skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know next to nothing about patent law, but wouldn't prior art be applicable here, if the online service was publicly available before the patent was filed?
But they have "Don't be evil" as a motto. How could they possibly be tempted by that?
I don't see that anyone is discarding or fading the role of the Russian military, but without General Winter (a coin termed by the Russians) the outcome would have been different.

There's an excellent book I bought at a library sale a couple years back, Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege (http://www.amazon.com/Stalingrad-Fateful-1942-1943-Antony-Be...) that really tells the story well.
If there is belief a currency is going to deflate it puts the brakes on spending. Why buy widget x today when you can buy two widget x's next month? Most people will just wait. The hoarding effect is a natural phenomenon, not necessarily a black/white thing.

I understand people use bitcoins for services rendered and a fairly limited number of products - but that is clearly to the benefit of the seller. It would be nice to see some statistics on bitcoin users actually using them as a currency. I'd wager it's less than 10%, esp. now they've become a media darling and a vast number of folks are looking at these like guaranteed lottery tokens.
As the other guy said: "Show me the money!"
Radish: Batman’s Utility Belt for Redis
"It is literally impossible to “change” the hashing algorithm in Bitcoin; any change would constitute a change in the protocol, and thus result in a completely new currency."

This was something that came to my mind some time ago regarding Bitcoin, but I wasn't sure if it was possible, or at least practical. What's to stop other interested parties from changing the protocol/hash and creating myriad competing virtual currencies? Metacoin, Hashcash, Bitcoin++, Digidollars, Ameribits, Eurobits, Digigold, Ingots - you get the point.

"Hi, my name is Fred, and this is my currency."

We live in a world with a wide range of currencies and exchanges, so I suppose there could just as well be an exchange that supports as many digital currencies as could ever be conceived. But couldn't that also mean that Bitcoin could be devalued through confusion and obfuscation, its present reputation notwithstanding?
Well, no, the task-switching UI is better than iOS, I do agree with that. It's perplexing that someone at Apple of all places thought the double-tap home thing was a good idea.

In any case, if someone at Apple were to load up on Red Bull and pizza and camp out in their office for a weekend, iOS's task-switcher could look and work exactly the same. They apparently believe they're doing it the right way now, though, for whatever reason.
What's with everyone making up tag names and undefined namespaces nowadays? <g:plusone>? A simple <span> with a class or data attribute would suffice.
Is it possible for someone to file a patent and then come back and sue me after their patent is granted?

Yes. The date of the patent application is the determining date for a patent. I'm thinking that since they filed the application after you were already online, you're probably more or less OK, but patent law is weird.

Am I even in danger or is this just an empty threat?

My money's on empty threat.
Show HN: My First iPhone App- my90X, a P90X Workout Log
Few M1s have been destroyed or badly damaged by insurgents in Iraq. Their use has declined since the invasion not because they are too vulnerable, but because they are less useful without enemy tanks to engage and using them against infantry in urban environments risks heavy civilian casualties.
I agree with your concerns although I think they are pretty analogous to people stealing gold out of banks. There's no recourse from that and if enough big gold reserves vanished I'm sure the gold market would be screwed up.

Of course those physical breakins are probly much much harder to pull off than hacking an electronic bank.
I was just highlighting that Google went above and beyond here. They are actively participating in the IETF realtime web group and have actually released some code. They could have just released some API docs, and some header files and wait for others to build an implementation while they still use their proprietary code.

Something like this happened to AMF format and Adobe. They release some specs, and then people started to implement Flash servers, except the specs sucked and a lot of stuff had to be reverse engineered.

[Warning: PDF document]

http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/download/attachments/111428...
This is something I learned both at my first tech job and in reading about the quest to make the "lightest possible Windows installation" for Hotmail: if you don't pay any attention to your dependencies, you'll eventually code your way into a huge ball of spaghetti. At some point systems get big enough to start falling out of your head. By the time I noticed it happening to me at that first job--when I had trouble keeping the relevant subset of the system in mind--my productivity dropped by an order of magnitude. Having a visualization like this would have been handy to help see it coming.
The difference is that changing the HTTP protocol and moving to IPv6 won't wipe out people's savings and threaten the world economy...
SSN Newswire
Ah, thank you. Beta is a coefficient of index performance, not just a measure of more or less correlation. So high beta would mean that when the startup market does well you do awesome. You'd also tank when there's a bust, but because YC's downside is so limited this is irrelevant.
Which friends though? Who are these friends that I am recommending it to??
It would be even cooler if a quadcopter delivered your grilled cheese sandwich within minutes no matter where you were. Why doesn't that exist yet?
Or maybe he heard of situationism, dada, etc., and classifies them under "nothing important".
Alfred: My Existential Butler
They started as a paper mill.
I'm curious: why do you think more YC companies will dilute YC's value or brand? What data leads you to that assertion?

