skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Playing devil's advocate here (I don't think software patents should exist, or at a minimum the bar should be significantly raised in what constitutes a patentable idea):

What if I'm really just an inventor type, and I don't have any of the skills or the desire necessary to go about making money off my patent. I imagine negotiating with Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. isn't a simple make a phone call and start receiving checks type process. Not allowing an inventor to sell his patent limits seriously limits a major avenue of revenue for the inventor.
Microsoft Exchange Private Appointments Aren't Private
Hmmm, may be worth mentioning something about scalability and reliability. I just got an "account suspended" page after clicking on the link :(
As far as the user-interface of printed books are concerned there is a very minimal, and understandable, set of features:

- it boots instantly
- has a high contrast and high resolution display
- is viewable from any angle, in bright or dim light
- permits fast random access to any page
- provides instant visual and tactile feedback on the location
- can be easily annotated
- requires no batteries or maintenance.

Current e-Readers cannot meet all of these specifications.

Books do a great job of conveying static information; computers let information change. In my opinion, the local library will continue to exist as a place of knowledge if it can evolve to provide the tools to access changing/shared information. Otherwise, it'll just end up being a quiet place for students to work.
MS want to buy Nokia Mobile division.
Looks like they fixed it now.
Just about everything of David Allen's Getting Things Done concept is taken from somewhere else. He just combined them into one workflow system that seems to work well for most people.
School teaches by ability, not grade level
because it's very awkward that the camera is not in the same place you are looking. You're looking at the monitor, when the webcam is most often above the monitor. So all the viewer (and vice versa) sees is you looking down.

It's not "eye-to-eye" conversation. If you want the other person to feel like they are looking at you, you have to look dead into the camera. But then you miss out on seeing the other person.
Yeah, same here. I'm surprised I had not heard of this before today, but I know for a fact that it affects at least one of my sites.

Have a good flight. I'm stuck in a car for another few hours, myself.
Right, because buying the long term debt of a nation with absolutely no political will to resolve its fiscal problems is the very definition of "low risk", right?

That really worked out well for the Greek, Irish, and Portugal sovereign debt buyers.
If the only way to get to your site is to use a Facebook account, I'm just not going to use it. I've heard Facebook accounts can be easier to set up than a separate account system, but a lot of people just don't want their Facebook tied with random sites like that.
People forget that Unix itself is one big IDE. I use emacs to edit code, but in another terminal window I use make to compile or run tests, "find" and grep to look for stuff, tail to look at logs, custom shell scripts for lots of other things, etc etc. So emacs isn't an IDE, it is just a text editor, and the best one I know at that (I love vi for quick configuration tweaks, but not real coding).
Latin American Startups
Boomerang for Gmail does this...
This is a terrible article. It almost looks like Sony's PR people are trying to come up with strange stories to make it look like lots of people are culpable for Sony's inability to store date safely.
It's not clear that nailguns are more complex than hammers. What is the measure of complexity? Nailguns are easier to use for a complete newbie, so a nailgun could be seen as a simpler tool. Becoming an expert hammer user takes literally years.

There are many different ways to measure complexity. Learning curve, interface, potential for virtuosity, amount of time implementation took, etc.

Nailguns are wayyyyy simpler to use than a hammer.
Are there any replacements which plug me into Australia's landline phone system for $12/month? Because that is Skype's primary utility, for me.
I would love to see one in person, but it's really been difficult with the delays. If the President can't manage to pull it off...
Ask PG/YC: Why doesn't YC take a convertible note instead of equity?
With the emphasis on convertible notes for startups (http://paulgraham.com/hiresfund.html), why doesn't YC take one? Why push one set of standards for other early investors but extract another for yourselves?

