skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Facebook acquires tech start-up Push Pop Press
Speaking of Markdown and Github, has anyone figured out a way to preview locally - with accuracy - how README.mdown files will look on the project page? Would Redcarpet 2 help solve this problem?
Vaccine product Nanopatch gets $15 million investment
The nagwall isn't in every story, but it is on many. Here's one: http://two.longshotmag.com/story/money-tank
why is this better than searching "show hn" on hnsearch?
>online anonymity itself also creates real-world consequences, such as character assassinations, harassment, and downright internet crime.

anonymity itself doesn't create crime or harassment. Like in the real life, it only makes it easier to perpetrate one. With this being said, why wouldn't we all wear GPS and RFID enabled collars at all times with our name, identification number and scan barcode being promptly visible on the collar?

Nice device, goes well with Guchi pants:

http://www.extremtrac.com/e/products/personal%20tracking%20s...
Moral of the story: Don't be a dick.

I can't remember the last time I flipped someone off. Certainly not some truck driver passing another truck slower than I would like. I reserve the middle finger for the epically stupid, where someone has done something exceedingly dangerous.
I have the same question. We have security in being nobodies at least, as the best hackers would be unlikely to go into my information for instance unless mass hacking for identity purposes. It is a matter of time before new technology in security, database and transfer of information is upgraded and available at a premium. With placing the mass population on the cloud, who would be better targets to fund this upgrade?
Try and spend some more time in the shower - your next big idea my come there. Also this essay by Paul Graham talks about how to get ideas for startups http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html
I use it with FF but in Chrome I use my host file to block the most obnoxious Flash ad networks. Why not use Adblock in both? By the time I started using Chrome I had culled the list of sites I visit regularly to a short list. Why do I still use FF? Well I use to be able to be logged into two G accounts simultaneously but not anymore.
Maybe not jail but at least some community work, perhaps on something like cleaning up industrial waste.
Why ISPs shouldn't ban MAC addresses
Google got my gender wrong, too.

Here's my full list:

Arts & Entertainment - Humor
Arts & Entertainment - TV & Video - Sci-Fi & Fantasy Shows
Computers & Electronics - Computer Security
Computers & Electronics - Programming
Computers & Electronics - Software - Business & Productivity Software
Computers & Electronics - Software - Operating Systems - Mac OS
Pets & Animals - Pets - Cats
Pets & Animals - Pets - Dogs
Shopping - Apparel - Casual Apparel - T-Shirts
Shopping - Apparel - Costumes
World Localities - North America - USA - South (USA) - Kentucky
Demographics - Age - 25-34
Demographics - Gender - Male

Some interesting points here aside from the incorect gender, as well:

1. I've only had this computer for about 2wks.

2. In that time, I don't recall having consulted Google in any way regarding my dog or my cat, but it knows I have both... kind of disturbing.

3. Apparently one good search for inspiration/ideas about a LEGO minfig costume is enough to get costumes dumped into shopping categories.... but not LEGO.

4. Given that they tend to dump some things into ad preferences after only a casual search (or out of thin air in the case of the dog/cat), I'm surprised the "Programming" category doesn't have a more specific breakdown.
Google: Apple, Microsoft Using “Bogus” Patents to Stifle Android
Or you can just turn javascript off and you don't get the nagwall either.
> What people think of you DOES matter.

If you believe that what you are doing is good for the world, should it matter what people think of you? I bet a lot of people think that Gregory Maxwell or Aaron Swartz are criminals.

I think that having strong beliefs/goals is much more important then bowing to the general social pressures of the day. If you have strong beliefs, and you think what you are doing is good/right for the world, then it should't matter what people think. The world might not agree with you, and your ideas might fail miserably. Fortunately, we are lucky enough to be part of a community and where failure is looked upon favourably.
The point he's making is that showing a rendered clip of some UI is not prior art, as far as patents go. You have to actually be able to demonstrate how it works.

