skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>True, but I don't think that's a concern for most people.

But that is the kind of thinking that lead to the whole issue with Dropbox in the first place. Its deceptively "secure" to any user who can't analyze the implementation implications themselves.
I voted for the "abolish all" option despite the fact I'm actually in favor of patents in general and don't think software should be distinct from hardware, but the situation has gotten ridiculous (as has the situation with patents in general).

I think that software should only be protected by copyright if the source code is placed in escrow and made available when the company goes belly-up or when the (strictly limited) copyright period expires.

I think that the patent system needs to be thoroughly reformed so as to do a better job of covering software, hardware, and a blend of the two. John Carmack's example is compelling but if patents were handled properly the odds of such a thing occurring would be as remote as the odds of doing the same thing in your backyard workshop with a lathe.
StackMob stacks up $7.5M to be Heroku-style backend for mobile devs
Not trying to be an ass... But I would feel stupid if I didn't correct you. I'm sure it was just a typo though.

A year has 52 weeks (plus one or two days), if 2 of these weeks are vacations, 50 weeks remain. Therefore 1000 / 50 = 20.
FWIW, his mobile phone review is fairly stellar in depth of review coverage (at least for all Nokia phones), and I've followed it for many many years now. I'm surprised that someone would call his work 'low quality', but then again I wouldn't know too much about his 'journalism'.
Arcimoto: Oregon-based electric car company
It takes significantly less effort to create a piece of hardware from scratch if you have a reference design to crib from.

However, if I independently develop a piece of software or an algorithm, there is a very strong chance that it took me the exact same amount of time and effort as the person who originally solved it.

These two instances are completely different. What about the hardware engineer who independently developed a piece of hardware? It would take him around the same amount of effort to create it as the original. Just like the software engineer who cribbed an existing design would have to do much less work than the original.

0% of the differences in effort have to do with physical vs software, and 100% to do with what references you have available to you before you get started.
no facts, no analysis, no points made. why is this submitted even? I just wasted 5 minutes reading it.
Hijacking brand search results on Google
I'm not sure what code you write or what it's for, but in the real world, sometimes we deal with buggy, archaic and downright bizarre code that we didn't write, and sometimes we have deadlines.

So, yes. I use a debugger, so that I can spend some time at home too. Because as nice as the office is, it's summertime, and there's beer in my fridge.

Back when I was seventeen and staying up all night writing a video game engine though, I definitely would have been onboard with the whole print debugging idea.
> You feel like a cheap prostitute afterwards.

Prostitutes get paid at least. You were a rape victim.
How Naked Pizza Scaled from 1 to 450 Stores in 18 Months
5 Best Free Symbian Mobile Games For Download
Surely a "fairweather fanboy" implies you stop being a fan when things aren't going well. Does that apply to Gruber?
To play devil's advocate, the people that have to fear getting food posioning the most are those least able to afford Whole Foods.
I don't know if you intended it that way, but that rings truest.

That MS doesn't care about the nominal OS fee they currently get (the milk) as, even accounting for FUD, Android has to be keeping very low.

But they likely want some of the app/media marketplace, the usage data, the navigation services, etc.
Your position is not consistent or just poorly thought out, and poorly researched. Or maybe I'm just a troll.

> In fact the way patents should work is that the patent officer spends a week trying to solve said problem themselves.
Does that really sound at all scalable (or even reasonable) to you?

So clearly you were saying that a week is too much time to spend on a patent. OK.

I imagine that many of the proposals that move through the patent office are highly contextual and may be simple ideas wrapped up in daunting language. It seems reasonable that it would take far more than a week to even get your arms around some of the problems themselves, let alone the solutions.

But in a week you can't understand the problem, much less a solution. So you seem to be saying that having a system where examiners approve patents they don't understand is preferred. I say that if the examiner can't understand the solution, much less the problem, then the patent is rejected. This will really get people to focus on writing clear patents, rather than the legalese that passes for a patent today.

But lets get to numbers. There are not 500 examiners. There are more than 6,000. So at one week per patent it's now less than two years per patent. That's actually about on par with the time today. That's extremely reaonable. And I'd argue that making patents more expensive, with less protection time, you'd reduce the number of SW patents, and thus probably can turnaround SW patents more quickly.
All I was saying is that this site is for news. A piece about MIT being a good school is not news, it is utter fluff.
Ask HN: Someone wants to buy my side project, How do I decide on the price?
Few months ago I developed a real-time location service Shaloc.com, its a iPhone app that lets you share your GPS location with friends using a web link, your friends can check/track your real-time movement on any browser, with any login or app download. People have been using it in a lot of ways, its got 5 star rating in appstore. Few people have been interested in the service and creating new verticals.