$20k may not be much, but in the context of a convertible note, even with a significant discount, YC's contributions could be properly valued by the market rather than set as an arbitrary standard.
I don't see why you were downvoted on this--Merlin cracks on himself when he doesn't answer a question directly (which, by his own admission, happens very frequently).
Stop Building Apps and Start Disrupting Industries
+1 for Bringhurst, definitely. Plus, when you meet a cute designer somewhere, he or she will be impressed when you drop that name.
Because I don't want clients seeing me in boxers, white teeshirt (usually stained with coffee because I have the motor skills of an infant), mussy hair, and a couple of days beard growth while I'm talking about the website/app they're trusting me with actual money to build.
How about patenting "a method for discovering patented methods in an application through a device". If you could be granted that patent, it would be the end of all patent trolling companies, forever. Or at least, you'd make a huge amount of money.
Ask HN: Weekend project, what next?
I read James Altucher's excellent blog post[1] and thought the crowd sourced advertising thing was a wonderful idea.

Over the weekend I built smashvert.com to take the idea and run with it.

I've got an HN checklist here. I've been MVP. I've spent barely any money. I'm iterating. I got super cheap hosting at bluehost and bought a cheap theme from themeforest. I used a creative commons image from flickr for my first post.

But now what? I'm going through the HN posts on bootstrap marketing. I'm trying some reddit ads soon. I'm trying to find all the competition websites I can and submit it. Finding people to take my competition money is going to be the hardest part. Maybe it's too little.

I loved Jame's toothpaste idea but I figure if I initially go for market segments like soda then there will be more leads to try and turn a profit somehow.

I've loved HN for some time, now I'm hoping HN can love me back a little with some advice.

[1] - http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/05/an-idea-i-had-that-went-down-the-drain/
^^Agree. Check out meetups and hack-a-thons. Contact any hacker spaces if there are in your area. Look at startup sites and email lists, e.g. StartupDigest. Go to one or two meetups/ dev. events and make friends. BYOC - Bring your own code. It helps if you have something started already - show that your serious.
The constant references to 'dead paper' belie the denials that Mr. Godin is not anti-book. Of course he is. And with that blind spot in his perspective he misses a number of advantages found only in a library. I've been wandering up and down the aisles of libraries since just after I learned to read. The number of things that I read that were not on any particular list is countless. Bit hard to do with a search engine. And there is no point in even trying to describe the problem of the enormous number of books not yet digitized. Does anyone seriously think that just because a book is 'old' that it's contents have no value? Most of the necessary and important books on both chess and weaving (to name to disparate subjects) are 'old' and for the most part are not available in digital versions. I guess in Mr. Godin's universe we throw all of that away and start over. Small aside---did you know that there is a library with over a 100k volumes on chess? These are just some of the holes in his arguments that occur to me as a book-lover and library-fan...
Everyone sucks at interviewing. Everyone.
As a dad, who also had a cancer-ridden father in a hospital bed that took up most of the living room, it's hard to not cry at work reading that story.
Print Stamps with Ruby
In 20 years of giving & receiving presentations I can tell you that this is actually the second most important advice I can give: if you can avoid handouts do so. (the most important is the importance of "the narrative" which I'm going to write about in the next week or two on http://www.bothsid.es).

It is your job to control the tempo & information in the meeting and handouts destroy that. I do sometimes give them after the meeting.

If you're not doing an overhead projector presentation then I agree that you need to give handouts. If a projector - there's no feedback that the other person could give you with paper in front of them that they couldn't with a handout unless it's detailed financial or other information (you could hand this out as you get to that place in the presentation).
I don't think this changes the debate. It adds another data point to the idea that piracy can give exposure to works that don't have massive amounts of money to spend on PR campaigns; such things that if they weren't heavily pirated, you probably wouldn't know about them. This idea has been around for a long time.
This kind of goes away on the phone though.
So according to

http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/e...

http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/a...

a comprehensive list of territories observing GMT all year:

* Iceland
* Burkina Faso
* Cote d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast)
* Gambia
* Ghana
* Guinea-Bissau
* Guinea
* Liberia
* Mali
* Mauritania
* Saint Helena
* Sao Tome and Principe
* Senegal
* Sierra Leone
* Togo
The best configuration for a frontloader that I have found so far is:

server
{
server_name domainname.com;

root /srv/sites/domainname.com/httpdocs;
index index.php;

access_log /srv/sites/domainname.com/logs/access.log main;
error_log /srv/sites/domainname.com/logs/error.log info;

try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;

location ~ \.php$
{
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string =403;

include /usr/local/nginx/conf/fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_pass phpfpm;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
}
}

This will allow static files to be served appropriately, standalone .php files to be run, and anything requiring a frontloader to be passed on accordingly. This should work with most frontloader based frameworks, however certain ones will fail, e.g. symphony (no not symfony)...

EDIT: Added change suggested by nbpoole to fix security vulnerability.
> The problem being: patent trolls like Lodsys LLC do not actually create anything. There's nothing to countersue over.

They don't sell products, but they surely use computers internally. Which makes them vulnerable to all sorts of patent lawsuits.

Patent law lets you sue both the person making the software (Microsoft etc.) and the person using it, in this case Lodsys.
With an online library how are you going to "serendipitously" find new books from other domains you don't know you're interested in?

Google could handle this with "I'm Feeling Lucky." I seem to remember delicious.com doing something like this. How about a serendipity web app that tries to figure out/crowdsource what you never knew you'd be interested in?
This.

Video chat fails at providing an emotional connection because of this. It leaves you feeling like you are talking past someone. It's a fundamental problem with the technology that can't really be solved unless we literally put a camera in the middle of the screen.
Errata: Cape Verde is the only territory currently at GMT-1. Got my timezone trivia wrong, sorry.
I wonder how effective google is filtering spam IM requests?
I wonder if they disclosed to Apple et al. that they would also be pursuing licensing from their developer base.
Why do people never put god damn paragraphs in these things?

IANA Software Patent Lawyer, but I see no mention of initiating sale of a sub product through a product application. (i.e. In-App Purchases). I only see a vauge description of listing products to purchase. If that's the case, surely every e-commerce site, app, online grocery list, falls under this patent. Surely there are things that predate this patent that could be used as prior art?
But for an app developer to take a year or two to write an application and to see money from the app, is good fortune built on top of the contributions of the entire shared ecosystem, including independent inventor’s patent outputs such as Abelow’s.

Did someone lose their Strunk & White?
I want to learn C/C++, but really shouldn't
As a web developer I've always been a scripting guy, and I enjoy the advantage.

However, recently I began to find C/C++ code to be beautiful with all their dangerous manual memory allocation calls, garbage collection and cryptic compilation logs. It just fascinates me, especially since I tinkered with Fossil.

But as it seems it can really make productivity suffer as higher level languages are more tailored toward the web. Please give me some advice to mute the hardcore hacker inside me.
As they say in TV, video chatting with your clothes on is a bit pointless.
The Lodsys Issue Is Bigger Than We Know
That's a lode of horse shit.

My N1 and my wife's have both been rock solid.

And by Cisco VPN, do you mean IPSEC? Or Cisco's proprietary SSL VPN?
Ol’ Mark Pincus Had a Farm…
Anyone else curious about why the Beatles returned nothing on iTunes?

[Note: All this applies to Beatles tracks ripped from CD rather than purchased via iTunes.]

I've just tried Genius (updated immediately before) on a selection of Beatles tracks in iTunes - Eleanor Rigby, Yellow Submarine, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band and not one of them produces a playlist.

Even before they were selling Beatles tracks enough people will have ripped them from CD to have the data to produce playlists so it seems unlikely (but not impossible) that it's data related, which suggests that it's either an odd, very specific error or intentional.

What's stranger is that for some (but not all) of the tracks it will make Genius recommendations to buy...

