skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>What we find in the next few years will radically change our understanding of the cosmos, I'm sure.

every time current "standard model" was incorrect for some fringe/edge cases a new theory was born that included the old "standard model" as an edge case. Lets this chain continue ( i personally feel that monstrosity of superstring theory is an indication that we've reached the breaking point :)
Just to play devil's advocate: Apple pays for the infrastructure to host and distribute the Kindle app, which then proceeds to circumvent the payment system by offering the app for free and charging for the content from outside the Apple store.

While this set up is clever and 30% is a bit of a margin on in-app purchases, it's not as if Amazon has the moral high ground here. It's providing a paid service through Apple in a way that allows Amazon to collect on it but not Apple. That's all that's happening here.
Ask HN: Know a small social network startup that was acquired recently?
I'm looking for examples of smallish startups (related to Social Networking) that were acquired recently, and it would be great if the examples included the purchase price and related details. Google and Quora didn't turn up anything for me.

Anyone?
Is it just about the number of dimensions? Seems like you'd get decent performance with mongodb if each timeseries is a collection, and each entry was another document?
Not until Lodsys goes after Kim Kardashian for violation of a patent they hold on how to screw a lid on perfume. As soon as someone breaks away from tech and takes it to pop culture, we may actually see some changes.

Don't mess with the publics ability to indulge in kids in tiaras or the brand of large booty they are into or there will be outrage to answer to.
By selling inside of the United States that makes them subject to US patent laws. That is why Rovio is subject to this lawsuit despite being a Finnish company.
Just to put it in perspective maybe.

32,000 deaths a year from driving in US.
500,000 deaths a year from cancer in US.

If it was me investing, I'd put my money into solving the cancer issue. Even if you can shave 5% off that death toll, you've already done more than eradicating cars would.

The problem is driverless cars sounds like awesome fun. Solving cancer is the harder problem.
It's poor professionalism and poor writing, not poor self-preservation. I doubt that the writer is putting himself in danger by calling someone an imbecile.
Please don't include passive grubbing for upvotes as a coda to your comments. If you have something to say, even if it's controversial, have the courage to say it plainly without projecting anxiety about karma (of all things).

It's insulting by implication to the community here that expressing a contrary but constructive and well-written opinion would become a crisis for your karma. For the most part, other readers can differentiate between constructive comments they disagree with and spammers, griefers, trolls, crapflooders, and trivial one-liners.
Its a stamp that costs whatever first class postage is when you buy it, but it's always good for that, no matter how much the rates go up. So the Forever stamp you paid $0.44 for now, you can still use it to mail a letter in 5 years, when stamps might be $0.70.
> I always thought if we can somehow ride photons, like hop on and go for a ride, then we can move at the speed of light.

That might work, but if we accelerate at the same rate we'd arrive at our destination looking much like sample from a centrifuge.
how did you get this idea that the US doesn't take drinking and driving seriously?

As a US citizen I will observe, I have found far too many don't take it seriously. Additionally, it is sometimes hard to believe our government takes it seriously. Just a year or two ago there was a lady killed on her scooter in SF by a drunk driver. Turns out it was that driver's 3rd conviction of drunk driving, and 2nd or 3rd vehicular homicide while drunk.

Anecdotes aside, compare the punishments for DUI's in the USA to the rest of the world. I think you'll find they are comparatively more lenient than you might suspect.
Why your next language better be C++
Google doesn't price these Chromebooks, they only price their business/education rental program. I don't know why it's hard for people to believe that Samsung and Acer have control over their own products.
Arizona Solar Tower 2X Taller Than the Empire State Building (200 MW)
Frid.ge: http://frid.ge/
An MBA or MS in CompSci? Depends on whether you want to specialize
Ask HN: noprocrast countdown timer?
Would it be possible to add a noprocrast countdown timer to the site?

This would show the amount of time you have before noprocrast kicks in, locking the user out of the site. (maxvisit - time site was first accessed)

I ask because I'd like to cut back my time spent on HN, and this would help me to measure time spent on site.
Don't even know Fleet, but Hiccup certainly has a place for when you WANT code as HTML. I'd never want it but I can understand why some would.
Tragic. Just a few days ago, he celebrated his tenth wedding anniversary... https://plus.google.com/108067740959569006573/posts/LJ1Z2Bvh...
I'm seeing a lot of misconceptions about test-driven development in this thread. The biggest one is that test-driven development involves writing a bunch of tests first. Instead, TDD involves interweaving tests and production code in a very tight cycle. You write a few lines of test code, then a few lines of production code, then you review and improve your code, then write a few lines of test code, and so forth. Each step only takes a minute or so.

This is useful because you're constantly making and checking hypotheses: "This code should make a test fail in X way... yup. Okay, now this code should make the test pass. Yup. Now this change shouldn't change behavior, and the tests should still pass. Oops! Undo. Oh, that method has to be called in the constructor. All right, this change should work. Good."

