoing HTTP headers.

X-Spook: Hamas subversive War on Terrorism Kosovo Delta Force
Sure... But as i see, the patent system in US is a mess. That can make my business fragile : I develop some app and then some troll sues me, so now instead investing in innovation , i have to invest my lawyer !

Maybe you have to do more paperworks in other Countries (ex. Germany) but your business is not in danger because bad use of patents. Sure other countries have also patent trolls but the system is not bad and currupt as US.
I hope an American lawyer can answer this (or at least someone with a good knowledge of the US legal system).

What can an individual (even one outside of the US) do to effect change in the software patent landscape? Who needs to made aware of the problems in the patent system? How can these people be reached? What will it take to get them to introduce changes that reduce the number of these lawsuits?

Is there anyone running a website dedicated to 1) cataloguing obvious ideas to act as prior art, 2) collecting cases for use in lawsuits involving software patents, 3) systematizing steps for how individuals can make a change?
Any minute now. We had a few blockers reported during the PyCon sprints -- hooray for finding bugs before the release! Those're now fixed, and we're wrapping up the last few details (translations, release notes, checks, etc.) as I write this. There's always a bit of last-minute work to be done to push a release out so I can't promise exactly when it'll wrap up, but it's coming damned soon.
I doubt B&N can afford adequate defense, and that's why MS is after them with such obviously invalid claims.

I would love if B&N went all in, proved the claims are without merit and countersued with a vengeance.
Yes, all these new form features are a massive boost for consistency and usability of forms on the web. Opera is often ahead when it comes to web usability issues like this. Great work, guys.
New FutureMidwest Contest Offers Startup $100K
My response to this related HN post: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=2349678

My proudest accomplishment in law school was a research paper I wrote entitled "Anti-Antitrust: The Need for Antitrust Law Reform."

In that paper, I argued that antitrust law as applied today totally misses the point: the issue shouldn't be whether a company, otherwise satisfying the elements of a monopoly, is harming competitors, but whether a company is actually harming consumers. Put another way: who is complaining about the alleged anticompetitive tactics: competitors, or consumers?

If one studies all the big antitrust cases of the 20th century -- from Alcoa, to DuPont, to Microsoft -- a curious trend emerges: it was always those companies' competitors who took issue with seemingly anticompetitive tactics of the big evil "trusts," and rarely -- if ever -- was it the consumers themselves.

A great example of this is Microsoft in the 1990s: do any of you -- aside from our realm of early adopter computer savvy tech types -- genuinely remember any everyday computer users actually complaining that Windows came preinstalled with IE instead of Netscape? Were consumers actually harmed, were they actually suffering? No: the only "people" who had an issue with MS bundling IE with Windows -- frankly, a brilliant strategy -- were Microsoft's competitors, and not, in fact, MS's customers.

So my take on this ATT & T-mobile merger is simple: the investigation should not focus on whether ATT/T-mobile is a monopoly from competitors' points of view, but whether it is anticompetitive to the point of actually harming consumers, e.g., with higher prices, etc.

Frankly, a good example of a company that really deserves a DOJ investigation is Apple -- IFF customers start to actually complain, and not not just Apple's competitors' start to complain.

Put more simply: a DOJ investigation into whether a company is a monopoly should be based upon whether consumers -- not competitors -- are actually being harmed by the allegedly anticompetitive tactics of a "monopoly."

After all, a company could not become a monopoly without customers' support in the first place. So clearly they have done something right that customers appreciate.

A "monopoly" that is not causing harm to consumers, either directly or indirectly, is not necessarily so terrible a thing. In fact, as with Apple, it is often the case that consumers enjoy a net benefit from such a company.
What is to say T-Mobile isn't already doing something similar? AT&T was only exposed because of the whistleblower.
The Limits of the Todolist
An Apple keyboard using CSS
Why was this upvoted over 90 times? This and its siblings are all pretty sexist comments.
Leave it in the bank/taxable account for a rainy day/opportunity/blood-in-the-water scenario.

10K is not really enough to create a "Balanced" portfolio of stocks. You could buy mutual funds or bet on a few stocks but that's not as valuable as having 10k sitting in the bank at the ready.

