skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, you're right. All of this is going to the third world. What? Don't start believing that Android is CHARITABLE. It's a different business model. And this patent case is just a bunch of huge companies suing each-other. None of these companies is any more charitable than the other really. Has Google not done enough gray things for you to realize this yet?
Email blast, facebook awareness, a retweet contest using a pair of sustainable designer jeans (our main product) as the prize. None of these led to sales, though, sales came from somewhat randomly from visitors.
Do you believe that Google and/or HTC used this particular patent to get the idea or work out how to implement it on their device(s)?

Does the answer to the above question affect how you feel about the patent (and/or patents in general)?
If only geeks could debate patents more effectively on HN, your thinking goes, we wouldn't be stricken with software patents?
I'm not talking about the written paper, I'm talking about the degree itself. Sorry for the poor wording.
The smart thing is the marketing comparison to Netflix. I get the service immediately.

I actually think a better market is offering a cloth diaper service, but I'm sure the USPS would have some issues with those packages!
Yeah, I abandoned Gimp when I couldn't import layered images. It might be useful for building from scratch but I have a GB of legacy art to deal with.
The nytimes they are a-changin'
RIM May Discontinue PlayBook
http://plone.net: http://plone.org
Yes, this point should be emphasized.

You should be able to discern most encoding effects on £1k/each speakers and a £500 sound card, if not then you have wasted your money.

OTOH as anyone who has tried to write music cheaply knows, distortions much larger than those typically caused by lossy compression quickly vanish on "normal" listening gear.

Of course, the people who care about encoding artifacts are much much more likely to have an expensive signal chain.
It sounds EXACTLY like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_tag_(Microsoft) to me, except on a mobile device. Does anyone know if Pocket IE6 had Smart Tags?
Congrats! Very excited to hear this.
To a degree, yes absolutely. The overwhelming majority of software developers, I suspect (invented stat), are against software patents, and the few who aren't suffer the illusion that deep in the obtuse language of patents there really is something novel...because they've been told such in so many internet discussions (that usually follow exactly the course of this one). I don't think that is true, and the illusion that there is something deeper is purely because we seldom talk about the specifics because patents are so horrendously worded, with so much boilerplate.

Thankfully Apple itself has provided such an interpretation, and their interpretation, worded to best be in their favor, is exactly as trivial as many have suspected.

This is a critically important discussion for this industry.
Why is HTC being sued and not Android - Because HTC is an corporate entity that makes money off Android - Android isn't a corporate entity on its own - who would they sue if they wanted to sue Android?

Google develops Android and markets it, and I would assume that they could be sued for developing an infringing product. Google most certainly makes money, and a lot of it, from Android.

But Google makes no phones on its own, unlike HTC and Samsung, so Apple goes after those companies to keep the devices from being imported into the US. And Apple can fight Android in a legal proxy war rather than directly suing Google.
The Life of a Link on Reddit (graph porn)
Clooj, a lightweight IDE for clojure
SPICE M-6868 LATEST TOUCHSCREEN PHONE FEATURES WITH 3D USER INTERFACE FACILITY
Banned from Google Plus, Anonymous Starts Own Social Network
Completely agree. This is exactly what the patent covers: the automated hyperlink-ization, using regex, of discrete pieces of data ranging from URLs to phone numbers, on mobile devices. Which is an obvious improvement any competent programmer could come up with, and in no way the sort of "invention" patents were intended to protect.
Seems like a very good idea, considering baby clothes can be expensive and are generally needed for only a short time. I think this model would also work well with women's evening gowns and men's tuxedos (much like tuxedo renting currently happens, but mailed to me and I can return it whenever).

I've talked with people who started a similar service a year or so ago, called Bebaroo (recently renamed Bebarang). In fact, they use the same description, "Netflix for baby clothes".

http://www.bebarang.com/

http://www.annarbor.com/business-review/netflix-for-baby-clo...
Direct link: https://github.com/downloads/arthuredelstein/clooj/clooj-0.1...
> At the worst they will pay the cartels and move along - business as usual.