Personally, I'd think the opposite is possible. (And likely if YC companies continue to be considered "successful".) A stronger YC network and a large portfolio of successful companies should only strengthen the brand.
regardless of whether it's true, greenspun reported that it's what the publishers believe:

"It is an article of faith in the computer publishing that bigger books sell better. They take up more space on the shelf and readers with a tech problem find a bigger book comforting. Readers aren't really sure what is wrong with their computer and they only have a few minutes in the bookstore so they figure the thickest book is the most likely to contain the solution."

http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/dead-trees/story
Oh, missed that one. It's a great day for dashboards and the more the merrier!
Thanks for testing and for sharing the results.
Here's the 37signals one for comparison: http://smiley.37signals.com/
Yes it is but I don't think Bitcoin was created out of dislike of all banks, probably just the Fed.
HP's Leo Apotheker totally open to licensing webOS to other handset makers
"We also paid a trifling sum of money for an option on participation in whatever the next thing the Flip creator does after he gets the grilled cheese thing out of his system."
The Engineering Behind Twitter’s New Search Experience
Couldn't I make the same argument for choosing another precious metal other than gold and convincing the world treat that as money. It seems to me that the only argument against it is that historically it hasn't happened. (except for cigarettes, Yap Rai, silver, platinum, and others I'm probably forgetting.)
Ensuring your information is safe online
The common element here is Brian Kernighan. _The Awk Programming Language_ is excellent, too.
Direct link to Shopify's http://smiley.shopify.com/
Thanks for the explanation and link. Reading it was like a train wreck...it's awful but you just can't look away.

I don't see how that can be considered in any way a reasonable limitation of the system. I had no idea the "coins" were so fragile.

Every time I think, "Hey, maybe it's time to start accepting bitcoin for our software. It can't hurt, and might even help spur adoption of new digital currencies." Something crazy comes along that makes me think bitcoin isn't so well thought out, after all. I was already a little worried about the "money" being stored on our world-facing system. I'd already assumed I would need to transfer to a private account every day or something to insure that a break-in of our web server (which has never happened in our 6 years of running it, but I know enough about system security to know that a determined attacker could eventually find a way in; which is why we don't store credit card data, software signing keys, or anything else particular sensitive on that server). But, this makes me think bitcoin, as implemented, all but guarantees coin loss, given enough time using the system...possibly very large losses, as in this case.

Seems that a system crash during a transaction would also lead to the same results. And even one bit of data corruption during saving data would do the same.

But, I guess this is the pain one experiences being on the bleeding edge. It wouldn't be called that, if somebody didn't bleed now and then.
Apropos System Shock, the sequel runs fine in wine, and is easier to enjoy, because they use the modern fps controlling conventions. Thief: The Dark Project uses a the same engine as System Shock 2 and is also worth playing.

If you are going to play X-Com: Ufo Defense, you owe it to yourself to use XComUtil [1]. XComUtil patches the binary to remove some bugs and can optionally introduce new gameplay elements.

Also the original Master of Orion is still one of the best civilization type games, if not the best. It has aged well, and really shines in its concentration on large scale decisions, and avoidance of micro-management.

[1] http://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=XcomUtil
The tire business has been a separate company since 1988, called Nokian Tyres:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokian_Tyres
Ugh, another button. The check-in buttons are coming next. Soon, there will be an aggregate button that lets you Like, Follow, +1, Check-in, Tweet, Post to FB, and save the page for later. There will be no more corporate or personal websites to house the aggregate button either. They will live on an aggregate page which has all the feeds from all the social networks in one place. This aggregate page will itself live on a social network which will have many clones that need to be aggregated. Goodbye signal, hello noise.
BetterLesson, Cambridge/Boston, MA

Content sharing and social network for teachers.

http://betterlesson.org Hiring UI/UX, product manager, and coders for all levels of application stack.

Our third year, closing our series A. Good traction, fans of Ries, LAMP/SOLR on AWS - working on Scala....

Email - jonathan [dot] hendler [at] betterlesson [dot] org
Thanks for clarifying. The reason I asked, is that I thought maybe Heroku did some optimizations on their stack that uses Thin.
Amidst burning platform, Nokia to attempt Guinness World Record with Angry Birds
It is still cumbersome for users to pay for apps on Android Market.

OS updates are handled by the carriers and the carriers continue to drag their feet.
Fixed point combinator, the origin of the name "Y Combinator"
>Flash soars with video because of hardware acceleration and active streaming

Hardware acceleration and streaming works fine even with HTML4 <OBJECT/>, providing the choice and configuration of media player if user desires.
>In a few years when there are 1000 YC companies it will start to mean a lot less to all those people who have been helping YC companies succeed to date.

Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford, etc. seem to be doing rather well, as far as higher education goes.

And I would imagine those that have partnered with them are doing okay too.