If someone develops warp drive or the transporter, does star trek count as "prior art"? That would be ludicrous.

(trying to figure out what comment you're replying to is exactly why whitespace-as-blocks is a brain-dead idea in python/coffeescript)
Boot Sequence for the Promise Pegasus Thunderbolt RAID Array
Multiverse' theory suggested by microwave background
http://wilmott.com/
Making a blanket statement about all innovators and all followers is an extraordinary claim, which requires extraordinary evidence. A reference to a single court case between a pair of companies hardly passes that bar.

Regardless, reading your linked article, it seems to have a pretty positive (or at least neutral) view of being a so-called "follower". It's interesting to point out the NKOTB-follower groups like Backstreet Boys and 'NSync. Regardless of whether or not you like their music, it's hard to deny that they were hugely successful and helped push the "boyband" genre of music into greater popularity. Not saying this is good or bad from an aesthetic point of view, but it sounds good from a business perspective.
Sometimes punishment despite no malicious intent is required. For example I can't imagine many drunk drivers are doing it with the aim of killing people, but I'd rather those people got their license revoked / fined / short prison time than everyone had no incentive not to drive when drunk. And if I were to ever drive drunk and get caught, as much as I would hate whatever punishment came my way, I'd still speak up for the law.

This is such a one-off case that it doesn't need swooping examples quite as much, but the same logic stands - if something can have terrible consequences, to the extent that the government should be preventing it, just telling people "please don't do this" likely isn't enough.
"Software developers, and Open Source developers in particular, have been adamantly against software patents for a very long time."

This is exactly as true as the claim that all scientists support AGW theory.

Reality-- most scientists don't support that theory.

But proponents of the theory say that they all do, all over the place. And since there is nobody who actually speaks for all scientists, there's nobody to prove them wrong.

So they repeat it over and over and over and over again, even though it isn't true.

Logically, your statement is easily disproven. I have been developing software for two decades, including open source, and I support software patents.

Now you can never make that statement again. Well, you can't if you're honest.

At the risk of sounding like I'm retroactively changing my argument, I didn't say "all software developers." My intended meaning of "software developers" and "Open Source developers" was many, not all, which I believe is a common and valid grammatical interpretation of a pluralized noun without a specified quantity.

Sites like Groklaw and organizations like the FSF (though FSF is a bit more extreme on most things than I am) show that there is a sizable group of people against software patents, and whether you yourself are for, against, or neutral, your position does not disprove the harm done to OSS/FS, small companies, and general innovation by software patents.

Finally, though this is off topic, do you have evidence that most scientists don't support the theory of anthropogenic global warming? From the perspective of a non-climate-scientist, non-politician such as myself, it seems like most climatologists do consider anthropogenic greenhouse gases a problem. It also seems that claiming that most scientists disbelieve in AGW is a hallmark of conservative arguments (as in preserving the legal status quo, not as in right wing), as is claiming that patents help the small inventor.
Thanks! Good to know it's common
Yes, British crosswords are something special. I'm surprised there aren't more fans of them on HN.

As introduction, here's one that's good and towards the easier end of the cryptic scale: http://www.guardian.co.uk/crosswords/cryptic/25247. There's a solution (with explanations) at http://fifteensquared.net/2011/02/16/guardian-25247-enigmati...

It's celebrating a crossword-setter's 90th birthday, and most of the in-jokes are explained in comments.
Ditto on interland (web.com). They basically hold your domain hostage, and force you to jump through so many phone customer support hoops so that most customers will just give up.
So you're MAD about something on the internet?
Google: Patently Absurd
To try to add Hacker News relevance to this story and its discussion: doesn't this show it's high time for truck-driving robots to free humans from this dreary job? Robots who won't, in the midst of personal anguish, be stressed about passing another truck to stay a few miles per hour faster? The displaced jobs would make way for more fulfilling, higher paying jobs as truck robot sysadmins and the truck robot YCombinator startup founders.
Right, I am usually very anti-regulations for most all things. But there are some things that are so obviously a public safety issue that regulation is a no brainier. But it does beg the question, should their be a safe outlet for people like this to pursue their intellectual curiosity without having to pay 100k to a university.
Download 30 useful and cool android apps
You're doing an admirable tap-dance to preserve your Google partisanship here. Apple may have acquired patents before this but I'm having a hard time finding support for your assertion that they're trolling with those alone. Or even applying them at all as part of their patent litigation, as raganwald has pointed out elsewhere.

