skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
About the only ads I find offensive these days are (a) ads that play sound without it being initiated by the user, (b) ads that get in the way of the content and (c) the Kontera-style double underline in-text ads that have an annoying habit of popping up when you accidentally move your mouse to the wrong location. Webmasters who use that particular advertising method, I think, are displaying a blatant lack of respect for their readers.

Apart from those, regular ads don't bother me at all. I particularly don't understand people who feel that tracking is bad, when all it results in is a more targeted set of ads. If I'm going to see ads, I'd prefer ads for topics I'm interested in. Tracking for the purpose of ad targeting is a good thing.
Hell, what about non-GitHub? I have tons of code on http://git.xfce.org that presumably this site wouldn't pick up at all.
To me the video is a scam. It gained massive attention attempting to compare itself to contemporary game engines without clearly representing any of it's limitations that prevent it from being used for anything. To me is screams as a way to get enough attention to continue funding of the project with no short term result (at least in the video game field that they are contrasting themselves with.)

They display two scenes side by side, but to the untrained observers eye, their solution looks fantastic, but there are important details that they never even touched upon. Dynamic lighting, keyframe/bone/ivk animations, physics/collisions, deformation. These are all extremely important elements in a modern video game to create the experience that consumers expect.

Someday this technology may replace the current approaches in video games, and it certainly has useful approaches in static 3D captures of real world scenes (crime scenes?) but the computation systems we will need for that aren't here.

Additionally, video gaming systems jump around in capabilities. This is becoming very relevant as casual gaming is making large waves in the handheld space. If the power/performance ratio of this approach can't beat more traditional polygon rendering, game developers won't work with it. Game companies are companies, have market demands to meet, not just play with the latest and greatest in technology.
Does disabling flash (or using click-to-plugin) count as blocking ads?

After I installed Lion I haven't bothered to install Flash Player. Everything is much nicer even without adblock. My primary browsing stays in Safari and I hop over to Chrome for flash sites (youtube/slideshare/vimeo).

Under Linux where Chrome is my only browser, I just turn on click-to-plugin so Flash and PDFs don't auto-run (see about:flags).
Specific stats literature too look for 'Goodness of fit test'

Answered here http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6933227/how-to-compare-bu...
I have been using AdMuncher which has worked very well, tried a few different ad blockers but imo this works best: http://www.admuncher.com/
Spludo: fast, evented, server side, prototype-based, JS MVC web framework
"They actually force competition-- and they give a leg up to all of your competitors by quickly bringing them up to speed on the state of the art."

Are you seriously arguing that competition uses software patent applications to get up to speed?

"If the patent system didn't exist, and Apple didn't reveal its inventions, android would be 7 years behind the iPhone."

Incredible.

"They'd still be at the drawing board trying to figure out how to make multi-touch work."

This is so wrong on so many levels that your argument is precisely what I criticized in my other post (that is, perhaps rightly, being moderated down to oblivion). Do you really think Apple invented multitouch? They neither invented the phsycial mechanism (they have nothing whatsoever to do with capacitive sensors), nor the concept itself. Aside from obvious examples like the movie Minority Report (and many that came before), which Apple apparently shamelessly ripped off, it has existed on industrial touchscreen for well over a decade.

The single and only reason Android avoided multitouch, despite the software and the hardware being capable, was that Apple won the race to the patent office. No one learned anything from their patent, nor did Apple invent anything beyond adding "on a mobile device" on their application.

That example alone demolishes your position on software patents.
I don't think that their infrastructure runs on Windows. You may perhaps get Mono one day...
It's a writer's tool, rather than a coder's tool. Markdown text is getting on for half as long as equivalent HTML.

# Subheading

## Main heading

Plain paragraph.

- bullet
- bullet
- bullet

Paragraph.

87 characters in Markdown. 147 in HTML. If I write in HTML, I get distracted from the words by the HTML markup...
Without anger or despair you have sorrow and grief, but we're not good at that in America either.
I'll make sure to check out the essay you mentioned later on today.
However, you -did- get in my way. For a long time. 3mph? Cripes, do you know how long it takes to move a rig around another rig at 3mph more while being safe?

By my calculations, about a minute and a half at the absolute most. So if you were intending to pass both trucks at 80 mph, and assuming the passing truck moves back into the right lane when safely able to, this fiasco adds approximately 10-15 seconds to your commute. Oh the horror.
Jim Simons MIT Talk: Is HFT Socially Useful?
Prior art for multi touch:

http://wearables.unisa.edu.au/projects/mpx/

http://gizmodo.com/278613/linux-mpx-multi+touch-table-may-be...

fwiw
I was part of a team that developed a distributed realtime database. That is to say, a record could exist on a dozen servers, and these servers could be handling transactions from hundreds of thousands or millions of simultaneous users. This was back in the day of high latency due to modems, so we worked out how to deal with the fact that by the time a client might get some information it might be out of date. We did this to allow for massively multiplayer online games... this was not a bogus patent because we really did advance the state of the art, and for a couple years there only about a dozen people in the world were capable of producing this kind of software.