No, worst case is that Apple doesn't see a reason to grant a license and effectively blocks the sale of HTC Android devices until they remove whatever it is that they're "violating" here (and what that is I have no idea).
From my reading of things, you can't just fork over the cash and obtain "blah.mysite" - your new TLD needs a business plan - and that has to be approved. You need to sell (or otherwise distribute) domains beneath that - you can't just keep the TLD for yourself.

IBM can't just register ".ibm" and keep it to themselves - that won't fly.
grellas, you're the man when it comes to assiduous comments on legal topics, but why this article? It's just a bunch of hard-nosed Valley boardroom hot air that namedrops from the NASDAQ-100 and tells middle america to suck it up. The only salient point was that the government has no easy way of producing more jobs, but there's no solution offered and it's buried in a sea of other BS. "Hey poor and struggling unemployed Americans, you need to find new skills?" Seriously, Forbes needed to run a whole article dedicated to this?

A much better take would be an examination of why our education system churns out so many college grads with few marketable skills. Or something that balances it with their viewpoint: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/16/growing-up-t... This submission is just a pile of inflammatory linkbait that offers nothing new to the people that would agree with it, and enrages those who disagree by using such caustic language.
Xbox emulation on Windows 8? Don't count on it - here's why
Show HN: How Obama's budget proposal affects you (Weekend Hack)
I love the look and feel of the landing page, the typography is concise and clear.

That said a couple of landing page suggestions:

a) You need to turn the "subscribe" call to action into a button or underline it, it's not clear to avg web user what to do. Suggestion for A/B is a less scary action than "subscribe", maybe "Try it Now!"

b) Get the "stains or spills" content into the top paragraph, it's fundamental in closing the sale. As a parent the #1 thing i wondered was how do you address the "ewwww" factor of sharing baby clothes, shouldn't have to scroll to see that.

Hope you guys crush it, sending along to my wife :)
This is basically what my family and friends have going on right now, so I know it will work. We're constantly shipping boxes of cloths around to each other. Great idea.
their "real time" analysis may not be fast enough... when I get followed by a spam bot, it's frequently deleted within a few hours. But those couple hours are enough to have a few hundred @replies that could cause direct emails that would sit around until someone gets a chance to check their email
Too bad, I'm not from Ohio. But this proves my point. Improve spelling? Increase vocabulary? It seems that swimming in the language isn't enough.
This is exactly the impression I took from Ptacek's post. It is condescending and remarkably offers no counterpoint but instead deals in vagaries and innuendo.

If someone wants to discount an opinion about a patent, they have the patent at the ready for their arsenal. Copy pasting the long-form version of "on a computer" is not a response.
You also don't need to recharge dictionary. Just a little battery to change a few times a year.
Suggestions for Obama
There's a great podcast about this exact topic by Planet Money: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/04/05/135151990/the-tues...
I disagree. The incidentiality of the teaching doesn't enter into it. As long as he is giving grades, he has a responsibility to make a reasonable effort to detect and deter cheating.

(I do think the strategy he described -- spending two hours per student trying to force a confession -- is unreasonable. Detection, notification, and escalation to school enforcement is a reasonable approach. Giving up and blaming the system is not.)

I agree that it is the responsibility of the school to have systems in place that provide the right incentives. But it is also the responsibility of the professors to defend the academic integrity of the school as much as they are involved with it.

Moral responsibility does not always add up to 100%.
Because you don't like the censoring country's government and you want to subvert their rule? Maybe you're another government yourself and you're willing to pay for this?
That arm is the KUKA Light Weight Robot (LWR) Arm, which was developed by the German Aerospace Agency (DLR) and called the DLR III LWR [1]. It can move _MUCH_ faster than in the video. It likely moves that slow for the safety of the human and itself -- it costs ~$150k and the high-speed movements create a lot of momentum.