Consider these patents cited in Apple's HTC complaint:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/02/the-complaint-apples-patent...

Steve Jobs and Scott Forestall are mentioned as inventors in some, and plenty more are attributed to one Bas Ording, who is a UI designer at Apple.

Even if fully half of Apple's patents in this complaint were acquired from an outside source, I have a hard time begrudging them their application of patent law in the protection of a business that makes a real product that required significant investment to create.
The Business Of Burning Man
I think the "Markdown standard" could be considered to be Gruber's official docs: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax
You mix up patents and copyright. You are right with copyright - I copy your code, I know I do that and that's why I'm ok with copyright protection. With patents people don't steal it - they don't even know you own it in most cases. Because software development would grind to a full-stop if you had to check every time you code something for all possible patent violations. Even lawyers have a hard time figuring out which code breaks which patents - software developers simply have no chance doing that on their own anymore. Patents are the wrong protection scheme for software for the same reason they are wrong for example for protecting book authors (imagine "Happy Ends" or similar ideas would be patented...).
I miss my CPU/RAM/NIC monitor. :c
I really like Gnome shell too, and I agree that there are a lot of settings that are just wrong by default... I have to change quite a few (many of which are stupidly hidden so I have to do it via gconf or a tweak application) each time I set up a computer with Gnome 3 to make it usable. And even then there are some design issues that totally ruin some parts of the user experience that I hope are fixed soon. For example, you can't shut down the computer. At least, you can't from the GUI without googling, and finding out about the secret key you have to hold to make the option appear. So they've gone and made an function that many users every day completely hidden and undiscoverable.

And when you complain, well, of course they can't change it because "it's in The Design", as if it was a document set on a stone tablet delivered from heaven...
Pokerai.org is the HN of pokerbots
> a voxel 'rock' or other solid doesn't need to represent the 'inside' with voxels

This seems to contradict Notch's (and Wikipedia's) description of a voxel. They indicate that a 3D space described by voxels has a voxel for each unit in space. The is analogous to having 1 pixel per unit of display space. If this is correct, then a rock would indeed have the inside filled with voxels.

I might be misunderstanding, though.
what's the difference between the two?
Heather Mills claims her phone was hacked
Who the fuck cares about Randi Zuckerberg. Without Mark would we give a shit what she says?
Yes. I do run business that significantly depends on ads.

The reasons are 1) because many ppl use it and - i need to test their experience with our products. 2) I just dont like ads, and dont care about "is it ethical?" stuff that has no significant direct impact on my business.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endangerment

I'm not up to speed on the particulars of Swedish law, but I imagine it has similar rules about reckless endangerment. Your DUI example is a good one. But we don't even really need specific examples, because the fact is, certain crimes are still crimes, regardless of whether or not the perpetrator had intent to cause harm. A reckless disregard for the safety of others can produce results every bit as harmful as those stemming from specific criminal intent.

Let's put it this way: anyone savvy enough to obtain radioactive elements and attempt to cause nuclear reactions in his apartment is also smart enough to understand how dangerous those materials are to himself and to those around him.
As I understand it[0], Mattel's claim of ownership of the Bratz IP derives from the fact that their creator developed them while subject to an IP assignment and non-compete contract.

