skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
in that regard it is interesting to see that Dambuster project was mentioned - technically brilliant, yet with very limited practical impact. The technical brilliance materialized in one piece of weapon doesn't win the war by default. Though, for sure it helps to keep your losses down or increase the losses of the enemy.

Even A-bomb, if obtained by Hitler wouldn't win the war for him. Though, the losses of the anti-Hitler coalition would be much larger (on the scale of 5-20K military personnel / per bomb)
"Strange how much human progress and accomplishment comes from contemplation of the irrelevant." - Scott Kim
That wasn't a criticism, just an observation. It was a bit of a Rorschach statement - people have read in to it whatever they want.

That said, I haven't really seen much from them in the way of developing protocols, etc. They had the money many other projects could've used to get farther, and what would have been better stewardship of the donations would have been to use that money to spearhead a movement between existing projects to interoperate and create formal standards. Instead, they spent several months and gave us insecure rails code.

Now that is my criticism.
Might want to ask over there: https://www.facebook.com/NextMontreal
The story of Lonely Planet with co-founder Tony Wheeler
Yes, I agree. I was just recently looking for a new job (and found one fairly easily, one which I'm now very happy with). There were a couple companies that I was assured were "hot right now", but which wanted me to do a silly brain-teaser code-challenge as a condition of even talking to them on the phone. I said no thanks, and I don't regret it.

So sure, maybe if you're a company that everyone wants to work for, and you're getting bombarded with resumes, you can pull off a non-traditional recruiting strategy, but for it to be workable for any company to do it, I feel like a large number of companies would have to start doing it.
Embracing Chaos: Random Participation and the Web
By all means :)
In general, software is EITHER trivial to copy OR the problem is non-trivial. I would be surprised to hear of any patents covering something that falls into both categories.
if they were so obvious beforehand, somebody would have:

a) implemented it into a working system (prior art)

b) patented it themselves first

It seems to be fairly common that somebody already did (a) but chose to forgo (b).

spent $130 million dollars just in the R&D phase for what amounts to…. Obvious? Perhaps. But nobody had gone through the trouble to actually do it, and spending that kind of overhead was a significant risk.

How much of that was it actually necessary to spend just to come up with the concept? Evaluation of the available COTS components, writing the perl scripts and cron jobs, management overhead, etc. are costs a competitor would have to incur as well, which makes them not part of the cost a patent is meant to compensate for. The fact that nobody had done it before does not necessarily mean nobody was clever enough -- just that nobody who was clever enough had had the problem this product was meant to solve, and being a solution to a novel problem does not make it patentably non-obvious.

In other words, if the ideas are obvious, a piece of software that does this should be buildable.

I don't think a computer program is likely to cover everything that would count as obvious.

"A person of ordinary skill is also a person of ordinary creativity, not an automaton." - SCOTUS opinion on KSR v. Teleflex
This is a sensationalist headline. Ramsey's theorem concerns patterns in a simple system, the coloring of edges in a graph. It says regardless of how the graph is colored you can always find a triangle of vertices with certain properties.

This does not mean complete disorder is impossible. It's just a combinatorial argument that says this simple game of coloring edges on a graph has some patterns to it.

But then maybe you're of the mindset that the universe is a complete graph and physics is a color by number game...in which case....oh god, we're all screwed...
If you could make a few more invites available I'd gladly join!
Then we probably share very similar views? :-)
\w instead of a character range might take care of that.
Map US airline routes in 30 lines of R
Some of the regulation makes sense.

Back in the 1950's there was a (small) breeder reactor being operated by a private company in LA that melted down without the authorities getting involved. We don't want that to happen again. Similarly, there are good reasons to have regulation involved in the health care sector.

