skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Marco Arment talked about this (not directly; he probably hasn't read this article) in "Build and Analyze" last week, and the conclusion he came to was: there's every indication Lodsys is totally prepared to litigate, and were you to challenge them, you would stand a very good chance of losing.

It's not a "small" risk this strategy asks you to take. It is, relative to the cost of simply licensing the patent†, a rather large risk; for most independent shops, you would be staking your company on the psychology of patent licensing shop.

Also, don't courts routinely combine cases, and routinely throw them out when they're filed in the wrong venue?

† Which you probably no longer need to do after Apple all but threatened to sue Lodsys.
I'm not a lawyer, but this sounds like a conspiracy to commit an abuse of process. In other words, you're trying to use the court system for the express purpose of inflicting financial pain on an adversary in order to intimidate them into changing their behaviour, rather than to correct a wrong.
Google doesn't have any content. That's not how it works. Google indexes pages and provides links to them, but that's not the same as saying that Google collects all that information.
why was this modded down but hansy's comment wasn't
Ex-Automotive Executives Start Incubator for Greentech Start-Ups
Fx4 is nothing but stable for me. Do you perhaps have a number of extensions that could be causing the instability issues?
>As a side note, is a BS in pure math particularly useful, beyond the fact that it's a bachelor's degree? That always struck me as one of those disciplines that would require an advanced degree to be of use.

Note that I don't have a masters/PhD in mathematics, so take this with a grain of salt. But from what I've seen, if you want to actively study & research mathematics, it's PhD or bust.

If, however, you want to be a software developer, a statistician, or to work in finance, for example, a BS in mathematics will serve you quite nicely. It may even have a slight advantage in that it's a bit more versatile: I'm currently working as a software developer but could take the degree any number of other directions.

And for other degree paths, it's simply useful as a bachelor's degree -- though I have had friends indicate that they found non-technical (managerial, sales, etc.) jobs insanely quickly with a BS in math or physics. They always attributed it to the inherent difficulty of the degree; of course, that's just anecdotal, so I'm not sure if that's really the case or not.
Microsoft Makes Windows Phone More Social
Yes, there are many things you can learn on the job, but there are things that employers shouldn't have to teach you, and there are things you don't have to know but give you a deeper understanding of what your field of study means.

Do you understand the basics of how a compiler translates C code into assembly? Do you understand some of the basic concepts of computer design (why we need RAM, how cache improves performance, or how an operating system allows you to run multiple applications at once)? That's not even getting to the level of understanding what a transistor is, or the calculus behind Ohm's law? Knowing how and why something works makes it easier to know what can be done within the bounds of the system, and the better you know the system, the easier it is to find ways to take the system further than someone else could.

I doubt you think you should be able to become a doctor, lawyer, architect, mechanical engineer, or other advanced profession without a related degree, so why do you think that the computer industry should be any different?
Companies make same error with Social Media as during DotCom era
Are you sure you're not on the beta channel? Coming from Firefox 4, that channel stuff was under the hood. If you used Firefox 4 beta, then you're probably on the beta channel (you can check in about:config looking at app.update.channel)
Sure, but how are you going to receive them? Packet loss would seem to be an issue.
I'll grant you that---I forgot about the time period where "natural philosophy" was science.
Internet Needs Government Role to Avoid ‘Anarchy,’ France’s Sarkozy Says
:(
I think I speak for many when I say:

When the G8 can let protesters have a peaceful protest during their session than we will believe their intentions in governing the internet as being for the common world good..

Until that proof shows up STFU..
The writing in question is often referred to here - which is why I mentioned it.
>Is the product actually better? If not, that sounds like a dysfunctional market.

Everything else being equal, marketing is just propaganda that makes the market less functional. And a "strong brand" is the result of successful propaganda.
I myself use profanity from time to time in in-person discussions with people I know, so this may seem a bit hypocritical.