However, on slashdot, people claimed that this patent was a patent on "the idea of online games!!!!!!". Later there was a big discussion claiming we'd patented IRC and oh, how bogus that was, because IRC was around for YEARS before we filed our patent!

Nothing in the IRC protocol, or any of the online games at the time (or most of them sense) solved the problems we were solving in our patent.

The thing is, the anti-patent people never read the patent. The Amazon "one click patent "is not a patent on putting a "Buy now" button on a website. Our patent didn't cover IRC, etc.

I haven't done a survey of patents, and so I can't say what percentage of them are bogus, and what aren't. I can believe a bogus patent could exist, and there is a remedy for that-- present prior art and the patent gets thrown out. This is a pretty functional solution, and anyone pressing their case better be prepared because the possibility of prior art always exists.

So, I doubt there are many bogus patents, at least, not many that ever make it to court. I do think there are a lot of patents that are presented as "bogus" that aren't. My other patent has a headline that makes it sound totally bogus... but it isn't. I just can imagine what people will say about it-- because they never bother to read the patent.

They already believe patents are bogus and whenever they see yet another claim that a patent is bogus they are ready to believe it.
I unblock sites I like which are ad-supported. I'd never run a browser without an adblocker, though.
The blind spot is the responsibility both of the driver with the blind spot and of anyone interacting with that vehicle and this goes double with a tractor-trailer. In a normal small car you might be able to overcome blind spots by actually looking over, but in a tractor-trailer some blind spots are truly blind. It is absolutely the responsibility of the truck to be aware of this fact and act safely in accord with it, but you cannot absolve people invading these blind spots of responsibility.

If trucks had no right to "invade" blind spot they literally couldn't move forward because a car can easily hide in the front blind spot.
It's sad that namecalling posts like this get upvoted because they echo the "general sentiment" of HN. Herd mentality != right.
I've had some good luck searching for freelancers on elance.com. Look at portfolio's, and if one of them has a style you like and some talent - you can use them as a resource for ideas. I usually have a couple ideas of what I am going for (like the feelings I want to project like "friendly"). I've been able to get some solid designs for $50 bucks. Worst case scenario you don't like it and try something else. I've heard 99 designs is great, but they would cost quite a bit more.
According to PaidContent, about IV investors:

Also, some of these companies, including Google and Cisco, have been investors for many years, and in the early years IV had a very different tone. Back then, the giant patent-holding company, which was founded by ex-Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold, billed itself as a “patent defense fund.” (Clearly, it hasn’t turned out that way. )
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-giant-patent-holder-intel...

IV was founded in 2000 and they didn't file their first suit until 2010. Companies certainly change their business model ("pivot," if you will).

Regardless, I'd like to see Google (and many others) divest themselves of their interest in IV.
I am hard pressed to come up with anyone I know that uses Google+ the way you seem to say things currently "stand": nearly every user in the system has people like Zuckerburg, Gundotra, 50 Cent, or Scoble in their circles, and most of the activity seems to be around "more minor celebrities" with blogs like Geek Feminism.

The model itself /is/ the Twitter model (circles as lists, reshare as retweet, comment as reply), with only one fundamental addition: "limit visibility of this tweet to these lists", which drastically helps specific use cases where otherwise people currently end up with multiple Twitter accounts (and then "awkward stuff" starts to happen due to how Twitter publicizes the resulting interaction with that tweet).
How could anyone function without it?
Team up with someone who wants to make it an app, then!

It's natural for a touch interface: each word made up of scrabble-like tiles with a letter on each, tap the letter(s) from each word that spell out the answer and submit for a score. Or, if you wanted to get crazy, you could play heads-up, but you'd need a whole lot of clues/answers lined up if you wanted to go that route (so if you wanted to go really crazy, string together some databases and programs to auto-generate each puzzle).
I'm not proud to say I know someone who has made tens of millions of dollars providing loans to contractors so they can drive a rig. The drivers rarely know what truly terrible terms they're getting, yet they're stuck since they lose their livelihood if they lose their truck. The guy jokingly calls his company 'Tombstone Financial.'
The Last Psychiatrist: Why we [Americans] are terrible at Math and RC?
OS X Lion (10.7) in fact does implement something similar.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7.a...
Interesting history: VeriSign acquired Netsol for $21 Billion in 2000, and then sold them to Pivotal Equity Group in 2003, but did not include in that sale Netsol's role as the sole registry for .com/net/org TLDs. Today VeriSign's naming division is the company’s "largest and most significant business unit".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Solutions

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VeriSign
The developer dilemma: idea is easy, building is easy, selling is impossible
Intuitively cool as soon as you see the video.
Your argument is ludicrous. My position on software patents mirrors the general complaint about software patents -- overwhelmingly they provide a monopoly on trivial, obvious, or inevitable "inventions". Your position on multitouch alone is a perfect example, really -- they didn't invent the hardware, didn't make the first implementation, and it had been predicted by mainstream media a decade in advance, but because Apple had the foresight to patent it first (even Microsoft Surface has years on Apple)...invention. Hardly.