On the other hand, doing business in third world countries often depends on paying people bribes. This is bad enough if you're operating in one country, but if you want to reach a global audience forget about it. (Years ago I worked for a voice chat startup targeted at Brazil that was incorporated in the Cayman Islands and largely based in the U.S. because the phone company could have put us out of business.)
I'm referring really to functional clarity. Fancy ruby DSLs that invoke method_missing and parse function names make for aesthetically pleasing end user code, but obfuscate the functionality for anyone unfamiliar with the code base.

Aesthetics and clarity are most certainly different in other ways (think pretty sites vs simple clear sites) but that's another discussion.
Microsoft Exchange and Outlook refer to UK time as GMT regardless of the time of year. They really are astonishingly stupid about time.
Remember Doom? Quake? Commander Keen? etc., all well in the "Angry Birds" category the author derides?

It's the money from those which let their creator indulge in Armadillo Aerospace, contributing to getting mankind off this risky rock.
The article asks who could have imagined ten years ago that by now we would all have video phone capability and never use it. Infinite Jest was written 15 years ago. DFW 1, SingularityHub 0
2011 Logo Design Trends - Showcase, Examples & Discussion
So you ban sales, and instead this company sells itself as a "patent enforcer", makes deals with inventors, and takes a percentage of moneys gained. They can even pay an advance. Practically speaking, this ends up the same as when you can sell them.
Real engineers build things like bridges and websites. Bankers build dreams and leverage the shit out of it to put the whole country in debt.

Without banking you can't have infrastructure: no financing, no cement, no salaries, one can't acquire land.

Shorter: you can't boot strap a bridge.
They have an army of lawyers, I'm sure they could find something.
Time-saving versus work-inducing software
Yeah, this is a tough one. I recently took a (7%) pay cut to join a new company, but my situation was a bit different. I had quit the previous company outright without anything new lined up, and I was being paid a bit above-market (their attempt to retain me despite the fact that I was unhappy). I'm sure I could have eventually found a company willing to match or beat my last salary, but I would have had to pass on several interesting opportunities to do so. So you can't just make the blanket statement that taking a pay cut is bad for any reason.
I think I edited while you responded only to my rorschach comment. I added more substance after that.
Physical devices (even models thereof) are applications of physics equations, not physics equations themselves. These have been ruled time and again as being patentable.

Algorithms are mathematical equations. They cannot be patented.
I do not understand. You stare at yourself when you videochat?
Stuart Holloway uses something close to this in one of the presentations at infoq.com. He uses a method from Apache Commons stringUtils as an example of battle-tested enterprise java.

Whether or not that is truly representative of java code is perhaps another question but there is certainly a body of similar accepted code out there eg http://commons.apache.org/lang/api-2.5/src-html/org/apache/c....
I do not these are science's most pressing questions.
Cool stuff. Can you post a few examples of the encoding?
No one forced them to take the cash.
Seriously just NO don't do it. Please.

It's going to drag Go's reputation down.
EnterpriseDB supports HP-UX with Postgres Plus Advanced Server
If somebody literally copy-pasted my code and released it as their own, then I'd be annoyed.

But I take no issue with somebody reimplementing ideas. That's progress.
I want to disagree on one (mostly semantic) point: The evacuation is a disaster. Deaths need not be involved for something to be a disaster.

The tsunami is obviously independently of that the far worse disaster.
Intellectual property is a curious intersection of capitalism and socialism: a free market which would barely exist without the creation of artificial legal constructs.

Bottom line: patents exist to foster innovation both for creators and users of ideas. Software patents do not accomplish this goal, and they are beyond redemption.
Is your loyalty scheme as obsolete as air miles?
I agree with your point about using backreferences as an html parser. I think the point of the post is regular expressions and back reference usage.
SMS Trojan Infects Multiple Android Applications
From the prospective employee's perspective, it also just doesn't scale. Most people I know are talking to multiple companies at the same time, often being in the middle of interviews at 4 or 5 companies. This just wouldn't work if each one required a consulting period, especially if you still have your primary job taking up your time.
Thanks for the tip on Guy Steele's talks!

