skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think saying "evolution theory" is very vague. There is the theory of common descent. That is what is being supported here: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/

But claiming that mutation and natural selection alone explains ALL speciation and ALL behavior that we observe today is just a simplistic position, almost an article of faith. How do you know there is no other factor involved? How do you know no other process WAS involved in the past?

We don't. So far as I know, we have never observed macro evolution taking place in recorded history (although I would be happy to be shown wrong on this point), so what actually causes speciation is just speculation at this point.

Common descent is one thing. "Evolution" is a loaded term. What does it mean?

It's a bit like the people who claim that the Bing Bang Theory describes an explosion in the first seconds of the universe. Actually, the BBT just extrapolates backwards from what we observe today -- which is that the visible universe is expanding, and there is microwave radiation at its edges. How do we know there wasn't some other process earlier in the real universe, which would make our extrapolation completely erroneous? How do we know that the universe isn't infinite beyond our visible universe? Every year objects disappear further beyond the light horizon, due to the expansion of space. Who knows hoc much lies beyond that? And yet people talk about "the universe had a beginning" ... how do they KNOW?

Okay I just wanted to throw a crazy idea at the end: Maybe our universe is like a reverse black hole, with a singularity at the edges instead of its interior. Meaning that just as gravity increases as you approach the singularity in a black hole, so the universe expands faster the bigger a "sphere" you take in it.
Submitted a week ago [1] and ignored. Submitted again, timing just right, lots of comments and discussion.

I feel that HN is broken in some fundamental way. The community decides this is worth reading and commenting on, and it gets missed first time round. How many other interesting links get completely ignored and lost.

I worry, I worry ...

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2745315
Seconding the standing desk suggestion. However, if you go to buy a "standing desk" you'll soon find that they're abnormally expensive. If you just want to try it out (somewhat) cheaply and have an IKEA nearby, these links might help:

http://www.ikeahackers.net/2011/01/wide-standing-desk.html

http://www.ikeahackers.net/2011/04/expedit-standing-desk.htm...

http://blogjunkie.net/2011/03/hacking-together-an-ikea-stand...
There's no escape from obligations. If your company goes bankrupt without cash to pay off its obligations... its simply impossible to fulfill them.

You are essentially saying as a hard-and-fast rule: do not invest in people who ran companies that declared bankruptcy, even once.

I do not thing that kind of absolutist stigma should be associated with bankruptcy.
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> Right, that is why you plan ahead and keep a buffer.

If every company planned ahead and kept a buffer, then no companies would go bankrupt. They would simply terminate services, and everyone would get paid what they were owed.
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I don't get it, isn't licensing the whole point of software patents.. sharing IP with the world and receiving royalties in return ? So how can Apple refuse to license the patent to HTC ?
Reminds me of some places I've worked in my time. Clients made one site and wouldn't pay for an upgrade, and the folks running the company learned PHP when version 5 was brand new, and never wanted to upgrade because of a combination of clients not willing to pay and "seeing no need to upgrade".

Most of them are amazingly still in business, and their clients sites are still amazingly vulnerable. And we wonder why PHP has such a bad rep.
I really hope they don't do this...
Makes it even easier for an attacker to get into an account.

What was the exact error message, instead of your interpretation of the error message?
I really think Apple needs to take a page from Google's book here and adopt the 'don't be evil' philosophy.

This is very disappointing to me because I see Apple like a tennis player who can tell you where he is going to hit the ball, yet still beat you there every time. I think they should welcome the competition and view copycats with pride. You don't get it right all the time.
With the increasing specialization of almost every field of scientific and even artistic endeavor, it's becoming more and more impossible for any one person to master multiple fields. Especially very different ones, like, say, quantum mechanics and songwriting. (Though I'm sure someone will quickly provide evidence of a string theorist who's also quite handy with the cello).

If we take the "10,000 hour" rule as even a rough basis for mastery -- to speak nothing of the years and years of academic credentialing necessary to be taken seriously in many fields -- then the math quickly tells the story.

As others have pointed out in this thread, Einstein seems like the closest we've seen to Da Vinci in many centuries. His accomplishments spanned almost every facet of physics -- a field that, even in the first half of the 20th century, was very broad and full of nearly insurmountable gulfs between sub-disciplines. But even Einstein would seem narrowly accomplished by Da Vinci's standards. That's not because Einstein wasn't Da Vinci's intellectual equal (he probably was), but because the nature of the game has changed so fundamentally and thoroughly since the Renaissance.

