skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
His comment was specifically criticizing Google's position of wanting to have defensive patents:

Google supporters claim that Google only wants to use patents defensively. But what exactly does Google need to defend against, if not actual patents Android actually violates?

He is basically scoffing at the very idea of defensive patents. Someone who understands and accepts the concept of patent trolls should also understand the strategy of defensive patents and shouldn't hand wave it away.

This should be particularly obvious in the Nortel case because everyone was theoretically an infringer until the very moment that someone won the bid, at which point the winner magically becomes non-infringing and the loser is all of a sudden an "idea stealer".

Just think about it this way: had Lodsys or Intellectual Ventures been able to afford Nortel's patent portfolio they'd be suing everyone right now and I can guarantee Gruber would not be saying "well, Apple did violate actual patents", instead he'd be calling it patent trolling.
Stop Using Backbone.js As If It Were A Stateless Web Server
The closest I can think of is Personal Rapid Transport[1],
which is a light-rail/monorail network of individually powered (small; 3-person or so) vehicles. Various schemes for routing have been proposed, many of which are conceptually similar to packet-routing of the carriages.

[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Personal_rapi...
Yep, I think it has been common knowledge for a while now, and studies that are not perfect can still confirm a general trend.
I'd say about 34 right now, once you account for occasional distraction. I usually have trouble focusing (on anything) for more than 3 or 4 hours at a time without a break.
A better alternative may be to frame it differently

If applicable, please enter your gift card number.

This implies it is single use though.

Another option is to provide the field when user is already very invested. For instance, he has entered shipping details, contact details etc.

I wonder if anyone has split tested "enter coupon" phrases which doesn't encourage shopping cart abandonment?

The other option is to offer them notification whenever new coupons are available. It is a good way get people who might have abandoned the shopping cart anyway to opt in.
经典短信
So everyone on HN is a nerd?
Keep in mind, the British parliament can over-rule the Scottish one. The British law could include a clause "none of the above may be changed by the Parliaments of Scotland, Northern Island, or Wales". But contentious laws are already hard enough to pass.
Research paper help
Research papers are well researched documents. Theories put forth must be well supported with evidences and the entire paper should be presented in an organized manner.
Adblock Plus and FlashBlock are the two FF extensions I use.
It depends.

On an older site I ran we discovered the same thing and exploited it. We made it easy to find coupons for our product via Google. Interested visitors would land on our buy page, see the coupon field, search Google, find one and buy the product because they felt like they were getting a great deal. The conversion rate went up. The original price took in to account a lot of users would be using a discount. We split tested having the field and not, and we made more money with the coupon code field and giving out a lot of coupons.

Yes, some users that would have paid full price may take advantage of the discount. But, potentially, you will get a lot of customers that only buy because they find a discount. My guess is that this works better for lower cost "consumer" type purchases (not larger, business purchases).

Making coupons / discounts easy to find is a marketing strategy. Why do you think half the apps in the app stores have "Limited time discount offer!" as the first line of their description.
> How does finance destroy the broader economy in general? Liquid functional capital markets are critical for a stable economy. Finance is only bad for the economy when incentives are structures so that government limits the downside.

False dichotomy. The article talks about the current financial system in the US hurting the economy. It's not suggesting dismantling the financial system in general.

Step back for a moment. The financial industry is infrastructure. It's there to grease the wheels of productive industry. It facilitates growth, but cannot in itself create that growth. Now, last year the financial industry accounted for something like 1/3 of corporate profits. It's gotten absolutely immense. Do we need such massive institutions just to create "liquid functional capital markets?" Are these companies so profitable because they're really creating enormous amounts of value for the economy, or because being close to the money makes it easier to justify taking a percentage cut of the money flowing through the system?

Now, I'm not attacking them just because they're profitable. But to an extent they're profitable because the benefit tremendously from government protection. When Apple innovates and sells iPhones, they pay 35% tax on those profits, but when a trader at Goldman moves money around to make profits, they pay less than half that in taxes. If we believe that tax rates create incentive structures, does it really make sense to incentivize the latter so much more heavily than the former?
If someone is making an effort to avoid being tracked (as is their right) and you figure out a way to track them anyway, you are at the very least costing them the effort they put into avoiding being tracked. You are also costing them whatever value the attach to not being tracked. Some people do put a high price on their privacy and make strong efforts to protect it online.
I found this comment rather ignorant.

If you can't see the damage that the finance industry has done to the economy over the past decade or so, then I would suggest you haven't been paying attention.

I would suggest googling the following terms: "Angelo Mozilo", "control fraud", "William K. Black"
The Billion-Dollar Valuation Club
go here and see just how many companies drop flash cookies on you: http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplay...
This is a bit ridiculous, and confusing, but it's not as bad as a lot of other fashion website things.
I generally agree (especially for startups and other less established / unfamiliar-to-the-user vendors).

