skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To stifle competition one not necessarily needs to form a cartel.

To stifle competition one can simply flood the market with goods priced under cost.

Besides, Google formed a cartel with Intel, they lost.
I used to really like Gruber, but he's become a very twisted orator, who seems to bend everything to Apple's favor. Maybe he was always that way, and when Apple was the underdog, it felt more like cheerleading than dishonesty.

I felt a decent amount of relief when I dropped him from my RSS reader.
Then it would be perfectly fine, they would be able to stop Microsoft and its elk from extorting patent fees, but the whole issue lies in that the patent went to Microsoft and Apple and others like them for the sole purpose of extorting Android.
Do you know of any case of where Google has used its patents offensively? I don't.
Looks great! One suggestion, maybe have the links open in a new window. I know this annoys some people, but it makes it easier to get back to your site after looking at someone's project. I don't always remember to control click on the links.
Good point. Still, I wonder what the data requirements of even a sparse voxel world of this resolution would require?
Lookout, Retrevo warn of growing Android malware epidemic
I think the author went about it the totally wrong way for a startup. (Although, maybe typical).

Instead of picking up a mockup tool, or using HTML/CSS to create a simple mobile web version (or a native app using PhoneGap), he goes asking other people to do it for him. (Probably for "sweat equity" ;) )

The article started out with promise: yes, kids can write iPhone apps. But those kids wrote those iPhone apps not by talking with consultants who charge $$$ for app development. You know how those kids developed their apps? By sitting down, learning about how to program for the iOS, and writing f#$$@ code. Not by talking to developers to do it for them. That's how.

I was half expecting an article talking about the state of the art of entry level development: PhoneGap, or other drag and drop methods. MacRuby for getting on the Mac App store... whatever. Something maybe easier to laypeople than "here's this weird objective-C thing with []s everywhere".

Having said that, I do make my living as a freelance developer (Rails, iOS)...

TL;DR: This is the story of a lot of startups: "I have this great idea! Oh, it's going to cost $N,000 to develop a minimum viable product? This is hard". On the other hand, it may serve as a reality check for people with a new idea that think we (as developers) can program DOOM in a weekend, for free err 'exposure'."
Since Microsoft, Apple cartel bought the Nortel patents aren't they exactly behaving like patent trolls ( Intellectual Ventures ) in this context? You have to be wilfully ignorant not to see the similarity.
Yes, I do intend to try out pandas at some point.
The problem is that Tritium is a lightweight gas which makes it very easy to ingest by inhalation.
So you want to prevent some poor independent hacker from selling his patents to large companies?
Yes I have. However, I don't frequent any dangerous sites much, and my computer it's terribly vulnerable. I've done full scans with MWB and AVG, and I've checked my data in/out rates.
They are being hypocritical by saying that Apple and Msft bid many more times than what those patents are really worth, when Google itself bid upto 4 billion dollars. And what gaurantee does Google provide that they wouldn't sue competitors aggressively? Dont tell me its because their 'motto' is Dont be evil.
xfce4 is really awesome. I can vouch for it as well. If you need a productive, traditional desktop, then try it. The only thing I miss is the gnome samba mount options.
"It's hard to take yanw seriously when everything he writes distorts reality and commonsense in the sake of representing them in ways that favor Google Inc and its endeavors."

It goes both ways. I don't agree with the way software patents currently work and think patent trolls such as Intellectual Ventures are the scum of the Earth, but Gruber has made some valid points here.
VMware reminds me of Palm in 2000... They start something which will change the entire industry but somehow they are loosing their lead rapidly...
Totally, totally agreed. I wish the patent situation weren't such that an interested party (e.g. me!) can't go and implement this. ZFS and DTrace (the ultimate reverse-engineering tool) on Windows would make me the happiest man on earth.
i am yet to hear a valid justification for ANY patent. can we just ignore them en masse please? the law will then have to change... at any rate i have zero respect for them. if i invent something already patented, good luck trying to extract money from me... i dare you.
I think you're confusing the UK with the USA...or perhaps I'm just naive.
As far as I can tell all software patents are patents on math. Here is one example of a software patent reduced to mathematics and logic the extends it to all software patents:
http://paulspontifications.blogspot.com/2011/04/patent-58931...
Character sheet is pure awesomeness. I realized how subjective the interview process when my last interview --- yesturday --- was entirely composed of: "From 1-10, 10 being the creator of the language, how are you with X? How about y? And Z?"

This kind of online resume gets past all that kind of stuff. I see real value in being able to cleanly present this kind of high-level skillset info to employers PRE-interview.
That's because they don't have any patents of their own to sue with. Before they acquired IBM's patents, they had a total of less than 800 patents.
How would it be "taken down" by Twitter soon? I've had to deal with scrapers before, and in the end I just gave up.
Mobile devs come hear the creator of Air Guitar speak about iPhone sensors
Then what incentive does the original company have in spending time & money into R&D to develop new products when some other company can just rip them off?
Banning MAC addresses is a must for large univerities (and probably any large network where you have frequent guests and do not have employer/employee power relations).

