skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> In other words, billion dollar companies get all the SW patents.

> All? No, they only get patents for those things that they invent.

As I pointed out, the "extensive publication" requirement is a significant obstacle for everyone else, so they won't get SW patents. Thus, all of the SW patents go to big companies.

> The something obnoxious like the famed "one click" patent

"obnoxious"? That's your objection to one click?

What's wrong with novelty/prior art and non-obvious?

In every other field, recognizing that there is a problem and patenting a broad-swath of mechanisms to solve it is considered good. Why is software different?

And yes, I'm familiar with James Bessen's work. I introduced his EE380 talk at Stanford.
And what would they do with it, and who says it would be a thermite bomb? It could be an integral part of the hardware.
There are a lot of visible minority founders. When I go to startup events all over the North America, I feel like Custer...holy cow look at all those ####ing Indians. :)

Note I am of Indian decent myself so I can say that. :)
oh and also - games/apps drive tons of pageviews for FB.
This seems to me to be indicative of a problem with the Facebook apps platform. They are using significant resources to try to combat spam, but the spam is posted through the mechanisms provided by the platform.

What I'm suggesting is that the Facebook apps platform is fundamentally making it easy to post spam so they have to fight it afterward.

Would a better approach be to shore up the platform so that apps are simply unable to generate spam? For example, currently a user can only Allow or Disallow an app. They cannot Allow or Disallow certain permissions. I should be able to use an app while denying it the possibility to post to my wall or my friends walls.

It seems like it's the wrong approach to try to stop the spam by banning apps rather than fundamentally changing the way apps can access person sites and information and make generating spam incredibly difficult.
The legal apparatus you identify is based on the 5th amendment, interpreted through the lens of mythological, historical ideas of how "thought" is different from information recorded external to the brain.

If you think things are confusing now, wait until merely sticking electrodes on someone's head and making them think about certain things by talking to them, without requiring any voluntary response, can generate usable evidence.

Requiring someone to reveal a passphrase or access procedure to reveal encrypted or otherwise secured evidence, external to the brain, is the tip of the iceberg.
@thwarted, it'd be great if we could use pseudo-code. (One of my colleagues once proposed using flow-charting.)

Unfortunately, many, many lawyers (and clients) are allergic to contract forms that don't look "traditional." I can say with great confidence that the typical reaction to a pseudo-code contract would be "WTF is this?"
It's not bad. I just feel that the online news space is already very crowded atm.

Certainly looks like it could be going somewhere though. There is a lot of wasted space though, escpecialy with that massive logo (nicely designed but too big), also that nav bar is too big as well. Make the header smaller and move everything up. That way you will be able to display more news items.

You should also consider giving users the option to customize their newsfeed, e.g. I'm interested in Technology, show me Tech news.

Good Luck!

EDIT:
btw, did you design the site yourself?
Old info

http://twitter.com/#!/kevinmitnick/status/84322256750260224
Transifex: An Open Translation Platform
"So a $50 million deal at any price wouldn’t lose money unless Foursquare winds up being worth less than $70 million."

I'm just in awe this was written.
If there's value in the community, then the cost to build that community is MUCH MUCH greater if you're charging. The obvious drawback is that until you HAVE a community, you're delivering less value, due to its absence, at the start. Where the community adds value to the product, or if the community is a producer of content, then by all means, they should be free.

If the community is simply a content consumer, or if there is a willingness to pay (or an accustom to pay, as in the case of lawyers, wall street types, etc.) then by all means, ignore the freemium model altogether.
Acoustic 'cloaking device' shields objects from sound
The key statement to me was "If it's not fun, if it's not social, why would they do it". He's new baby, http://keas.com/, is about playing games around gaining health and fitness.
Already posted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2693901
I enjoyed using mockingbird. Can't collab in free, but can show other people and have them look through it. Balsamiq got old with popups asking me to upgrade.
Cipher DAG [pdf]
Xing CEO dumped shares hours before disastrous website relaunch
Also: with right of first refusal, not this crazy "we can steal them back at strike price" crap.
Fundamentally, because Facebook counts it, that's what they seek. That's probably part of the recipe.
Or better yes, 50'000 containers of varying sizes, 49'998 of which are filled with random data.
“Operation Developer Love” is what Facebook calls their weekly report on the state of bugs in their developer/app platform.

