skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find this comment in the article to be very interesting:

"the reported industry average for invalidations during IP review is around 90 percent."

It would be very interesting to have a look at stats on patent invalidation reviews. If there's solid data showing that the invalidation rate is around 90% this might be useful as evidence that the USPTO is not doing their job by issuing patents that should never have been issued.

A number like 90% should embarrass anyone who might wish to argue that the system is not broken.
Gingerbread update comes to Xperia X10
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Fluid_and_cry...
Why would they lose a lawsuit if one were brought in this case? I haven't read it but I'd wager their TOS gives them the right to your first born child (hmm... I'm trying to say it probably disclaims any possible liability in the broadest possible terms, bad analogy perhaps). Then again, whether that holds in court is something we couldn't know until after a case.
By posting him "the blackspot"...
Heh. Damn right it's linkbait. My entire scientific outreach efforts are linkbait. Dude, I talk about zombie brains to the public.

Do you know how hard it is to get the most of the non-science public to care about science? If I can get people reading about the stuff that I find cool and mindblowing, and that makes them want to learn more on their own, then hell yeah I'm going for the linkbait title.

I'm not making money off this site. I don't give a damn about my SEO or bouncerate or whatever. I write this in my free time because I love the brain. And hopefully some of that accidentally rubs off on people.
It will differ according to the problem I am solving. But in general, I need to see the code in my head before I type it.

Management may like to call you a coder(or worse, a resource) but don't be fooled, you solve problems first and foremost. Sometimes solving the problem doesn't require any code at all.
If what you quoted is the only part of my statement that you read, I can see how you reached that conclusion.

It's not "blind faith" to decide that your initial response was an overreaction and eventually forget that you even held that opinion.
Correct, although some languages fit my thinking better than others. Sometimes features are missing that can lead to really convoluted workarounds that would greatly increase the amount I need to type.
I'm glad that Tom won't be one of my co-workers at Google.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2807796
Its more of cut & paste now-a-days
I would agree except that a bunch of companies just bought some patents for $4.5 billion. If patents become ineffective, the value of that purchase is $0. Very few companies are going to look on this as a positive thing.
Back before the intertubes in a different world, they would have been the ones sending in letters to the editor written in purple ink and ALL IN BLOCK CAPITALS. On pages ripped from a shorthand pad.

Nice clean clear Web site you have there.
jajajajajaja

...
What if I have no idea for how many hours I have been programming in total?
On 3, Bruce Schneier has the following advice, which seems a little more sensible than wiping your devices in all cases:

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/laptop_securit...
HTC has some leverage but I have a feeling, after seeing OS 10.7, that Apple cares less about the Mac then their iOS devices. Would they sacrifice the Macs for the chance to block Android?
Your comment shed a new light on this article. It seems "Dave" would be incentivized to fluff or exaggerate numbers knowing this article will circulate the interweb where several devs will say "I want to make that much money" and reach out him - seems he just got some free publicity and a new stream of talent coming his way
I imagine this depends a lot on the sort of problems you're trying to solve.

Also, a lot of my code is experimental, or adding more logging to diagnose the problem - does it count if I erase half of the code I write at the end of the day?
Greg Meyer is the new Director of Customer WOW. What a smashing idea: A team devoted to wowing customers. Love it. Imagine if the rest of the business world adopted that philosophy. Great thinking, Assistly!
java doesn't just triple characters typed -- java changes the way you model the solution, most notably by making 'nouns' so easy and 'verbs' so hard. in fact, due to the 15% or whatever shown in this poll, i wonder if verbosity isn't really that big a deal. nor is VIM.
I just assemble a 3d rubik's cube in between trips down to the wine cellar.
It's your Dharma to Hack, if you are a Geek.
> When I heard the airbnb business model, this type of situation was the first thing that came to my mind

Same here. Great model, glad it works for some people, but the only price I'd take to rent out my house - with my personal items in it - is the price of replacing my house and personal items.
I think that's what other commenters and me are getting at, though. The responsible way to not need to worry about the hardware in the box is to purchase only as much capability as you're going to to need in the time it takes before you want to replace it.

But you're wildly overengineering for your needs; you could literally spend half as much on a system which isn't "future proof", and in two years replace the entire thing for half again what you paid. So my question, which seems to be the common one, remains, why?
"they seem like a man claiming to starve who turns his nose up at an apple with a small bruise. It feels a little insincere"

Agreed, but I am not sure it's just these companies. My general feel of the market in Europe is: if you're looking for an experienced hire, you're not willing to train them. It feels like solid experience in a semi-related area is not enough to get the jobs in the current environment, exact experience is asked for. So small "skill bubbles" exist, with only the most desperate or broad minded taking a risk on someone without 80% experience already.