Yes you can change your MAC address. But this type of policy is in place in order to stop misconfigured machines or malware ridden machines from connecting to the network.
I would assume your ban was related to "hacker" news.
The problem is that Google's patent pool is relatively insignificant (in terms of size, not necessarily scientific merit) compared to some other, much older companies...
I had a dual-boot setup like this on an external drive with Windows and Linux when I was in high school. It was pretty useful whenever I needed to use one of the school computers. Not seriously game-changing, mind you, but somewhat convenient (more pleasant and useful than portable apps).
For one, much of the funding for roads comes from taxing gas

I feel the need to add the qualifier that this is true of federal roads, but less so as we talk about local roads. I realize the story pertains to the interstate system, but as a cyclist the widespread misconception that gas tax funds all roads and other users are somehow freeloaders is quite detrimental.
But what if Google had won the bid and was using these patents (they hadn't developed) defensively to defend against the fact they have violated patents developed by others companies, would it more fair? I don't think so.
This patent thing has to come to a head. Something has to happen.

It's not just big companies that are involved here.

Guys like me. A family man in the northwest just trying to make a living doing pretty obvious things with technology is going to get screwed by all of this eventually.

I develop on Android and it's a massive chunk of my income. If they go down, so do I.

All these games have to stop and something has to be decided. The courts need to look at this, the government needs to look at this, and things need to move swiftly.

I'm about ready to start painting houses. I've never heard one of them complain about getting sued for the way they move their arm up and down when they paint.
Lessons from the Netflix prize challenge
The implication is that these are legitimate, unassailable patents that Google has ripped off in some nefarious scheme to steal Apple's good ol' homegrown American hard work

I would argue that android "borrowed" a lot from Apple, and that the iPhone was truly innovative in many ways. The question whether they copied too much, or whether Apple's idea were innovative in the first place is what the Patent system is trying to answer.

There is little doubt the current patent system is a big mess. But I see opposing the idea software patents in the same light as opposing patents in general. It is likely that allowing companies to copy everything is good for consumers (at least in the short term), and increases competition.

The question is where you put the line, for example - if Android was an exact copy of iOS, would you still say that it should be permitted?
Quants in banks are generally not working high-frequency trading which this website seems to focus on, and which generally requires very limited modelling. Therefore HFT is often the province of IT teams, though quants may have some input. The role of quants tends to involve hedging, calibrating models, and sensitivities -- http://www.risk.net/type/technical-paper

As a rule of thumb: it is quanty iff the word convex is employed. Interestingly, this can be abused by the uninitiated -- "Have you considered the convexity of the underlying?" etc. -- to pretend to a deeper, quantier knowledge than that possessed.

Depending on the asset class there are more specific books but "Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives" by Hull is a good starting point.
Any patent can be made to look obvious by quoting half a sentence. Clearly you have no idea what that patent covers, I've only skimmed over it but iirc it was recognizing certain things then giving you a pop up list of choices based on what to do with them. There may have been more to it. And that patent may in fact be stupid and obvious, or it may not, IANA patent attorney.

And you clearly aren't either, even though you can dismiss every possible patent Google might be accused of infringing on while accusing everyone else of being a fanboy...

....

"Oh, hey, look, Android isn't actually open... What relevance does that have"

I was referencing the iceberg of irony that your good ol' ship (the HMS Zealotry) keeps crashing into.
Firefox 7 and 8 (both in development) are much better behaved over long sessions. You should give one of them a try.
Anonymity is about much more than people trolling each other. Anonymity is what allows a guy to mug you and then disappear into the wide world without consequences. It's what allows a child rapist to buy a nice house next to an elementary school. It's what allows a known terrorist to board a plane and crash it into a building.

I don't deny there are many great benefits to anonymity, especially on the internet, but people should be aware of the costs. Anonymity can allow people to do bad things and get away with it.
They're not targeting individuals; they're targeting traits. That's the difference he's talking about.
Facebook is (so far) arguably the most successful example of "permission marketing," a concept in which the marketer learns about the mark, in order to more effectively sell them some crap they don't need (and perhaps something they do need, just to be fair.)

Of course, anonymity is a powerful defense against this type of marketing, particularly when it isn't particularly "permissive" in the first place. Facebook's repeatedly sneaky approach to eliminating privacy is part and parcel of that effort.