Anyone any ideas? Some strange part of the Beatles licensing deal perhaps though that would be very odd as really who gains anything by that?
I wonder how much of this is generational-- my teenage daughter probably videochats more in a week than I have in my life.

I think that over the longue duree, a lot of technology shifts occur not because individuals gradually get convinced to move to the new technology, but because the folks clinging to the old ways eventually die out. (I'm paraphrasing Kuhn on paradigm change in science, of course.)
Same here. Fixed on my local environment, just need to alter my production server asap.
So this give the option of chargebacks? This seems to be much less safe for merchants.
Will Nokia Become The IBM Of Handsets?
I 'd rather have a breakdown of how these ads perform wrt conversions, and how they compare to adwords
The Chromebook's achilles heel: Excel compatibility
The ability to sell patents give investors some downside protection when funding a startup. Every VC I've ever pitched to asks - "What's patentable". If you don't end up making money off selling a product / service, at least there is the hope of selling a "asset"
This is perfect. Groklaw continues in capable hands, while PJ gets to walk away satisfied. Looks like positives all around.
Fun read.
I believe Apple actually filed a patent for a screen with an embedded camera. I don't know how technologically/economically feasible it would be to actually make and integrate into devices.

Article:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/01/08/apple_files_pa...

Patent:
http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Se...
My mind reads it as "Strips"
Web performance matters : latency, bandwidth and station wagons
Video chats give me the opportunity to feel socially awkward. I most often do not feel that way, but the threat is there.

This is not so with voice or text mediums.

With my girlfriend, parents and siblings I'm at ease and comfortable. In fact, I really enjoy it. With everybody else, though, I feel somewhere between indifferent, annoyed, and dreadful.
Current e-Readers cannot meet all of these specifications.

We are pretty close, actually. I've booted my iPad only a few times in the past 3 months. The rest of the time, it's been in standby mode, and it "comes up" pretty much instantly. It is high contrast/high resolution. If it's not high contrast/high resolution enough, this is bound to improve. I've never had a problem with viewing angle or in dim light. Bright light visibility should improve. Random access has been good for me, including the use case of using programming books for reference. There is visual feedback, and I haven't missed tactile feedback. There are ways to annotate PDFs on the iPad. The iPad requires no batteries, and the maintenance has been limited to syncing and updating OS software.

So, to meet your requirements, the next iPad just has to:

- be viewable in bright light
- incorporate tactile feedback (or equivalent)

Perhaps improve in these ways:

- increased display resolution
- reduced maintenance
- better annotation
Do Your Skills Stack Up Against Your LinkedIn Connections?
جريدة
> doing stuff you don't know with your bandwidth.

But FreeNet is GPL and this pretty well describes it's standard operating procedure... Do you think FreeNet is evil too?
It's difficult to gauge how serious this proposal slash thought experiment is. The nice thing about a pair is the way it naturally lends itself to iterative processing: There's the CAR and the CDR, the first and the rest. (Are the keys in these maps ordered?)

Not all data is complex enough to merit a map: modeling e.g. a list using lists is perverse in that you're using degenerate single-item maps to model what is a simpler data structure.

And what does a lisp based on maps look like, if this language preserves the homoiconic nature of lisp?

The argument by analogy that a lisp "should" have a "better" data structure than a cons cell because lisp lambdas support multiple arguments, unlike pure lambda calculus, doesn't hold water. Lisps--and even Scheme, which is often incorrectly taken to have as a design goal to be minimalistic to the point of consisting of axiomatic primitives--do not deal in pedantic adherence to theory. Limiting lambdas to a single argument is pointless whereas a cell happens to be minimal yet extremely useful in practice.

