skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google didn't argue that this patent purchase was for defensive reasons. They argued that it was for offensive reasons, that these patents could then be used to attack Google and force licensing fees onto Android. That entire argument is negated by the fact that Google had the option of bidding jointly on the patents and, therefore, having a license to them.
Don't whine like a little girl because your edits don't meet the wikipedia guidelines.
Just for fun, I did the exercise in haskell with state monad.

import Control.Monad.State

f x | x < 3 = x
f x = f (x-1) + 2 * f(x-2) + 3 * f( x-3)

t = f 20
t2 = f 20 == theSequence !! 20
t3 = f 20 == theSequence2 !! 20

nextSeq a b c = 3 * a + 2 * b + c

theSequence, theSequence2 :: [Integer]
theSequence = [0,1,2] ++ (zipWith3 nextSeq theSequence (drop 1 theSequence) (drop 2 theSequence) )
theSequence2 = [0,1,2] ++ evalState theSequenceS (0,1,2)

theSequenceS :: State (Integer,Integer,Integer) [Integer]
theSequenceS = do
(a,b,c) <- get
let next = nextSeq a b c
put $ (b,c,next)
xs <- theSequenceS
return $ next : xs
Wait, they actually called it "Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act"?

I'm speechless.
The Art of the Pithy Hashtag
When I read exercise 4, I thought, "I can't believe Ruby made the same mistake as Javascript!" Glad to learn this particular type of foot shooting is not possible in Ruby.
Featurestage is Offering Free Online Project Management SaaS with Pilot Program
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You should add a category - No, I have never heard of it.
If you aren't happy giving out your real name, you shouldn't be using social networking.

Anyone with a social graph of any size has already betrayed their identity, whether they know it or not. When people are sharing large volumes of data about themselves and their connections to others, they are a correlation attack waiting to happen. Pseudonymity on the internet is largely a fool's paradise - either you are fully anonymous, or you are using an identity which is separated from your own by a brittle and invisible membrane.

You may be filtering out low-level annoyances, but you're also establishing a false sense of security. If anon chooses to dox you, they'll do it and there's not a damned thing you can do to stop them. Pseudonymity offers some degree of protection for people with little to hide, but if for whatever reason you sincerely believe yourself to be a target, you should act as if your pseudonym has already been compromised.
The command line has no affordance:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance
The potential of building forms influenced by algorithms
You're describing Facebook. Google+ has a link for reporting people who are using fake names. Someone who wasn't using Google+ much could probably slip through the cracks, but someone using it a lot with a fake name? Good luck.

Edit: as tomkarlo points out, facebook has an option to report fake profiles, too. Also I found this quote from Facebook's former Director of Marketing, Randi Zuckerburg, troubling: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2847491
TCP (or UDP) checksums only cover the packet when it is in transit & don't protect the information when it is stored in a device such as a DNS server.
Again, I'm not DEFENDING this position, but...

Assume you've got a a super-successful app making $100k/month. Then a bug in the market messes up its ratings (like it did last Friday) and as a result they lose ranking and several hundreds of thousands of dollars over the next few months. They complain about it in a forum, and a helpful engineer says, "Oh, yes, that's a mistake we pushed to the Market. Sorry our testing procedures aren't better. I'll fix it right away!"

Bang, they've just publicly admitted negligence, and that developer could sue them for the lost $$$.

Again, I have seen NO proof of this. It's a going theory primarily because the money-oriented arms of Google (Market, AdMob, AdSense) are also the three that are the most tight-lipped over support issues.
For the record: ScraperWiki is about %95 open source: https://bitbucket.org/ScraperWiki/scraperwiki/src and Github has an incredible open source presence: https://github.com/github. Meanwhile... https://github.com/buzzdata

I'm not trolling, I'm just a big fan of open data -- especially community driven approaches.
They’re doing this by banding together to acquire Novell’s old patents (the “CPTN” group including Microsoft and Apple) and Nortel’s old patents (the “Rockstar” group including Microsoft and Apple), to make sure Google didn’t get them;

Microsoft’s objective has been to keep from Google and Android device-makers any patents that might be used to defend against their attacks.

Where did they argue that it was for offensive reasons?
I am not convinced, especially when the company is hyping it to kill "virtually all" viruses. Far from the majority of viruses contain dsRNA. For example, the Ebola virus and rhinoviruses, which cause the common cold, all contain an ssRNA genome. (For this reason I am confused why somebody quoted in the article specifically uses these examples.) HPV and many other categories of virus [1] contain only DNA. It would seem that only this category [2] of viruses would be affected.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DsDNA_virus

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-stranded_RNA_viruses
Ask HN: Have you ever convinced a naysayer about something?  If so, how?  
Have you guys ever convinced a naysayer about the value of what your doing in the first stages before the evidence becomes vastly overwhelming shown they cannot reasonably deny it (e.g. giant sales numbers)? If so, how did you do it? What stage of development did you do it?