I call B.S. on most of these articles, and most of them are perpetuated by the people with the absolute most to gain: recruiters.
There's an idea, start calling patent trolls "patent terrorism" to leverage the current climate of fear for our own purposes.
Life might be rare despite its early emergence on Earth
This is why I asked the question, as the grandparent poster seemed to be making some sort of legal or moral point conflating a DDOS with the right of assembly. Nonetheless, strictly speaking there are clearly many forms of DDOS that are not illegal (DDOSing your own equipment, for example, and those situations you explain) but they don't seem to fit well into the point he/she was trying to make.
Certainly, you can get nearly 100% of people to do the right thing most of the time. That is what judicial deterrents accomplish. Those don't work if people are anonymous, however.

The Milgram experiment was not intended to be "extreme". They expected less than 3% of participants to actually torture their (fake) victim to death. The U.S. group was to act as a control, such that they could proceed to compare results in Germany, for instance, where the Holocaust had so recently occurred. Following the unexpected American results, Milgram simply did not bother to perform the actual intended experiment in Germany.
First, HTC didn't even have these patents until recently.

Second, Android clearly went with a strategy of cloning the iPhone, of course Apple struck first. Is Apple the bad guy for also wanting to close the fake Apple stores in China?

The question isn't who struck first, the question is whether each parties patents are valid or not and whether they are infringed or not. Defending poor journalism doesn't get us closer to that.
To force the country to prioritize its spending and stop creating higher taxes on future generations.
Deficit spending is taxation without representation, and should be eliminated.

Both parties are guilty of deficit spending (republicans more so) and new representatives were elected in 2010 to reduce spending.
18 months ago I didn't think they had anything similar to self-driving cars, so it wouldn't surprise me if they did. The human genome project is pretty Google-y, with massive amounts of data and clever algorithms.
Alternatively, language choice is a big deal for him, as it has increased his productivity so he can focus on not-coding activities.
Not face recognition, face detection. The new APIs [1] make it possible to detect if an image contains faces and returns position data of various face features (eyes and mouth). There is no way to recognize which person a face belongs to.

As an aside, why do rumor sites always have to make it seem as if these things were somehow hidden? It's a well-known and documented part of a public API (it just happens to be under NDA at the moment, but it's not any kind of secret, really).

[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/#document...
HTML5 sites should complement native apps, not aim to replace them
Personal Projects: Compressed Air Rockets
Microsoft's MS-DOS is 30 today
They already purchased those patents, though. It's kind of a sunk cost. They wouldn't be losing $4.5 billion cash if patents became worthless, they'd be losing ammunition for a type of fight that they wouldn't have to deal with anymore.

That's like saying, "We can't stop fighting this war, then all our guns would be worthless."
I knew about the inurl parameter; it's the range operator that's new to me.
Grooveshark Beats Out Spotify in Lifehacker Poll
What's your favorite online tool for music consumption?
Characterizing the Scalability of Erlang VM on Many-core Processors
hascan: only serve the ones your care about
They want them to sit nice and quiet and let them take the decisions themselves

This is the very definition of a government's job in many western countries. The government is elected by the electorate in order to make decisions on our behalf while we get about our lives.

Whether or not governments "allow" protest to certain levels or not is a different matter, but the design of most current western democracies is one that should, in essence, not require significant levels of protest, since they were elected to do exactly what they're doing by a plurality (or even majority) of the electorate.

But ideally, the Governments wouldn't want you to protest at all, whether you do it in crowds or on your own on Twitter.

Ideally, would anyone want to protest or want other people protesting? Ideally, I certainly wouldn't. Of course, in our less than ideal world, sometimes it is necessary, but unless they're doing it for fun or attention, I doubt anyone "wants" to have to protest.
http://xkcd.com/927/ Seems relevant here...
Q. and A. on the Debt Ceiling(A crash Course)
Even though I agree - this would be VERY helpful in a situation where a manager doesn't understand that it's ok for a site to look different between browsers.

I've had times where I've explained how a site will look different in older browsers, had that approved and build the site, but when it was time to look at the final product one person cant understand/accept that buttons "don't look 3D" in their browser of choice.
It's exactly this discrepancy that I find so fascinating! It's what I spent my PhD on :)

I believe that the two major players here are plasticity and connectivity. If you lose a critical hub in the network, you're going to be much worse off than if you lose a loosely connected, plastic region.

