skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It was an especially 'we are more open-ish' WWDC from a PR stand point. Former Apple evangelist Matt Drance wrote [1]:

The introduction of Bing as a search provider for Safari on iPhone had been rumored for some time. Naturally, everyone saw this development as an attack on Google. But the presentation itself sent just as much of a message. Jobs used the word “choice” six times in less than twenty seconds during the Bing announcement. While Apple’s addition of Bing was a shot at Google’s core business, the announcement was a shot at its melodramatic PR.

The announcement that FaceTime would be an open standard was another surprise. Would Apple have done this without the pressure Google and Adobe have been applying? Maybe. But we certainly wouldn’t have seen a slide with a giant “OPEN” on it.

[1] http://www.appleoutsider.com/2010/06/15/wwdc10/
I love that Smoots are in Wolfram Alpha. :)

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+smoots+from+th...
You sound like a great landlord, to me it really comes down to whether they are actively acting maliciously, for example the landlords who screwed me out my deposit were clearly trying to steal the cash - one when I was at uni made up loads of costs despite us having spent a day cleaning, painting and getting the place spotless, another kept on promising to pay but then suddenly dropped all contact, in the end I had to threaten legal action (after a couple months).

> Once you've had a couple of the really bad tenants, I think it's very, very difficult to learn to see the good in people again as opposed to the enormous risk exposure.

Absolutely, I can understand that - sorry to hear you've experienced that. Seems unfortunately quite common. Who are these people?!!
Have you made anything before? Startups usually are looking for smart people. Showing past projects and technical challenges you have overcome is an easy way to show off how smart you are. I personally feel like resumes, and linked.in profiles are pretty useless to everyone but HR departments and recruiters.
I'm interested to see that they do historical rate comparisons. I thought about implementing a hotel rate searcher which flagged deals that are better than historical prices, but was put off when I saw Bing held a patent related to their Rate Indicator: http://www.bing.com/travel/about/ourTechnology.do?FORM=TRABV...

Edit: it looks like Bing's patent relates to predicting future prices (when will be the best time to buy).
It's probably a marketing thing, since people with PhD's aren't usually the entrepreneur-type.
You can't call this action picketing/marching/protesting.. This group has brought down multiple websites, with the malice as the intent. The next best real-world comparison would have been a riot. Attempting to shut down a business is in my eyes not something the police would let slide in real-world situations
that's ignoring all the potential social advantages of being roughly grouped by age

Which are?
I grew up in the North East and spent a good amount of time living in Boston. One thing I always noticed about Bostonians was that upon meeting anyone new one of the very first questions they ask is "where are you from" (and I also felt there was asterisk there: *in Massachusetts/NE). This may seem like a small thing but it speaks a lot to the main focus being "which direction did you come from" rather than "which direction are you going?" placing a lot more value on pedigree than entrepreneurship. I later moved out West and have never been asked this until knowing people much longer, and usually as a point of small talk.
Google appears as the last result on the search page!
Talking about generic names, the plaintiff in this case is "Office Corporation". Oh, the irony.
In truth, I got what you originally meant and was expanding on it.

The fact that VCs can have such a low hit rate and such a low return rate, yet still have a job, is astounding to me.

I think the underlying problem is that there is an incestuous relationship between retirement funds and investors. Nothing else explains why the funds keep giving away 2+20%.
On Bing, "search" goes to Yahoo.
The good news is that based on those competitors websites you posted, no one knows what the hell to call themselves. No one has any meaningful Meta description -- or title really.

It looks like people all see this as a needed product but don't know what to call it (read: they don't know what their potential customers call it and are googling for).

Play around with Google Keyword Tool and with Google Trends and see if you can find it.
In many cases the any court (in almost any country influenced by the French law) interprets the laws and confirms if the 'new laws' is consistent with the 'old laws/ more basic laws' and not in violation with the basic premise of the constitutions. Of course this is a over-simplification but this is at the most basic the function of the courts.
For a different point of view on the legitimacy of tactics like sit-ins, please check out http://goo.gl/5JuJn
I agree the interview does not get to the gist..

some new theories and applications to learning are coming out of neuroscience but I am unsure if Andrew specialized in that area at least from the interview.

The older neuroscience stuff we are already aware of that humans remember in 3s, 5s, and 7s of items, several channels used at once such as visual audio increases info percentage retained more so when skills re-used, etc.
Because (with few exceptions) you lose steering wheel controls and thieves become a lot more interested in smashing your windows. Also, my radio is nonstandard size and the adapters are fuuugly.
MPEGLA says VP8/WEBM violate at least 12 patents
I think this is mostly a workaround for a huge flaw in most languages—especially one as dynamic as ruby. Nil should accept any method and return nil.