The Bratz case seems entirely unrelated to the matter at hand, though in the closest comparison I can see, Mattel is a parasite trying to use IP laws to reap the benefits of creative work done by MGM and the designer of the Bratz dolls. The pro-IP Mattel is not the leader in this case.

[0] Edit: and, according to your article: "A jury deemed that the creator of Bratz, Carter Bryant, devised the idea while he was an employee at Mattel."
That behaviour makes sense for a lot of applications sure but for stuff like terminals it is really annoying.

Why isn't it possible to configure that on a per-launcher basis?
>The point he's making is that showing a rendered clip of some UI is not prior art, as far as patents go

While the discussion was targeted more at the actual value of software patents (i.e. what specifically Apple 'invented' with their multitouch patents), in actual practice yes such a movie is prior art if the novelty of the patent is the application of multifinger gestures. The idea that you need to show a working implementation is nonsense, and has never been a requirement of the patent system.

Regarding warp drive, the novelty of multitouch is the mere concept of using multifinger gestures on an interface. The novelty of a warp drive is the mechanism of achieving warp drive, not the concept of it.

To put it another way, if you patent a method (or system) of making a car fly, maybe that's an invention. Patenting the concept of flying cars, however, is not.
Once you start letting people use pseudonyms, then what? Are we going to start letting dogs use pseudonyms too? Where does it stop?
Brilliant idea. And probably wildly hard to get companies that have invested $100s of Billion in their patent portfolio to agree to.
Am I the only one that found the font on that page distracting?
Not trying to be a dick, but I thought you'd want to know http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
Does it really matter that they're using an open video codec when their protocol itself is not? It's at least of little utility to anyone else that they use an open video codec.
You lost me at (6):

Shouldn't it be proportional to O(n log 100) ~ 0(n) aka linear time?
Nice!

Someone should make a website linking all the little improvements like this people have made to HN.

EDIT: When I'm on page 2 ordered by date, then click on order by points, it takes me to page to ordered by points. It should take me to the start.
Linus is right. "Old school" or no, a new window for apps like terminal is exactly the right behavior. At least for my workflow it is: I want a shell right now, and I'll throw it away when I'm done.

I worked around this by binding Ctrl-Alt-T to spawn a gnome-terminal (likewise Ctrl-Alt-E to launch a new emacs window). Happily that key customization UI survived the transition to gnome 3.
The West Lothian question: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Lothian_question
Most of the software developers I talk to don't like software patents. Certainly not all, and I don't have precise numbers, but it's almost certainly the majority.
By compact I mean the domain logic was all in one place and not diluted like a fine mist across the code. You could read it like english and it made sense. Consistency in abstraction levels and not too much genericism.
Note to Google - fix smartphones and insure against future patent abuse by advancing an even better alternative - a fully formed HTML5+Javascript mobile OS offering.

Mobile and Web are the same thing, its just we have a legacy crud that needs to be factored away.

Ideally my phone runs linux with a GPU accelerated HTML5 UI, and has a javascript programming model with open API to get to hardware features. We are nearly there.

I believe Objective-C and Java languages are ultimately unsuited to phone app development. [ because phone app development _is_ web app development ]

This would be a bold, unifying, visionary strategy. You already have this in place, it just needs to be amplified - doing so could be the perfect strategy to win the patent game by making the patent game largely irrelevant.
From memory Tritium or H-3 is relatively safe unless ingested and is not classed as a radiation risk. [0]

[0] "Nuclide Safety Data Sheet Hydrogen-3" Beta radiation won't penetrate dead skin and has approximately 6mm penetration capacity.
http://hpschapters.org/northcarolina/NSDS/3HPDF.pdf
hnsearch is certainly a great way to find the same information, and in fact we use it underneath to get our data. However, going through hnsearch requires a few steps and many casual readers might not bother to go there. Since most "Show HN" posts link to the project homepage, we hope that displaying a thumbnail of each page in a visual gallery can help views discover interesting content faster.
hn_decay... Regardless of the validity of your comments, you just played the "fanboy"/'Godwin' card.
That's a virtual mutually assured destruction move. You won and lost and the debate is now a fallout zone.
My side project is full-time (40+ hours/week on lunarmods.com) for the last 6-months, but I still do part-time freelance work to pay about half the bills.
SEEKING WORK

iPhone/iPad, PHP, MySQL

Recently started looking for freelance opportunities. My day job is as a web developer for a state university.