That's the point of these two papers:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20921401 <- free open access
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21040843 <- lame closed
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Easy Create Bubble Tooltips With jQuery: Grumble.js
Last week I spent 17.5 hours in MacVim, 7 hours in a shell, and 2 hours on Github. That's out of 42 total recorded hours. On a related note, I love RescueTime.
The Ellison Kids: Billionaire Producers Making Their Mark on Hollywood
The problem really is that no one really measures the amount of time spent unless he has to.

I only track time now because i have to bill them to clients, and it seems i have tracked approx 2500+ hours from December 2009, which is when i started freelancing.

And i've probably been programming since college, but really minor stuff not much beyond the curriculum. But i've always played around with new technologies, even if it was just hello world in different dialects.
The last big poll (the one about hiding comment scores) had about ~4500 votes, IIRC. Everybody who voted is probably somewhat active on here; and I'd guess that most active users voted.
"Over the past few years, Apple's been slyly but deliberately severing ties with a piece of hardware that most rational humans still view as essential on a full-scale computer."

I can count the number of times on one hand I've needed an optical drive in the last year.

In the last five years? Probably twenty times or so. I backup on the internet and use external hard drives. I stream content or view it off of an external. If I need to transfer files to someone, I do so using the plethora of online services, wireless networking, or using a thumbdrive.

I'm so very GLAD that Apple has the balls to do this.

"I've gotta say, though -- it's a wee bit difficult to shove 50GB worth of Blu-ray goodness into a North Carolina sky, and I'm saying that while residing just a few hours to the right."

I bought a PS3 years ago for Blu-ray, but I never ended up buying one for movies because the convenience of streaming and mail-in-DVDs made it easier to save space around the apartment.
This, a thousand times this. IE6 persists in corporations not so much from risk-aversion, but simply from inertia and the lack of a cost-benefit justification to upgrade. Windows XP is the real culprit. XP installers even through the latest service packs never came with anything newer than IE6, so it's going to stick around as long as XP does. And given the frequency that most corporate workstations get reassigned and reinstalled and reimaged, IE6 comes out of the reinstallation casket all the time.

And consider the users as well. These are corporations with thousands of users with no technical expertise, especially corps in fundamentally non-technological fields like say education or food service. These are the users with twelve handwritten steps on Post-its for how to open their timesheet on the intraweb. Even a switch to tabbed browsing can get them lost in their routines. What IT department wants to spend any amount of time upgrading and retraining these users?
More importantly, the same problem applies to anything not using nVidia GPUs, which is most low-end desktop PCs (Intel integrated GPUs) and a lot of high-end desktop PCs (anything with AMD).

So now we can't have a PC with the best GPU and CPU because Intel and nVidia are suing each other over IP, and we can't have a cheap PC because Intel is infringing on S3 patents, and we can't even give up and get a top-of-the-line AMD/ATI CPU.

Argh.
What do you mean "laws don't apply on the internet". Someone very clearly broke the law here and should be caught and punished accordingly. That's not the argument - it's that a lot of companies can and will play dirty if they have to. Don't you remember the facebook/google PR scandal from a few months ago?

Background: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/05/12/facebook-bu...
Classic Cocktails at the Pioneer Saloon with Bols Genever
not only to get rich

Pretty sure Yegge's 'auteurs' are getting rich.
25% and this seems to be the average for everyone so far.

I'm not happy about it.
Meetings and decision making takes most of the time.

In theory that is ok, but in reality those meetings and decisions are actually very slow. I'm expert in my field and I know most of my decisions are the correct and best ones, however I have to explain it to others, and usually they come to the same conclusion as me - but it takes a week for that process.

I would like if at least 50% of the time was actual coding or setup or w/e kind of "actual work", because discussions don't make me feel like I'm progressing.
This doesn't specifically answer your question, but the post does seem to mention that financial compensation from AirBNB was offered:

"They have offered to help me recover emotionally and financially, and are working with SFPD to track down these criminals."
My apologies. I read HN b/c intelligent people write here.
I hate to say this, but protein folding projects aren't good for any practical purposes (or show me a breakthrough). It is good for PR (public participation, awareness of the topic), but like SETI (FFT on essentially CBR noise from space) it is quite futile: while in theory it could work, it is really not a reasonable way to use scarce resources.

It is literally burning electricity (oil, coal, Fukushima) for no real reason (MS wants to patent computational heating?)