I've been meeting a lot of people at the beginning stages who basically say "this will never work" and give some loosely logical reason as to why it doesn't work. Most commonly, "Ya, but so and so has done something similar and they failed thus you will too. Now let's discuss something realistic (status quo topic) or go away and stop bothering me with this idea."

Since I haven't made a successful product, I'll use other people's product as an example. The iPhone, it was beyond obvious to me that this was the future of phones. I tried to convince people that this is the future of the phone but so many of them said it was impossible. Of course, years later, guess what phone they are using? I have no clue how that happened but something made them quiet about the problems.
Would you mind pointing out where Google made that argument?

Because Google didn't make that argument, no matter how terribly M G Sielger may misinterpret it.

"They’re doing this by banding together to acquire Novell’s old patents (the “CPTN” group including Microsoft and Apple) and Nortel’s old patents (the “Rockstar” group including Microsoft and Apple), to make sure Google didn’t get them;"

That's what Google actually said. Google partly owning them in concert with Apple and Microsoft does nothing given that Apple and Microsoft are the primary antagonists of Android.
http://www.conversiondoctor.com/conversion-blog/coupon-codes...

TEST: (Straight A/B test for an online retailer in the women’s clothing market)

Control: Coupon code on the first page of the checkout process.

Variation 1: Coupon code removed.

Results:

Control: 3.8% conversion rate. (967 sales / 25,489 unique visitors)

Variation 1: 5.1% conversion rate. (1,276 sales / 24,991 unique visitors)
In tech, innovation and copying are two sides of the same coin. It's really hard to build something better than what's on the market if you're not allowed to start from what's already there.
Danah Boyd's persistently looping problem is that she's never designed, built, implemented, maintained, marketed, sold, held accountable for nor financed anything, never mind experienced the personal sacrifices and risk associated with the engagement of entrepreneurial activities yet she seems to always be first in line to demand change from the work of others while invoking her rights to benefit from the fruit of their labor.

She's today's critic and tomorrow's cheerleader wrapped in the guise of unaccountable academia, whose success rises and falls with the whims of those who manipulate her data for their own purposes, to include herself.

Truth be told, social networks have existed since the beginning of time, mostly in the meatspace, but also many in print or via other methods of communication. Some of those networks required their membership to provide bona fides while others went to the other extreme and forbade any form of real identification. A person could then choose which network to associated with, or not, depending on their personal preferences and the same could be argued for the network facilitators.

There will always be a contrarian reaction to any established rules, so while some social networks will only allow you to participate using your true credentials, others will be present to allow just the opposite, just like Hacker News.
Exactly - and me. I'm not saying that's how it's supposed to be, I'm saying how the mods seem to be trying to interpret it. Tutorial material seems to get short shrift.
This will not even come close to threatening instructor-led education. There are a very small number of courses that can be automated in this way.

I also think that the instructors are going to be surprised when the 10,000 students come up with more than 25 interesting questions.

I wonder what happens for the students who need questions answered that aren't deemed sufficiently interesting or unique?
Are Fake Stores a Compliment to Western Retailers in China?
Google: Microsft is Tricksy, But We’re Too Smart
The money quote from the article:

"If you have a monopoly business and generate monopoly profits and take those monopoly profits to another industry and gave away what your competitors (must) charge for, which led you to quickly capture the dominant market share, would you…

…whine like a bitch?"
This ideology can only go so far.

Human brains work well when manipulating objects as they are being interpreted. A graphical UI is an extension of reality. We manipulate the UI until it reaches a desired goal. This is somewhat instinctive, while remembering commands is not as they must be learned before going further.

UIs are not the same in this way. A UI can be manipulated before having any knowledge of what it does, eventually giving an impression of its use.

Playlists, or media controls are easy. But what if you wanted to navigate a spreadsheet? Do I instinctively know that I have to type spreadsheet move to D:3? Not likely.

Clicking, dragging or scrolling on the other hand is much more intuitive to how humans interact with reality. This is true with early learning as well. Children are encouraged to learn shapes, colours and dimensions first as it is much easier than demanding them to know exactly what shapes, colours and dimensions are useful for in everyday life.
So you say my ex is going to correlate the social graphs of well-known friends of mine to find me online?

What's the difference for you between a forum for anonymous alcoholics and a G+ circle with 'Joe' and 'Bob'?

