skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it says that it's highly theoretical there would be one that is copyrightable (and that you would need to register copyright on a tweet before being able to take action). My point was that therefore it's unlikely you'd consider what they're doing copyright infringement, but sure it's "possible". Unethical is another question entirely :-)
If you disagree with the previously posted, well-written article, please just comment on that thread, but don't upvote this article.

Personally, I can't follow the logic in this article. It hypothesizes that you're weakening your negotiation position with VCs in some way by totally committing to something and that you should instead build a great product. In a comment on the article the author later mentions that it is never a good idea to cut off possible revenue streams. Go figure ...
IANAL, but digging around your Wikipedia link suggests that the litmus test here is whether or not the material is to be considered "obscene". The law struct down in the case you linked was worked around by introducing the PROTECT Act, which clarified it as "obscene depictions" of minors.

This so far has not been challenged, as apparently the guy I mentioned in the Simpsons' case just entered a plea bargain:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_cartoon_pornogr...
yup. the remote system explorer package. i love it. its the most like a typical project browser that i've found.

honestly, my main complaint is just about eclipse itself. for some reason id rather be using something more "cool", but eclipse has always just done the job for me.
Wow, all this over some tea? I must try your tea.
It is an unlimited resolution snake-oil renderer, optimized to extract funding from the Australian government.
This appears to be similar to overlap.me, you should take a look at it.
because that would require your local government to give up the huge buckets of cash they get for licencing it.

£1bn expectation: http://www.mobilebroadband.net/news/2012-spectrum-auction-pr...

£22.5bn for the UK 3G spectrum: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3AMCpcS...
Its not always the right thing as there are years of issues/corner cases that have been resolved.
Show HN: Tipspring - Share deals with friends, earn $ rewards
Museum of Fine Arts, Quincy Market/Fanneiul Hall, a decent aquarium if that interests you. Good Italian food on the North End.
Right...people should just start to assume that anything they ever post on the Internet will be publicly findable for the rest of the Internet's existence.

15 years ago, you could've written a local newspaper column espousing the most radical of views and felt relatively comfortable that once you moved to a different state that no future employer would ever associate those words to your name. Not anymore. Hell, that's even true for people hundreds of years ago, now that Google has digitized old newspaper collections.

Same with photos. Posting a photo devoid of any caption or metadata may seem anonymous now...but five years from now, there will probably be the search capacity for anyone to efficiently and accurately search by facial-features and stumble across that random photo.

There's already services that mirror twitter feeds and scrape blogs, reposting them for any number of reasons, even just for filling a spam blog. So, this undetweetable just makes such exposure more explicit.
I had a major hand in writing the CPTableView class in Cappuccino. The tableview is designed to handle hundreds of thousands of rows without slowing down. This is accomplished both through very aggressive caching, and the smart use of algorithms. If you look at the source code, you can actually see where we document the time complexity.

A standard tableview (static row heights) is laid out in constant time, whereas using variable row heights is laid out in logarithmic time.

An early implementation provided variable row heights in linear time (or perhaps n^2, I don't recall)... this caused scrolling to be absolutely terrible and unusable if you had more than a couple dozen rows.

With constant time we can, theoretically, have any number of rows in your tableview and it will remain just as performant as if you only had 1.

If you're building real software and throw out the concept of time complexity, then you're setting yourself up for failure in the long run.
Plant a Tree Everytime You Print with Print a Forest?
Blizzard defends online-only requirement for Diablo 3
Two things that make me instantly distrust this:

> Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said the patent-reform bill will be the first to move after the recess, as part of a package of legislation designed to boost job creation. Reid and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) said the bill, which attempts to speed patent applications, is expected to create 200,000 jobs.

> The bill has drawn opposition from small inventors, and some provisions are controversial, such as one that would make it easier to challenge business method patents. But the legislation has wide-ranging support from industry, both parties, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the White House.

"Patent reform" means completely different things to people in D.C. and people on HN.
Well, just because some prominent luminary says it shouldn't be done never means it's always a bad idea. A lot of the basis against rewrites are for relatively mature projects still on a high growth trajectory or large installation base. However, there are exceptions to that as well. Foursquare went from LAMP to Scala/Lift, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB with minimal complications and it's paid off handsomely to support their amazing growth.

Also, the money quote: "It's managed to survive our vicious benchmarking tools and our ridiculously comprehensive test cases. " My assumption is they are using the same languages and tool sets (not porting from language X to Y).

I'm curious as to how long the rewrite took though.
If you're dealing with human DNA, a complete code rewrite will likely fail.

But if its just an amoeba and you have a lot of time, go for it.
Honestly I tried it - not a huge fan of it. Really is no point to this site - it's a cool tool, but why do i care if i have this or not? If you took this tool out of my life - would I miss it? That's the question you should ask yourself.
What if you wrote an infinite loop, and wanted it that way?