All that said, despite the hyperspecialization of everything these days, some big and important breakthroughs seem to come from cross-pollinization of disciplines. The world is still quite ripe for gap-bridgers and box-busters; in fact, some would argue that we need these people now more than ever.
Not only big, the biggest one. But given increase in costs (MS tax, now Apple tax, tomorrow who knows) at some point it could be more cost effective for HTC to stop paying anyone and just not sell in the states. WO patents are much harder to get and very expensive to keep, so no big problem there.
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Why we created Mealnut & How?
Mealnut is one of the startups I'd been following for a while, now as I'm going to be in the food and health sector, now on. Thanks to the team, for caring to share the why and how.
Scientists unveil new tools for rewriting the code of life
Actually, historians argue about the level of impact da Vinci had on science, with many saying "not very much." This is because his notebooks were not published for centuries after his death. Most of his "scientific observations" were only to quench his personal curiosity.

In a sense, then, we can all still become da Vincis. Da Vinci was big on learning from experience, rather than by reading the works of others. Nothing is stopping a person alive today from observing nature and learning from it, in the same manner of Leonardo.

Will you be learning things that are already in a book somewhere? Most likely, yes, but I think that isn't really the point; the quest for knowledge may be more important than the acquistion of it.

Also, consider that many breakthroughs/innovations are from new entrants to a field# ie those who aren't experts in the new field. (Of course this may not apply to science as much as another field, but it's worth pondering regardless)

#See "The Medici Effect"
>I suppose that means I need to be a bit more brutal in trying people out and then discarding them, which isn't much fun.

Remember, you don't owe a freelancer anything except what you've promised them. Pay them fairly (and quickly) for the work they've done, but don't continue to give them more work if you're not happy with them.
Are you envisioning a real version of Nehemiah Scudder? In the Heinlein books, he is elected in 2012 ...
I've lived in countries where copyright and patents were not enforced. One country didn't even have a copyright law until this century. I've seen the results of your theory, and it's not pretty.

> Wouldn't it be nicer if everyone just competes on quality and price?

No.

To be worth while, investment in R&D needs to be recouped. If cloning finished products is legal, the clone makers don't need to recoup R&D, so can undercut the price of the inventor while (since it's a clone, perhaps even produced by the same factory) matching quality.

Also bad, such as with electronics, the consumer sometimes can't tell if the clone is the same quality or not until months later when inferior parts begin to fail (especially low quality capacitors in electronics, which have a tendency to look exactly the same right up until they burst). Sometimes, as happened to Akai in the country where I lived, the brand takes the reputation hit for the problems from the copyists who were selling the copies at a price so close to the original the buyer couldn't tell whether they got an original or copy.

(A countermeasure to this is an invention so ahead of the market the production process is unique, and the inventor somehow manages to lock up 100% of manufacturing capability and capacity itself. Such inventions are relatively rare.)

> doesn't 'discovery' of some technique give a time-advantage already?

No. With JIT manufacturing, clones hit the streets sometimes before the original. Not to mention, in your world, the incentive to steal product prototypes would go through the roof, letting the lesser priced clones hit the streets during the original marketing push.
Someone mentioned that the patents are from 1994 and 1996. So Apple is winning this battle in the smartphone industry, with something they had way, way before iPhone. How is that fair?
Could you tell me which cognitive psychologists say drills create a solid foundation?

I agree that cognitive scientists say that extensive background knowledge is necessary for a solid foundation, however having background knowledge does not necessitate drills. I haven't seen any studies that specifically say that pure drilling is good, and instead have seen the complete opposite. All I have read also enforce my beliefs that mindless drilling necessary isn't good.
How is it identical? One has a difference of 1000 the other of 4000. We all know that $4000 is much more than $1000.

The only thing they have in common is that both amounts have doubled, but I think there is a huge difference between 1000 to 2000 with 1 million to 2 million although they both have only doubled.
I think this is an excellent suggestion. There are probably lots of moms who are very capable of communicating in an intelligent manner and would like to work ~10-15 hours a week from home, but don't know where to find legitimate work like that (as opposed to "WORK FROM HOME AND MAKE $$$$$!!!!!").
"Development of the Apple Newton platform started in 1987 and officially ended on February 27, 1998."[1] "HTC was founded in 1997 by Cher Wang, HT Cho, and Peter Chou."[2]

Apple's been investing in mobile usability (e.g., recognizing and acting on structured data with a tap) for a very long time. That an iPhone has a phone attached to it is arguably a secondary characteristic.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC
Am I missing something - with webkit the TV fades in & slides down but nothing in mozilla. Also what is the actual product? It's not really giving me any information.
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This largely depends on the services you are delivering. Design should only be based on hourly if it's a salary situation. The creative process isn't the same as typing out HTML / CSS.

