skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wouldn't consider that "legitimately voted onto the front page". Moderators would step in and remove it.
They didn't wait. .NET arrived after Windows XP, and it would have been a poor business move to delay XP by a year so they could include .NET. Microsoft bundled it with the next Windows release.

It might have been a smart move to roll it into the first service pack as a required part of the update, but people would have screamed "anti-trust" if they did.
And then they continued bidding to over $4 billion. There's nothing to indicate that bidding non-round amounts changed the outcome.
They cited the "explosion in patent litigation, often involving low-quality software patents" as one of the reasons why they argue "in favor of real patent reform".
I'm not sure that they can. I don't believe patent law provides for anyone by the patent holder to sue for infringement.

Could be wrong, though, but I seem to recall a similar story in the news not too long ago.
Java (the language) isn't something that is patentable. They are reportedly being sued over the implementation of the VM, but the core ideas used in the VM (both Oracle's implementation and Google's implementation) are something like 30 years old. Sun just happened to be the first to try patenting the old ideas.

VP8 was designed to avoid patents, but there's so much stuff patented in the audio and video fields that it's nearly impossible to avoid infringing.
"efficient"

DRY: as a programmer you know that having to maintain two identical copies of something to keep them in sync is bad. You should refactor. Now take that idea and make it part of the language: header files. You have to declare every method in the source file, and then again, in the header file.

That at least made some sense for C, because header files were small, compared to source files. Only a few key methods needed to be in the header files. Now take C++: the entire class declaration has to be in the header file, including all the private methods. Now every source file has to parse a much greater amount of header files.

For bonus points, don't change the rule that a header file can be included multiple times, with multiple different active #defines. So you cant optimize that.

Then, even if you do start using microsoft specific #pragma's, of compiler-recognizable #ifdef MYFILE_H #define MYFILE_H, these files can still render different syntax trees between different source files, so you can't parse them one per project.

Then, introduce templates. Basically, remove the need for a source file at all, and declare that huge reams of code will actually be in header files. Bonus: dont declare a new form of source file, just keep using header files for this, again with the rules that the same header file (of templates) can mean multiple different things in any given source file, despite the fact that this is guaranteed to Not Do You What You Expect even if you were foolish enough to do it.

The only template "improvement" in C++0x is "extern templates", which is basically a huge goddam hack that says to the compiler "look I know you've had to parse+comprehend this template code for every single source file but please dont actually generate the machine code in my object file".

Finally, get together and decide that of all the things fucked up about C++, its the lack of threading support that is the big problem for us all. Seriously?

There isn't any way to make Visual C++ "efficient" because it compiles C++. Likewise, "modern". If you mean "efficient" for typing / editing, then I'd recommend you have a look at Visual SlickEdit (if you are the IDE type) and even then you will be light years behind what a modern IDE can do with a modern language.
I wouldn't be surprised if Google is pushing this story along as a PR effort, but they can't be the only thing behind it. Lodsys suing iOS developers was one of the major catalysts in turning this into a relatively hot topic and I don't see how Google could have realistically have had much of a hand in that.
Ok so I'll cite some supporting evidence:

http://infochachkie.com/fast-followers-i/

"Whenever creating an imitation of a successful leader, great care must be taken to avoid outright intellectual property infringement; the closer the duplication, the greater the care which must be exercised. MGA Entertainment (MGA), which produced the Bratz dolls, learned this the hard way. Late in 2008, U.S. Courts forced MGA to cease and desist in the manufacture of the dolls. A jury deemed that the creator of Bratz, Carter Bryant, devised the idea while he was an employee at Mattel. In the Spring of 2009, a U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the jury decision, mandating that the intellectual property associated with Bratz dolls was the sole property of Mattel."
> if you have it on your system, they'll use it