We have no clue how proteins work/interact (this is why epigenetics is hyped these days). We have some "educated guess", but it is mostly data harvesting from public databases and then doing some simple Bayes or correlation analysis, without much scrutiny on the harvested data itself (ie. was it made up using multiple imputation?)
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Ask HN: Recommendation for Rails/SSO forum
Hey guys,

We're running a significant website built using Ruby On Rails and Warden for authentication.

We'd like to setup a community forum to allow users provide each others tips.
Ideally this forum would be multi language (not sure if it's essential) and we absolutely need that users don't need to reauthenticate through the forum.

I tried Vanilla forums but it doesn't fit - their proxy-connect plugin is buggy and breaks from a version to another.

Do you guys have any recommendations ?

Thanks for your help !
What to Remember When Moving to 802.11n
Indeed. Telling potential customers that you are thuggish and immoral isn't the best way to get them to do business with you. I have to wonder if it's ever worked as a tactic for him.
I've heard there's a shortage too but I doubt it by the way big companies are acting. I think that just about the only thing they are short of is recruiters!

I've contacted a whole bunch of companies (the usual) and not heard back either way. Probably because they see I'm in the UK but if I've taken the time to write in about a job they posted, the decent thing to do is to reply either way.
Urban swimming in Zürich
This Switzerland sceptic gets swept away by the vibrant day-to-night culture in Zürich, which has lidos à gogo that become hip bars after dark
I'll watch this tonight, from the summaries I generally agree with him. I feel the same way about brilliant math and physics people doing HFT for Goldman Sachs. But I'd also point out that from a comparative advantage perspective, it may be optimal to earn lots of money in a "useless" area and then donate where it makes a difference. If you can earn $500k/year at a hedge fund and give half of that to SENS, that's probably better than quitting your job to learn molecular biology from scratch.
Which Tech Giants Birth the Most Successful Startup Founders?
I think it really depends on what's filling the remainder of your time. If I'm working on something difficult, and I spend that time talking my thoughts over with someone else, that's going to feel great. If I have only trivial work to do, but meetings and other bureaucratic nonsense get in the way, I'm going to feel like shit.
I guess my biggest question is: in what way can programmers outside that specific discipline pitch in and help out? Are there relevant open source projects that could benefit from someone with a lot of programming experience and a slightly-better-than-layman science background?
Given this is a HW and SW patent, and my superficial reading leads me to believe that this may infringe on HW -- this isn't your typical SW patent issue. It's HW too. Are people ready to say that HW patents, such as those held by Intel and ARM, should also go bye-bye?
Oh awesome, fake breasts. Way to attract the other 50%. And there are complaints that g+ is male-dominated? This disappoints me.

My internal dialogue: "Great, now I'm either going to keep my opinion to myself and move along, or speak out and be perceived as a hardlining feminist". Goddamn, do I hate unthinking misogyny sometimes, I'm completely sick of it and it's totally acceptable in a male-dominated forum where so many other forms of isms have been classified as inadmissable. Reading the comments was even more disturbing, as the scrolling arrays of men commenting on the +00+ interspersed with only a few disapprovals from the women strong enough to speak out about this in the public forum.
this is such a great question.

It really depends on if you are coming up w/ something new, or working on trying to get something up, you have already done ( think web app w/ 50 reports all w/ json datasets visualized by javascript ).
Open Cloud Initiative defines "cloud freedoms"
If you think that Android devices are just clones of the iPhone, and that it gives Apple just cause to strike first, I'm not even going to bother writing a real response.
If the competitor was in the same business, I think this kind of story would negatively affect them too.

Well, unless hotel chains are cooperating in doing it to tarnish AirBNB's repuatation - but I still think that is unlikely.
You might want to pick up the current issue of the New Yorker. It's got a lengthy profile of Ray Dalio and Bridgewater.
London Attractions 
Quirky attractions in London. =]
covered: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2811865
What about generics? Poker.app, Vancouver.app? Who gets those?
3.1416
NYT apps selling mobile subscriptions through iTunes under Apple's new rules
Yes, thank you; humor, that was intended. But thanks for all the downvotes :)
You'd have to remove words that sound alike.
For the love of God, can your site give pricing info when I click on the pricing section???
Thank you
I've probably spent around 7,000 hours programming in total. I'm a fairly strong developer by most accounts, but I'm no Bill Joy or John Carmack.

I started programming when I was around 10 or so (my dad was in college for CS at the time and I "helped" with his assignments), but didn't keep it up and stopped until college.
I think the Patriot Act could actually help us here.