So naturally, "permission marketers" think everyone should be identified as it helps them make more money. That's really what it's about: the bottom line.
Yeah, FF4 had its problems. FF5 and FF6 fixed some of them, but I think you'll really like FF7. Try it out!
Thanks, that is definitely related (and admirable). But, in my scheme the proposed pool would sue anyone who sues for software patent infringement, regardless of whether the original suit has anything to do with patents in the pool. To receive this coverage, the target of the suit might be required to donate their own patents to the pool first. This could create a positive feedback loop, to quickly grow the patent pool to the size necessary to have broad influence.
It's hard to argue with a comment so lacking in substance.
Perhaps, I've never instigated attacking posts on Google's competitors I merely react to what I think are unfair attacks.

And yeah, he probably made valid points regarding pixel width in OSX, he's out of his depth discussing patents though.
> In order to patent something, you have to reduce it to practice. That is to say, you have to actually make it work, in the real world.

This is false. I could patent the idea of using, say, a camera's sensor to recognize the species of a plant based on a leaf without any idea of how I would actually build such a thing (what algorithms would be required, etc). I could similarly patent the idea of tracking a user's eye movement to control a user interface, without the slightest clue of how to track a user's eye movement in realtime.

To take one small example - if you were to pull up patents related to virtual reality, the claims (which tend to be written in the mid-1980s) are all ridiculous, the dreamy technology simply didn't exist to build the proposed ideas (i.e. computers small enough to stick on people's heads), but they were still patented anyway.
I'm surprised that people can't sense the irony here, I'm telling the true situation, btw.
No, but you can play "what if" games to death. You can't be slighted as being hypocritical for something you haven't done yet, which is what Gruber is claiming.
The distinction made by Gruber here is between two kinds of companies:

- Apple, MS and similar companies who buy patents and actually use them to make products.

- The Lodsys's of the world that use them as revenue sources and don't actually contribute any value to anyone.

In the blog post, Google is lumping everyone together, whereas Gruber disagrees.

Apple's patents that they've used against HTC and similar are for things that are remarkably unique - more unique than the Amazon 1-click patent and similar. Notably, they're not seeking out patents to use as weapons - it's likely, if not transparently obvious that they purchased the portfolios in question to remove the chance that those patents would be used against them.

I'm no friend of patent law (I think it should be reformed to function in a manner similar to real-estate property law), but I'm thinking that there is more nuance to this debate than "Gruber is a Google Hater".
I really wanted to like Gnome 3 and gave it an extended trial run. I really like the gnome shell for the most part, overview mode, left dock, dynamic desktops. It felt right on my 14" 16x9 laptop screen. However, it took a serious hit in terms of power management and other laptop usability - no auto dim on battery? No exposed lid close event? No exposed power profiles? It also didn't feel nearly as good on my dual desktop monitors. A lot of what the shell does right is conserving real estate, but when you have a lot of it the extra room isn't so critical and you start missing some of the convenience.

I did absolutely hate it until I learned a number of keyboard shortcuts and how to launch applications by typing a few letters of what you want.

I am back with KDE 4.6 for now, but I am looking forward to giving it another try after they've polished it up a bit. I heard when it launched that august was a target for a point release.
The reporter said it was just to prevent algae growth.
I missed that too. Now I have found an extension, which is not yet in yum, but it's not too hard to install following the instructions in the README.

https://github.com/paradoxxxzero/gnome-shell-system-monitor-...
Multitouch has been around long before 1999.

http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html
[Citation Needed]

How is falling for elaborate hoaxes correlated to IQ?
as I understand it, the disparity in explanations can be attributed to that we're talking about using voxels in a data structure known as a sparse octree, that would in itself be used to optimize the system by, among other things, allowing only the surface information to be stored.

edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voxel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_voxel_octree
Browser IQ "study" was a hoax
I think it's a bit unfair to call him willfully dishonest. I find Gruber's writing really fascinating in that he's clearly intelligent but he appears to have no awareness of the way he twists things like this. It seems more likely to me that he is a case study in cognitive dissonance.
Minor nit: .org is run by Public Interest Registry and operated by Afilias. That TLD was removed from VeriSign's management in 2003 after VeriSign's contract expired.

http://www.internic.net/faqs/org-transition.html
I found the word very clear. Here, rewritten to use both of the most common definitions of the word:

"It's OK for Google to weaken or impair Microsoft's for-pay licensing business by giving away Android for free, by eroding the foundational concept of an OS being something you pay for; but it's not OK for Microsoft to weaken or impair Google's attempts to give away for free, by eroding the foundational concept of its free-ness[1], an OS that violates patents belonging to Microsoft?"

[1] undermining free as in speech by showing it is encumbered, and undermining free as in beer by licensing the relevant patents for relevant dollars
Since it's allowed in HTML to not close <li> tags, lists are pretty readable and easy to write:

<ul>
<li>Item 1
<li>Item 2
<li>Item 3
</ul>
then it would be hypocrisy. but they didn't. so its not hypocrisy.
"You should be able to tell whether a page has value to you or not within the first 30 seconds of skimming through it."