Don't conflate the wish to withhold your name with the 'I need to be anonymous or the government is going to kill me' with all the other reasons, please.
You're saying if Google bought them anyway, it would've meant fewer patents for Google to worry about, but that still wouldn't have been as effective as buying patents that could be used against Microsoft as retaliation.

Google doesn't just want to counter all Microsoft's future patents that they will buy, because that still doesn't change anything. They want to counter Microsoft's old patents, the ones they are using right now.
Absolutely - I'm the last person to say you can't do something. What I will do is suggest that you find a different route that allows you a higher chance of success. You're a few years away from being realistically fundable. Put your effort into getting there. Don't jump ahead - this is a LONG road.

You do have advantages - food, shelter, free time, support, enthusiasm, a lack of experience to cloud your thoughts. Use them.

A common mistake you'll see over and over again in business that people tend to focus on what isn't working. Don't do that. Focus your efforts where you are strong, not where you are weak. And right now, your fundability is very, very weak.

Best of luck!
Only 500px?

My 13-inch MacBook (1280*800) doesn't even show the bottommost pixels of the headline.
I read all of it, and also took 6.001 from Hal & Gerry. (Looking at the comments, I must be an exception.)
Overcoming Professional Prejudice
> If you aren't happy giving out your real name, you shouldn't be using social networking.

The many dissidents who live in oppressive regimes and use these tools to coordinate resistance and provide support for like-minded allies will care not even a little bit about your guidance. The privilege implied by the bias in your remark is exactly the trouble with these real name policies in the first place.

Christians in China, gay kids in the Bible belt, women in Saudi Arabia, they're all entitled to take measured risks to find fellowship in their struggle. It's not for you or Google or Facebook to tell them what they should or should not do with their identity on social tools. Assuming the social platform operators provide reasonable disclosure about the risks, it's up to these folks to assume those risks and try for anonymity if they want it.
The worst thing you can do to convince a naysayer is providing logic and reasoning. They are naysayers for a reason, rationalism simply eludes them.

Talk about some rubbish pride and take a middle ground. Let them win a bit, it kinda pampers their ego.
No, but I plan to read HtDP http://htdp.org
The main daily newspaper in San Francisco had a front page article trumpeting a "takedown" of a child porn ring. I commented online that this was an advertisement by the government to encourage surrendering our rights to "protect the children".

The reaction was pure hate for my posting because it was defending pedophiles (it wasn't). It felt like an angry mob that had nothing but revenge on its mind.

This is why the efforts to destroy all privacy will succeed. For the kids. Yeah, that's it.
So this is a really old article I wrote a couple of years ago that I stumbled on again... I've learned so much since then.

Interestingly, I still hold to this, so it must've been some good advice!
Statistical note: With a 4-6% false positive rate, this device is only useful where there is a very high probability of infection. In much of the developed world where HIV infection rates are a fraction of one percent, this would mean that the overwhelming majority of positive tests are false positives.
And even if after all that, they still do? Its not going to be a statistically significant proportion of users who participate in studies to skew the results.

That's beautiful, and absolutely true. When I was younger, I remember answering surveys for random offers. I was caught a few times by different surveys for inconsistencies - although I wasn't told explicitly. To cope with this, I drafted up several identities and thought through a backstory to each character - personality, background, etc, which made it much easier to remember details. Depending on what the survey was about, I just picked a profile I felt a researcher would be looking for. Wasn't perfect, but had a hugely high success rate. I doubt very many people will go to my length though. When you start trying to passively filter people, and hit someone like me - well, we see it as a challenge... for better or for worse.

An interesting note: I used one of these profiles far more than the others. As a result, I remember walking home one day near midnight, and thinking "Geeze, I'm 29 already... one more year until I'm 30 - and I still haven't done anything I wanted to do." It didn't strike me until a minute or so later, that I wasn't anywhere near 29, and it wasn't actually my birthday.
> Bill H.R.1981 contains legal responsibility for any Internet Service Provider to keep detailed records of "your Internet activity for 12 months, your name, the address where you live, your bank account numbers, your credit card numbers, and any IP-addresses you've been assigned."

The quotation marks imply that the quoted text, which the entire remainder of the post is built on, is part of the bill. It's not, as far as I can tell. In fact, there's no requirement that resembles those described in any conceivable way. Assuming the version on the Library of Congress website [0] is current, the only section regarding record-keeping by ISPs requires them to keep track of customer IP address assignments for 18 months:

> A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least 18 months the temporarily assigned network addresses the service assigns to each account, unless that address is transmitted by radio communication (as defined in section 3 of the Communications Act of 1934).

The only interpretation I can come up with is that the linked post is a deliberate lie.

[0]: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.R.1981:
From a real name policy to "White Supremacy" is quite a leap.