Hourly rates - incentive for productivity gains - this is a two way street. I base my fixed prices on my hourly rates (though I may raise these rates significantly depending on the client and the job) and try to estimate the hours needed. If bid good, then I will get my hourly rate. If I bid horrible then I'm either making more money or losing money.

Of course I want to get the job done as fast as possible (without cutting corners) to get the best rate possible for the job, but I also have to keep an eye on deadlines and the start date for the next project. There are always more factors than just money to give you incentive for productivity gains
"what happens with collisions?
when two databases
update the same record
It's a race condition
solution?
solve it at the application layer "

I suspect this is a deal breaker for many. It certainly is for me.
The first patent is described as a "system and method for performing an action on a structure in computer-generated data," which Apple says applies, for example, to tapping a phone number and being prompted options to call or look it up on the web.

So they have basically patented the context menu. How broken can a patent system possibly become before it crashes an entire economy?
So are they ditching the Windows Phone OS, then?
I think there's a rather large snowball effect in play here, and during the first hours of a post where the snowball should first form, there's massive randomness in what activity will befall a post. The fact that an article is genuinely interesting doesn't guarantee it's spot on the front page, it just greatly increases it's odds.

What is of more concern to me is that all of the front page articles are genuinely interesting. To me HN does pretty well in this regard. There are so many interesting things out there that it doesn't bother me if some of them slip through the cracks and never reach the HN frontpage.
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For many reasons, DAWN is one of the coolest spacecraft in the Interplanetary fleet.
I foresee that nobody will do anything about this problem
Founders on HN
That is quite curious because we never had any deficit reduction debate before 2007 or any talk about government having too much debt yet now we all the sudden do.

I think if there was a graph of government debt it would show a big spike around 2008.
The purpose of patents is to share the IP with the world, in return for a period of exclusivity. The decision to licence the technology in return for money is entirely down to the patent holder.
Customers are not stupid for not knowing about duty cycle in the slightest. The scheme you described above is completely incomprehensible. Perhaps if you tried to explain it in more engaging and inclusive ways, "most customers" would not be "stupid". Defining "20% duty cycle" and "bandwidth minutes" and "auto-throttle" in non-technical terms would probably be a good start.

Until then, stop being patronising and calling people outside of your area of expertise "stupid". It's not going to win you any arguments.
WordPress remove the comments count column from pages
Good idea Tom - right now it's all 0%, just the table of contents.
These patent stories get more and more ridiculous by the day. We need a major software patent amnesty event to just wipe the slate clean. Patents were originally for protecting tinkerers and original thinkers from getting their ideas ripped off by some corporation. I love myself too much to read through the meat of the patents but it sure sounds so vague and general to software in general. Any idiot who took CS101 could dream up a parser that auto-recognizes a phone number and make it clickable. I mean scrolling, like really? Do I need written permission from Steve Jobs to implement it on a touch device? So now we wait until year 2050 before we see it on anything other than a iPhone? I wonder who will be winning then, oh right probably Apple because now they cornered all the hologram related patents with their trademark "no touch" interface in iOS 21 and OSX Sea Lion while the rest of the companies were busy getting sued.

We need to rethink software patents. Anything that hampers the next wave of innovation is pure evil. Software, especially UI innovation with all the metaphors drawn from the physical world is nothing like inventing the cotton gin. Sure we need to reward the the innovators but Apple engineers, brilliant though they may be, are intellectual slaves who don't own their own thoughts. Whoever actually came up with these things for Apple isn't retiring early that's for sure.

All this is great but smart companies are going to flock to countries where saner laws prevail or even the wild wild east like China where nothing is safe but at least they can focus on innovation and not second guess the ideas coming from their own engineers brains.
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Edit: nice downvoting. Do we downvote for disagreeing these days?

Do we care about our karma on a website on the internet?
> Not only big, the biggest one.