There are novel software implementations. That applies to vanishingly few software patents.
Sorry, I didn't know that was karma whoring because I never think about it, I was just confused because I was down to -2 with no replies and I wasn't sure what it was people weren't agreeing with. I'm on HN for the conversations, not the points, but points are indicators of the community's opinion of my views, and in this case, I had no comments to back-up the down-voting, so I begged a little //
New Yorker iPad App Hits 100,000 Readers, Begins to Define a Genre
Openness + death by a thousand papercut licensing fees whenever you try to write any piece of software. I'll take secrecy and copyright, thanks.
Oof, not sure any of the options fit me well enough. Of those that interest me, I probably read about 80% in full, 15% I start reading, but find I'm not actually as interested as I thought, and the last 5% I might just look at the HN comments.

I usually (but not always) read the HN comments. Depending on my familiarity with the subject (based on the headline), I may read through the comments before reading the article. But I might not.
Can you point to a clear, major innovation software innovation that they are currently being sued for? I can't think of any.

I'm also not seeing the difference between "It's nearly impossible to write a nontrivial program that doesn't infringe patents" and "I do not believe I could write any significant program that was entirely patent free."
MySQL departs Lion, is Oracle to blame?
You illustrate the root of the problem. You are not aware of what the multi-touch patents cover, what the inventions are, and you are not aware of what patents are and so you think the movie "minority report" and non-multi-touch touch screens are "prior art". (And FWIW, the stuff in minority report was conceptualized based on the research that was being done by what is now Apple.)

I've learned that you cannot argue facts with ideologues-- you will just make up your own facts, as you have done.

You can have the last word. I'm not going to debate this. I really, actually, don't care that you're anti-patent. I believe the anti-patent position is an ideological one that doesn't care about the facts... it is purely political. It is also anti-startup and anti-capitalist.
BEQ, an NYT crossword constructor, did a Reddit IAMA the other day. He mentioned a favorite clue and solution being {Take cash but not credit} for GHOSTWRITE. I'm always the most satisfied whenever I successfully fill in a solution for clues like these.

IAMA is here: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/j5v6g/iama_new_york_ti...
Facebook Is The New Nielsen Family
Wow. What an amazing consolidation of uninformed opinions. It's as if none of them have ever actually used C# and the .NET platform.

Oh wait, it's Slashdot. They haven't.
Anyone who thinks two-dimensionally should be slammed. Trucking creates one of those scenarios where we attribute personal accountability to systemic problems.

Always be wary of such systems, for the devil is in the details. You may save a nickel, but in the process cost society as a whole $0.50.
I think they are typically referred to as cryptics across the pond.
Not "does it run on Windows", but "does it run Windows". Seriously if you can't run full, real Windows on it, forget it, you'll never get anywhere in the market.

Anyway, you can't compare "virtualenv" which seems to be some sort of Python interpreter hack, with full virtualization. They are completely different things, with completely different use cases.
Yes. Laptop battery life is important.
I don't run an adblocker, but I would if it meant I could get rid of CSS popover ads.
Fingerworks patents cover work done from 1999-2005. Everyone thinks they have smoking guns on this but you dig two inches in and nothing is clear.
Sometimes. - I turn it off for sites I frequent and benefit from, leave it on for sites I rarely visit.

Exception: even for sites I read regularly, if you are using that intellitext crap that pops up an add every time my mouse pointer slips over a keyword I'll both block your adds and stop visiting all together.
Perhaps this is what I'll do at the start. Some of the other suggestions seem really good but cost a little too much as I'm just starting out.
You can...
Neither of those are prior art. I suggest you read the foundational patents, and if you're not familiar with the terms of art, get up to speed on it, and then look into whatever you think might be "prior art" very carefully.

If you do, you'll find that there is no prior art, otherwise Apple wouldn't have had to invent something new.

I've learned that I cannot stop people from constantly making these kinds of claims. You don't actually make a claim-- you just give me links and then assert there is prior art. This is not an argument, because you have failed to address the issue of what the patent actually says.

You can produce links to other websites all day long and then make it beholden on me to prove that they are not prior art. I'm not going to play that game.
Statistical Presentation Graphics [pdf]
"I did not say anything about size of business."