(If you're interested, my book goes into more detail, and it's online: http://jamesshore.com/Agile-Book/test_driven_development.htm... . I also have a extensive screencast of real-world TDD here: http://jamesshore.com/Blog/Lets-Play/ )

Despite the extremists, TDD really is a useful tool--and that's all it is. Sure, TDD has been turned into yet another vehicle for programmers to engage in religious wars, but you can't really blame TDD for that, any more than you can blame Richard Stallman for emacs vs. vi wars.
That's the least of it. I edited out six full days where the whole page above the fold was an ad.
> I guarantee there are just as many incompetent programmers as there are incompetent drivers out there.

I don't feel this is a good argument against self-driving cars, mandatory or not. Code and hardware for self-driving cars would go through multiple passes of design, heavy testing both automated and manual, etc. The same can't be said of snap decisions by drivers. There will absolutely still be accidents with self-driving cars -- mechanical failures, bugs in software, etc. The question is whether that number would be significantly lower than the number of accidents that happen right now, and I find it highly doubtful that it wouldn't be.
The problem is that many gamers fall into this category.
Steps to Configuring Privacy on Google+
Bring back gaming to your checkins and tell your friends: Oust Me
Remember way back in 2010, when you were roaming around, making new Foursquare locations everywhere and checking in every day so you would be mayor of all of them?
In terms of views, it did far better with this link than with the previous one. I was surprised, I only noticed when I looked it up on my analytics.

A big part of the problem is that it's abysmally hard to search for previous links on HN.
Oh, that's a good idea! One possible use for the ux review is something along the lines of uservoice or getsatisfaction for design/ux I will log that one... thanks!
I'd think that world would be a long ways off for a lot of people. I can't play large games from my phone. There's not even a port of Dwarf Fortress. Sad times.
A New Take on MySQL Master High Availability
I think Google's strategy for ChomeOS is all wrong. Nobody wants low powered laptops without a proper OS. As soon as the iPad blew up the netbook market Google should have retargeted ChomeOS as a tablet OS. A lightweight (zero-weight) OS is perfectly suited for a tablet. I use an iPad almost exclusively for browsing the net and checking email and I bet I'm not the only one. A Chrometablet with some decent specs and maybe some hardware WebGL support might even open a whole new online gaming market.
Which is a problem to be fixed, not a quirk to be tolerated.
I've built a physics engine in C# called Farseer Physics Engine. Believe it or not, but it is acutally faster than the original C++ code it is based on. I did a benchmark on physics engines (based on Box2d) in Java, C# and C++: http://ianqvist.blogspot.com/2010/12/benchmarking-box2d-base...
Does this include word derivations?
Apple gets to sell more devices

This is Apple's top priority, so you're probably right. It assumes way too much about having a working internet connection, though[+]. When I'm reading a book or a movie and decide to switch to a different form factor, I don't want it to take a bunch of fiddling just to get back to where I was. Nor do I want to be stuck without a wireless connection and be stuck unable to download the app or data from one device to another. Without guaranteed communication between devices, they really will be different devices, with all the inconvenience and mental overhead that entails. Apple will have to implement peer-to-peer syncing over bluetooth or over a cable instead of depending on iCloud.

[+] I took a trip to Chicago over the weekend, and my 3G connection only worked a handful of times over four days. Coming from a city where AT&T provides excellent 3G service, it was a real shock to be reminded that you can't take connectivity for granted.
I don't think that Google is especially slow in this area (e.g. they've been very responsive when mega-posts by very popular people were causing a bunch of noise). Instead, I think it's because Google is trying to do a bunch of different things that need engineering cycles. When Google+ launched, people wanted first-class integration with Google Apps. People has also been clamoring for business/entity pages, not just personal pages. Those are both important and will take some time. There's just a lot to do, even for a service that's only a few weeks old.
> all Lodsys manages to do is stifle innovation

Lodsys has been suing for such absurd things that maybe they are indirectly contributing to the downfall of the patent system as a result of public uproar.
True, the ads could be more targeted. I do get ones on there for things like red diesel which is fairly relevant.

But even with better ads I wouldn't make much as I only average about 50 hits a day. I think there's a bit of potential in the site, it just needs a re-design, the car database cleaning up (HUGE amount of work there), and some promotion.

I'd like to have another go at it, but currently all my free time is devoted to BugMuncher.
Not regularly, no, just something I want to have available. Here are some things I still use an optical drive for:

- ripping CDs of rare or out-of-print music.
- burning CDs/DVDs of photos for friends who don't have a USB drive.
- reading old CDs I have, like a CD of BeOS.