I don’t know i MS opposes WebM or not, but that doesn’t mean they support it: they have an API, you write a codec with that API and it works.
I am the author. Teleport sets up servers by "teleporting" to the machine and running itself there. It sets up Ruby, then follows the instructions laid out in your Telfile to customize the server. Here's a sample Telfile:

user "admin"
ruby "1.9.2"
apt "deb http://downloads-distro.mongodb.org/repo/ubuntu-upstart dist 10gen", :key => "7F0CAB10"
role :app, :packages => [:memcached]
role :db, :packages => [:mongodb-10gen]
server "server_app1", :role => :app
server "server_db1", :role => :db
packages [:atop, :emacs, :gcc]

More details on github. Feedback welcome!
Link to Handl's blog or it didn't happen.
We tried to make this fun. Some of the hidden features that I think are pretty cool include the way you can bypass the nagwall with the Konami code, and, of course, the nagwhal: http://two.longshotmag.com/404
This actually reuses plastic bottles, putting it one step higher up the "reduce-reuse-recycle" priority chain.
A century ago they were called revolutionaries, today we call them criminals.
Keep in mind that it's based on your current browser's cookies...I checked it at work and it says things like "Fiscal Policy News" and "Colleges and Universities" are among my interests...on my laptop, which I brought to work today, it's "Social Networks", "Soccer" and "Clubs & Nightlife"
Ask HN: login on the front page
I am getting ready to launch a new design for my startup. I don't have a login form on the front page. Should I?

I also don't currently have a link to sign in, but that is what I was planning to do.

For reference, here is a preview of what we are close to launching. It is a Wordpress template, so the content is not what we will really have.

http://bizen.csclientsite.com/

old site: http://bizen.com
Google should buy Lodsys :)
Nitpick: BEQ, the guy who did that AMA, is a crossword puzzle constructor who has had some puzzles published in the NYT. Will Shortz is the NYT crossword editor.
Apple's Cheap Stock
I enjoyed that. To be honest though, he does not make a very strong case for anonymity. That is not to say that there is not a strong case for anonymity, but anecdotes like "they saved a cat" and "they protested scientology" are not it.
I think people have organized protests on Facebook before.
Facetime is neither open, nor a standard right now.
If you are not offended in five minutes after leaving your doorstep, then you dont live in a free country.

Facebook being the Identity provider of the net is a scary thought. As does anyone that big.
I had to go back and check to tell it was even different, not that I care either way or think it matters a great deal.
I have released many pieces of software which could've brought a shitstorm down on me, legally and otherwise. I've decided in every case to do so under my real name, as I felt that I was in the right and if others disagreed, the downside for me was low (I have no house to lose, no family to support, etc). Others in the same exact position would've chosen to release these things under a pseudonym, as they had more on the line; this is a reasonable choice, and one that should be respected. In an environment where everything has to be tied to your name, you don't just crush malicious actions, you crush anything controversial. That's not alright.
I don't know what he meant by that either.
50 miles everywhere should be sufficient to get it to a train yard. The number could be increased for western states perhaps.
I would hate to see a tradition in political discourse older than the US be given up for advertising dollars. How would a modern version of the Federalist Papers work with no pseudonyms?
I've been using a Chromebook (Samsung) for the past few days. I keep it next to the iPads in the living room and have been experimenting to see which one I go to the most for basic browsing tasks. I don't have a strong opinion either way as of yet. I got a few out-of-memory errors on <10 tabs. This surprised me as I usually work with 30-40 tabs open.

In your case, it seems to be an either-or trade-off. I'd recommend an iPad 2 ... great games and apps, decent web browsing experience, pretty good for note-taking. I was worried about the on-screen keyboard myself. However, the larger screen real-estate makes the keyboard very usable (at least for me).
Your argument is valid, but I think so is the 'quid pro quo' notion, and as I mentioned, personally I'm not bothered by ads and yes, I suppose I do find some value in them now that you mention it.
Microsoft announces $250K in prize money for new defenses at Black Hat
"Google extremely blatantly cloned the look and feel of the iPhone and have pursued a strategy of dumping Android in an attempt to reduce smartphones to a commodity."

