skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The comments here are mostly supportive, but did you read as far as where he admitted to desiring suicide/terrorism and wound up on thorazine? Maybe he was being figurative, not really sure, but that throws into question any of the positive effects of such habits. Moreso, it throws into question the self-analysis required to judge the effects of them. "Yeah, I wanted to kill myself and others, but it's cool bro."
To be sure, he is ultimately responsible, but I highly doubt he himself sanctioned or approved of those actions.
I wonder if the people crying that the internet killed Borders are the same people that cried that Borders killed the independent bookstore.
I liked Pylons and I wanted to like Pyramid but couldn't get into it. Then I discovered Flask (http://flask.pocoo.org) and moved on to using it with Bulbflow (http://bulbflow.com).
In my law school, everyone is graded on a strict curve and honor code violations are handled first by a board of students. Does wonders for reducing cheating.
This seems to be a related idea: http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/Chaffing.txt
Music stores have suffered similar fates. The big, generic chains have been destroyed by ecommerce but smaller shops that provide expertise in a distinct niche have survived and even flourished. I think there's a lesson for software businesses in this too.
I think this is usually a case of marketing having a bit too much say in product discussions. In the publishing industry, it seems like "My widget does X" doesn't get as strong a reaction from publishers as "My widget does X and it adapts to your readers".

The problem being (of course) that people forget how hard a problem machine learning can be.
If the link you mention was the one to the Guardian article, I don't recall there being any suggestion there that his death was due to his having revealed details of the phone hacking.

And, it's still off-topic.

I didn't flag it, I'm just saying why I think other people might have.
That's nitpicking. You get the idea.
A solution looking for a problem and/or customers scores $350k.
I think what you are missing is the in between phase where scarcity still exists, but the best way to produce scarce outputs does not involve humans, besides those who own or run the scarce-output-production entities. This seems to me to either produce societies with wild inequities between a very few producers and a very many do-nothings, or the types of socialist utopias that we appear to be really horrible at as humans. The everyone-has-a-magical-everything-maker phase, I agree, that sounds pretty solid.
If you say it and the company in question complains, then stop saying it (in that situation the legality doesn't matter as it is a case of BIG v small), otherwise as long as you are not the "airbnb" of a market that airbnb might be in (or want to be in) then you are probably okay... maybe... don't ask a lawyer though, they tend to freak at this sort of thing.
This is so true... if you don't have a spouse whose coverage you can utilize, the cost of health insurance is prohibitive, ESPECIALLY for anyone over 30 who has a spouse and kids. At that point going without insurance (as I did when doing a startup, and so many other entrepreneurs I've seen do) is not just risky, it's irresponsible and foolhardy. Taking financial risks to start a business is fine - but you shouldn't have to risk your health and your family's health.

If the government wants to see more people starting new businesses and taking risks, it needs to remove the HUGE disparity in healthcare costs between working for a large corporation and going solo. There's just no reason it should exist.
Amazon Simple Email Service Now Supports Attachments
Everything in this article is false. The author admits having not even read the patent. This is just misrepresentation to further an agenda that wants to pretend that Apple didn't invent anything with the iPhone.

Reality: That compaq used a stylus, it was not a touch screen. And the patent doesn't say what is being alleged anyway... but then, its easy to construct arguments when you get to make up your oppositions position, right?

By definition, this whole thing is knocking down a strawman.

FWIW, every time I research one of these "alarming" "absurd" patents on an "idea", the turth turns out to be something else.

I'm convinced that the target audience never reads the patents or isn't conversant in the art sufficiently to comprehend them.

And thus these are essentially political posts to foster the idea that Apple doesn't deserve any protection for their inventions in the iPhone, because those making the claim are android fans or apple haters.

Reality is this: Prior to the iPhone, android was ripping off the blackberry. If Apple hadn't done this work, you'd still be arguing over which phone had the best physical keyboard and bespoke facebook interface.
Welcome to nominative use! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use

Nominative use, also "nominative fair use", is a legal doctrine that provides an affirmative defense to trademark infringement as enunciated by the United States Ninth Circuit,[1] by which a person may use the trademark of another as a reference to describe the other product, or to compare it to their own.

Bear in mind that this is a defense and not an immediate get-out-of-court-free card. This fair use exists because otherwise it'd be impossible to refer to trademarked items at all without infringing in some way. After all, you just used the word "airbnb" in your post ;-)
Good to see a mention of the Tattered Cover, as they actually have 3 locations. There was a Talk of the Nation segment[1] that covered independent bookstores, and how they are coping today just a few weeks ago (the Tattered Cover owner was guest).