There are plenty of legitimate uses for an infinite loop, a REPL, a server, etc.
After you're done with Harvard, head over to the Border Cafe on 32 Church Street near Harvard Sq, great Margarita and great food.
search for patents and published applications at:

http://appft1.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-adv.html
http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-adv.htm

the query to use is:

in/lastname-firstname

If you don't find any references, then asking the candidate to describe a technical problem and means by which they solved it is less likely to be received as a request for confidential information.

Hope you find the above links and search query useful!

Best.
ICloud 404 page
哈氏合金板
I was reading up on the latest (?) one of these this morning.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/aug/02/dragons-d...

I assume there's some kind of legal precedent that when at least one person has seen a threat that you're making, it's a valid threat? If you have no followers, make a threat, delete the tweet (that is archived by this site), would you still be held to have made the threat?
Flagged: fake
Oh fuck them. There is no worse form of DRM than a permanently-required connection. The 99.9% figure is total bullshit too, I "have" internet, except when there's a problem with internet or elec (every week, multiple days), or I shut my laptop (every day), or I move from wifi network to another (every day). C&C4 was ruined by that crap.

What a ridiculous excuse too - "people finished Diablo 2 on normal and couldn't find their friends online".

Call it what it is assholes.
Well that's one way to ensure a burgeoning trade in hacked copies of your software on Bittorrent.
Excellent points.

On a related note, I just read a good article on using small barriers to entry as filters for your time: http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/i-use-small-barrie...

Most of the folks that ask me for help aren't 'kooks' perse, but they usually want someone to make their dreams come true with little or no effort on their part.

Asking these people to do a small task as a precondition of your help is a great way to filter out those not really serious about the goal.

Here's how it typically goes:

"Hey Matt! I hear you do iPad apps! I have a great idea for one! I'm super passionate about this and really want to get it going!"

Me: "Great! Before we go any further, it's best to sketch the app out on paper first. Do that and then let's take a serious look at it!"

I've had many many conversations like this. Even requiring a simple sketch filters out about 98% of these people.

Another common variation is from folks who want to learn programming. Instead of asking for a sketch, I'll send them a link to an excellent beginners tutorial to work through. I very rarely hear back from anyone after that. However, those very few that do come back are typically great to work with.

I haven't always used these filters. I used to really try and help everyone that asked for it. Unfortunately that nearly always ended up with me putting in time and effort to help someone who I would later discover wasn't really all that serious about the goal.

Small barriers/filters have been great for saving my energy for those that are really serious about doing something. It's really been a sanity saver.
Yes, this is absolutely an example of the disruptor being disrupted. RIM has killed themselves by trying to out-increment features on a handheld email machine all the while ignoring, or failing to perceive as relevant how both iPhone and Android were irreversibly changing the basis of competition.

RIM's only survival strategy is to stop playing catchup with me-too products that the market has already passed, and to offer something different leveraging their proprietary platform if possible, but satisfying and targeting a completely different market need, such as doing mobile social more elegantly or something like that. I'm in process of writing a detailed analysis of RIM's missteps that have enabled disruption, and why their current strategy is pointing them to oblivion. This article is killer for RIM -- only 26% of Blackberry owners plan to get another! http://tiny.cc/iphone5_kills_the_pack
ooh, very nice. Prior to this & your other reply, I hadn't seen anything using the __git functions. Everyone uses sed. Thanks!
I didn't get past the login screen because I was really turned off by your app wanting access to my facebook photos. I might be an outlier though, it seems like the younger generation is much freer with their private info.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20073014-1/fake-sean-con...
Yes, actually. I'm a woman, I used to write long business articles for magazines, and I'd often use a war motif for those articles (common thing to use a motif -- offers art choices and/or keeps the writer entertained). War just gives you lots of great word choices ("bombarded" "invades" etc.)that seemed to go well in business articles, esp when you're looking at one company vs. another or a new one breaking into the market.

It's kinda like how you often see "capitulate" somewhere in an article about France (even if not related) -- it just works together ;-)
There's a fuzzy line between spammer & contributor.
Becuase it's only investors that have skin (money) in the game and so for them the valuation is more important than profit as they want to be able to exit at a far higher valuation than when they entered. Profits are only important to people working there or that own shares and are long term investors.
there is now a usergroup up dedicated to this issue so whoever gets this letter, signup to this group to increase collaborative efforts:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/Us6275821/
I think that this applies to the technology you're using as well.

I've been thinking about this because I'm writing an application in Rails and realized relatively recently that it would be better suited as a Node application. My motivation for using Rails was that it was what I knew the best. Luckily for me, the most time-consuming part was the front-end, not the Rails part, so I'm hoping my switch to Node will be relatively painless.
Developments in Facial Recognition
Quick follow up to clear up a couple questions that came up:

We only lay out visible rows, thus that layout is done in linear time, but calculating the position of those rows use the time complexities I described above.