Quality matters.

>It probably already means a lot less to a VC to hear you're a YC company, because they've met 300 of them.

I doubt that. A VC is just trying to pick the next Google. Or the next Google founder(s).
He has absolutely nothing to threaten you with at this point. In 2 or 3 years he may or may not have a patent and only then could he contact you about possible infringement. Patent applications become public after a year so you may want to set a reminder to take a look in a year and possibly send the patent examiner some clarifying info about your public website predating his application
If the page content is taller than the browser viewport, you will, due to the nature of hash links, jump/scroll to the expanded entry. This may or may not be desired.
Post-Mortems at HubSpot: What I Learned From 250 Whys
Tablets Are Killing My Interest in Smartphones
My money is on empty threat too. If he had a real case, he'd have "come harder" than he did (i.e., you'd have gotten a letter from an attorney, at least)

Best of luck, bud. Don't let it distract you too much. :)
Dropping support for older browsers shows why Google Apps will continue to struggle against Microsoft products for government contracts such as was the case recently in San Francisco. Large organizations get locked into legacy OS's for many reasons - example government agencies who bought and rely on geospatial data in Autodesk Mapguide format.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapguide

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?siteID=123112&...

And yes that is a plug-in for Netscape that is still available!
This guy: http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menus/

Has been at it for years, lots of good stuff there.
Ask HN: Did anyone else get an invitation for a Chromebook?
Just received an email. Did anyone else get an invitation?

I didn't find it exciting to have applied for a chrome cr-48 and now just received an invitation to buy a chromebook.

What are your thoughts?

-m
ASK: Silverlight video advertisement provider
Any recommendations for video advertisement provider who can support silverlight?
CSS Marching Ants
This is damned good. If organisations continue transitioning, hopefully it'll up the pressure to keep updating browser versions and internal resources.
I think a better word would be "prejudiced", although in his case what he describes would not be a "judgment" of inherent value but more a "judgment" of a heightened likelihood of undesired side-effects.
Please enlighten me if I'm missing something obvious here, but wouldn't a pretty interesting number be the percentage of funded companies that are profitable today? I mean, maybe not as a measure of YC's success monetarily, but certainly as a success rate for choosing viable products/teams, no?

So to be clear. I'm most interested in how many of the 208 considered as part of the $22.4 million calculation are self-sustaining and making a profit today.
Russia's success hinged on two things: their massive geographic advantages and the use of scorched earth tactics.

I don't want to minimize the fact that Russia bore a lot of casualties (more than any other country) in the process of defeating the Germans and pushing east, but frankly most wars are won and lost by the factors that existed before the first shot is fired, including population, logistics, and geography. If Stalin had done a better job, maybe Russia wouldn't have suffered so many casualties; if Hitler had done a better job, maybe they would have suffered even more. But there's no way Germany could have actually won, just as there's no way the South could have actually won the American Civil War.
Google uncovers major account-hijacking campaign targeting senior US officials
They are using a relatively older phone there. I'd like to see startup time on a iPhone4.
Stopping Screenlock Smudge Attacks On Android
[video] How kernel development goes wrong
I use my iPad for some illustration and graphics work for 2D games, and for the most part, it is adequate. For illustration, I tend to use Autodesk Sketchbook Pro for illustration, sketching, painting tasks, because it has some great features, is easy to use and works well. If I need something that will let me get ideas down really quickly without getting in the way, Adobe Ideas is the way to go.

For animation, you are pretty limited. As far as 2D game animation goes, I have had some success using SpriteSomething for animating sprites and basic animations, and with the most recent update supporting zooming, I want to try it out on a more complex animation than the usual walk/jump/attack/die animations that I have done in the past. The only other animation program I like is Animation Creator HD, which is pretty great. Some of the brushes aren't the best and I have run into some lag when using it (this is on my original iPad), but on the whole it is a fantastic application. That being said, I would never really use it for production work. I would prefer to use Flash or AfterEffects for production so that I have more options, effects, an asset library, etc. But the convenience of being able to animate and test out new ideas and do great pencil tests with full color on the go is absolutely mind-blowing, and for that I thank Red Software for making AC HD.

While the iPad is great, the one thing I can't get over is the lack of pressure sensitivity for illustation. I would love to see someone come up with a stylus that senses pressure in the tip and offers and API for developers to take advantage of that data. And, there aren't really any satisfactory vector applications that I have used yet for iPad, so those cute icons and mascot illustrations have to be saved for Illustrator.

I haven't tried any android tablets, so I can't attest to that platform's offerings in the art field. One of my buddies does use Photoshop on a tablet laptop with a pressure sensitive screen and has been generally happy with it, but I have yet to play around with it.

Hope this helps.
* I'll bet from their perspective they felt they had to 'maximize shareholder value,' and when that failed they can just off-load (since the community left, there is no reason for them to keep it).