I have 2 apps in the iTunes App Store and currently working on a third.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cleveland-college-radio/id433...

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cleveland-state-university/id...

http://mcphersoncreative.com
Selling doesn't matter. Just get users and people will give you money to be a startup. It's the thing to do you know.
SETI Crowdsources funding with great success
It doesn't matter from a user's perspective, but it does show that VP8 is good enough for Skype to use it.
Can you actually read software patents? To me they're undecipherable. "Openness" isn't worth a lot if it's all written in a language that no actual software developer understands.
A-line dress online
i agree with you that not all IP action is evil. but the patent system is horribly broken, they grant patents for retarded things and it is nearly impossible to get a stupid patent overturned. it isn't nearly as simple as "challenge the patents, change the law". microsoft and others who abuse the patent system in this way are going to keep doing everything in their power to ensure it stays broken.

and yes, i'm sure HTC knows what they are licensing. but they've signed NDAs as part of their agreement, and microsoft refuses to publicly disclose what patents they think they hold. if google could learn what patents microsoft is charging license fees for, they could potentially write android in a way that didn't infringe on those patents. microsoft doesn't want this. they want android to infringe, so they can continue to collect money off it. this is a malicious abuse of the patent system. there is no other way to describe it.
>Maybe go look at the actual patent lawsuits against HTC, Samsung et al., they aren't hard to find.

You say so much while saying so little.

Apple's assault on HTC is a perfect demonstration of the failure of the patent system. Dozens of trivial, laughable patents such as "recognize an email address in a string of text", patented decades after such techniques were commonplace. Do you want to show one with actual value, instead of alluding to some great argument foundation that you don't actually have?

Oh, hey, look, Android isn't actually open. Yuk yuk. What relevance does that have, beyond just partisan posturing? Who cares?

You know thousands of patent holders are realizing the potential value of their patents, looking longingly at Apple's $75 billion dollar cash pile (poor guys. Everyone is stealing their stuff). It will be interesting to see how positions change after Apple comes under constant, unrelenting assault. I already see people like Gruber trying to differentiate patents by their holders, which is so ignorant and fanboy-driven that it should embarrass him.
Best wishes Peter. You work hard on catonmat.net and it shows. Well done.
If you mean "us" in the sense of the HN community, you're probably right. But those restrictions are likely no different than what the majority of workers across all professions in the US (and the world?) are subject to. Truckers are certainly not unique.
With GNOME3, I really tried. I decided to give it some time to see if the workflow would sink in but after a month of using it, I reverted back to GNOME2. Using GNOME3 makes you feel like the developers have effectively decided how your desktop workflow should be. I'm quite disappointed with this trend towards a polished, "grandma-friendly" desktop.

As of now, I'm fine with GNOME2. Perhaps I will switch to something like XFCE in the future.
CPU:0.001% RAM: 7/10GB NIC: 1TB/s

Remember that time we went to 100% for 1 week and overcame a process you couldn't kill?

10ve,

p.c.
And its a major complaint I have with OSX, haha.
Show HN: Github Feed - RSS Feeds for your Github Repos
This is an app I wrote during the weekend. One of my friends did the landing page design for me and I pushed it to Heroku. Basically, it is a Github post-receive url that will generate an RSS feed of specific commits you make to a github repository.

The live site is at http://ghfeed.heroku.com
The code is at https://github.com/zhemao/ghfeed

This app was built with Sinatra and MongoDB. It is the first thing I have ever programmed in Ruby.