And I agree that the cons based model of a list hides important properties (parallelism being perhaps the most important one).
Dynamic vs. Dynamic Typing
Apple Planning Major Product Launch For Retail 10th Anniversary? 
[edit] question mark added to end of title
1) Patents shouldn't be transferable -- this eliminates patent trolls

6) If you don't use the patent in a business use-case, you lose it. A bit like Trademark.

Suppose somebody invents a device but lacks the facilities to mass-produce them (building by hand is probably too expensive to make for a viable product). Rule (1) bars the inventor from selling the patent to somebody who has these facilities, so it appears necessary to arrange a licensing deal with a manufacturer (I expect selling a license to manufacture is still allowed and would count as a business use of the patent). How long does the inventor have to make such a deal before those who do have the right production facilities can simply ignore the patent and produce/sell the invention without compensating the inventor?
@kerryfalk Good point. It's easy to be smitten with googly eyes. So, how do you know then (for a business), and with like ~8 people is probably exponentially more complex. I wonder if though some people/personalities will more or less cancel each other out...making it easier than with just two people.

To make a dating parallel though, I think we def got at least a triple.
More than a third of entrepreneurs may be dyslexic: here's why
This is a very interesting data point. Although Nokia sells over a billion phones a year, this proves that you can target a narrow sliver of a huge market with futuristic innovation and still gain the majority of the profit available in the whole market.

Moreover, you create real value by innovating and pushing the future forward, reaping the reward from that. Nintendo has similar strategies.
You may have it backwards. Does your voicemail outgoing message include your email address? Do you reply to email promptly? Most do not.
On the other side, there are the people that hear the word 'nuclear' and think that there is an atom bomb in the middle of the plant with wires coming out of it, ready to explode if someone looks at it funny.
I think puppet in this case is overkill. I simple bash script with a small function to check if it already exists and what not would do just fine and you don't have to install another application (puppet).
Any recommendations for when to make this distribution decision? If applicable, what have other (successful) startup weekend guys done?
That's pretty interesting. I never knew that Diaspora is using Ruby on Rails.
It happened on the screen where you hook up facebook & twitter. Account was created fine, though.
If you've been recently bereaved, then I'm sorry for your loss. However, everything is potentially jarring, as complexity multiplies coincidence. Yesterday I read a news report of a person who was seriously injured after he fell off the balcony of a house - on Fell Street. Such coincidences are meaningless, but can make us feel worse anyway because they remind us of our helplessness on the grand scale of things. Those feelings are something we all have to deal with at various times.

The word use itself is not bizarre; there is a large number of similar idioms in English, one of the best known being 'dead reckoning' (for maritime navigation). Nobody knows the origin of this usage; some think it might be an abbreviation of 'deduced' combined with the haphazard development of spelling, but that's only a guess.
I'm with you until that last line.

If you look at what Germany was trying to do - invade the UK - then the only real course of action for them was to indeed launch the Battle of Britain. They had momentum, they were pressing the attack.

While true that the Luftwaffe didn't have exactly the right equipment for a strategic bombing war (nobody did, actually, it wasn't perfected until the allies needed to do it), you're playing too much of a Monday Morning Quarterback blaming Goering.

Strategically, the only mistake the Germans made during BB was to switch from targeting tactical targets to bombing cities. It's doubtful though if this really made much of a difference in the end.

Fundamentally though, there was nothing overly wrong with the German approach to the BB. It was a tough assignment that they perhaps were a little overconfident in being able to pull off, but in the end, they just lost.
Crowdsource, Please
Triunfo Del Amor Capitulo 145 | Ver Telenovela Online
In education or homelessness you're going headlong against problems of the human condition that resist the use of technology.

I went to Dreamforce two years ago and saw Beniof and Newsom congratulating themselves for introducing a new program that creates web sites for homeless people. It was insane!