* It's possible that they didn't want the projects, but felt that just donating the projects away wouldn't jive with their responsibility to 'maximize shareholder value' so they went for some gungho approach that would drive people away and let them drop the project (in a way that they could justify to shareholders as just a failed attempt to 'make the project profitable').

* It's possible that they are slowly realizing that they can't attempt heavy-handed tactics with folks that can just walk away from the project and fork that code into a new project.
Frameworks and Knowledge Workers, Lab Rats and Code Monkeys
Ask HN: Last week I took a break from any work and I slept much better
Hi HN.

I'm a college student and I spend a great deal of time programming.

Last week, when I took a break from any work I slept much better than usually.

I think this could be the reason why I sleep bad:

When there's a problem I can't stop thinking about it.

It's not just programming problems, because I try to make some money from my own projects, and that makes me be sort of obsessive about it.

What should I do to sleep better?

Any ideas please?
Perhaps that all means that you can pay in BitCoin, provided you assign a fair and reasonable exchange rate with the USD at the time?
Serve with a good glass of wine and it wouldn't be a bad idea.
What is this, digg?
This should be allowed under the current terms as far as the interpreter part goes.

The UI looking non-standard might be a deal killer.
Sometimes I wonder how I missed such opportunities, or how I actually didn't figure them out. In the dawn of bitcoin, it was easy to mine 10K coins with my computers. That would make 10 years of an engineer salary in my country!
A very interesting breakdown of how statistics can end up skewing conclusions, if you aren't asking the right questions.

Torture numbers, and they'll confess to anything.
~Gregg Easterbrook
HP CEO: we would be ‘open’ to licensing webOS to companies like HTC
I read your comment a couple of times and I must admit that I just don't get what you're trying to say. As I said before, the developers don't have to worry about legal repercussions unless they intend to distribute the modified code under a license which would violate the terms and conditions of GPL.
So if you're developing an open source stack for your own personal needs, modify the underlying components any way you want to. If you want to redistribute it, though, you have to give the users of your software the same rights that you were given when you used those components. It's as simple as that.
Also:

It's not that I sleep bad normally (when I work.)

It's just when I didn't work, my sleep was awesome. And I want that.
I did, but I also received a CR-48
Funny, the "Get code" link in the email Google sent me goes to 404 page. Fail.
Airbnb Farmed Craigslist To Grow Its Listings, Says Competitor
Another source independently corroborates this story: http://techie-buzz.com/mobile-news/microsoft-buying-nokia.ht...
That wouldn't help. It doesn't matter where you're based as long as you do business in California.
"It probably already means a lot less to a VC to hear you're a YC company, because they've met 300 of them."

Another way to look at it is that the total number of YC startups over the least six years is less than the number of deals the typical VC sees each week.
YouTube Instant Inspiration + Last.FM similar artist API
But you can create an arbitrarily high number of bitcoin-like electronic currency units, simply by taking the exact bitcoin implementation and changing the genesis block

Yes, you can. If your X-coins will be in some respect better than the original ones they may even supplant bitcoins. But you'll have to put of effect in order to convince people to use them. With uncertain results. Currently bitcoin has network effects working for bitcoin and against other crypthographic/p2p currencies. To change that will require a major effort.

The history of bimetallism (gold & silver) is relevant in this respect. The final result is that your are better using the medium of exchange the majority using, so usually there only one money left.
I think the concern is that it costs money to lose a lawsuit, too.
I would consult an attorney asap.
This is my first app, I have really enjoyed making it. If you are looking for an iOS developer, let me know, I just started freelancing full-time. steve at (my hn username).com
so as an owner of a CR-48 would you buy the Chromebook?

If no, is it because you already have the CR-48 and therefore don't have the need, or because you didn't like the CR-48 and don't think the Chromebook would be useful?
Filing a patent doesn't mean anything at all. If the patent issues AND the claims read against your practice AND the filing date predates your practice of the invention then he could reasonably claim infringement. Sending an email to someone simply because you have filed is amateurish. The guy sounds like an idiot.
Drop in the anecdote bucket: I'd rather type in a URL shortened link than bring up an app on my mobile phone.
So it's ok for me to misrepresent a situation and make other people look bad as long as I'm "just playing"?
Ok, we get it. Google is "evil". I'd pay $0.05 for every time someone wants to harp on this and DOESNT.
Right on. I think as long as the quality of YC companies remains high, the presence of imitators will of course increase the value of the original, just as in higher ed.

Startup incubators may in some ways be easier to replace than universities (Harvard, Brown, etc. are still going strong after 200+ years), but they are subject to similar dynamics, insofar as there is team loyalty and networking benefits (as there obviously are). Personally, I would accept 10% dilution of my company simply to be an YCombinator alumnus since I think the benefits are and will remain that high.