For variable row heights we cache a few values for every single row up front, that is also linear.

The time complexity I'm describing in my original post is talking about calculating the position of those views are you scroll, draw, and layout (not the initial setup) ... which is what is most expensive.
If Euclideon wants us to believe they've invented something unique and ground breaking then the onus is on them to at least show us something that can't already be done with existing technology, if not explain how it works.
Even an event-driven loop needs to cycle now and then to service timers.
There are other factors involved when deciding a version number than the code under the hood: API changes, new features, is it production ready, 'this is the now stable API that we'll be maintaining for a long time', etc.

Edit: for perspective, a thoughtful proposition on how to approach software versioning: http://semver.org
People build temporary structures all the time -- event tents, for example. And plenty of people finish a room, redo a bathroom, build a treehouse or a shed, etc, as a side project. And believe me, it takes a high level of expertise to inspect a building. Many of the most important kinds of flaw are only evident to the eye of an expert.
So the main advice from the guy from giftrocket is to send out giftrockets. Got it.
Ask HN: Where to find good Application UI designers?
I have looked at and worked with a few people over at themeforest.net for sites and web admin UI's.

I am making some desktop apps and looking for someone who can design the product for me.

Thanks
Wow, that's just a straight up talent acquisition maybe with some patents thrown in for the impending legal meltdown. Remember the first acquisition Parakey? It was going to be a web OS of some sort so even Grandma can easily share pictures or something. Instead we got a perennially buggy Facebook iPhone app. It just goes to show how hard it is for growing companies to find good talent in the valley.

These are really brilliant people though. Must be amazing to have all those people in one building. Still, have no idea how Facebook can really bring out the best of that talent, Apple seems like a lot better place except for their old school secrecy. I guess it's hard to shine when you have two super novas like Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parakey
I'd be curious to know what kind of software systems are in place now? Googling turns up some pretty big players, like http://www.gemcomsoftware.com/, http://www.minesight.com/, etc. I interviewed once many years ago at Vale-Inco in Sudbury, Ontario and at the time they were still hiring Fortran developers.
WSGI, Web Frameworks, and Requests: Explicit or Implicit?
until you can make ObjC apps on your iPhone

I expect that to be possible within two years or so. And even if Macs remain the primary platform for developing apps, what's available to normal consumers is a separate matter. I stand by my prediction that by 2016, Apple won't sell any mass-market products that allow root access or running arbitrary software.

Steve's footprint is ALL OVER Lion, starting with the total abandonment of the HIG in a lot of the core apps

Agreed, which is why the article is incorrect. Steve doesn't care about interface consistency (at least across versions), or functionality for power users.

Merging iOS with OSX is something you see in Lion? Where? Scrollbars? Launchpad

Yes, along with fullscreen mode with non-support for multiple displays, reversed scrolling, removal of functionality in Spaces, and the app store being the only publicized way to install it. Steve himself said in the "Back to the Mac" presentation that a major goal of Lion is to incorporate parts of the iOS user experience, so it's not clear what you're disagreeing with.
#4 really surprised me. what's the underlying issue with Internet in NYC?
what are the implications of this?
I agree with this comment - as a general rule, I'll only share my personal information if the application is extremely compelling. Unfortunately, I can't figure out enough about what your app does to decide if it is compelling!
Um, I've worked under that assumption since I started using the Internet in 1991. I've found USENET posts I made 15 years ago on Google.

Don't want something public? Then don't put it on the public Internet.
My first reaction is that I'm pleased it's in English. Beyond that, it's potentially a cool play. Like a dating site but on a platonic and social, not interpersonal level.

It might be the best way to find your next business partner or permanent friend.
IPhone App Scans Moles for Signs of Skin Cancer
Mashery Interactive API Documentation
The things which weren't said explicitly but which we can assume are that the original implementer wasn't around any more, and that nobody else understood the system either.

With these pieces of information, the decision to re-implement seems like a reasonable one.
MENS STRAIGHT JACKET-BLACK SATIN CHAR
Whether their decision was right or wrong, they made a decision that big companies tend not to make. Startups should probably have a bias towards decisions like that.
http://dribbble.com/
It's a matter of purity inference. They already trivially know the value isn't used based on the AST, so they need to show that the function being called is pure to elide it. Naturally, in the general case this is undecidable, but there are fast algorithms for very weak purity inference that might do the trick, at least in this case.