On the other hand, Nokia was the largest global handset seller at a time virtually nobody in the US market knew what it was. Ignoring the US market is viable, and the US market isn't for everyone. Look how many car manufacturers have tried and failed to make a go of it. (At least Americans can pronounce Nokia. Peugeot didn't stand a chance.)
And as you become better in your niche you are likely more efficient than the lower priced competition. I have seen plenty of cases where developers from relatively poor countries are charging far more than I would (and I would still be getting my target rate) for something because they likely have no understanding of what the job requires. In these cases I would likely have to raise my rate (and as a result make a killing) just so I don't look like the crazy cheap guy.
It will be far more likely to have some kind of laws as tomjen3 suggests. We can't allow individual countries to jeopardize the Euro. With the worst case that one country will abandon the Euro (although I don't see that happening any time soon)

The EU will not dissolve, that's just crazy talk. The EU is something _totally_ different than the Euro, not all members of the EU even have Euro's.. Saying that the EU will dissolve is almost as unlikely as saying that the US will dissolve.. although countries in the EU are of course much more individual than states, we work together on so many levels that it would just be nuts.
If you didn't notice, he was joking due the fact that there's a story which Gauss did the same,
Well I think they remember all too well what happened last time with PC wars. This time they're playing for keeps.
I'm sure it was nice viewing Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 with pride. It was probably wonderful being proud of Bill Gates trademarking the term "PDA" after hearing John Sculley use it in a talk. It's probably pretty flattering to see Google switching from designing Android as a blackberry clone to designing it as an iPhone clone.

To paraphrase a joke from the last depression: $5 and some pride gets you a nice cup of coffee at starbucks.
Remembering, of course, that it's typically 95/5 billing. So only near-peak traffic matters, but it matters a lot.
Apple patented a popup menu. lol
I feel that HN is broken in some fundamental way.

As long as people don't make an excessively big deal out of "duplicates" and allow for discussion to happen the second time around (or third..or whatever), I don't have a big problem with it. It's an organic process and, as you indicated, timing has a lot to do with it. Many of my posts here get completely ignored -- no votes, neither up nor down, no replies, no indication of any kind it was ever read. Then sometimes a post of mine gets multiple replies and many votes when I figured it would be ignored as usual. I am still trying to get used to that. It is partly the scale of the place. Personally, I find that refreshing. I feel like I have finally found a big enough pond where I can be a little fish and not run into all kinds of nightmarish problems over being seen as too big for my britches.

Peace.
Reading this is like not reading it. Nothing gained, a minute lost. Where is the research, perhaps an opinion, what does this all mean. That is not journalism imho.
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In my opinion, a reason for concern is different than believing their product is inferior.

At the end of the day, this is business. In business, there are many ways to battle the competition.

G+ is clearly gaining some initial traction and Facebook doesn't want their platform to be used to better the competition.
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I dislike pretty much everything about Apple except the MacBook Pro.
The American people wrote in large numbers to their representatives to not bail the banks back when. If you remember, the bill was not passed first time around.

It probably would have been much worse though had it not passed second time around. Tremendously long cues like the British bank Northern Rock worse.
I remember reading articles in the late 90s about how games were becoming so complicated and expensive to develop that indie game developers would die out and everything would need to be a multi-million dollar funded blockbuster. Oops.
I recently left a job I had just started, because a much better offer came around and I simply couldn't pass it up. I offered to keep working from home during the evenings and weekends (most of my work was done remotely) until a replacement was found, but my boss chose to cut ties that day and we both moved on, amicably, which is nice.

In this climate, I imagine that the only norms are those stipulated in a contract.
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May be so. But how does this comment help to create an interesting discussion?
Don't take it personally, please. But HN has always been great because of good comments. I'm not saying I've always contributed well, but let's try. :)
"It gets a LOT more into the nitty-gritty of personal politics"

That's the feeling I get from the author's last few posts that have made it to the top of HN.

It seems very superficial and focused on how he felt versus something substantial.
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A woman who worked as a teacher at a school in Chicago played by multi-talented artist Cameron Diaz where it is not appropriate behavior even inappropriate conducted by a teacher with his job as a teacher wants to be Santa Claus
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Not really. China is possibly the biggest market and if cost factor is factored in, India is perhaps the second biggest market for smart phones. The middle class in both these countries far exceed the entire population of the US. While they may not be able to afford a 600$ smartphone, they can definitely afford a 200 - 300$ one. HTC may as well focus on this segment and make cheaper smart phones. To hell with Apple and it's patents.
I don't understand the jump in logic you are making from "the US government is at risk of defaulting on it's debt" to "the US dollar is at risk of failing as a currency". Can you explain this?

You seem to be jumping from one conclusion to another which much reasoning to link them, and then drawing another conclusion from that.
> (Though I'm sure someone will quickly provide evidence of a string theorist who's also quite handy with the cello).

Does bongo count? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKTSaezB4p8
Does someone have to watch the integration test occur, or does it report errors to something?