Other have written lisps atop vectors as the primitive data type. That's an idea that makes more sense: it's a generalization of the pair to arbitrary length.
I use FaceTime/iChat video chat daily to consult with other members of our small company as we're spread out across the country. It's a great tool imho and keeps us feeling more close knit than just text or voice communication.
Another advantage of real printed books is that real printed books are also inexpensive enough to be routinely given as gifts to small children, even in dirt poor families. IMHO, this is important as early readers are often young enough to be ridiculously rough on pretty much anything they play with, electronic or paper. They also lose things a lot. The difference with paper books is not that they're more durable, but that one book getting damaged or lost doesn't destroy a child's entire library and doesn't have a high replacement cost.
That configuration contains a major security vulnerability, at least if your site allows file uploads (I tested it on my server to be sure). I've written about this issue before: https://nealpoole.com/blog/2011/04/setting-up-php-fastcgi-an...

Edit: You need to copy the try_files line into the PHP location block. I'd recommend using the following line (I just added =403 to the end of yours, so you return a 403 error rather than a 500 error when try_files fails):

try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string =403;
Mortgage loan modification
Mortgage loan modification is a system utilized in making a mortgage credit more convenient for anybody who is pressured in keeping up the mortgage amortization.
At the time she resigned, I wondered if this was a polite way for her to take a swan-song and she had other plans for the site. Whether she pulled it together first, or it just emerged, I'm grateful. The commentary quality is just so good there, it's the first source for software litigation related to open software.
Pretty cool... sort of a "crawler meets selenium" approach. I wonder if they support css3 - cant find out much from their docs.
Experiences Developing My First iOS / iPhone App – OnCall for Nagios
A Veteran of SEAL Team Six Describes His Training
There needs to be a cash penalty for people bringing frivolous patent claims - and that money should be awarded to the defendant. Then you could get no-win-no-fee laywers defending collections of small devs against claims they think are unlikely to win but which the devs couldn't afford to defend against.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3939333.stm

I guess they haven't tested air crash and being submerged in 4km for almost 2 years...
I suspect that's not it, because we all grew up with videochat - they did it all the time on Star Trek!

More seriously tho', I don't think it's wise to extrapolate from teenagers, because socially, they're not very sophisticated and don't have very long attention spans anyway. Grownups prefer much richer interactions that you need the whole spectrum of body language for (dropped frames in video calls misses this), intonation (poor audio in video calls misses this), ambience, the place you meet matters, and so on. That's why video calling is a solution looking for a problem.
seems to work for paypal

in a large mainstream bitcoin economy there would be multiple escrow services, both the consumer and merchant can decide what services they will use

clearcoin has the option of donating the money to charity if there is a dispute, seems like an interesting innovation to me
I tried to use it but once twitter authorisation done its shows error page sorry
Kids. Grandma.

'nuff said.
Fair-trade coffee producers fare worse than conventional producers
There have been several attempts at solving this, including one by Microsoft[1] which involves putting a camera on either side of the screen and synthesizing a new image that allows eye contact.

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=6726...
A book is not defined by being made of paper. Godin is pro-book but recognizes that the future of the book is as a digital file.

I don't think anyone is arguing that there is a continuing role for librarians who act as archivists of valuable paper books. But that number of librarians is vastly less than the number currently in existence.

Librarians who refuse to give up paper books are like record shops who refused to give up vinyl. Sure, a few will stick around--but the vast majority will have to move on.
Ask HN: What is Boston developing?
Hey all,

My name is Kevin McCarthy and I'm a writer at BostInnovation.com, a Boston-based publication. I focus on tech and web/mobile development (see here: http://bostinnovation.com/tag/programming/).

I'm curious: what is Boston hacking on? If you'd like, post a comment on this to let me know. Hopefully, I'll be constructing a view pieces on the responses.

Thanks everyone!
TLDR: Microsoft Exchange relies on client software to hide/obfuscate private appointments. Doesn't handle the security on the server side.
I like text more than video. I almost never go to movies, don't like watching YouTube, almost never rent videos...

So, no, I don't want to video chat unless we have a really good reason to. Something that involves showing me a video feed of X, where X can't be copy-pasted.
Itemize and Iterate
Easy to follow tutorial on effectively utilizing Truecrypt