This is the pattern that Objective-C embraces, and it works very well. You can chain method calls to nil and get nil as the result of the expression, should any method return nil. You end up with cleaner, more readable code. Sure, it makes some edge cases harder to debug, but not by very much. In this case, the benefits far outweigh the code. You'd simply end up with:

def admin_of?(project)
membership_for(project).admin? || false
end

Additionally since nil is falsy, you could even skip the `|| false`, and any `if u.admin_of? p` statement would still work. (Not recommended, but just pointing it out.)

def admin_of?(project)
membership_for(project).admin?
end
EA CEO: Consoles Now Only 40% of Games Industry
http://obtiva.com/ is huge on mentoring apprentices
>The frameworks are ridiculously heavy...
I agree with you on this part. I kept scratching my head when I was first introduced to Enterprise java beans. It all smelled like BS to me but because more experienced people than me and with more status were evangelizing about it I couldn't really call them on it. In the end I just ignored all of that and used the pieces that I like. Kept everything as simple as possible. I'm not directing this at you but just in general: Nothing wrong with moving to knew languages but criticizing any language because it is missing some simple feature like X and claiming that without it you just cannot work seems to me lazy and full of BS. All languages have issues. The difference is made by the programmer.
Which (unsurprisingly, as noted by the replies) itself yields Yahoo when you search "search" [1]

[1] http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=AjCXgFY8lSKJSSw5JLdr1HSb...
I never "search" for things. I "google" them.
You could use:

from processing import ...
I have used Opera a few times, and at the time I was using it, there was no support for SOCKS proxies (something standard in other competitors, always cool to set up a poor's man VPN over SSH). By then, it was important for me to have this in my browser, so I dropped Opera and chose Chrome instead.
Nevertheless, I checked the last version and it seems like they implemented SOCKS. Great news, but for now I'll stick to Chrome... BTW, is there any killer feature in Opera ?
You haven't seen some of my friends try to use a computer.
The most surprising thing about it for me is that it told me that someone I knew had shared bing on buzz earlier this year.
The thing about political protest is that you actually have to show up to show that you care. If your protest march has blocked the street you might be inconveniencing others, but at least you're inconveniencing yourself more. You think it's legit to have a form of protest which inconveniences others without inconveniencing yourself? If this was legal, then wouldn't it be done by everyone, all the time against everyone by whom they felt aggreived?

Remember, the world is full of folks who hate other folks. Sometimes for legit reasons, sometimes for stupid reasons.
>>There's a reason why professionals in every field buy top quality tools and not cheap disposable crap.

Agree But Java is not cheap disposable crap. At this point it is more a matter of taste. You don't like Java fine, but other people are able to be just as productive as you using Java and probably more depending on the programmer itself. At the end of the day it is the programmer that makes the difference.
Haskell removes not only the () that Ruby does, but also the commas. It also uses a simple precedence trick to remove almost all () in general (not just for functional calls).

I wanted to translate the code to Haskell directly, but the idioms don't map that well (self.cellSize would becomes something else entirely, and the comparison would not be fair).
Why don't we heat our homes with servers?
I thought we banned thehackernews.com ?
I've been thinking this a lot recently. You can't patent software in the UK and it seems ridiculous that you can in the US.
But this is exactly what you shouldn't be doing -- determining the legitimacy of tactics by assuming they're being used by someone whose cause you like. There's always the temptation to think that the end justifies the means, when you're supportive of the end.

Always assume that the questionable tactic is being used by the Illinois Nazis (I hate those guys) or the Westboro Baptist Church. Because if it's okay for Martin Luther King to do it, then it's gotta be okay for Fred Phelps to do it too.
Yahoo uses Bing.
My cell reception at home and work is flaky at best (thanks, AT&T!), so when I call my parents (both of whom also have iPhones), I'll usually do it over Facetime, which uses the much stabler WiFi.
Yeah, it's a game of silly buggers all around. At least it's not on the level of the "app store" nonsense.

It's also hard not to develop a rather cynical attitude towards the USPTO given the unending tide of negative press swirling around it. The system is infamously broken. What are companies supposed to do? Not file applications? Not try to defend a granted trademark because it's generic, only to have someone turn that against them? Is it the company being overly grasping or trying to do their due diligence in a high-stakes game of CYA?
This is What the Somali Drought Looks Like [Pics]
They're definitely disruptive. In the same way that a gang asking for "protection" money is disruptive to small businesses' commerce in a neighborhood.
Managing Without Managers
Maybe it's because in recent years, much more has been written about Bing as a search engine.
This makes sense to me. If you're using google to find 'search', you're probably not searching for google.
Yes, with the justin.tv iphone app.
This is cool. I put a similar idea into my idea book for a while after I found current electronic circuits sites still work like 10 years ago. I like the idea to use HTML 5 Canvas to render schematics.