There are actually quite a few differences between Android and iOS in terms of interface, and there always have been -- in fact, many features found in later versions of iOS were found first in earlier versions of Android, such as copy & paste, wallpapers, and the upcoming notification area. In addition, applications are presented differently (you have to slide up a panel, generally, or tap a button somewhere to get to them), wallpapers can be dynamic (Live Wallpapers), and Android is, in general, much more reliant on menu structures than iOS, which seems to take a more simple and transparent route to most functions.

Sure, there are similarities -- like the fact that it's a touch interface and applications are represented first as icons -- but I'm inclined to think they're less prevalent than seems to be thought, and the ones that are there are (more or less) common sense. (I could be wrong, of course :))
I used dribbble.com several times and I love it. You have to contact the designer directly and close the price beforehand but the results have been awesome.
This isn't loading for me...
WebRTC and Skype have pretty much opposite philosophies.
Thirteen Third-Party Tools for Google Plus
From this page (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/03/16/html5-video-up...) they say,

"IE9 supports HTML5 video using WebM for Windows customers who install third-party WebM support."

From (http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/03/introducing-webm-in-inte...) the WebM team says,

"Microsoft collaborated closely with us to make the components fully compatible with HTML5 in IE9, so features such as the <video> tag and its canPlayType method are fully enabled for WebM. Our thanks go out to the Microsoft engineers who provided technical assistance and hosted our team in Redmond last month."

Does this sound like a company that opposes it?
Ask HN: Would you pay developers to fix open source bugs?
I could see it working well for GitHub. You would submit a bug to some sort of "bug board" with a link to the repository and attach a reward (you choose the amount of money). Other developers could then choose to fix a bug and maybe the developer who finishes it first gets the prize? However this could lead to crappy code and there would be wasted developer time (developers who don't finish first).

There could be many other ways to award the prize but I'm just curious if you would ever use a service like this?
When does the Windows team keep their controls private? It seems like most of the stuff that makes sense as a public control (e.g. not the Start Menu) gets a public API.

The Office team is a different issue. They seem to do a lot of non-standard stuff, and I'm not sure 3rd parties should be trying to follow their lead. The effort a lot of teams spent emulating Office 2003 was obsoleted when 2007 arrived.
Go get a cofounder
I'm curious if you have run into out-of-memory errors? It has happened to me 2-3 times and I don't think I stressed it that much.
Watch The Change Up Online Free
Watch The Change Up Online Free
Change Up will hope to follow in the footsteps of bridesmaids Part II Hangover Bad Teacher and Horrible Bosses who also played Bateman who all found a significant audience for their R rated exploits.
Java: it's far from certain Google is in the wrong here, and they could potentially win a court case. (Likely they'll settle out-of-court, sadly.)

VP8: the fact that Google has been using VP8 in WebM for 14 months now, with no clear allegations of wrongdoing, kinda kills your "willful" argument. If Google was fully aware they were infringing on patents, don't you think someone would have brought this up and/or sued them by now? (I could also start ranting about submarine patents, but I'll leave that alone.)

The parent poster also didn't really ask the right question. "Point to a single nontrivial piece of software that doesn't infringe on someone's patents" may indeed be solved by pointing to anything written over 20 years ago, but how is that a useful measure? We're not going to just say that we only need software written by 1991 and everything written in the past 20 years is useless. So sure, maybe "mission accomplished", but that's like saying "mission accomplished" for successfully going to the bathroom. Sure, well done!

The more useful question is -- "can you write a nontrivial piece of software today that infringes no patents?" I don't know the answer to that, but I suspect it's hard to do.
Is India's Elusive $35 Laptop at Hand?
Any ideas what the adding of the bleach does - it is just to keep algae from growing in there, or does it have some optical properties?
In case anyone is unaware, Web.com is a pretty evil company.