There may be other Python-specific concerns I'm missing - my work in this area is in Ruby static analysis - but one other thing is that allocating memory is a side-effect itself. The main side-effect visible to Python is that it might raise an exception for being out of memory - this would have to be special-cased as an acceptably ignored side-effect by any purity analyzer.
really.. why the downvote ?
can't a man be blunt on HN anymore, i have to make sure i don't hurt anyone feelings
isn't this a "dipshite company" in Mike Arrington's dictionary.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/15/venture-capital-super-angel...
True, but it's O(log N) rather than O(N) to determine length.

BTW I'm not sure if it was clear or not but those are bits in my diagram, not bytes/characters. The "x"s are the bits of the length field, not the characters of the string.
That's a pretty dim view. Sometimes systems are too complicated, or have swaths of dead code that you spend hours figuring out only to find out they're never referenced anymore.

I'm currently working on a project which was written somewhat poorly with little technical oversight, the result being a minefield of code which is slightly brittle and full of dead codepaths. The old system (which works, is complicated and creaky, and I spent some days figuring out out things worked) needs rewritten and if we weren't pressed for time I'd rewrite it in a heartbeat.

Given a goal, an API spec, expected behavior one can rewrite a system which one doesn't truly understand and still do it better.

Certainly, something built by one person is rarely the best. That being said, what's wrong with occasionally taking out the trash?
Hi Miss Melon!

With this kind of thing, your most important question is, "How am I gonna make the user say 'ooh, that's cool!'?" When you have that answered, it makes everything else easier. Your whole app becomes a direct path to your user's personalized "ooh cool!" moment. Your front page shows a 1-2-3-ooh-cool! sequence.

It sounds like you're trying to help your users find people that like the same stuff they do. The idea has got potential, but there's no "ooh cool!" moment in this app yet. It'd be "ooh cool!" if I was somehow having a beer with the five users that shared my interests, but my options for hanging out with them are kinda limited.

One idea that occurs to me is to tell your users "I bet you'd like xyz!" where xyz is a song or a piece of art or what have you. Then you could have them say "Yup!" or "No, that sucks". This little interaction could be tied back to the people that liked xyz, and they could be informed of it when it turns out well. This has two potential "ooh cool!" moments: a user sees something new, and if he likes it and clicks that button, then other users are somehow informed that others like their tastes.

Other misc notes: normalize shared likes by total # of likes, make "follow" buttons more prominent, and make the pages less static (some kind of live activity update would be good).

Good luck!
-Shawn
This is about the coolest thing from government I've ever seen. Finally, they embrace the 21st century.
I wonder how long until an open source Diablo 3 private server is created, and this form of DRM is rendered near-useless.
Solvent Dyes
My Fake Facebook Birthdays: What happened when I celebrated thrice
It's much easier for them to shut down 1 server vs. 20m pirated copies that need no server.
fusion funds, energyscript, claims that lisp is better than fusion.
DVD rental startup Zediva fought the law; guess who won?
On The Verge Of 5 Million Users, Pulse Scores The First ESPN Deal
schemaless fusion, lots of advice about "how I got fusion."

"Top 10 reasons your fusion is not reaching customers."
This being Blizzard, I'm a little more inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and believe it just might not be for draconian DRM reasons, and actually be for the reasons they stated. Compared to many other game companies, they seem to be all about the online experience.
I really hope developers do cool things with this. There are so many parts of the government that appear apathetic or backwards that when something like this comes along, I feel this visceral need to give them positive reinforcement for fear they'll get discouraged and revert to their old ways.
Canary Chrome in OSX. It's been stuttery in every browser I've used, in multiple OSes; I've been on the site a couple times in the past for other posts (I think most via HN). To clarify: it doesn't crawl, but it's not smooth.

Looking at the profiler in Chrome, I'm not seeing any unnecessary events while scrolling between things - maybe it's a transparency somewhere instead? Removing a handful I could find did speed things up, though I probably missed a few. Browsers are still lame at those, unfortunately :/
fusion on rails.
VCs telling 22 year-olds that they are changing the world - one electron at a time.
That's certainly the best option, but using a pseudonymous goes a long way.
15 ways companies exclude employees wih Aspergers
He who has the lobbyists gets the reform?
This may seems pretty boring for most people, but as I and anyone else who uses federal gov't websites with any frequency will tell you, they usually suck. The federal register has had a surprisingly awesome website for a while now, and I'm glad to see this API too. Even if the Washington websites made it as easy as possible to navigate data, there is still a mind boggling fuckton of data, I hope this API is a sign of things to come.
Well, those text ads do let us get, for free, a good mail service and an oracle that knows all and tells all.
I find very interesting the difference in philosophy of the two most respected game makers.

Blizzard has become much more closed as they've aged, while id has a history of open sourcing their software.
He didn't say this system was unreadable or undocumented, only "complicated and creaky," One particular programmer who was regarded as "smart" couldn't figure out what it did, but it may just have been too complex for him.