[1]http://www.npr.org/2011/06/30/137529480/how-to-make-it-as-an...
Func<Action> would be a function that takes no arguments and returns an Action. The desire is to be able to specify void as the return type of a Func, so that you can use Funcs for all callbacks, instead of having to use Funcs for callbacks that return a value and Actions for callbacks that don't.
There are actually quite a few "game-artists", especially now that the independent gaming scene is thriving. But Rohrer is likely the most interesting for the casual observer. Passage has the startling capacity to reduce people to tears in five minutes flat. His works are absolutely without equal for their inventiveness and resistance to conform to conventional wisdom.

This is my favourite article about him, and one of the most memorable articles I've ever read: http://www.esquire.com/print-this/future-of-video-game-desig...

It's a great starting point for people who are unfamiliar with his story.
Aren't we the ones who most benefit from patents?

No. The two groups that benefit most directly from patents are established companies which wish to block competitors, and patent trolls which wish to sue lots of people.

For the kind of startups that HN people are interested in, patents are an exercise of interest mostly because of their potential value to investors and purchasers. But in the meantime they cost money, don't affect sales one bit, and you likely won't get them until years after it is obvious whether you've succeeded or failed as a business.

Until the big boys decide that the cost of patent trolls exceeds the benefit of their patent moats, nothing will change about patent law. In particular I see no sign that the next 24 months is critical. In fact I'm willing to bet you money on that. The next 24 months is mostly going to be spent with a Republican Congress (who see patents as "business friendly" and have bigger political fish to fry) fighting with Obama. After that we'll have a new administration, which is going to focus on top political stuff for their first 100 days.

My personal suspicion is that the economy is going to go south again, credit problems are coming back in a big way, and financial/economic issues are going to keep software patents off of the list of priorities for a long time.
The way I read the essay is different stages in life require different perspectives. All night hacking sessions on Red Bull and ramen work until your mid 20s. In your 40s it'll kill you, quick and you're knowledge or ability will not be any better for it. You need to spend time to sit down and absorb the knowledge.

Games like golf and I don't know skeet shooting show how you can do more with less. However, that doesn't mean the foundation you built in youth with intense practice or an unforgiving drive to achieve is now worthless.

Rahul can say "you are not running out of time" because he stepped on the pedal damn hard. To each their own. I'm pretty sure that if Rahul went bankrupt tomorrow he'd be back to his 17 year old self hustling with everything he's got but if he did that now he'd be putting more at risk than he has possibility to gain.
It was a CNN article, and I don't know if any major media outlets are mentioning the connection yet, but the timing is too suspect not to.
NZ School Adds iPad 2 to Compulsory List for Students
I can't believe I've read this far into an epic flamewar already, but thank you for making the one comment I can get behind.
My experience with most development teams is that they have their own custom version of whichever framework(s) they use with as much of the warts removed as possible, in their own style. There's just no way you're going to get around this part, no matter what framework you use.
نتائج جامعة المنيا 
نتائج جامعة المنيا نتائج جامعة المنيا نتائج جامعة المنيا نتائج جامعة المنيا نتائج جامعة المنيا نتائج جامعة المنيا نتائج جامعة المنيا نتائج جامعة المنيا
PDF Document Generation Library for Node : PDFKit
All twitter.com pages come up empty for me for the past 30-40 minutes.
So? It's not like we are never going to build any more cities or that none of the existing towns are going to grow into cities in the future. Nor am I claiming that this is the only statistic that matters.

In any case, this is a curious objection to raise in a thread about a story documenting the inability of rural farmers to hire a productive labor force following a change in the law. Quite a lot of immigrants work in the agricultural sector and live a good way away from major cities.
But it is higher-risk to be unable to find anyone employable than it is to train people yourself. So the system depends on a surplus of already-trained workers, which someone needs to provide, or everyone suffers.
…and they're usually asked anonymously too!

I always just assumed that most of them are rhetorical setups asked using a sockpuppet by the user that made the long and involved answer ranked at the top of the page.
You just need a "tagging" or "category" feature.
VC Jeff Clavier: How to Raise Investment Capital
You can start by just saying "No, thanks," to those $1000 patent bonuses at your company.
the performance is STILL lagging behind Python

It's hard to benchmark these things with accuracy and impartiality, but there's not a significant gap between them anymore. For example (see JRuby here):

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-lang...

I just ran an identical-technique-almost-identical-code recursive fibonacci benchmark against Python 2.6.1, Ruby 1.9.2, and JRuby 1.6.1 and got times of 17.4s, 7s, and 3.2s respectively. (Undoubtedly you could find benchmarks where Python wins, but this is an interesting test of a common algorithm nonetheless.)