That being said, I've seen at least two companies cleverly use the visible coupon code field: Lenovo and Dell. They use it to establish at least 3 tiers of pricing:

1. People who don't use the coupon code at all anyway and get the standard "sale"
2. People who Google for a code and find a 5-10% coupon
3. People who get a better coupon through "less public" means (e.g. newsletter, limited-use coupon, etc.)

On top of that, I suspect Lenovo and Dell have their standard "sales" because they want higher "list" prices that make the corporate volume purchasing discounts look better.
Renounce their citizenship to go where? Europe (which is far less friendly to the rich)? Asia (what's the point of being rich if you have to live in the developing world?) Fears of wealthy people leaving are a red-herring.

Plus, who says we have a shortage of investment capital in the US? There is a ton of money floating around from pension funds and 401k accounts, even leaving out the money held by the very wealthy. If you look at the economy today, it's absurd to say that lack of capital is the reason for the lack of top-line growth.
I agree the Coupon Code field is a taunt, but what if someone has a coupon code and has lost the url for the coupon-specific form, or just ended up at the main form anyway? That could be especially frustrating - to have the coupon and not see any way of entering it.

Perhaps another solution is to have a checkbox "I have a coupon" instead (and ask for the code on the next step) or a link. That's less of an incentive, but still keeps the option for coupon holders on the main form.
Congrats to those that took home a Pwnie.

I think VUPEN would've won Best Client-Side Bug if their vulnerability had been for the HTML sandbox rather than the Flash sandbox, but it's still nice to see comex win after all the hard work he put into JailbreakMe 3.0.

Still can't believe Sony won a Pwnie for Most Epic FAIL, especially since they had some tough competition.
Don't all the people here with side projects have IP issues with their employers? How many of you have IP related contracts signed with their employers? My understanding is that most technical companies make you sign such contracts.
I'm not sure a significant portion of people will renounce their citizenship over the capital gains tax rate. We didn't have a brain drain or mass emigration when the top income tax rate was 91% either.

To make tax policy based on a fear of wealthy Americans deciding to stop being American seems ludicrous.

Similarly, I think investment capital will remain in the US because of the opportunities this country provides for investment and enterprise. You have many countries which have much lower, or even zero capital gains taxes and only the ones with talent and the ability to produce return attract and maintain significant amounts of investment capital.

The Isle of Man, Jamaica, and Mexico don't have any capital gains taxes, but are obviously not attracting the kind of capital that the US does- and for good reasons.
Not everyone, some accounts are bots & scraping scripts for apps.
I think the more likely explanation is that a lot of people saw insane fortunes being made from computer science in the dot-com boom and went and got their degrees, hoping to cash in as well. In the subsequent bust, the party was over and computer science reverted to being a program for those who were truly interested in it. I'd rather it stayed that way.
Side project while I finish up my MBA but hope to build enough momentum by the time I am done to jump full time into it.
I was looking for one too...couldn't find one.
Excellent comment. The notion of mediocrity is often interchangeable with the notion of compromise, a critical skill in life and engineering. I wish I had learned that in college.

It seems to me that "getting shit done" is a tad vague to be useful as a professional goal.

Edit: On second reading, I realize that Mr. Zac is sort of talking about compromise. He's accepting his development skills as they are -- "good enough" to be effective in whatever other managerial or planning roles he pursues.
Feds hack past anonymity, bust 72 users of child abuse "horror" site
Raster to Vector Conversion Service
I've gone the contracting route, working mainly with startups and small companies. While it's less secure than a long term gig at an established big company, you tend to get a lot more latitude--minimal paperwork, rules, and bs. All that really matters is that you get stuff done, do good work, and communicate well. The hardest part is getting your foot in the door so you can prove yourself. Once you do, you're set. Startup communities are small and entrepreneurs would much rather go with the recommendation of a friend/colleague than any other method. If you can get people what they need, you can pretty much set all the other terms, including charging a lot, and you'll still get as much work as you can handle.

As far as getting that foot in the door, go to where the entrepreneurs are. Go to meetups, conferences, anywhere entrepreneurs and web-minded people congregate, and talk with people about their work and ideas. With Android, you definitely have a skill that's highly in demand. If you show intelligence and enthusiasm, it's very possible you'll get offers on the spot. Hope that helps.
>> Reality-- most scientists don't support that theory.

Citation needed.

Anecdotally I think the statement about software developers in general being anti-software patent is true, but especially OSS developers - you really think this is incorrect?
Your point was that google hasn't sued anyone, which is pretty much a non sequitur without the assumption that this would've remained the case if they'd won the Nortel bidding.

Which, really, is just a covert "what if" game.
Video of a comet crashing into the Sun
> but traditionally many servers were purchased per-role.