But I use it infrequently enough that maybe a peripheral is the way to go.
I think that an important difference is that we already know how to solve the car problem, in terms of technology. We can't really say the same for curing cancer.
I enjoy the idea a lot, that one day people won't need to program their machines anymore but can discuss with them what they actually want. Yes, there will still be the need for the good old coding (maybe even more, because someone needs to write these eloquent programs, right?). And yes, the resulting programs of these discussions will be a lot more unclear (and thus prone to all kinds of bugs). But for what does your grandfather need a 100% correct program? He needs some food (no matter if carrots or beans), some clean clothes (no matter if the red or the blue shirt) and someone who reminds him to take his pills and tell him how the weather tomorrow maybe could be.

I wonder why we don't read more about these topics. Not just because of the opportunities for less educated people and the chance to automate repeatable tasks we can't repeat just yet. There are so many things where we are actually a lot more flexible then we think. For example when I prototype my new android game, I don't really care what way finding routines the game characters use. In the beginning I just want to put together something really fast to see if my game idea is worth anything. I would really like an IDE to just fill in the empty spots itself with anything that might work. And after time, using my more concrete programming input and the data from the test runs that every coder does while developing the IDE could improve the code itself.

I imagine an IDE that I can tell "I want to code a computergame. It should be rougelike. Very rougelike computergames are rouge, nethack, ADOM. A little rougelike computergames are Diablo, Dungean Siege, Baldurs Gate, Oblivion, World of Warcraft. Not rougelike computergames are Counter Strike, Doom, Sim City. Not computergames are VIM, Firefox, Word. Make prototype!"
> "But punch cards are the reason that some software still limits you (or just defaults) to 80 characters per line."

Neat. I had always wondered about this.
I think I should probably add that I didn't rip off any of Google's code, just the idea :)
Google Bans Developer, Developer bans Chrome Extension
Why Real-Money Play Will Revolutionize Game Monetization
happily, this is not a synchronous application with tens of thousands of concurrent users, so "totally hosed" for us may have a very different definition.

What do you mean by "very large numbers of columns" ? I've seen some mongo users with very rich, i.e. large, document models.
Find out where a bunch of programmers like hang out after work. Find a single programmer of the opposite sex, seduce them, and then start a relationship with them.

You'll have a much easier time convincing your partner to build you a mvp rather than a stranger :)
Especially since it would seem that the drunk driver would be imprisoned for his actions.
I work in the security industry, so my point of view about both the incidence and importance of security vulnerabilities (and subsequent hacking disclosures) is probably unrealistically skewed. I offer my bias as a caveat.

That said, I don't see a rise in hacking incidents. What I do see, is that hacking is currently part of the zeitgeist, so much like when someone tells you about a red car and you start to notice red cars all over the place, the collective focus on security is just bringing more incidents to light.

Quantifying hacker activity is akin to quantifying IP piracy, in that there's really no good way to accurately capture the real numbers. For many years, publicizing breaches was anathema, so the general public were left unaware just how commonplace attacks were. If you want to see remnants of this mindset, just ask a security consultancy for references of other clients they've worked with (It's like asking for a list of someone's sexual partners). We're now at a point where there is more pressure to go public when an incident occurs (as well as things being more difficult to hide).

Even if I remove my cynical security consultant fez (which would make me salivate on the benefits to my livelihood based on the public perception of the state of internet security), I think it's probably a good thing for this stuff to be in the public sphere.
TFA doesn't give the patent number, if you want to know you'll have to dig up whatever they've filed with the courts. I'd start looking in EDT; I'm just guessing, but it's where all the trolls file for quick, predictable payouts.

All the article says is that the patent allegedly covers buying new levels from within the game. So the patent is probably some generic nonsense about a method of having an ordinary computer do ordinary things. But nobody prior to them patented or mentioned doing those particular ordinary things on a computer, so it's not considered legally obvious, no matter how much it makes us want to bang our heads on a wall.

EDIT: I should mention that we won't know if they infringed at all (or whether Lodsys has a valid patent) unless it goes all the way through the system. Depending on what's being demanded, they may find it cheaper to settle, even if the patent is garbage and they may do so as a pure business decision.
I think the point is that at the time they file for patent violation, the patent holders don't have to say what part of the patent is violated (edit: except general things like patent number).

Troll: "We think you violated our patent, pay or else"

Company: "But how?"

Troll: "Look at the patent, it's not our job to tell you what you did wrong, in fact, it is our interests not to tell you"

Company: "But the patent is completely vague, it could be anything"

Troll: "Ah hah hah hah... Still want to go to court to fight this? "
Stop Wasting Money On WebLogic, WebSphere, And JBoss Application Servers
I have to wonder if anyone on this team has actually used any of these services, or if this is just some kind of takedown piece? I'm a Sirius subscriber and a Pandora One subscriber. The very moment that I purchase a car that offers Pandora integration, Sirius is out the door.