From my experience with them, their practice is to sign up businesses to build a website, but Web.com retains ownership of the domain name. They make it difficult and costly to move the domain away, as they're the true owners. When I last interacted with them, I believe the exit fee was something like $150 to have the domain the customer already thought they purchased be placed in the customer's name.

In that way, I suppose acquiring Network Solutions makes sense.
(I forgot to mention also that manufacturers and carriers also seem to have a lot to do with the overall interface -- Samsung's stock Android for the Captivate, for example, does mirror iOS quite a bit, while HTC Sense probably couldn't be much more different if they tried!)
Keith Rabois's answer to Why have so few successful startups come out of Google?
Cloud Computing : What is Cloud Computing,Trends and precautions
How depressing that an operating system being able to run third party software is now held up as notable enough to count as "support" of that software.
The five stages of fads: learning from music history
Disgruntled Canadian Developer Behind Internet Explorer IQ "Study" Hoax
I think "support", for video codecs, would mean shipping with the browser. Adoption will be very limited as long as it requires a separate download and installation (unless the browser makes that seamless, with no admin password requirement).
I certainly don't blame them for continuing to play the game as it's currently played. I was just hoping that they would also look into other, broader, more beneficial options.
>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.

Not to downplay the importance of losing the bid, but is it possible Google simply decided there are more effective ways to get what they want than to spend an extra $2 billion on top of their highest bid? $2 billion can buy you a lot of lobbying. Patent reform or action by the DOJ could greatly decrease the value of the $4.5b of patents Google's competitors just bought.
The CLR does inline, but it has restrictions that you're probably hitting.

It has restrictions that I am absolutely definitely hitting, and that I hit whenever I want to do something that would actually benefit from inlining.

Inlining a property get on a windows form in response to a mouse click - not very fucking useful.

Not inlining a matrix multiply of a few million verts = guaranteed downcode to native.

Not inlining a single matrix mult? Now I have to determine if the call to native, and the associated compiler, linker bullshit, is worth the effort.

Ok, for games its obvious that one has to just jump in and write native code. But its a shame because the C# and the CLR should be able to out-perform the C++. There are tons of applications where it could be much faster but isnt, and where there isnt a programming team ready to drop down to native.

Its a shame Intel can't write their own JITter.
Just curious if there was a reason why this is not on the official Github blog?
I'm also using it in combination with privoxy and iptables filters for skype and many other malicious packets that I don't want to break-out or break-in.
Everything you buy at the store and everything you order online moves by truck. Planes and trains can't get it to your house or grocery store.

Not by long-distance trucks that this article describes, though. Those trucks drive from the airport to the city center, and then from the city center to individual homes.

Say you buy something from Amazon. Their fulfillment center is co-located with UPS' hub at Louisville Airport. Your box leaves Amazon and goes on a plane to your city. Then, a short-distance truck picks up the package, it's taken to the UPS distribution center, and another truck takes it to your house. No 10 hour days. No driving 500 miles to see your sister in the hospital. No nights away from your family.

Anyway, it's very possible to own stuff that was not delivered to you by a long-distance trucker, despite what the article says.
I'm using an early version of this for a project, and it works a charm. If you work within its (sensible) constraints, it accomplishes much the same thing as Chef, with less effort and less overhead.
Stop building stuff, when you get an idea, just patent and wait to sue.
Is there really any point in building your great new idea? Maybe its cheaper just to patent it and wait till someone else does a great job of implementing it and commercialising it, then sue them. Costs you less and requires far less effort and risk. It's the "new entrepreneurialism".
Validity? No, I'm sure they did.

Timescale? Today's innovation is at an incredible pace. To grant patents that don't reflect that is absurd, what was innovative 20 years ago is utterly mundane today. Because what was a difficult problem 20 years ago is trivially solved today even without that innovation.

That so many patents are used offensively without ever seeing their inventor use them practically is evidence of this.