Looks like if there was really developer love, they wouldn’t need to market their love of developers.
6prof crashes on osx, i've aske on the mailing list and been told that it is only stable on Linux for now. Put a big damper on my Golang activities
It's doing fine as a business. The landlord is trying to take advantage of them by raising the rent dramatically. Restaurants aren't very mobile.
As cool as this is, I seriously doubt that this is something new. I'd say the military has had this technology for years now. We're just hearing about it now.
Celebrate?
I don't think I'll be the only one closing my Dropbox account now. It's not just this event, but the recent series of privacy issues.
I'd really like to hear from hackers organizing their projects what software in this category they like best. I have liked Basecamp as a framework for sharing do-list items with colleagues (most of my colleagues and I work independently of face-to-face meetings most of the time) but I am willing to learn about other products or service. Efficency is key. What do you recommend to do best what Basecamp does?
i was under impression that the right to remain silent is valid even before the court. Anyway, googling it, stumbled upon interesting reading :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_silence#United_States

"...the U.S. District Court for Vermont ruled that because the defendant had already cooperated as far as he had and already potentially incriminated himself, by stating his ownership of his laptop and providing law enforcement with partial access to it prior to his arrest, that he must now surrender complete access to all information on that laptop, even encrypted and potentially self-incriminating or confidential information.[20] Because the defendant had cooperated in part already, the Court ruled that the defendant must continue cooperation and provide the decrypted and potentially harmful information to the government..."
Does Europe have punitive damages? Who gets them?

The US does and they go to the winning plaintiff, which is sort of odd. After all, if someone is fined for assulting me, I don't get that money.
I think you're wrong. Yes, a lot of very good domains are taken, but you can spend as little as $200 in Flippa.com to get a decent one that people can at least remember.
Given MSFT's history of doing their own thing rather than supporting the community alternative, this seems like a really strange decision; particularly as they have the potential to build a great competitor product using .net async features (http://lorgonblog.wordpress.com/2010/03/28/f-async-on-the-se...).

Building JScript in parallel to JavaScript back in the 90s was a dumb idea, but forgoing their own toolset to support node.js is equally misguided. They should concentrate on educating .net developers on how to compete with the non-msft development community using the .net platform to bring them to productivity / toolset parity, and fostering open-source .net projects.
I'd love to but I've never been known what it should be. Any ideas?
Pretty much everything I've ever seen from "reason.com" is material promoting a libertarian viewpoint. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's pretty much just politics.
Comparison between the US and Europe in this area is close to meaningless, because of fundamental differences in how the two tend to view the roles of the judicial and executive branches of government in the enforcement of laws.

The US has a greater tendency, particularly in the areas of civil rights but also torts in general, of structuring the law so it gives the injured party a private right of action, which they enforce in courts, and leaving the executive out of it.

Europe has a greater tendency in these areas to have the executive branch deal with enforcement.
that's now what is being suggested (i think). typically how it's done is to have separate pieces of information, related to different keys. you can then make a system that (1) produces the data associated with a valid key and (2) does not reveal how many valid keys there are.
Afghans Build Open-Source Internet From Trash 
Afghans Build Open-Source Internet From Trash. Fast Company reports that residents can build a FabFi node out of approximately $60 worth of everyday items such as boards, wires, plastic tubs, and cans that will serve a whole community at once.
The two best things about working at foursquare:

1) It's our job to invent the future. We copy no one; other folks copy us. Every single day we're try to build new tools that change the way folks relate and interact with the cities they live in. It's super hard, and we don't get it right all the time but we keep pushing forward and we feel like we're on to something good.

2) We have the best engineering team of our size at any startup in the country. Everyone on the team is just incredibly sharp, hard working, and passionate about what we're doing.

Want to find out more? Check out http://foursquare.jobs for open positions in both NY & SF or send me an e-mail (contact info is in my HN profile). I'm more than happy to answer questions here as well.

-harryh, engineering lead @ foursquare
Keeps them looking like they are always innovating and ahead of the curve.

lately, most of google's products have come out behind the curve, lacking polish and functionality, and then fail to gain traction and get killed off.
Chipotle no longer is related to mcdonalds. They used to be an investor, I believe, but were not part o it's operations.
| There's nothing wrong with using Flash

If you look past how proprietary it is, the constant stream of security vulnerabilities, the lack of half decent x64 support, the privacy issues, the incredibly poor mobile experience (yes, even on Android), and it's performance, then yeah-- it's great.
Or change will happen much faster. Actually change is already happening increasingly faster. More people getting the hacker mentality will only add to that acceleration.
I think Jason Fried and DHH might take issue with, "You proved yourself wrong, I think."

In addition to "Say no by default," one of their other points of advice has been: "Let your users outgrow you."

37signals has found that there's more people to sell to at the bottom, and when customers need/want more, they're free to find it elsewhere.
For a tastier and more intimate (literally mom and pop) experience, I prefer le petit bistro on el camino.
The 37signals ethos of having an opinion and saying no a lot creates wonderful experiences and products for users who are new to a certain field. For someone who is new to project management, for example, the fancy programs with every feature and option are confusing and scary. Products like Basecamp are beautiful for these users.