Just like cable vision, Sirius has hundreds of channels full of music I really don't want to listen to. Meanwhile, I drop an artist or song name in to Pandora and magically, I have hours of quality listening available. It's amazing. The Music Genome Project is Pandora's most powerful asset. It allows them to piece together relevent music, even for edge cases.

My Spotify invite come through yet, so I haven't had a chance to use their service, but it strikes me as a little bit different use case. Spotify appears to allow you to listen to specific music. That's not really how I use Pandora, and I think there's room for both:

Spotify - a replacement for purchasing thousands of dollars of music that I'll only listen to for a few months.

Pandora - a replacement for the radio that plays music I don't like.

As someone who uses two out of three of these services, I don't see Sirius sticking around long once 3G data service is common place in automobiles. Additionally, I think there's room in the market for Spotify and Pandora, both of which fill different needs. I still buy music from iTMS, but I'd jump at a fixed price solution like Spotify. I still want to listen to "random" music that fits my tastes while at my desk or driving.
so... you rewrote something and it's now faster? i applaud the outcome, but i'm not sure it necessarily implies that the VM is better than other VMs or native...
JSTOR is not just public domain works, and there is no indication that the downloading was limited to public domain works.
"Also, the web platform isn't ready to be the only platform available for applications."

That's the whole point. The web wasn't quite ready to subsume PDF, until people went and tried to do it, found the pieces that were missing, and got them added.

We expect and hope that we're going to hit a ton of things that don't work today, and that we'll have to make them work and get a standardized API and so forth. I think that's a better way to proceed than to make speculative sky-APIs on standards mailing lists.

We are exactly targetting mobile devices (handsets and tablets), because we agree with your assessment of where things are headed, and because that's where the app action mostly is today. (We want to solve the app-store-for-web problem too, but that's another project.)

This isn't just about the web apps you have today. It's about having your contacts manager, camera, gallery, dialer, SMS app, GPS-integrated maps, launcher etc. be hackable using web tech. That work will help on desktop as well, since many of those pieces are on desktop/laptop machines -- if you write OS-specific code to get to them, and you're allowed by the OS to interpose your version of it.

Maybe you're right, maybe it's a fool's errand. We think it will help the web grow in powerful ways, and make important internet technology be accessible to more user-focused customization, so we're going to try it. That's basically what we do.
> JSTOR's particular collection of documents is protected by copyright

We've discussed this on HN before. Reproductions of public domain works are not protected by copyright.

Edit: Of course a significant portion of JSTOR's archive does consist of copyrighted works.
I wonder, how obnoxious and intrusive would the ads have to be before they earn back $150+ of revenue? Not sure I'd sign on to that.
15 year old sells his startup
I'd also be interested in any great pitch videos you've seen. I am about to take on the task of finding and securing investors. Scary :)
I would be interested in seeing these numbers adjusted for age. My belief is that traffic accidents tend to kill younger people while cancer tends to kill older people. If I'm right, one car crash death would likely eliminate more potential years lived than many cancer deaths.

I mean, I'm not saying your point is invalid, or that trying to extend our lives by fighting the 'old age' diseases is without value, but I do think that the number of deaths does not tell the whole story.
The real problem is that you should only be able to patent a solution to a difficult problem, while these "broad" patents often look more like you are patenting the problem itself, so that any solution is covered. This is totally against the original idea of patents (either software or hardware).
You Can Read, But You Can't Buy: iOS E-Reader Apps Remove Links to Bookstores
I used to work for the company that did this site, AKQA DC, they do great work. This was a HUGE project and took 3.5 years to do.
Git support added to Google code
Meta-circular Clojure STM implementation
Cloud computing should be safe simply because the history of computing until the 1990s should be available to serve as prior art. What would be helpful, of course, is if there were a ruling or (heaven help us) a law which made explicit that there would be a high bar to originality in this space aside from the particulars of how an operation is performed.
Wouldn't count on it:
http://www.usatoday.com/money/advertising/2011-07-21-kim-kar...
That's a fair point. It would have been nice to see something like that.
Just to offer a single datapoint:

I lived in the UK for the first 27 years of my life. Admitting to drinking and driving there, in my experience, elicited very strongly-voiced disapproval. And not just from some particular demographic - it was universal.

I moved to California in 2003. The day I went to WaMu to open a US bank account, the teller was annoyed it was raining, because she was going out drinking that night and would have to drive back "buzzed and in the rain" from SF to Mountain View. I was shocked, but unfortunately I can't say it's been an isolated occurrence here.
Firefox on Android uses very little in the way of the Java APIs, it's virtually all NDK code. That said, it will certainly require some meaningful adaptation.
Google+ Profile Suspended
That's actually good news; I mean, it reminds the Michelson-Morley experiment, right?
Isn't this just someone requesting Linus that this get's pulled?
I thought collection copyright applied, but am happy to be wrong about that.