Incidentally, this was the same arm used in the "knife-stabbing experiments." [2]

[1] http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/26/kuka-light-weight-robo...

[2] http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/medical-robots/0...
Well as Aaron Hillegass says in one of his books, a degree in astrophysics may not be all that practical, but it helps you overcome challenges where doubt might creep in about having the intellect to take on a difficult problem.

1) I am having trouble solving this problem, I must not be smart enough.

2) Wait, I have a degree in astrophysics, so I am smart, this must be really hard.
Tell that to SoSasta (India), Groupoer (Israel), Twangoo (South Africa), Disdus (Indonesia), ClanDescuento (Chile), CityDeal (Europe), GroupMore (Malaysia), etc.

All local Groupon clones which were acquired by Groupon for multimillion dollar amounts.
I got the impression that you cared more about your pay raise than about the students learning.

I get the impression that most people care more about their compensation than about <insert bullshit feelgood metric>. Money is an important thing in the modern world, and I guarantee that 99.99% of people in the workforce do their work solely for the money. Stop paying them, they leave. So it's natural that this professor would want a pay raise, too. Everyone does.
I laughed at your last sentence which has a strange verve, and slightly ambiguous meaning. I cannot tell if you were being ironic, but it is definitely entertaining in the context of your post.

[quote]but they should at least know that ican (I can) is wrong right, especially when it's underlined in red, right? [/quote]
I think TLDs solve a problem, to some extent, but not the one ICANN seems to think they solve.

You can have puppies.com and puppies.org — I suppose that helps if you run an organization to help puppies, and I own company that sells puppies. But that does not help when there’s another organization that helps puppies in some other country.

Ah, but we have ccTLDs — you can be puppies.us, and the other guy can be puppies.in. That’s a different naming convention entirely, awesome!

But, really, if you tell a bunch of people about your great new puppy venture, most of them are just going to go to puppies.com (thanks for the business!) or search for something on Google.

TLDs are meaningless! They’re just semi-random bullshit that we stick onto domain names so there can be more than one of each domain, to reduce the chance of someone getting stabbed over who owns the one true “puppies”. (All of the above taken? Be hip and get puppi.es!)

Of course, in the real real world, puppies.com, puppies.org, puppies.us, puppies.in, and puppi.es are all taken by domain squatters, so you and your dogs’ dreams are fucked anyway…

Unless you want to race me to puppy.dog.
Depends on what you consider the market to be.

Domain names: Public Internet Registry (pir.org manages .org), Nominet (in that ICANN recognises Nominet as the owner of .uk - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/03/nominet_joins_icann/ - granted this probably requires ICANN to delegate the running of TLDs to organisations. )

Online naming/branding: Facebook, Twitter (in that a growing number of organisations and/or their offerings are being advertised by their Facebook profile name. I'm seeing it regularly in movie trailers these days.)
I highly doubt that Apple will shut Android down. If they do, they'll have the DOJ all over them trying to break them up.
The ‘Go Big or Go Home’ Startup Mantra is Flawed
Living inside the techno-bubble as an entrepreneur you are inundated with fraudulent marketing that tells you that you need to go ‘big or go home’ with your startup. It's this message that creates a bubble. Start small and build profits instead.
You failed to provide quotation supporting your statements, and there were quotes saying otherwise :-)

The lawsuit is public knowledge, with plenty of articles written and a decision published online. I think we both know that I was getting voted down because I was correcting misinformation about a court decision against Google. :)

At any rate, this lawsuit is bullshit, and should be called out till they blush. The webserver has been likened to house left with doors wide open and robbed in absence of the owner (page 36.). Seriously?

If you started a newspaper that did nothing but copied the headlines and lead paragraphs from, say, the New York Times, how long do you think it would be before you got a cease-and-desist letter in the mail? That's copyrighted material.

For a wider picture: the newspapers joined (by publishing public websites) a well established space: the Internet. It takes serious incompetence -- or malice -- to move somewhere and not follow well-documented, mutually-benefiting local rules.