As users gain more experience, their needs become slightly more complex. They start to understand the simple product completely, and then they have the cognitive ability to understand more fancy bells 'n' whistles. For users who have been doing project management for a long time with any software product, they will have a long list of things that they know -- from experience! -- that they need.

That is why there's a market for simple and there's a market for full-featured. Both are discrete markets, usually. Obviously every software designer strives for "power made easy" -- it seems easy at first, but there is power under the hood when you need it.
> That is going to be abused TO DEATH.

That abuse is the intent.

Whenever someone uses the "child porn" excuse, they're trying to get something that they shouldn't have.

Disagree? Provide three counter-examples.
We are from Playality, developer from Grand Poker. As many of you may know, our application was disabled this morning for no apparent reason given. The company spend huge amount of marketing dollars on adverts and product development . Furthermore, many of our paid customers demand for refunds or legal action. Grand Poker is our company main source of revenue, and it is also funding other projects on facebook. This incident pretty much killed off the company.

Also, using user's feedback may not be an accurate measurement to the quality of the application. There are many methods or bot script that can simulate users to mass complain the application. This is a very common strategy uses by competitors.

all in all, we are still relatively new to for facebook, It may be possible that we did somehow crossed the line in feeds or wallposting, but.is it worth killing off a small start-up because of this?
Google ships Chromebooks to I/O attendees
Just came in my inbox:

Thanks for coming out to Google I/O this year. We’re excited to pass along details about the Chromebook gift for I/O attendees.

Samsung is pleased to be able to provide each of you with an Arctic White Samsung Chromebook Series 5.

Please log into the Google I/O website by Friday, July 8, 2011 with the confirmation number below and your Google I/O password to receive details on how to receive your Chromebook.
I absolutly love redmine. Easy to customize, hundreds of add-ons, tons of functionality (including turning off tabs you're not using) and lots of support. If you're a geek that manages your own server, it's the way to go for sure. There's even a "basecamp" theme that looks and works great ;)
If you are willing to pay, then http://www.pluralsight-training.net/ is the great choice for learning Microsoft technologies.
It's trivial cryptographically, but from a security point of view, it's not necessarily trivial at all.

If we assume the courts can order you to decrypt the drive (and without debating that point) - one has to consider that the court may be fully aware that the system has multiple hidden volumes, either by eyewitness testimony, 3rd party evidence (check out truecrypt's warnings on their site about full system encryption and what to watch out for.
Things like finding the same windows installation doing every update twice. There are all kinds of information leaks that COULD pop up.

I'm not saying it's impossible - just as strong cryptography, which is easy and is all over, doesn't mean all our data is secure, neither would a more complex system like this protect someone from the legal system.
"Algorithms can be beautiful", or "code can be beautiful" is certainly something I wouldn't be surprised to hear from a programmer. I don't see people freaking out over those usages, though.
When a duplicate post like this comes up, I usually flag it. Does anyone else do this?

It really fragments discussion having duplicate posts on the main page since people usually just comment on the first one they see.

I also noticed that the only difference in the URLs between the two was a trailing slash. Shouldn't that be included in the dupe detection? Probably the most frequent and easiest to catch cause.
presumably your new investors understand the difference and are happy with the real numbers. so it's a great chance to invent the future (as you said above): do it the right way, and have other folks copy you.
Free web based file explorer for media desktops
That exists to prevent the state from coercing a wrongful confession out of you. Compelling the truth out of you has no such moral hazard. I am not a constitutional scholar.
As a health care IT pro, I think you're right about the conclusions, but your reasoning is off.

Google is not pulling the plug because of a technical problem with the product (security/HIPAA), but a social issue. You can have the most beautiful API, repository, and website in the world, but it's worthless without any data. Ostensibly Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault are "personal health repositories" (PHR's), and live and die based on the content, not the platform.

Health care data has high complexity, lives in heterogenous silos (most of them obsolete), and has a huge variance in quality. Doctors don't understand it (and shouldn't have to), and patients certainly don't. It is certainly plausible for patients to expect that their health info is accessible to them online. With all their prowess, Google could have helped people expose their data. I do this every day with providers.

Google could have built more alliances with care providers (both large and small) and helped get an initial seed of users. They announced some, but not enough. Basically the only things the mainstream media covered about PHR's so far have been their birth, and now death. Nil penetration.

The health care industry needs technical help beyond Obama's stimulus, the existant products are so weak and suffer from so much technical debt...

I actually Google could have done well. They just didn't follow through. Now Dr. Chrono or Practice Fusion are far better positioned.
Google I/O 11 Attendees Receive Samsung 3G Chromebook Emails
That's the way to apologize, very impressive way to handle the situation in individual level.