It might be different in California (where Beniof illegally ran a business out of a house, driving housing prices up), but I live in a place where it's easy for homeless people to get into the shelter and get welfare IF they're willing to (i) deal with bureaucrats and (ii) stop drinking and using illegal drugs. Unfortunately, a lot of people aren't willing to do that -- it's not a problem of providing physical housing, it's that some people's social connections have deteriorated to the point where they can't even manage to collect welfare, never mind hold a job.

From a systemantic perspective, education has two purposes: (a) provide a way that parents can pass class status on to their children that appears legitimate and (b) provide good work for teachers. These are the actual functions of the system.

Now, you can innovate all you want in the area of "increasing human potential" but you'll find that people are pretty indifferent to this -- they're more interested in partitioning out access to what already exists. You're not going to get a dime out of the public school budget, and if you threaten (a) or (b) you're going to be viciously attacked by parents, students, teachers and school boards.
It's going to be a nightmare. Its not easy to seamlessly assimilate a company as big as Nokia. It takes time, at least 2-4 years before you see any ROI. Remember Alcatel Lucent. They haven't still recovered.
Great tl;dr. Perhaps arguable, but succinct, and some food for thought. Thank you!
27 Tactics You Can Use Today To Become An Intrepid Risk Taker
One of the the mistakes that O'Reilly makes is that he's looking for revolutionary leaps in established technologies. He's underestimating the impact of gradual, incremental improvements over a long period of time. I think that's the real promise of computer networks and web technology. Its not going to make any one field 90% more efficient. But, it will help us squeeze 5% bits of efficiency from many different fields. Add up enough small gains, and the big gains become unnecessary.

This discussion reminds me a bit of the energy debate. Government and corporate leaders are looking for radical new solutions (e.g. biofuels, solar thermal, hydrogen, etc.) and are ignoring incremental improvements in efficiency that have the potential to bring about the same amounts of savings without radical restructuring of energy infrastructure.

PS: That's the flaw in looking for the next big thing. It blinds you to all the little things that can add up to have the same impact.
It reminds me quite a bit of mp3 files in 1997, when they were just a novelty and record companies didn't know what to make of them.

Despite those industries' efforts and help from various world governments, MP3 filesharing, still exists. Likewise, it seems possible that BitCoin exchanges will still happen despite it being illegal.

Is there a way to even shutdown BitCoin or would it turn into a pseudo-arms race like filesharing has become?
Agreed, although I suggest that Apple has already proven that "you can target a narrow sliver of a huge market with futuristic innovation and still gain the majority of the profit available in the whole market." Macintosh systems account for 7% of the PC market and 35% of the profit.

More insanely, Apple has a 90% share of the revenue for PCs costing more than $1,000. Although smaller than the market for PCs costing less than $1,000, that's still a huge market and Apple has cornered nearly all of the money in it.
i'm sorry, have you seen this ancient crazy IT party announcement?

http://yourforum.gr/InvisionBoard/lofiversion/index.php?t463...

(the guy second to left seems familiar, show it to Max)
Maybe he's in touch with a Nokia insider that has knowledge of their intentions, and this is way he is so good at predicting Nokia-related news, but not other news.
There are often projects that need to be done in a company that aren't related to the core product, so it's not usually that difficult to give a contractor something unrelated to work on.
JSONKit (https://github.com/johnezang/JSONKit) is by far the best JSON parsing library I've seen.
Then we probably share very similar views? :-)

---
EDIT:

You make a very good point: for the money they got, they could be creating more value (or creating value differently). I'd prefer if they released a stripped-down 1.0 that anyone could dig into; right now, they're centralizing too many design decisions.