I have moved on and working on another idea, but one guy is really interested in buying Shaloc.com, How do I decide on the pricing if I want to sell it? should I let him give a price or should I give him a price?
For people with OCPD, OCPD is obsessive–compulsive personality disorder.
You don't.

Years ago, urls in profiles were indeed clickable. Then pg said that they were being abused by spammers, so he removed that feature.

It used to be that, if you hadn't edited your profile from before pg made the change, then your old links would remain clickable. But looking around, I see that is no longer true. So that feature is now completely gone for everybody.
Buttered cat paradox
rofl -- yes indeed, microsoft continues on its "buying dairy cattle for beef" acquisition strategy.
Clickable link: http://shaloc.com
I've been playing a lot with Kawa (Scheme) for Java, it's rather nice.
Doesn't seem like you noticed, but the author offered alternatives to the standard 3-week contracting approach.
I thank the Diaspora community so much for creating such a large-scale open source Rails application. Coming from years of PHP experience, I had such a hard time learning and getting used to Rails, but digging through the Diaspora repository has really helped me in terms of understanding what should be considered "production level" Rails code.
Installing and Testing DB2 9.7.4 on Ubuntu 11.04
Bradbury's approach was always a social message, even social commentary veiled through token "sci-fi", which was really never that far-fetched, and very central to the characters themselves. Great observation.
Skype 6: "like groove for voip"
i genuinely have no idea why people would give a negative vote to this post. he's obviously just excited about having photos of his colleagues posted online.
i didn't see it on the front page but does it interface with any existing data tracking sites like fitbit or strava?

you may want to look at http://earndit.com/ to see how they automatically pull fitness data.
I agree with the other comments which mentioned that Clojure is more flexible here (works with any seq, not just character strings). A similar Java code would have to accept an enumerable parameter (not sure what it is in java, something like IEnumerable in .NET) and the loop would change accordingly. The loop-less regex version would not work (it might with the input converted to a string, which may or may not involve a explicit loop, depending on what is available in java ecosystem).
"What happened is, a long time ago, the country Belgium took over this country Congo and killed a lot of people and made everyone slaves."

No, that's actually not what happened. First of all, they did not take over Congo because Congo never existed before Leopold drew it up on a map on a rainy Saturday afternoon together with Stanley. Also, the country of Belgium did not take over Congo, it was a private enterprise by king Leopold II, although the government later took it over from him after reports of atrocities started to trickle through to western Europe. Third, they didn't make people slaves. The slave traders operating in Congo were mostly African-Arabic. The Belgians levied taxes on the population. This was first collected in rubber, and the colonist but also the Congolese army committed atrocities such as the cutting off of hands, murder of village elders, and so on to maximize production. Many more lives were claimed by the sleeping disease. Later on they switched to taxing in money which meant that many young men had to work in the mines to earn money for their village, often under really bad conditions. The wars, dictatorships, and genocides started after the independence.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not making excuses here or anything, but it irks me when people reduce the complex history of a beautiful country to an overly simplified and plainly false representation of the facts.
I've recently been wanting to get back in shape so this is perfect timing. My morning workout instantly got me up to Level 4 - great motivation.

One comment - I'm using a netbook (1024x800 resolution) and some of the boxes, like "great, you just earned X points" are too tall for my browser window, but they move when I scroll - I can't see a button to make the box go away, so I have to click on "play."
Large user base; proven and useful technology. Most Skype users find a value in it (I do think there's more money to make than what has been made so far). In the end it's a technology that could help brighten Microsoft's image.

If they manage to integrate it gracefuly in their office & collaboration stack, without ruining it as a standalone product, it may very well be a winner for them.

Indeed the challenges are huge but I believe this is the right time for challenges at Microsoft.
Cloud Business News Roundup May 9 - May 15, 2011
And so the process begins to make bitcoin as user friendly as credit cards.

Escrow has never worked well for consumer commerce because sellers dont like it.
"The idea is to focus on simplicity and performance. Not availability or fault tolerance (at all)."

This sounds absolutely perfect for a restricted number of use cases, and really tantalizing but unworkable for the rest.
One issue that has been ignored is that of security / confidentiality. What happens if the individual you are "courting" works for one of your competitors? Any project that he would work on for you would likely require access to sensitive, proprietary data. Sure, you could force him to sign an NDA, but that puts him in a strange situation post-project.

How do you balance giving the candidate access to your data such that he can work on a meaningful project (read: the results of which are actionable) vs. having him toil away with some dummy data just to see how he thinks?
Hey, thanks for the feedback on netbook resolution. I clearly overlooked that when designing the flow on the workout tracker page. I'll try to get that fixed asap.
In that case, let me warn you about the "missing vowels" trend you're about to notice...
Thanks for pointing this out.