There's a rule stating that content-owners are supposed to let another company take their work and make money off of it? What rules are you referring to specifically?

Let's be clear: Google is no schoolyard bully here -- even if it was elsewhere the other day

That's arguable, but more importantly, it's a dangerous maneuver for Google in anti-monopoly Europe.
Safe Driving: Why Your Next Car Will be Connected to the Cars Around it
I was wading through opaque news and wikipedia articles to figure out how Obama's budget proposal would affect me, and I decided to make a Saturday afternoon public service project out of my findings. A nice change of pace from working on http://flock.fm. :-)

Any feedback (UI, technical, tax code clarification, etc.) would be appreciated, although this was a rushed little project.

Disclaimer: This is my best interpretation of tax code...my numbers could be wrong!
Telex stations could be in the cloud, change IP address frequently to avoid a static blacklist. But how to advertise their presence to Telex clients without using a static DNS entry? Some chain of DNS entries that changes predictably?

Sounds like more work to be done.
Really cool.

Unfortunately for me, on Firefox 3.5.17 on Linux, I can never get to the submenu items. They disappear before I can "roll over" to them (which is why flyout menus can be so frustrating).

But presumably that's nothing a little tweak wouldn't fix.
Your statement is disjointed and impossible to follow. Both parties are obsessing over jobs, and both parties have different ways to "fix" this problem.

If you want to discuss regulations, lets discuss how the lack of regulation led to the housing bubble and the near collapse of our entire economy.

If you want to talk about "robotic" jobs, please discuss how this is supposed to change? Do you want the government to persuade people to take more skillful jobs (and if so, doesn't that go completely against the conservative ideals?)? Do you want people to want to be in more skillful positions? How do you deal with the manufacturing workforce that had stable jobs for 30 - 50 years and now have nothing?

What is it you are actually trying to say here?
8 New and amazing WordPress hacks
Progress was made but looks like it's stalled atm. Since Tame has an endpoint maybe easier to just suck it in?

Edit:

That compiled script looks a wee scary. I need to be able to fully dive into a debugger with clarity and can't imagine if there were tens or hundreds of lines of this.
That's technically possible but unlikely in this case. Apple violates S3 patents for example - HTC own S3 and if they refuse to license those then they could stop Apple from selling iPhones too - which is good ground for both to consider cross licensing in this case.
Foursquare Custom Badges Require $75K Commitment
Genuine Greek sarcasm. :)
Could we be trending towards a future where 99% of people are unemployed, but the 1% that is employed are so productive that there is plenty for everyone? I guess that's basically the same as saying that robots will do everything.
Diaper services (like groceries) are inherently local.

A national flat-rate service that offers local folks for pickup/delivery would be very interesting.
This is an argument that the unemployment problem is structural rather than cyclical. Paul Krugman points out constantly that if the unemployment problem was structural, we'd see wages rising in areas where there is demand, but wages aren't rising for anybody that makes less than 400,000, though for those above they've increased 23% since 2008.

The structural unemployment argument is a trope to insist that the government can't do anything to encourage employment, because stupid people just can't do today's jobs. Its politics disguised as economics.
Modern industries take a lot more training than those of a century ago. At the very least, the time to retrain will be longer than in the past. That alone would lead to higher unemployment. More importantly, there are more people who, for whatever reasons, just aren't capable of becoming good engineers, scientists or business people.
Apple's patent sounds like Microsoft's "Smart Tags" from IE6. They surfaced in IE6 beta, but were removed from the shipping version because they were so unpopular.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Smart_tag_(Mi...
Sounds like the dawn of a post-scarcity society to me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_scarcity
Google generally does that. Most other tech companies, including Apple, are not so benevolent.
Android, as an operating system created by Android, Inc. and incubated and promoted by Google, is not "charitable" per se, but that's not the point that martythemaniak is making. As a free, open-source piece of software, it effectively acts as a lubricant in the consumer electronics market. By eliminating the manufacturer's cost of building a device's operating system, Google have made it more affordable for both device manufacturers and consumers to effect smart mobile device transactions. So while it may not be strictly financially "charitable" for Google to do this, if we account for the non-financial value of these transactions, I think it's fair to say that an enormous amount of wealth has been created above and beyond what would otherwise have happened in a market that was only dominated by devices running non-free software, especially in countries that have populations that are generally too poor to afford the iPhone.
You should use something like Recurly or Chargify + a real payment gateway/merchant account for subscriptions. Using Paypal is just asking for trouble. We've been using Recurly for our clients and it's been working flawlessly (kind of expensive at $70/m, but IMO it's completely worth it for any kind of business.)
If the Constitution says that you are supposed to be paid in time but, at that time, the money is not in your bank account, then you still don't have anything in your bank account.