This tradition started ~98, with Microsoft. Before that, when servers were Suns, IBM and Digital, every server had lots of roles.

Somehow, microsoft convinced the world that it's better to have one server per role (and pay them for some more licenses).
How to Recruit a Technical Co-Founder for Your Startup
Thanks much. I'll join and keep an eye out.
In my mind, SICP is better as a capstone, senior course. Think about all of us who defend it. Do we think that we could reach a better audience with that message if the audience were seniors looking for a summary/enlightenment, rather than freshmen exploring CS and engineering applications?

Indeed. I read SICP while in grad school w/ the online lectures. Frankly, I'm not sure I would have appreciated SICP nearly as much in my freshman year. With that said UCB and MIT are probably the two places you'd expect to find freshman that would appreciate it. But given the fact that the text is freely available online, and there are great lectures available for free online, it might be reasonable to say that for the inquiring student, they can use MIT's Open Courseware.

Here's an interesting direction to take SICP: http

The link you posted is dead. I'm interested in what it is. Could you post a new link?
From employers perspective, remote working doesn't gives confidence, if they doesn't have faith in employee.
And its really difficult to have faith on any new / average employee.
Http://www.echina24.com
My question is how would they deal with light as soon as it gets dark?
Good point, but could you argue that those Americans that would renounce their citizen ship are already hiding that income in untaxable locations already?

I wonder if it would be a wash, you suddenly up the tax, and everyone that was ducking anyway leaves and the rest get taxed and fill the void.

All speculation of course, none of us would have numbers to know.
It's been down the past few hours. They've been HN'd (or YC'd or w/e analogue to /. )
Not all of them use flash local storage objects maliciously, however. Many of them use local storage objects to actually track user preferences which is how they are intended to be used.
This is my hunch, as well. You can make a 5% coupon easily available for anyone who searches on Google, and bake it into your pricing. Customers feel they got a deal, and you keep the flexibility to use larger coupons for specific promotions.

I haven't tried this yet, but I am planning to give it a shot once I launch the app I'm working on. It seems to work for GoDaddy, at any rate!

I strongly suspect that we wouldn't be reading this post if the author had found a working coupon as the first result when searching for "product X coupon".
Offer HN: Legal advice over video chat [form]
Offering legal advice to startups over video chat at a rate of $100 - $150 per half hour. Expert attorney specializing in startups.
自然堂
Mapnificent: shows area of reach via public transport in a given time
Winamp creator releases REAPER v4 digital audio workstation software
They're also used extensively in games for a variety of reasons (saved games, local scores, inventory, etc).
Testing and finding the right methods for your individual audience is the best thing you can do.

I am just not a fan of showing a distraction to someone willing to give you money.
Is it supposed to be blank?

I would guess it's because I use "Click-To-Enable" for plugins in Chrome. Your battery, sanity and page responsiveness will thank you. (Not suggesting that CtE blocks this, just that much of it's probably an unnecessary result of Flash ads, etc on pages where you're not even using the Flash content)
The link was the 6.945 course at MIT. As I understand it, it's SICP used in a graduate course. It still shows up on google if you search 6.945.

For the truly inquiring student, there's also a planned self-paced version of the course that may also include an honors option to dive deeper than what we can do in 61A (aka, SICP/6.001).
How is that relevant? Nortel's patents do not represent the cases where Android borrowed from iPhone, if they did, then they would be Apple's patents wouldn't they? These patents were being violated by BOTH parties, and one happens to own them now.
I switched from puppy-525 default desktop to xfce - what an awsome os!
I disagree with your interpretation. The collection of expressive elements such as icons seems copyrightable in aggregate as much as any of the individual elements. What that decision says is not copyrightable is an organization of data (including choice of words that would struggle to qualify as expressive). If they had allowed the copyright on that then things like logical taxonomies would also be copyrightable. User interfaces not built with a platform's standard interface elements are more akin to works of art and can be expressive and assuming it was copyrightable then determining if a clone was infringing would depend on if it was a true clone or if there was some transformative change.

I'm not sure what is accepted case law, but the cited case seems much narrower to me than you are implying.
What about individual sites that use evercookie for their own purposes, even if it's not for tracking? There's still the lack of respect for browser settings and "wasted bandwidth" as they claim... but it's not necessarily (perceived) as "malicious".
There's not necessarily a car approaching head on at all. It's about someone passing more aggressively than expected (keeping much closer to the passed car than is normal in western countries, for example) causing the passed car to freak out and swerve away, into another car. All the cars involved are going in the same direction.
Good god. I took Sussman's course when SICP was still in the notes phase. I never would have predicted that it would have such a following almost 30 years later.
Most days* :

5:00am - 10:00am

* OS development
* puzzles
* articles
* work on personal projects

10:00am - 6:00pm

* coding for my day job

13hr/day * 5 days/week = 65hrs
+ anything I can sneak in on weekends

I aggressively work on work/life balance and take frequent breaks (a great habit leftover from my days as a smoker), so I don't spend much time staring at the screen -- I use this time fairly efficiently.