I guess other cool features in the long run can be
1. Integrate simulators so circuits can be tested.
2. Meta tags for search circuits based on purposes, types, components.
In Ruby nil can receive any method and return nil:

class NilClass; def method_missing(*args); nil; end; end

The problem? It makes code fail late and siltently, which can happen with a simple mispeling of key names on hashes.

In ruby, Andand allows you to solve this more locally: http://andand.rubyforge.org/
Moonbase Alpha game By NASA
Any process is arguably a mathematical algorithm. The process by which I sanitize water can be expressed as a mathematical algorithm, where the various components play the role of various mathematical constructs.

And therein lies the problem. If you read SW patents they're usually pitched as processes over a computer device. This makes it hard to untangle from any other process that acts over some matter.

With that said maybe we get rid of processes altogether. I'd say get rid of everything except drug patents. But that would require congress to sign off.
I think it depends heavily on the app type and the feature-set required. Certain apps can never be duplicated well or even at all; others (such as apps that wrap web content already, or form-centric business tools) would be near-indistinguishable to the casual users who are the target market for most apps. (Also keep in mind, the article was referring not to the quality of products, but of potential business models).

Moreover, cross-platform distribution is nothing to sneeze at. I'm reminded a little of Java programs back when Macs had under 5% market share, and far less native software. I might have been annoyed that these programs were slow and didn't honor Mac conventions, but when there weren't good alternatives, it still beat having nothing at all.
By very poorly I would guess it would depend on how your comparing them. In my experience working with Java, C#, Scala, Python and Ruby all of them were fantastic. The only time I have ever considered a language a "deeper circle of hell" was with (large team) php and perl projects.
> Why is programming a basic skill?

For the same reason being able to write English[1] well is: If you can use English effectively, you can better influence the people you have to deal with. If you can write code effectively, you can often find ways to better influence the computers you have to deal with.

[1] (Replace 'English' with any natural language of your choice, if you want.)
And why shouldn't I want to take swimming lessons from a mermaid? Sounds like a dream.
There's a misunderstanding here. I wasn't saying that those tactics are justified because Martin Luther King wrote a justification of them. I'm saying Martin Luther King wrote a justification of them, and a damn good one.

The point is not the reference but what the reference points to.
Take a look at Sponsered Ads on bing and google
MPEG-LA licensing is a joy compared to the licensing of a certain pair of audio codecs...
Some things go without saying.

That, of course, means they go without linking.
Haskell is compiled. As I understand it, much of the point of Maybe is that it provides a formal language for expressing and manipulating unhandled edge cases. Then the compiler can spot those unhandled edge cases at compile time and make sure you handle them at one level of scope or another.

In Ruby the concept seems less useful because there is no compiler.
Hmm. So, it seem the definitions of public and private are skewing the ability to compare apples to apples?

There appears to be no way to "normalize" the data.
yeah, I hit it a few weeks after launch. Charging from day 1 + strong forum marketing = good revenue quickly
Even if he did specialize in that area of neuroscience, it's largely irrelevant. Sociology and psychology are much more important for understanding how to do education right, followed by anthropology and cognitive development. There are definitely a few good insights from neuroscience, but it's not really a field that's produced many game changers, at least not yet. Even history is more important than neuroscience at this point.
Grooveshark sued by new group of songwriters and publishers
Actually, you can sort of formalize the argument: Software is eligible for copyright. Therefore, the law already recognizes that it is an expressive activity.

A mechanical device is already not eligible for copyright.

Software is the only thing I know covered by both patents and copyright. Sometimes people deny this to me when I say this online, but I haven't yet heard anybody come up with a concrete example that stood up to scrutiny. Is it really so stunning that two systems never designed to mesh, patents and copyright, turn out to in fact not mesh and produce a big mess? Is it really so horrible that software be only copyrightable and not patentable? Very few people are arguing that software should not be covered by any sort of IP protection, and I suspect the non-zero set of such people would be further shrunk if patents were removed from the equation. (Though I also guarantee, not eliminated.)
It sure seems Dr. Tannenbaum loves his desserts way way more than his entrees.
Shell.js: a javascript shell around files in dropbox
Why did you put the link into the text?
It's only worse when they use Chrome's omninbar to Google 'Google', then Google 'Google' on Google to get to Google
Ask HN: Would anyone be interested in Startup Olympics in SF?
Would anyone be interested in participating in Startup Olympics? my team and i love playing sports and thought it might be a great idea to get plugged into the SF/SV scene by hosting a large "Startup Olympics" and have everything from basketball, flag football, ping pong, to soccer for the ultimate bragging rights and some nice trophy hardware and swag.

would love to hear your thoughts
The main goal of the web app is to have a shell-like environment with files in the cloud as the "file system" (currently only Dropbox, may add Google Docs later), so we can write scripts that interact with these files easily.

Please leave any comment/suggestions.

p.s. it only accepts javascript syntax right now. Writing a more shell-like parser is a potential TODO.
Sure, it makes some edge cases harder to debug, but not by very much.