We are headed towards a situation where we're in default, no matter what the Constitution says. If that happens our creditors will be in a position to go to the courts and get their money back. It will be a slam-dunk. They will win. But on the date that they are supposed to have their money, they still won't have money to spend. And that is a big problem.

Incidentally the actual text of the 14th amendment doesn't say anything about "default". It says, The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. In other words if you've been told that we owe you money, we owe you money. Period. But it doesn't actually say when or how you'll get that money.

Incidentally if we do default on some of it, we should, unlike what we did in 1979, pay it back with a generous penalty on top. That would do a lot to make lenders more comfortable that it isn't so bad to temporarily get paid late. For instance in 1979 the pre-emptive spending of, say, $40 million would have saved us billions over the next few years.

Unfortunately nobody has the political will to consider that course of action, no matter how good it would be...
> Well, we may not understand the obscure details of every patent claim . . . but we understand very well when a company like Apple is trying to make an end-run around the Patent Office.

If you don't understand the patent claims, you do not understand what the dispute is. End of story.
Smartphone demographics by gender
Yikes! Sure hope the end result is worth it!
Elias has another brilliant idea for startups to work together on a short time frame. The competitive environment is fun and tests your abilities - I'm ready to sign-up, are you?!
Hmm... it doesn't do much, does it? :)
I second this, great book.

Here's the author's blog: http://econfuture.wordpress.com/
EPIC vs U.S. Department of Homeland Security
We have to balance the budget in the long run, but this is a hare-brained way to make it happen. If anything, a default will make it harder to balance the budget in the long run, because if the markets get spooked into higher interest rates on T-bills, a greater proportion of tax revenue will have to be spent on debt service.
It's good to be a software engineer.
http://www.google.com/intl/en/trends/about.html#1
It's more idiomatic in python to just test for truthiness (i.e. "not x" rather than "x is False"). There aren't a lot of cases where you'd want False to be false but not None, 0, or an empty container.
>Government cannot create jobs. It can make the cost of doing business less expensive by lowering taxes, or it can make the profits of a business higher by providing incentives. But for your average small business, those kinds of changes add up to much less than one person's salary, so it makes very little difference.

It can also use monetary and fiscal policy to stimulate demand, increasing the amount of work that needs to be done and resulting in more hiring.
This is why I dropped out of college. The other kids ruined it for me: while I was trying to actually do my assignments, everyone else was copying-and-pasting it, getting straight As, and partying late into the night. Nobody ever got caught cheating, but my C work certainly got me a lot of Cs.

In retrospect, most of my friends from college are still unemployed.
Of course, definitions of skilled and unskilled labor change too. A reasonably skilled cotton picker is still "unskilled labor" to an economy that needs machinists. A highly trained machinist is equivalently unskilled in an economy that requires programmers.
Mozilla BrowserID "seriously flawed", privacy advocate says
As jjm says, with Tame as a concrete, proven solution, it'd sure be great to have CS adopt something like it. Turning the problem "inside out" like this may be the best approach.

I.e., it has well-defined semantics and "only" involves JS rewriting, which is CS's forte.