* I'm getting back on track after my wedding and honeymoon, so I'm not yet completely back in the groove yet.
Agreed, It seems like someone should research a company a little more before he judges what kind of employee their looking for.
Use the original title:

"Study: Android is least open of open source mobile platforms"
Dive into Haskell with whatever interests you. Try solving some Project Euler problems (http://projecteuler.net). Or, maybe web programming suits your fancy (http://snapframework.com). If you're more visual you might play around with these exercises which don't even require you to install anything.

http://pnyf.inf.elte.hu/fp/FunctionGraphs_en.xml

http://pnyf.inf.elte.hu/fp/Diagrams_en.xml

Others here: http://pnyf.inf.elte.hu/fp/Overview_en.xml
Heh. I agree. But while you're telling that to the Linux guys, remember to tell it to both the Windows 8 and OSX Lion designers as well.
I looked at it and thought, "easy, I'll just rewrite the Scheme function in Mercury and tell the compiler to memoize the function."

Of course, obviously the point of the exercise is to encourage thinking about how a computer actually performs computations, which is in a linear, imperative fashion. In that case, why use Scheme in the first place? Its syntax and semantics encourage exactly the opposite style of programming, and in my opinion, obstruct the learning process in this kind of problem.

To make an analogy, teaching this problem using Scheme is like teaching someone how to bake a cake using an unplugged Kitchenaid. The Kitchenaid would work great if it was plugged in, but it's not, so you have to push the beater around by hand. Why not just use a hand beater in the first place? [Scheme would work great for this problem if it had memoization, but it doesn't, so you have to solve the problem as if you were using Python. Why not just use Python in the first place?]
Echoing what rayiner said - where are the rich going to go?

Europe is less friendly to the rich - extremely so in the most pleasant of places. China? India? Neither are very pleasant places, and even with truckloads of cash has a hard time competing with the quality of life enjoyed in the US even under onerous taxation.

I think you're not giving enough credit to the American quality of life - it's why my family immigrated here from Asia. While developing Asian countries have seem dramatic improvements in the last two decades, the QOL in most of these countries still pales in comparison.

Just about anywhere someone used to the Western quality of life would want to go would have higher taxes.
My interpretation of this "slight" is that Warren Buffett uses money as a measure of success. It does not imply any sort of lifestyle just that he strives to be more successful and that means having more dollars. After having read a biography on Mr. Buffett I agree with OP on this and disagree that it is "unmerited and undeserved"
Damn, I feel like I'm really missing out having only been through a community college for CS. This is exactly what I need.

I don't know if anyone else posted this already...

SICP full-text online: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/
There is a fundamental flaw in this argument.

People choose to spend a lot of time watching nyan cat. I don't believe that their quality of life is actually improved by this.

Zynga is very good at delivering games that cause compulsive over-playing. I don't think that Farmville has improved the world.

Going back farther, a lot of people choose to smoke, yet are very clear that they would be happier if they could make the opposite choice.

Just because people choose to do X does not mean that X is good for those people.
Youtube uses it to store manual volume level otherwise they default to 100%.
A better alternative is to pre-fill the form with a "standard" discount, or have that code somewhere nearby. Coupon codes work wonders for tracking off site promotions. Are people finding you from a blog, a magazine article, a special event, or what? Having specific coupon codes for each let's you measure the effectiveness of campaigns you otherwise wouldn't be able to accurately measure.
It makes perfect sense that most people in the top 0.1% are associated with the financial and banking industries if you know how banks work. Banks, and the Federal Reserve, create new money. They give this money to themselves, and then loan it out. This is as bad as, and effectively equivalent to, counterfeiting. Creating new money, i.e. counterfeiting, i.e. inflation, does not create new wealth. It merely changes the distribution of the purchasing power of the money away from most people who have the money and to the people who get the new money. This is where the wealth of the top 0.1% comes from. Freshly printed money. It is a terrible system. The people with the highest wealth are not contributing in proportion to their wealth. Rather, they are stealing their wealth from the bottom 99.9% by stealing their purchasing power by printing new money.

If you would like to read a thorough argument about how fractional reserve banks and the Federal Reserve are scams, read "The Mystery of Banking" by Murray Rothbard. Google it and you will see it is available for free at mises.org.

For some reason this subject is very polarized and I get downvoted whenever I explain this. Don't downvote me just because you are uncomfortable with what I'm saying. Note that I am not ignorant. I have learned about economics. It just so happens that when trying to understand the issues myself, I have arrived conclusions that are not mainstream. But they are the correct conclusions in so far as I presently understand.