The reason I try not to do it online though (or in person with strangers) is because I have marked that when you use profanity with strangers (especially online) it tends to make the discussion more rancorous because people focus on the profanity instead of the content. It does not seem to matter whether it was meant as an insult, or simply as an "emotional multiplier".

I have certainly realized that I used do it, so may be it's just a bad data point, weighted heavily!

So that's my perspective.
That's what I've been doing, and though I'm still very unhappy with developer churn, being able to hire and fire at will is convenient. It's just very hard to find someone that doesn't have a project mentality and is prepared to do great work.
Quick: Who made Kleenex?

The answer is Kleenex. Now try to tell someone in a general conversation that you when you're talking about Kleenex, you meant 1) the actual company Kleenex, not the 2) product nor the 3) other generic tissue paper products. Because now you have to explain to consumers why your Kleenex is better than your competitors Kleenex, when before you could just say 'Kleenex, the brand that works' or 'Kleenex, the brand you trust' or just plain 'Kleenex'. Even if it's just a name, if you reduce the number of ways for you to differentiate your product from others, it just makes it harder to do so.
>My alma mater, a public university in Ontario, Canada does this, but it appears to have more to do with government regulation of certain programs.

Good! This is, IMO, the best approach to degree programs. People could study what interests them without mountains of debt when leaving school.

>Per-term fees differ by faculty, with arts and mathematics (not inluding CS) being almost the same, CS being much higher

Interesting. I've always heard that a proper computer science curriculum is almost indistinguishable from an applied mathematics curriculum, and that it's in computer engineering/programming/applied computer science/(yadda yadda) that the real bacon is made.

Of course, I've never taken classes in a true CS curriculum, so I really can't say.
Who is winning the location-based services race, Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare?
I'm not sure his native language is english; he may be swedish.
Survey: 85% of New College Grads Move Back in with Mom and Dad
Sounds kind of like Marimba on steroids. I like the notion of it running on Android 1.6, if I could drive the price down for a 1.6 capable module to sub $25-$35 I think I've got an enterprise use for it :-)
Looking back on the space race
The Easy API: Lessons Learned Scaling an API
U.S. 54% Unemployment Rate - Under 25
One-Of-Everything iTunes App Store Binge Would Cost You $891,982.24
Facebook Loses Traffic in Middle East
Motorola Droid X ME811 Review
>Rephrased, if I define classes Foo and Bar, and I write generic method foobar (accepts as params instances of Foo and Bar), where do I put foobar?

This sounds similar to the expression problem.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Clojure-Expression-Proble...
Dell XPS 15z
Saudi Woman Driver Arrested After Posting on YouTube (UPDATED)
Isn't the problem more about access than storage?

We naturally recoil from the global namespace idea because we (rightly) anticipate huge issues with organization and duplication, so we want a hierarchical structure (files and modules) to keep our functions organized.

How about leaving our storage hierarchical for organizational purposes, but streamlining access? Instead of always using tedious import and require statements, simply call/use your functions, objects, gems, plugins, etc. directly and let the compiler and/or runtime infer from your usage which you are referring to in the case of ambiguity. Only if the ambiguity cannot be resolved in this manner would the programmer need to be explicit. Intelligent metadata and indexing could also add a lot of power to this sort of system.

Currently even our best languages require a large amount of cruft and legwork that is only really necessary in those 5% of cases where ambiguity can't be automatically inferred away. Seems like optimizing for the edge case if I've ever seen it.
Retirement And The Recession: Savings Destroyed For 1 out of 4 Older Workers
Show HN: GroupsFinder - Find All of the Tech Groups Near You
Is misc.foo better than misc_foo?

My point being - a point also raised by Joe - is that just "adding dots" doesn't solve anything.
I think the EPA and Army Corps frown upon massive thermal pollution of the Great Lakes now. The ecosystem can't really handle it.
Where is the search box? That's the first question the vast majority of users will ask when first presented with this UI.