The hurricane was also cheaper to make and easier to repair than the spitfire because of its wire and canvas construction.
Software is an application of mathematical equations perhaps, but then hardware is an application of
material properties and other laws of physics. Since material properties and laws of physics can't be patented, you're presumably against hardware patents as well?
If I could time travel, I would make it a requirement of some web specification that "previous" and "next" buttons go above the content, at fixed widths, so they don't keep moving around.
Motivated Reasoning and Erlang vs Python vs Node
Reedge.com Combines Google Website Optimizer and Google Analytics
Smart Products
Looks like Recess Mobile acquired PennySMS.com and OhDontForget.com over a year ago. Here's their blog post about the acquisitions:

http://www.recessmobile.com/blog/recess-mobile-acquires-penn...

Looks like the Recess Mobile website is down right now, so here's Google's cache of the page:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:WdqYHJK...
Do you happen to be following wendlers 5-3-1 routine?
You should consider adding some more body weight achievements maybe some more exercises. I prefer them to weights--cheaper, always available. http://www.frixo.com/sites/fitness/ is a site I use for reference, but there are many out there. Maybe some yoga as well? Adding some amazon affiliate links to some equipment might do well. Pullup bars are cheap and awesome.

(I got an internal server error on http://fitocracy.com/profile_setup_3/ of the setup process)
Basic negotiating strategy will tell you that you should force him to name the first number.

But consider a different way. Pick a price that you'd be happy to sell at, and name that price. If he takes it, try not to regret asking for more.
Everytime I read anything from those guys, it's all just a bunch of words, hype and promises.
Look, I think most people here agree that BitCoin could be something major. If not, the debate can still be interesting I agree that some BitCoin news is relevant here. What isn't relevant is every single thing remotely related to BitCoin being submitted to Hacker News. At this point, it's practically spam. I'm seeing 2 or 3 BitCoin posts a day, and I don't see anything else getting that amount of coverage. If many of these posts didn't have "BitCoin" in the title, they would get 0 upvotes, because they're largely meaningless fluff. FFS, can we cut back on the BitCoin submissions unless it is major, important news? This is ridiculous.
Me neither. But what about the opposite case - you work on something for a long time, and then make a breakthrough. Genius! You apply your breakthrough to do something awesome and release it out into the world. Someone else notes, it, reverse engineers it, and has a better marketing operation than you so they make $$$ and you get nothing. without patents, how do you protect your genuinely original work?

I'm not a fan of software patents. To be honest, I wish we didn't need a patent system at all. But since we don't live in the Star Trek universe and world communism turns out not to be the economic panacea that its creators hoped, we need something to protect the rights of inventors. Same thing with copyright - before it came into being, artists and writers had to rely either on fickle patronage or else hope to make some money on their first sales run because after that it was a free-for-all. Although I hate the way IP law and institutions have swung towards the opposite extreme and are now damaging to consumers and the general cause of innovation, those rules exist to solve a genuine economic problem.

It would be easier to overturn software patents if there were some alternative proposal to reliably secure the fruits of innovation to the inventor. If that task is left to the market, then a) there's abundant evidence that profit will win over ethics, and consumers won't know or care and b) people whose time is best spent innovating will have to spend more effort on marketing and monetizing their IP and fending off competitors, which is inefficient for solo inventors or small firms. So is spending a lot of time on patent work, admittedly, but a patent is a more reliable shield against having one's invention ripped off.
I will repeat the parent's sentiment - do NOT accept a lower salary. I was nearly caught in this trap a year ago, trying to get out of my current job that's not exactly fulfilling. I was given an offer that would have forced me to take a 13-18% pay cut and nearly had my vacation time slashed in half. I politely declined. I stuck it out for a little more than a year and just got offered a position that's going to pay 55% over what I'm getting now. Keep plugging away and keep looking..

Edit: Not sure about the vacation thing with the new role, but this is on a 6-month contract. I'll assume long vacations are out in the mean time, but it'll pay well enough that I'll be living ok for a little bit if I don't go full-time after.
I think that's directly related. The answer to the question "Why should we replace our lists?" is that you can avoid known failure cases with lists at a relatively small price in complexity and memory in the worst case, and sometimes get big gains. Singly-linked lists are not suitable for a concurrent world and functional programming really needs to stop putting lists on a pedestal and writing them into their very syntax. There's actually other problems they cause, too, but the concurrent problem is a real killer, because you can not just program your way around it, you need a fundamentally different data structure.
I'm not saying you assume someone who doesn't have open source work / contributions isn't necessarily a going to be a good employee. I'm just saying it's materially harder to tell in comparison to someone with the same resume and a publicly-viewable history of contributions. Any time you have a choice between the unknown and known, it's going to favor the latter.
Interesting note: there are about 44 airworthy spitfires remaining:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_surviving_Supermarine_S...