Perhaps in real world tests there are places where performance can be made up, but at its core, Python isn't showing much improvement over Ruby nowadays until you start to use things like PyPy (which is, I admit, totally awesome).
From what I've read, in the WSJ editorial today perhaps foremost, he sanctions those activities implicitly if not explicitly. Don't forget in the midst of all this the NY Post front page story alleging DSK accuser not only of being hooker but pimped by her union! If it is the end of Murdoch, good riddance.
Just checked and it works great on Firefox 5 on Linux.
This is what happens when you refuse to pay me
> However, those who oppose software patents never bother to investigate them. They're just looking for something to confirm their position.

I investigate plenty in my research areas; fortunately, suing academics for patent infringement tends to be a poor use of funds, so I can ignore them with relative impunity in my own work. But the average amount of innovation in patents I read is pretty low.

In computer-music, for example, I'm willing to agree that there are some truly innovative patented methods; for example, the CCRMA patent on inventing FM synthesis surely counts. But for every one of those, there are 100 or maybe 1000 patents on minor variations of algorithms they didn't invent, sometimes stooping so low as to be nothing more than a choice of parameters in a well-known algorithm not invented by the patent-holder.

It makes the area a bit of a minefield if you want to do anything commercial, because everyone and their intern owns patents on hundreds of trivial permutations of everything. That's considerably different from there being one patent per truly significant innovation in computer-music synthesis. There are probably 100 of those in the history of computer music, maybe 200 if we want to be generous; and yet there somehow exist thousands of computer-music patents.
Apple Computer entrepreneur's rise and fall [1985]
First, you spent a lot of words arguing with me before reading the patent. Don't do that.

Second, you've misread the patent. The "server" needs to be in the same machine as the input and output device. The patent description defines the terms used in the claims language (you will easily find a basis for that assertion in patent law if you look); here, the server is a subroutine coupled to the system via an application programming interface.

Further, I believe if you take the time to poke around, you'll find software extracting patterns from text in the prior art references. Claims cannot be interpreted to substantially duplicate the descriptions (not simply the claims) of cited prior art.

Finally, your logic doesn't work. In your worldview, if I sell frobnitz flanges, and Apple invents a phone that uses frobnitz flanges to legibly display the otherwise invisible color blurple, and then files a blurple-display patent referencing frobnitz flanges, I can no longer sell frobnitz flanges. Any elementary description of "how to read patent claims" will show this logic to be false. The infringer must violate all the elements of the claim.

(Late edit: I mean to say, the direct infringer).
Are you suggesting that Twitter is immune to hackers? Which, you know, these people obviously are?
We used a service for our first kid, and yeah, keeping a pail of soiled diapers around for a week isn't ideal. For our second kid, we just purchased our own diapers and did the laundry every two days.
The current unemployment is caused by a lack of demand. It is ridiculous to think that a new unsolvable structural issue with the workforce showed up all of a sudden in the last 3 years. Businesses have money, there is plenty of capital, taxes are low, interest rates are low, etc. This is not a supply side issue and it is not a "structural" unemployment issue. If there was demand there would be full employment again.
It's interesting that Rohrer played around with the idea of taking Chain World online-- when I heard about Chain World, the first bit of sacrilege that came to my mind was "well, why should this be restricted to a USB stick? There's no reason a multiplayer server couldn't be governed to do this."

I wrote Lonecraft as a way of replicating the Chain World idea, but using an Amazon EC2 instance as a multiplayer server with a few custom Minecraft server plugins and a Heroku instance as a web app to govern the rules of the game (to make sure only one player plays at once and no one plays more than once).

The code is here: http://www.github.com/ckolderup/lonecraft
It needs some more work to flesh out the idea of resetting the world after a set number of players and exposing the blog entries of each player after the world resets, but the general game mechanic is there and functional.

My instance of it is technically up and running, too, but one thing my friends and I quickly discovered while testing it is that people who have been playing Minecraft for a while have a nasty habit of not... really... dying. Once you've learned the ropes it's pretty easy to make armor, carry food, and fight monsters. Death usually comes only occasionally and as the result of a careless mistake.

I've toyed with the idea of imposing a time limit or a number of logins that you're allowed before you're also kicked off, but that seemed to defeat the whole purpose of giving meaning to the in-game death.
Agreed.

An image Lulzsec use as their identity linked below, for those that don't get the joke they made:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/7c/Lulz_Sec...
Something along those lines that I'd really like to see (or maybe create someday) would be a decentralized virtual universe. Minecraft and such games are usually run on a server which is under someone's control; it would be funny to have a consensus-based distributed world (drawing inspiration from Freenet and possibly Bitcoin for the technical implementation) which would exist in the network of the players, be the same for everyone, and survive as long as people are playing it.
I had a look at one of the patents and it sounds like Smart Tags to me.
Borders Closing Imminent
'Hall Of Wonders' Explores U.S. Innovation
I think you'll find that any "free webhost" is going to give you a lot of trouble if you want to deploy a project built on a modern web framework.