Like it or not, the search box is how most users navigate the web.
If you're in the one of lucky countries (or have credit card from one of them) I'd suggest Spotify, their client is marvelous (the best UI for a music player ever and also very fast), supports playing local files and since last version also syncing with Apple devices (maybe some others too, haven't had occasion to check).
Regardless of whether that's also a line from a movie – and I did not recognize it as such – it's still a legitimate question. After reading the article, I too wondered exactly how he got caught. I can guess, but it'd be interesting to know.

In contrast, reflexively referencing a movie/celebrity isn't interesting.
Emacs is using single namespace, and people are just contributing .el scripts here and there (put in the right place, they get automatically loaded - (I'm just an user of these .el scripts - mainly for lisp/lua development))

Also "C" - single namespace, and though very verbose sometimes, google it, and you'll find result (saved me many times looking for Win32 API, GTK, Cairo, lua api, etc.)

But what about data? Static data, vars, etc. Also some languages/systems have initialization/deinitialization of the module (register/unregister, etc.)

But in general I like the idea, and thought about it, now I'm even thinking more.

He talks about putting them in database, well each database would have to have a name - maybe that's the name of the package (and you can rename), and you can merge. And if the DB is say SQL - you can even operate on merging databases way better than the methods of "ar, lib (msvc), ranlib, etc." or whatever the language/runtime provides
Many don't have $2,000 for a rainy day
I don't think its always a matter of unwilling as at times being unable.

When I was in university, I was a TA/Tutor and found that even upper level CS students have trouble coding. There are many cases where the students understood the upper-level concepts behind say networking, or DFA minimization but couldn't produce simple Fizzbizz level code.

The problem wasn't apparantly with their intelligence (as they could annunciate and expand on the concepts they were taught in class), or their rationality (they made it through the Discrete Math weedout), or even their determination (they worked hours upon hours outside of class)....

So now I'm one of those who believes that sometimes no matter how hard you try, there's a switch that won't go off to make one a 'coder'.

That said, I think a business guy should at least try to learn coding if his idea demands doing a lot of it to start with.
They have less than 6% of most of the most valued companies. They suffer dilution when these companies raised money. YC doesn't do follow-on rounds.

Then again the companies will probably be worth even more by the time they reach liquidity.
I am going slightly off topic here, but I wanna say I like the prospect of being able to save phone conversation for your record. But I was wondering about the legal implications of doing it without letting the other party know. Then I looked up this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_recording_laws#United...

I would advise the author to check this out and see if he or the person he talked to was in one of the states that prohibit wiretapping without consent.
Not because it cannot be quantified, but because you failed to quantify it. A sense of aesthetics is not an irreducible "thing," it's a set of algorithms and heuristics. If you could explain exactly why you find DaVinci's creativity so appealing, you still wouldn't be able to reproduce it directly--but you would have reduced it to a problem in NP.
Charlie Rose Interviews Paul Graham at TC Disrupt 2011 [video]
> The really excellent insights come from people with seemingly irrelevant background

I highly doubt it. Can you quote me some example of these really excellent insights which came from people with irrelevant background?

> As has use of deductive sorts of processes (philosophy is a lot like debugging).

I still don't get it. deductive processes aren't something unique to philosophy. I studied Mathematical logic and induction more extensively than a philosophy major. The point you are making it is somehow philosohpy helps understand comp. sci. better. I fail to see how.

> That's not really a good comparison.

I don't have a fair survey at hand. From personal experience, good programmers have excellent communication skills.

> GEB and the Feynman book are as much works of literature as they are technical pieces.

That wasn't the point. The parent post said about technical people trained not to like non-technical stuff - I was just saying that I was forced to study History in high school an d I didn't like it at all. I don't have any use or interest in why did the opium war start or analyzing Shakespeare's writing - if I am going to read, it would be something which I find fascinating and/or useful. Technical people trained not to like non-technical stuff is non-sequitur.
Yeah, first you have to go underneath the "Billpay" tab and add a "Pay To" account. After you do that, you'll get a little icon that displays if that account is eligible for E-Bills.