If seen the ones on display in Seattle, but I can't recall if I've seen one fly (went to a lot of air shows as a kid).
How to Build the Twitter iPad User Experience
I understand that the change is for the better, but as I miss the day when engineering in a start-up meant C/C++ hacking in a UNIX environment, as evidenced by Richard Stevens' books on Max's shelf:

http://levchin.com/images/PayPal/1840-yellow.JPG

Even though you no longer _need_ to be a C hacker to build a web application (and that's generally a good thing, as anyone at Paypal who still deals with the legacy C++ code, or anyone at Amazon who remembers OBIDOS can tell you), you should still work your way through Advanced Programming in UNIX Environment, and UNIX Network Programming: you won't regret it a bit.
> So you seem to be saying that having a system where examiners approve patents they don't understand is preferred.

Not so. I'm not defending the current system, just trying to demonstrate that your suggestion isn't feasible.

> There are not 500 examiners. There are more than 6,000.

Citation?

---

Edit: found the data on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Patent_and_Tradem...
I think you are being way too harsh here. They obviously get a lot of emails, and they're being pulled in a lot of different directions ("distributed social networking!", "privacy!", "a drop-in facebook replacement!")

Maybe they won't amount to much, but criticising them because they didn't respond to your email is not fair.
Sure, here's a link to one that's doing well, but I feel could be doing better.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/zazen-suite-meditation-timer/...
I think it's a mistake like the other poster mentioned. I am not a regular reader of Vanity Fair, but their general writing style must be really bad for you to attribute this to it :)
Cool, but my startup is doing something similar. http://openpoke.org/2011/05/16/moving-forward.html
Any thought of adding a simple API? We have some iPhone/Android fitness apps that we looking at hooking into a leaderboard or other social system. This might be an excellent match.
I know, i like clojure. Diving into it for a while now. :)
What I don't get... why not just use elgg...?
IMO, an interview is to working at a company what speed-dating is to a long-term relationship. The interview process may get some measurements about someone's technical fundamentals, but very little can be gleaned about rapport with employees and in general how well an individual will gel with a company's goals and other team members. The success of a team is not just about the competence of each individual but how well the individuals work together as a team, and individual competence is not totally correlated to working well with a given team.
Why didn't he use Slide to post these?
We already have quite a few bodyweight exercises on the site, though the scoring system for them is a little borked and is in need of an overhaul. Yoga is also on the site as well.

Regarding the internal server error, did that occur right after Step 2 or was it when you attempted to finish the sign-up process?
One could argue that you shouldn't code around patents in the first go round. Because if you demonstrate that you knew about the patent and then proceeded to infringe on it, you could be liable for 3X the amount.

If you don't know about the patent, then you're only liable for 1X the amount.

Moral of the story: don't read patents, you can only get into trouble. If you get sued after the fact, then you can change your code to work around it.
I wonder what Lemelson would have thought about Lodsys and Intellectual Ventures.

"You cannot develop a reputation for somebody who gives up. You have to be known as a fighter for your rights. Otherwise, you'll never license anything...Even Thomas Edison had a tough time supporting and protecting his patents. He spent about $1.4 million [to defend his inventions], and this was around the turn of the century, when beer was a nickel."

-Jerome H. Lemelson (1923-1997)

Arguably the most successful inventor (in terms of revenue from patents) ever. His legacy is the Lemelson-MIT Award for Invention and Innovation [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_H._Lemelson

[2] http://web.mit.edu/invent/a-main.html
Http://www.Facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.102895553127799.5716.100002220641706
The title is from Paul Ford (the author) himself, on Twitter: http://twitter.com/ftrain/status/69952439767404544
Jason Calacanis is Wrong: Bitcoin is Greatest Hope for Liberty
This article is a response to "L019: Bitcoin P2P Currency: The Most Dangerous Project We’ve Ever Seen" by Jason Calacanis and the LAUNCH team.
I'm a native English speaker and I don't generally understand patent texts. In fact, I've filed quite a few patents and have always been amazed that I give something readable to a lawyer to write up and they turn it into something that I can't understand any more. The idea that a patent is the medium through which an author shares their invention with the world is rather perverse.

So I agree; coding around patents is difficult given that they tend to be so hard to read and understand.
How to Write Interesting Copy
Until the brand atrophies because you're giving a competitor a world-class opportunity by vacating 90%+ of the smartphone market.

Now, what's more likely, is the way Google handles it's Maps, Nav, etc: It's available for iPhone but it's way better on Android.
While I have a strong opinion on the topic, what do these polls accomplish? It just seems like navel-gazing at best.
StackMob, Heroku for mobile applications, raises $7.5 million