To pretend otherwise is to grant monopolies to people who have already reaped the benefits of their inventions at a massive cost to society, the very people these laws were meant to benefit.
Show HN: Our weekend project - HN Showcase, browse "Show HN" posts
http://www.hnshowcase.com

Moses (nnythm) and I browse Hacker News daily. Show HN posts are some of our favorite parts of HN. We wanted to create a way to browse Show HN articles, even those that might not quite make it to the front page. We created http://www.hnshowcase.com last weekend to make discovering projects posted on HN easier. It searches all "Show HN" posts and generates a thumbnail view for each of them. You can sort by submission date, points, and number of comments, and navigate with left/right or j/k keys.

We used the following technologies:

HN Search API, Pyramid web framework, jQuery, url2png and thumbalizr for thumbnail generation, and dotCloud for hosting.

Let us know what you think and how we can improve the user experience!
That a company that copies things might infringe patents?

Wow, seems like you have a pretty big bias here. That hurts your argument quite a bit.

Are you aware that Apple doesn't cry about how it's the end of the world and we're all going to have to pay more for the next iphone because they had to write Nokia a check for Nokia's previous and substantial innovations to mobile?

It's one thing to license a patent filed and wielded in good faith. Google already does that as well for lots of patents.

It's quite another to collude with other companies to buy up huge patent portfolios for the sole purpose of extorting your competitors and stifling competition. That's what Apple/MS/etc. appear to be doing here. Obviously I can't speak to their motivations with authority, but that's how it looks from the outside.
Direct link: http://www.hnshowcase.com/
I can't agree with more than the first few lines of the grandparent comment (as it is, as you say, "pure fanboyism"), but there is a point there. Nothing — nothing — before the iPhone had anything similar to it's UI. Not Palm OS, not Windows Mobile, not (in-development) Android, not even any research prototypes. The iPhone was new.

But "wallpaper", "copy and paste", and even "live wallpaper" are not new. Physics-based scrolling responding to touch input as if it was actual physical objects you're manipulating? That was new. Android's innovating (and not at all bad) notifications interface? That's new, although it's not quite at the same scale.

But it's hard to argue that Apple did not make serious progress in computing as a whole with the iPhone. Even if you believe that Android (and webOS, Windows Phone, etc) should be able to use some of those same elements, or if you believe that Apple shouldn't be able to patent them.
Those are all worthwhile sentiments, but they're not the same as "we're opposed to patents on software."
That's not an easy question. The alternative to patents is either less innovation (see countries with weak IP protection) or massive secrecy.

I don't see either of those as particularly compelling alternatives. Patents need some major reforms but not abolishing.
How is adoption going to be limited if Chrome and Mozilla both ship it? That's 50% of the market that get it w/o thinking. From all indications MS wants the codec to work well on their platform. They don't want the liability of shipping it.
What's special about Lisp? Simplicity. No syntax means you don't have to parse code when reading it. Each construct's scope is clear. Whenever I code for a while in Lisp and then have to go back to C or Java, I find myself uncomfortable. Not so the other way around.
Nothing much to add except that it's a great idea, and really nice-looking implementation.
That's one example - if you get air shipping. If you get ground shipping, not so much.

Also, I think his bigger point was the "everything you buy _at the store_" comes from a truck part.
In real life people use their real names ... doesn't stop idiots being idiots.
JQuery Mobile Beta 2 Released
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make other then to distract from the fact that your prior art argument has been torn to shreds repeatedly.
No straight male gets sexually exited when they watch other male jerking off. But many people dreaming about starting their own company will find this really exiting and inspiring.

And seriously, i can't believe that this (probably) is the most upvoted comment in this article.
I think anonymity on the Internet has to go away. People behave a lot better when they have their real names down. … I think people hide behind anonymity and they feel like they can say whatever they want behind closed doors.

That's nice that you feel that way. Why do I need to care, though? I can say whatever I want behind closed doors.