Once you request E-bills, you can setup an E-Bill Initiated Payment Plan.
Mozilla Labs: The Location Bar Has To Go
Apple Granted Access to Unreleased Samsung Hardware in Patent Suit
Or he could actually be asking how he was caught.
Total cholesterol 220
s/G8 agenda/Nicolas Sarkozy/
Have you considered developing some proprietary code? :-)
SquareTrade Drop Tests iPad 2 with Smart Cover
> I'm sure you can find a long list of people who've done exceptionally well who majored in any common subject.

Or people who have't majored at all - Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs etc. Parent post is making rules out of exceptions.
Free app turns Windows into a wireless router
Two things: first, kin selection is one possible mechanism by which a critical mass of cooperators can arise, but it is not the only such mechanism. And second, the mechanism that gives rise to cooperation may have evolved for some other reason, with cooperation as an ancillary effect.

For example, inter-species cooperation (as between dogs and humans) is almost certainly not a result of kin selection.

So even if Wilson is right and the theory of kin selection is flawed (I can't imagine how he could be right, but I haven't read the paper) that is not an indictment of Axelrod.
Will the unlimited plans extend to the 4G lineup?
I prototyped something vaguely similar in Python, using the 3d Visual library. I would love to port this to CoffeeScript/JS + Canvas. The dream is to have zoomable user interface (like Google Earth) where you can zoom in and view one file, and zoom out to see all files. And when code is run, you can watch a highlighted path fly from file to file. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZLzmNvRI1w https://github.com/hugs/detour
IBM bringing Windows to Mainframes
The Cocoa APIs basically simply ask the developer to fill out a form when they’re asked to do so. I’m not sure how much more higher level and abstracted one can get without relinquishing control of how the data is displayed.

It's been successfully achieved with Convention Over Configuration. See MacRuby's HotCocoa.
Show HN: I Made this Y Combinator T-Shirt (Words from PG's Essays)
BSD-licensed C++ runtime
> that's not the same as saying that Google collects all that information.

Except they do collect all that information.
Systemd Documentation
Cloudant (YC S08) is Accepting Reservations for a European CouchDB Cluster
Bernstein is not a professor at the University of Chicago, he's a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, completely different university!
Thanks for submitting! The nice thing about our publishing model is that I can edit the document with suggestions, so send them my way!
Great article, but they seem to barely mention the most mind bending fact about the experiment:

They are generating a 1km wide blast of neutrinos in suburban Chicago and sending it 450 miles through the ground to mine in Minnesota.

I had to read parts of the article 3 times and follow some of the links to make sure that is really what is going on.
I learned to program by creating an ecommerce service for my pet store ("Outlet" at http://cheekob.com) in my spare time. I am now broadening it to help other sellers with a new selling format: automatic markdowns (http://pricetack.com). What really helped me was the awesomely simple, yet powerful Python framework Web2py.
Here's another visualization of the Gray code: http://billmill.org/static/perm4.png

(it's from a few visualizations of permutations I did a while ago: http://billmill.org/permvis.html )
prat- AZ law states that at least one party must be informed that the call is being recorded. They monitor and record their calls for Q/A and I'm doing the same... Society would be better off if the common man had the same weapons as corporations to enforce accountability.
Following all the rules does not make you a good person. In fact, rule following and obedience to authority is what enables large scale evil. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment for a famous demonstration.
My thought: Microsoft should try to capture the low end.

I know, it sounds dumb, but right now they have a terrible history of competing with Apple and Android. If you're going to shell out hundreds of bucks, are you going to risk it on another Microsoft device?

On the other hand, if you were going to get a free phone anyway, and somebody tells you that the new MS "smart" phone is free, why not try it? If they can get wide adoption there, get a lot of user feedback and keep improving, they can start releasing nicer handsets and work their way up into the premium market.