Although the bigger issue is, how was this ever possible? Do they push code to production without any normal or security code reviews? Without pen-testing? And if that's the case what does it stop this problem to happen again?
What will happen next, I presume, is that absurd patent and copyright laws will start catching up to reality. Hopefully.
Probably because its the website for a libertarian magazine? They don't even pretend that's not the case, unlike something on Fox News...

From the about page:

Reason is the monthly print magazine of "free minds and free markets." It covers politics, culture, and ideas through a provocative mix of news, analysis, commentary, and reviews. Reason provides a refreshing alternative to right-wing and left-wing opinion magazines by making a principled case for liberty and individual choice in all areas of human activity.
While 'loser pays' might benefit your particular case, it's easy to imagine an equal number of scenarios where a guilty corporate defendant uses the threat of running up huge legal fees to discourage valid lawsuits against it. The result is a windfall for corporations with no net improvement in actual justice. To put it another way, it decreases the likelihood of frivolous plaintiffs but increases the likelihood of frivolous defendants.
The key is to put some stuff that's reasonably embarrassing in the fake volume, like nude pictures of yourself or weird fetish porn.
Apple and others given green light to bid on Nortel Patents
> You know, where you put some light sensors in front of something you did not create yourself and pretty much just collect the photons that bounce off it.

You're forgetting the editing that almost all commercial photographs get.
I've never been called "demon," but people are constantly calling me "DAY-MEE-ON."
The part of one individual doing all the accessing can't be right. The dude who reported it (on hn or reddit not sure) said he had his friend double check it.
Yeah. I thought HN would catch trailing slashes.
this isn't new - techcrunch covered the letter in late march. surprised venturebeat ran something with an error like this. [http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/25/colors-totally-public-photo...]
Always get your users' emails when they sign up. Facebook even has the email extended persmission to streamline it. That way you aren't 100% reliant on facebook to keep in touch with your users! You never know what they are gonna do.
Store finds clever way to increase new customers by 76% and revenue by 130%
AppMobi Acquires Hosting Platform; Reveals Faster HTML5 Mobile Rendering
Things are moving quickly in HTML5 game development. The author of TapJS built it and had it acquired in literally a few months. The direct canvas technology by appMobi looks very promising.
Heh, I remember how heavily Steam was derided back when they rolled out the beta. And people screamed bloody murder when they made it so you had to go through Steam to play CS online.
Dying Star Betelgeuse Spews Fiery Nebula : Big Pic
>I suspect the overall high failure rate of IT projects is attributable to "people with two year associates degrees in information systems or something". I'd rather hire an autodidact with a degree in math, physics or engineering.

yawn yeah, yeah, I know that going to yale makes you better than I am.

Kids today. No respect for the trades.

Everyone choosing a major out of highschool is encouraged to go in to something highly theoretical or impractical. I think it's a show of wealth. I mean, if you get a degree in fine arts or something, well, you had better have a rich uncle or something, right?

Granted, the fact that every SysAdmin education program I've seen was decidedly second rate doesn't help. /good/ sysadmin education programs would help a lot. Really, there is no excuse for the lack of good SysAdmin programs. *NIX is older than I am. It's not like the field changes faster than anything else to do with computers.

I think you have similar problems educating people as computer scientists and then expecting them to work as software engineers. We need a lot more software engineers than we need computer scientists; and if I need a program written, sure, I'd prefer an excellent software engineer who was also a computer scientist, but if I had to make the choice, I'd choose a software engineer who was not a computer scientist over a computer scientist who was not a software engineer for 95% of all projects. But what kind of high school kid choosing a major would choose to be a lowly Engineer instead of a Scientist?
The flames of Betelgeuse
According to TFA that's not how it works in Europe: if you deliberately run up costs, the court will not assign them to the loser. Only reasonable fees are passed on to the loser. And the loser can challenge.
I've always wondered how people would answer the "Your volume is 512MB, but this truecrypt file is 2GB. Explain please". question.

I guess they can't prove that there is a hidden volume, but I thought with Truecrypt they could not prove whether a file was actually a Truecrypt volume in the first place?
Apple Releases iOS 5 Beta 2 to Developers, Now with Wi-Fi Sync
Bank of Canada: The New $100 Note
As a designer, I was frustrated using Basecamp before and that made me start Teambox. I chose the open-source way (like Redmine) and a simple feature set (like Basecamp), trying to make a more up-to-date version of what I thought project collaboration should be.

Things I found missing on BC and I did implement on Teambox: a single account (37s got this right later), a real activity stream (Facebook style, reply to anything from the feed), an open-source codebase so others could extend it and tight integration of first level elements: Conversations, Tasks, Pages.
Dear RIM: Hire me as your Co-Co-CEO