I think back on planet earth, what's more likely is that the people who created these systems are insisting on real names to solve one sort of problem without thinking about the other problems it may cause, rather than "a desire for hegemony" or "promoting one culture as the dominant one".
No need for conspiracy theories - other companies have nothing to do with it.

One law firm in particular is behind this lawsuit. This type of thing is their bread and butter.
Google wanted the patents to fight back against Microsoft, since Microsoft is the one probably leveraging the greatest patent tax against Android devices. A joint ownership of the patents would be useless against Microsof. They could leverage them against Apple, or Oracle, or other parties that didn't own them, however, but even that could be to Microsoft's benefit.

Keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
No, but unethical for most applications, don't you think?
Show HN: Entry Level Job Search Site
I used the Simply Hired API in order to create a job site that filters out entry level jobs. I take advantage of Simply Hired's "New Graduate" filter, but also do a bunch of filtering on top of it (for example, not showing internships unless you type in intern).
Came out and said what? This is just providing more detail to exactly what Google said before. Discount whatever second hand noise you've read elsewhere: Google has been very consistent thus far (they derode patents when they made their $900 bid on the Nortel patents, for instance. They didn't learn to hate patents after losing), and this inside detail does in no way change or undermine what they said yesterday.

Microsoft and Apple don't want Google to have defensive patents (patents that both of them know that they infringe on in droves, otherwise they wouldn't be concerned about them).

They should have worked to remove all of these patents off the table as cheaply as possible. The available cash that MS+Apple simply dwarfs what Google has.

Dwarfs is a gross exaggeration. Further both Apple and Microsoft have shareholder responsibility. Microsoft has already made questionable judgment calls to maintain the upper hand -- billions of dollars in patents to make a few hundred million a year in extortion fees, while empowering their own primary competitor (Apple)? It's extraordinary. Apple shareholders are going to start demanding their cash back if it looks like one giant ego pile.

And Google can't quietly buy patents because the people selling want to get as much as possible for it. Well except for IBM who just wanted to stick a gank in Oracle.

The fact that their current IP strategy seems to be to buy IP is absurd.

Many of the patents that Microsoft and Apple are using against Android precede the mobile explosion. They are older companies, having had a long time of big profits to pay people to sit around submitting patent applications.
Interesting. It even has Sean Parker as co-founder: http://www.causes.com/team
We already know you are a sellout, we are just negotiating price
"I know of several countries within the EU where you can be a citizen and pay essentially no taxes, or extremely low taxes."

If so, then why have the rich not moved already? Indeed, why have you not gone to these places? I mean, no tax, whether on capital gain or income, is better than any tax is it not?
Frequent updates are a must for staying on top of the charts.
Awesome! We're building a pretty great community.

I can't wait to see your contributions.
No really? Wikipedia has fostered a culture where the only remaining people who participate think it's perfectly reasonable to destroy knowledge because it hasn't achieved a level of fame such that everybody already knows it.
Interview with René J. Pinnell-CEO & Designer of Forecast
very well done. i think i saw this a few months ago and had problems using it. good progress. bookmarked for future use. thanks
Philips wins DOE's $10 million L Prize for 60W incandescent killer
"It's the deletionists, stupid."
The thing is, that takedown, an Ars Technica article about which was on the HN front page briefly last night, was accomplished without this heinous legislation. To my mind, that rather puts the lie to the need for such laws.
and picture-mode.
Given the fact that the number of social tools is only increasing, isn't there feasibly a social network for everyone?

If anonymity is important, use Twitter or another product.

I actually appreciate Google making people use their real names, it's a step forward to actually having the ability to make people responsible for their actions online. Google isn't forcing you to use your real name everywhere until the end of time, simply on their Google Plus Network.
This isn't the first time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_PATRIOT_Act
A fake name can be 'George Bush' or 'random valid firstname from my region' + 'random real lastname from the phone book in my region'.

You think you can report me if I use the latter? Good luck.
And we are back: Mono 2.10.3
Ask HN: What's the best way to make the switch from web-designer to programmer?
What's the best way to make the switch from web-designer to programmer? Obviously it would be to learn to program, but how would you transition and learn to work in a programming environment after being a web-designer?

I know HTML/CSS, Javascript, some PHP, some python, some C. I have very basic programming skills.

I'm wondering how I can leave the web designer/developer field and move in to a programming community. What steps should I take to emerse myself in the programming world. Knowing to program is obvious but what kind of work is out there for an entry level programmer? It seems like all the jobs out there want pros.
Be right back, need to cancel my New Yorker subscription...
By way of explanation: this is a poll, my choice is not an option, therefore I posted it instead of merely upvoting it.

This answer is roughly equivalent to "Would like to but probably won't in the near future."