Rule of thumb: if it doesn't have SSH access, and it's not a Platform-as-a-Service like Heroku or Gondor, you're probably not going to have much luck deploying anything except PHP or static HTML.

Check out webfaction.com, it's great for beginners and does most of the deployment for you.
According to the whistleblower, the problem is endemic to the entire industry.
You're probably right, but that's irrelevant here: a 2005 phone isn't invalidating prior art for a patent filed in 1996. In fact, for some forms of disclosure, there's a cushion of 12 months prior to filing, meaning that conceivably a phone could have been disclosed in 1995 that wouldn't invalidate this one.
This is probably a fair point about the "enterprise .NET" community, which is by nature very conservative and closely aligned to core Microsoft technologies where the guarantees of support are strongest and the developer pool the largest.

However we as a smaller shop have used F# on a couple of projects within the last year -- to embed an expression engine within an analytics product, and for the parser/analyser in our Sass plugin for Visual Studio. But I know I'd have struggled to get that technology choice into the last enterprise environment I worked in. So the lack of uptake may be more to do with the culture of "enterprise .NET" shops, more than the "broader .NET community."
I doubt Bill Gates agrees. You do not get to be the richest man in the world (without being the monarch of an oil-rich country) without a strong streak of competitiveness.
> proprietary extensions are not possible

Create a second library that links to the LGPL one and extends its behavior.

> dynamic linking is mandatory

It's also good practice most of the time.

> the whole hassle of including any tools or data for recompiling said LGPL library and

Only if you change it. If you didn't change it, you can just redistribute the tarball you used.

> the patents grant is implicit rather than explicit

It's still there.

> Just because you can do something, it doesn't mean you want to.

I get it you don't want it, but, just because you don't want it doesn't mean you can't
PayPal is no worse than any other merchant account provider in regards to their policies for risk reviews and what happens when an account is frozen. The policies are essentially word for word the same at PayPal and at the major banks underwriting most merchant accounts. Sticking a subscription-management-as-a-service startup on top of your payment processor does not alleviate any of these issues.

I know exactly how easy/hard building in-house billing is, thank you very much. I've built many, for my own business which supports over 80,000 users with a myriad of complex one-time/subscription/overage/special-rate/etc. payment plans, and for others. You can look at my profile if you wish some evidence.
So you either require the user to somehow sync a private key across multiple computers (Including phones and tablets) or the can't access the site with this method. Do you agree on the digest, method, sizes? Do you blacklist md5, sha1? Does everyone agree to this or can I go to one site which uses an insecure algorithm and theres the potential for information to be leaked, which affects my usage of that private key on other websites. Do I have a private key for each different website? Do I then need something to manage this for me, ala KeyPass or 1Password? How do I authenticate with KeyPass or 1Password, with a password? We're back to where we started.

I don't think PKI is the solution for this problem.

BrowserID is moving in the right direction, I can trust Google to have appropriate security for my personal information, but as we've seen time and time again sites like gawker, mtgox cannot be. It would be nice to see a service like BrowserID catch on and I'd be willing to pay for a vendor for the service if they provide full disclosure on their method storing of my data. So I know they aren't storing in plaintext, hashing with md5, encrypting the passwords etc.
The simplicity and plugability of django's authentication system gives you as much as you need and as much as you want, if it doesn't provide something then you can reuse it. I can't think why I'd want to "choose" between different systems that should be provided in the core functionality.

The admin is not the auth system, you are not forced to use it and in fact its disabled by default in every single django startup app. I've in the past done my own functionality pages, and would use Admin when it was most suitable.

Personally I haven't seen anything in Rails 3.0 that makes me think "ooh this is a killer feature" the only thing that rails had over Django was migrations, and South closed that hole up years ago.

I'm going to to reinvestigate Rails 3 soon, however my concerns with magic are related as much to the coding style as the overal magical structure. One of the reasons I understand Django so well is the well written code, the other being that it is clean and well designed as a system.
It will be interesting (and terrifying! don't get me wrong, but also interesting) to see what happens if we get to this point - there is no Bastille for the masses to storm, throwing out the entirety of the democratic government would accomplish very little in terms of wealth redistribution, and the military now has the literal capability, though hopefully not the strength of will or weakness of conscience, to kill every member of the starving horde. Our distribution of wealth may not be as skewed as pre-revolutionary France, but our concentration of might is far higher.