One of the edge cases that I've recently seen in some code is string comparison:

if ([myStr caseInsensitiveCompare:@"OtherString"] == NSOrderedSame)
{
// Do something
}

If myStr is nil, caseInsensitiveCompare is going to return nil (=> 0), which is the same as NSOrderedSame. In these cases, you either have to check for nil first or swap the variables:

if ([@"OtherString" caseInsensitiveCompare:myStr] == NSOrderedSame)
{
// Do something
}
This is ancient, it's been like this since before I joined Google, which was before Bing came out. I think back then Dogpile was #1 (??), then Yahoo, then MSN Live. Occasionally it comes up and people get a good chuckle out of it.
That, and there's the 'education as hazing' notion: "If I had to suffer through four years of high school bored out of my mind, so should the next crop of kids! It's good for the little buggers! Builds character!"

Frankly, the best way to deal with that mindset is to invent some crap for the people who have it to go through so they leave the rest of us alone. Maybe call it a team-building exercise.
22 Mbps shared by hundreds or thousands of customers is much worse than cable or DSL. You can already do ~100 Mbps at decent range in 2.4 GHz using Ubiquiti or similar equipment; there are dozens of WISPs doing this and if they're lucky they barely break even.
A program is pure math ...

A program is a tangible, physical arrangement of electrons, atoms, and/or electromagnetic fields. Just because it is easily rearranged and difficult to perceive with the naked eye does not make it mathematical or virtual or unreal.

In a sense, all possible computer programs for a given architecture are implied in that architecture, ...

All possible medicines are implied by the rules of chemistry obeyed by a liter of pond scum. Determining which potential medicine does what is a patentable invention.
>> Frankly, it surprises me how small a role patents play in the software business. It's kind of ironic, considering all the dire things experts say about software patents stifling innovation, but when one looks closely at the software business, the most striking thing is how little patents seem to matter.

This is not true any more. At least some developers withdrew from the US market because of patents fear (specifically, mobile app developers) - this is a business changing phenomenon.
I know one active patent troll who is also a patent attorney, who wrote and prosecuted his own patent application and now writes his own threatening letters and licenses to the patent, has made a lot of money from it, and shows only delight at the money. He also still works for his law firm, and spends part of his time doing patent work for outside clients. I've long wondered how the rest of his firm felt about that.
Getting to Facebook is a four step google search:
Go to google.com
Enter w w w . F a c e b o o k . c o m press enter
Click first result.
Log in.

Or better yet:
Start browser, search in search box for google.com then go on to search for your website.
This is What MTV Thought the Internet was in 1995
No, which is why Cringely's rant is pointless.
Link bait title.
>If you read SW patents they're usually pitched as processes over a computer device.

The problem is that a computer is itself a mathematical construct. If the patents really wanted to describe a process on a device, they could not use as their "device" a Turing machine, because that is not a physical device in the sense of water sanitization. Whereas water sanitization requires the physical presence of water, a program can exist totally in theory as some bits in Wolfram's 2-state-3-symbol.

That is, unless you believe the mathematical universe hypothesis, but I don't think the Court's job is to decide whether the Universe exists!

I am also not a lawyer, nor formally educated in the field of law. I do know a bit about theoretical CS, though.
By that logic, you may have been duped into liking that article b/c the last word in its title is a variation of the word "good".

While those sorts of biases are interesting, the impact on human rationality of such techniques (used intentionally or by accident) is probably a wash. I'd be curious if there's a study that shows otherwise -- such as that people with certain phone numbers are more likely to declare bankruptcy.
Yes. And it is wrong.

The economics of production of hardware/things is (still) fundamentally different from the production of digital copies. And that is why it makes good sense to be squarely against software patents and be indifferent about hardware patents.
Nonetheless, there are two separate and completely orthogonal questions here.

1. Is it good policy to allow software to be patentable, and

2. Does existing law allow for software to be patentable?

I am fairly agnostic on question one, and about three Juris Doctorates short of being able to answer question two, but it's the Supreme Court's job to answer question two without any regard whatsoever to question one.

This article appears to be arguing about question two based on his opinions on question one, which is like arguing that a cat is a handbag because you want to be able to take it as carry-on luggage.
That's english with a few more words, they still sound scottish, not swedish.

From a bit of youtubing and googling the few clips I've heard are instantly recognizable as scottish, with a few words you don't understand.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shet...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ij60XUvWjZY&feature=playe...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVxNxnXo7-c&playnext=1...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cx5MgoL5tQ8

The UK has a phenomenal amount of dialects, they're all British though and even a Londoner can tell the difference between a Swedish accent and a British one.
API Stack – Audio Transcription with Quicktate API
I would like to vote you up for the chuckle, but this being Java, I can't tell for sure if you're joking...