Well 'empire' has some connotations you may not be aware of.
Google Should Publicly Oppose Software Patents
This is extremely revisionist.

http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/12/27/rim.thought.ap...

http://www.engadget.com/2007/11/12/a-visual-tour-of-androids...

Nobody is arguing that Apple invented every piece of technology that went into the iPhone, but it certainly wasn't the case that all their competitors were moving to multitouch based phones at the time.
Win Forms was always just a clunky wrapper around the aged Win32 APIs, and while WPF is extremely impressive, its performance still appears to be an issue for large-scale desktop applications.

I've been away from the Windows world for going on 6 years now, so my question is: what the heck are people using to write Windows apps these days? I'm sure there is still a mountain of .NET developers writing a mountain of crappy WinForm apps for the enterprise, but what about consumer software? Is it still Win32 and GDI?
I love how he's doing it in his apartment kitchen. Not his house located in an isolated forest, but an apartment building....
Love Triangle: A High School Romance in Mathematical Terms 
A follow up to X Marks the Spot by Alexa Lash – a writer, editor, and on-the-spot poet. Former Floridian and resident Bostonian, she has written for the Seminole Chronicle, Momslikeme, and the Central Florida Future, and is currently working in the Journalism Department of Emerson College.
I'm not sure if I get the pricing right: using Weebly pro I'm paying 4,58 US$ a month max. and can use it on 10 Domains. If I use Weebly Designers I pay up to 24,95 US$ for a single domain. So the possibility for my own branding justifies a price increase of up to 50x or am I missing something?
This piece really is all about the Nortel patents.

Google wanted the Nortel patents very badly but couldn't find enough fellow bidders whose interests matched its own to overcome the concerted efforts of Apple, Microsoft, and others who have a stake in pulling Android down. An interesting analysis of who the winners and losers were in this bidding process appears here: http://www.tangible-ip.com/2011/what-does-nortel-mean-for-th....

Having lost that bid, Google is in a far worse position to defend Android from patent attacks than it ever has been before. Essentially, all of its competitors now have formidable new weapons to use against the Android platform. This isn't so much an issue of "trolls" as it is conventional large players who use patent portfolios as arsenals for both offensive and defensive purposes. Google's enemies are now much more formidably armed as a result of the bidding.

Google therefore hopes to stir the DOJ into doing something about this on the antitrust front. The DOJ is scrutinizing this deal and may wind up imposing conditions that could be vital to Google. Its antitrust chief, Christine Varney, had represented Netscape while in private practice years ago in its antitrust fight with Microsoft and she has publicly expressed concerns about the misuse of patents by trolls and others for anti-competitive purposes (for those with a subscription, see this WSJ piece: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230365740457636...). Quite apart from her personal views, however, it is problematic that competitors can collude horizontally to do a major IP acquisition for what seems like an obvious anti-competitive purpose.

Google is not a "little guy" that might elicit sympathy in battling over the mobile space but it clearly has had its competitors gang up on it in pulling off the Nortel bid. Android will undoubtedly survive this attack but Google is seriously worried about being besieged in this way. In this piece, it is essentially looking to its last best hope in the DOJ for attempting to block this attack by competitors who hope to win by artificial legal means that which they can't win in the marketplace.

Let's hope this gets the scrutiny it deserves.
Whether I scrub ads or not has no bearing on whether a site I view makes money because I don't click on ads. Now, some sites I read do run advertising in their articles, that is, they choose to plug particular products they feel deserve attention, and I'll gladly check those products out. What I refuse to reward is spamming of advertising of the sort that network TV and ad networks take part in, in which the ads shown are all about whoever has the deepest pockets and have no bearing on the quality of the products being advertised.

A good example of how to make money from advertising that might actually make money off of me is the referral code system that Amazon uses, where you can embed a link to Amazon that also contains your referral code and therefore makes you money off of sales. This is flexible in that it works for any Amazon product, and also user driven in that a user can choose to add a referral code link to their site. This is in contrast to advertiser driven systems like what Google runs where the ads shown on a particular site are determined not by the site owner but on a combination of algorithms Google controls, settings controlled by the advertiser, and the unspoken force of money given to Google by the advertiser. It's true site owners have the option of blocking particular ads, but that's far from the owners actually endorsing the products advertised on their pages.
Too many times has my computer succumbed to malware in ads (mostly flash and java). Noscript for me.
I hate the text color so freaking much.
I changed it to black with firebug, but it's a major issue with that site.
I don't understand why would you not use Adblock. Perhaps there should be a poll for this question.
Why would it?

Railroads essentially operate monopolies on transport within a given region, and we're against regulation these days. Plus, those pesky workers know that, so they do inconvenient things like form unions and demand concessions.

So instead, we build a giant taxpayer-funded road system, which in turn results in sprawl, which requires yet more road systems.