As far as developing technology goes, a working proof of concept should be as good a starting point as any and that's what they're doing. (Sure: not the best practice out there, to develop first and document later, but in this particular arena, I'm a pathological satisficer: just get the bloody thing done.)
Just have some fun and try it out. No need to put your savings into BitCoin or anything, but you can check out http://freebitcoins.appspot.com/ to get a 0.02 BTC to just see how things work.
Nothing compared to how much fuel the rockets burned. Digital and Virtual is our glorious ecologically friendlier future.
Very good point; I hadn't thought of this angle because the parent hadn't mentioned anything about going to a startup. In my situation, this other company was anything but a startup, rather, it it was a well-established but still very niche company that I dealt with. No seniority, no equity, no raise.
I was at a conference a couple weeks ago and the Diaspora team was there talking about how they are in the process of talking with vc's.
You guys are funny.

The conclusion that you should be reaching is software patents are simply not a viable mechanism, period. In other words, even if you like the idea of patents in theory, in practice they do not work because we will never have enough patent examiners with the necessary expertise much less time to make valid decisions on patent applications.
Ask HN: Need help determining how to build my project
I'd like to create something similar to a family tree online app (like geni.com). I'm unsure what languages I should use to build it with. My IT strong points aren't in programming and this project is going to require me to sit down and learn some languages. My problem right now is that I don't know what languages I should use.

So with the idea of a family tree online app in mind here are some of the specifications.
- I do not want to use flash.
- The app needs to be zoomable and scrollable (sort of like google maps)
- The app needs to be able to add content without reloading the page. Perhaps there's a little "+" sign and when I click it, I can add a tag/title/description/picture
- The app needs to be able to save your work for that user to retrieve later on.
- The layout that a user is able to create in is sort of widget based where the user can add a new bubble and then in that bubble they are able to add text or content.

I started programming this with HTML5 canvas and Javascript, but I'm stuck on creating a connection to the database that isn't directly from Javascript (because that seems very insecure to me). But I'm not just stumped on how to interact securely with the database, but also I'm concerned that I won't be able to build out the app with just javascript and may need something else like ajax or something but I'm unfamiliar with what each language does now.
The bigger issue, is that the current 'in app purchase' system is mandated by Apple to be the only way purchases can be made for your app.

Apple licensed this technology, mandated it on it's developers, then failed to mention that it required a separate fee to be paid to a third party for use. How is this not getting more notice? Lodsys is evil, no doubt, but what Apple did right there is shady as heck.
What exactly stops someone (even a government) from creating a Bitcoin2 that is similar to Bitcoin but uses different parameters? And then a Bitcoin3, and so on?

That turns Bitcoin into just one of several P2P currency-like commodities, with the government able to control the overall P2P currency supply just like they control the current currency supply.
Code review of the Node.js Express-driven app Finance
c'mon, these reactors of the basic design dating back to the Manhattan project need to give way. The primary goals of these designs were weapon related programs. Even molten salt reactor (supposedly coming in the happy future as Gen IV) was successfully prototyped in Oak Ridge 40+ years ago.

I'm completely for technological progress, including full speed nuclear. Yet, without hitting the current nuclear establishment hard in the nuts, they wouldn't let the progress happen, and will be continuing to build, if permitted, these old designs, or nothing will be built at all. The human race thus is kept hostage - either old and dangerous or nothing. There is no debate whether nuclear is safe or not. It is just a PR of the existing industry trying to sell old dusty designs and their minor tweaks wrapped as the necessary component of the technological progress of the human race. The real answer is - existing nuclear is dangerous, costly, and huge portion of its cost is socialized (as typical for any monopolized industry). The nuclear energy, if/when it is developed using even existing today state of human race technology (not 50 years old) can possibly be made safe and very effective.

Edit: among my best hopes for advanced nuclear and thermonuclear is that Musk will need a source of energy on Moon, Mars, etc... and there is no nuclear industry yet capable to reach beyond the Earth to limit the progress there
You forgot the question mark in the title. Not sure if Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies here, but let's not convert speculation into fact on a whim :)
Is Merlin telling me to stop reading Hacker News?
Mono Developers start their own company
Finding Your Company's Evangelists