Of course, all this assumes that they can make a phone with cheap hardware which performs decently and is truly a step up for flip-phone users, and that they can get adoption there. But at least those folks have lower standards and less to lose by getting a Microsoft phone. (Which, by the way, should NOT be called a Windows phone.)

It's the "a smart phone in every pocket" strategy. :)
I've used the same profile on my primary computer for something like 5 years, across a migration from Windows to Ubuntu, and a few times when I've had too much time on my hands and ran minefield/betas for a month now and again.

They were unstable, but I never corrupted my profile.
DumpsterDrive - Passive Sharing of Deleted Files
The abstractions that philosophy deals with have to do with things like the nature of knowledge and being. For some CS folks this comes as a natural extension of what they know -- thinking about daily experience categorically.

If you consider the knowledge and abstraction capability it takes to design the schema for an app -- thinking about the knowledge in the system at a meta level -- philosophy is in some ways analogous to that.

However, even if there was a perfectly obvious analogy between ontology in CS and philosophical ontology, I think that many engineers would still forgo thinking deeper about life. (Sorry, I know how condescending that sounds and I don't mean it that way.)

> Is there something in CS that prevents CS majors from asking abstract questions?

This type of response is annoying. Is there anything that prevents an eight-year-old from learning C and doing your job? Theoretically, no. Practically, yes. It's not the right question, because whether there or isn't something that prevents them from asking those questions, the perception is that they don't do it.
NASA to Give Nod to Lockheed Space Capsule
Right. Chrome uses a binary PDF reader plugin, there are no sources available. Open source projects like Chromium and Firefox require an open source reader. I think MuPDF would be a good choice.
Actually in node at least modules can export functions directly, just assign a function to `module.exports` and when you require() that module you'll get a function back. Plus you can add attributes to that function since functions are also objects.
Indeed. The detector, or receiver, I imagine would have to detect variations in the density of neutrons. Given a large enough density range, one could assign different ranges to different integers. Still a technical issue disclaimer attached.
I predicted that this would happen the first time I mixed them up.
For me, it works in Chrome but not IE.
I would love for some simple HTML(5?) API where certain anchor elements automatically show up on the scroll bar. That way, for instance, you could have a huge document split into chapters visible from the scroll bar, or a blog post where you can just glance at the scroll bar to see how long the article is and how many comments there are.

Something like `<a rel="scroll">`
Robots develop language to 'talk' to each other
No one has mentioned that modules/packages hold together code that shares concepts.

Surely getting rid of Java packages and keeping the classes would be far less extreme than what Joe is suggesting for Erlang -- yet then we would have a zillion "meanings" of things like Image, Server, PDFFile, etc.

What about the Erlang functions that aren't "file2md5" and "downcase_char"? Is he way over-generalizing, or do Erlang programs typically just munge data in obvious ways?
I do, but it's not as fun.
I certainly don't have any put away for a rainy day. After a bit of time being jobless, I finally found some underpaying work to get back on my feet. Coupled with various bills and medical bills, etc., I'm sitting at a paycheck to paycheck point. I get paid again tomorrow and I have $5.00 in the bank. It's quite depressing. Couple that with my girlfriend also losing her job and we tore through any savings pretty quickly.

I have a side project going that I'd love to launch in the next month or so, but I'm also polishing up the resume to begin sending out June 1.

Time for me to start pulling myself out of this rut now that I've got things in my life stabilized again.

I actually feel a little embarrassed posting this here, but what the hell. This will act as motivation for me. I seem to have forgotten along the way that I'm a good developer and worth more than the small salary I have right now. (I took on some consulting work that sort of turned full time. The salary was not/is not great but I kind of ended up 'trapped' there. Stockholm syndrome for the employed?)
I didn't even think of that - I was considering each crime as being a distinct entity (eg, robbing a group of people counted as only a single crime). By counting victims, which probably makes more sense, financial crimes would more than make up for the decrease in violent crime.