We don't read the same things apparently.
The blue pill or red pill: Start-up life or an MBA?
>And what gaurantee does Google provide that they wouldn't sue competitors aggressively?

So they are hypocritical because of something they haven't done? By that logic, everyone is an hypocrite.

Has Google ever actually sued competitors aggressively? Not that I know of.
There's no hypocrisy here. Google had made it clear from the outset they were only bidding for the patent portfolio as a defensive measure.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/patents-and-innovatio...
“Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at googleads.g.doubleclick.net.”
All patents held by companies were bought from someone else. They're just usually paid for with salaries.
Christmas Tree Packet
What are the Top Services each start-up should use?
Hey guys,

I've looking into some startup services, and other startups that offer products for newly-developed companies.

In other words, what are the top 10 most recommended services each startup should use?

Some I can think off the top of my head are:

- UserVoice
- Pivotal Tracker
- etc
What choice? Oh wait, you mean what kind of Ads you would receive :P?

On a serious note though, assume that you have a sandwich shop and your business is of course to sell sandwich (not free) and people flock to you for your tasty sandwiches. Now, if I open a Sandwich shop that gives away free sandwiches and it also tastes pretty much (close to 85%) like your sandwiches (say, i was inspired by your sandwiches, but i don't acknowledge publicly) and make money out of the numerous solicitors selling all kinds of things (you can decline to buy stuff, but they're always in-your-face) that are in and around my shop. Now, why would customers go to you if I sell the same (pretty much) sandwich for free?

Does it mean that I am a philanthropist because I give away free sandwiches to the people? And because I am doing a charity (technically), does it mean that you should not sue me?

That said, patent troll (like Lordsys) is entirely different issue. However, I don't think Apple has a choice here. It is trying to defend its business, and the only legal way it can do it is through these stupid patents.

Edit - Instead of just down-voting, why not elaborate?
RTextTools: an R machine learning package for text classification
Sounds like his system has been tripping an IDS and being flagged for malware. Changing the MAC address (which, in some environments, is a violation of the Acceptable Use Policy) will just result in the new MAC address being banned as well, if that is the case.
Yes, getting users is the first obstacle, where I really got problems with. If you are developing apps and doing websites 24/7, its really hard to be a marketing expert, too, thats what my blogpost is about.
As a chemistry major, I've honestly seen stupider things allowed to happen in a supposedly supervised laboratory than what this guy was doing.

Was it wrong that he was doing it in his apartment, putting all the other tenants at risk? Absolutely, but I don't think he should be put in jail, just reprimanded and told where to perform experiments in a safe environment. Who knows, maybe his experiment would have worked w/o all the cigarette smoke and ash.

The only reason I post this comment is because this guy is exhibiting the hacker spirit that we all do, just in a physical science instead of computer science. I would be upset if someone told me not to play with data structures they way they won't let him play with chemicals. (Again, I know its not the same thing in practice but it's the principle.)
Advertisers and brands don't get games. This is your chance to fix that.
"Yes, because Google isn't forming a cartel to stifle competition."

Hmm. I'm not so sure. There's a way to see Google's behavior where what they're doing is precisely that.

Predatory pricing exists when you try to take over a market by selling something so cheap, other competitors are driven out – or prevented from entering, since they couldn't recoup the costs involved in developing a product.

In league with their manufacturing partners, Google has their own cartel, attempting to homogenize the smartphone landscape under a single, free OS.

The incentives are obvious: it's much easier for Google to make its ad money if it controls the next big platform.

They may have dressed it up as pious and open – but for their purposes, it's a land grab. Is it anticompetitive? I'm not sure. My antitrust scholarship began and ended with The Microsoft File back in the 90's. But I'm also not sure it's any better than whatever satanic pact they are intimating has been formed by Apple and Microsoft.

Google's argument here is summed up as "You could trust us with those patents. But we didn't get them. You can't trust the guys who did get them." I'm pretty sure at this scale, with this much cash on the line, business just doesn't work that way. Google will run over anyone to keep their ad money flowing, just as Microsoft will run over anyone to keep their license money flowing. Why should we side with one cause over the other?
Ask HN: AdolfHitler.com. What the hell should be done with it?
My old partner and I bought AdolfHitler.com about 6 years ago from a domainer. I figured we could donate it to charity and take a tax write-off, but that didn't pan out for a variety of reasons. Over the years I've wondered what to do with it besides startling people at the Genius Bar with my email address. I've had a couple of fun ideas like blogging as Hitler himself (as if Hitler had the temperament of 16 year-old, lolcatting through his day), but I figured I'd open it up to suggestions to see if anyone else had any thoughts. I'm not looking to make money off this, nor am I looking to offend anyone -- I just think it's being underutilized (it has type-in traffic), and maybe the HN community has some ideas, or people interested in developing something fun with it.