If you are not already, start automatically saving cash and automatically contributing something to an 401k/IRA. Pro tip - Make sure it's automatic and the money gets saved before it hits your regular bank account. If you have the opportunity to contribute to a 401k do that - especially if they match. If you don't then get an IRA. [1] You could create one and stick 5k in there this year and deduct it from your taxes and continue to build up that war chest again.

Also, see if you are eligible for a ROTH IRA[2] instead of a regular IRA.

[1] http://goo.gl/vFXKs (All of you do this now!) You probably want an IRA and a "Taxable Account" so you can buy CDs (and one day stocks)

[2] http://goo.gl/EJIUS

[3] I am not a professional financial advisor your results may vary etc...
Of the 30 or so books I have in my kindle only 1 was even lendable anyway.
Is there anything private on HN? The packet headers will still say that you went to HN, and when. The only thing it's blocking directly is knowing your username. That's pretty straightforward to figure out from correlating POSTs to the comment timestamps.
The hypocrisy of Microsoft is really a turn-off.

Microsoft statement on this new action against Barnes and Noble:

Their refusals to take licenses leave us no choice but to bring legal action to defend our innovations and fulfill our responsibility to our customers, partners, and shareholders to safeguard the billions of dollars we invest each year to bring great software products and services to market?

Then there is their statement regarding their appeal of the $290 millions dollar judgement against MS for infringing on i4I.

This case can be summed up in one world – balance,” Microsoft’s David Howard, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel for litigation, said in a statement. “The current approach taken by the Court of Appeals improperly tilts the scales to reward invalid patents. That approach needs to be corrected in favor of a system that ensures the process for obtaining and defending patents is clear, reasonable and doesn’t unduly burden the system or innovation.
> I think the blossoming of GUI's -- which have A LOT of state

I don't think GUI's have to have a lot of state.

I wrote a Haskell library (https://github.com/Peaker/vtywidgets) which can serve as a proof-of-concept of a "stateless GUI".

The idea is that a widget is a pure function like (in pseudo-Haskell syntax):

input_from_program ->
(output_to_user,
Map input_from_user
(documentation, output_to_program))

A "Map" is a dictionary. It's like a function, but its domain can also be enumerated so we can generate useful documentation about how a widget responds. So a Widget takes program and user inputs, and generates program and user outputs.

Any state (e.g: cursor) will be saved elsewhere, and I've come to the conclusion that separating "GUI state" from "model state" is not a good idea. This allows me to use the "cursor" of a box of widgets as an active selection, and not just a way to navigate, for example. It also means that I can use the same persistency model/etc for the GUI as I do for the model.

I wrote a simple (again, still at the POC stage) transactional, structural, revision-controlled editor based on vtywidgets (https://github.com/Peaker/treeedit), and it persists the model, including the GUI state, in the transactional database. This means that I get undo features for GUI state (I can store it outside the revisioned store, but it's quite nice to have), and if I kill the editor and restart it later, it is at exactly the same state it was before.
Is that the sound of a joke passing over someone's head?
Back-End Software May Be Real Worry in RSA Attack
Tylenol and the War on Drugs
Fake profiles, essentially sock puppets of the founders.
4 Reasons Today’s Tech Scene Differs From the ’90s Bubble
Is the EFF the most effective organization that accepts donations to fight this type of thing?
So what you really mean is that looking good isn't worth the perceived cost to you. Your first comment gave me the impression that you prefer not to look cool, other things being equal, which was the source of my confusion.
MS is suing several Android device makers simultaneously. Along with Google, there's an obvious incentive for them to pool their resources.

Not to mention that Google has a few patents of its own of course.
A more appropriate question may be whether those methods would be general and obvious in present day if they hadn't been invented 20 years ago.

I would say, yes.
The fact that we can't replace every single human does not mean we shouldn't try to replace some of them.

Is it your assertion that with 16% less adult supervision (to borrow a number from my first post), schools would degenerate into "lord of the flies"?

If anything, I expect the situation would improve. Rather than having 1 teacher trying to do double duty (lecture and impose discipline), we could have cheaper discipline-only employees handle the discipline side and leave the lecturing to Khan.
I would give a giftcard if one were available. I'd buy a $30 card for $30. If one weren't available, I sure wouldn't pay a company $1.50 to set up a hoop for my friend to jump through.
No it's not. We use Microsoft .Net framework on the backend for documents processing.

Fabrice
Agilewords founder
Reasons To Hate Twitter