skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> putting the patents they control into a pool that everyone can join on the agreement that they never sue anyone for patent infringement, and giving everyone in the pool equal ownership of the patents in there.

That's an interesting idea! And they might even put some funds/legal help in there to help protect any member companies from patent suits by others. Then, if anyone is in this pool, they're protected by this NATO-like pact.

This kind of thing could kill software patents, if companies can join easily enough (e.g: Even without contributing patents).

This doesn't solve the problem of patent trolls, though.
This is HTML, and yet this is Lisp. That's an example of Lisp powers in use.
You know information is never truly destroyed.

Information is always destroyed, and the universe uniformly has less net information now than it did a second ago; that's the second law of thermodynamics.
While I'm not a VC, and I don't know enough to comment on how hard the job itself is, I do know that it takes a significant amount of capital. Not everyone and their mom has enough capital, and therefore, they're not in a position to become a VC.

It is plausible that the barrier to entry is high, but the job is easy.
Gaming Apple App Store's Review System (View in iTunes - Read Reviews)
My favourite thing about that link is how it functions both ways. It describes an example of Republicans trying to shift blame onto Democrats, and it is an example of Democrats trying to shift blame onto Republicans.
Click on "View in iTunes" and read through the reviews. The app is currently number one under the paid utilities section. I really don't know how they managed to get there. Fake accounts writing reviews? Mechanical Turk?

FYI: All the app does is change your wallpaper.
I think his point about the language-oriented approach is interesting. My fear is that the create-an-appropriate-DSL-and-your-problem-takes-little-code approach would actually be disastrous if used by mediocre programmers. Instead of having to read their bad code, we'd be stuck trying to read their bad code in their shitty DSLs.

Object-oriented programming probably wouldn't suck so bad if it had stuck to his vision. Objects are great in some circumstances (the biological metaphor of complexity encapsulated behind a simple interface applies) but they've utterly failed as the default means of abstraction. The default abstractions should be (1) pure functions, and (2) simple and sound mutable state primitives (STM, Agents, etc.)
5 important life lessons
Graphical interfaces by definition don't have a chance to communicate with each other, but I'd argue nowadays we have quite strong import/export functionality everywhere, so this problem disappears in most cases.

On another note, you're also stuck with defaults if you happen to use a badly written CLI (takes input from files only, etc).
When you delete your facebook, all you friends who were using this will no longer know your phone number.
Funny how the cross-browser Favicon works
This is a solution for one of those extremely small details regarding your website: the favicon.
Favicons are those semi-forgettable images that are actually a nice finishing touch on any website. But, do it wrong, it’ll end up a mess in your server logs or just plain won’t work everyone visiting your site.
I recently realized how pesky this lil’ file can be while walking a buddy through getting one setup on his site when I realized that I forgot some small but important details how to make one that works and doesn’t cause problems.
Well... we don't have the money Spotify had, but that's another problem. The main inconvenience trying to reach Europe first is that our business model requires a minimum number of users (let's say 200k) and it is much easier to reach that cap if we have global coverage than if we are just in Europe with a very limited budget.
just make sure you don't do stupid things to quiet static code analyzers or compiler warnings.

http://digitaloffense.net/tools/debian-openssl/
Awkward: The Human Condition is a One-liner
There was a comment on the site about this article being a "rip off" of Huxley (once again, wikipedia delivers in spades): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World#Comparisons_wit...

"Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism."
Then it's using SNI, which I linked to. The request is still encrypted, but the host name is passed unencrypted using SNI.
I went to see Ira Glass speak about creativity and storytelling. I was a beautifully crafted speech, and one rhetorical nugget I remember clearly was this:

"Ideas come from other ideas."

He argued that we cannot be creative in isolation, but that if we surround ourselves with high-quality ideas and stories, we are more likely to produce them ourselves. That is what he sees (and strives to create) in public radio.
That's actually quite an interesting parallel you draw. I never considered Fred Rogers and Carl Sagan in the same thought, but despite being in some ways polar opposites, Sagan being a very liberal, science-minded individual, Rogers being a very conservative, faith-minded individual, they had almost more in common, given that these leanings both stemmed from a deep, gently- and eloquently-expressed love and concern for humanity.
How to visualize the competition
A different take on those dreaded "competition" checkbox slides for your VC pitch
Windows Phones Down 38% Since '7' Launch
I'm a little late to this party, but:

Short answer: technology destroys jobs for dumb people and creates jobs for smart people. Until now this has been okay, because there have still been enough dumb jobs for all the dumb people. But as technology continues to progress, we (without genetic engineering or eugenics) run into the point where we have more dumb people than useful things for them to do. There are no jobs doing manual labour, and the dumber members of society aren't smart enough to perform the new jobs of maintaining the robots which do the manual labour for us. What, then, is the use of these people, and what do we do with them?
...on a website that doesn't have a working favicon.
From your first post: There's no reason why Android shouldn't have built up similar IP protection in this time. This is why I say whoever ran their IP strategy should be shown the door. This is a firing offense to find yourself in a position where the only way to protect yourself is not to assert your own IP, but to have to resort to buying IP you didn't create.

This is one of the many things that I (and probably many others) find fundamentally broken with the patent system. If I'm creating my own mobile operating system from the ground up, I shouldn't have to patent anything if I don't want to. Actual innovation comes in the form of lines of code, not numbers of patents. "IP" as you put it is orthogonal to the actual productive work of a company.

Patents, in my view, should be used strictly to prevent a competitor from producing a direct ripoff of a highly specific invention.
Y'know, I've never actually seen much of Cosmos, but I'd like to put in a plug for my favourite 80s documentary series, David Attenborough's Life On Earth.
I wrote a basic sound driven visualization about a year ago using SoundManager, which can be had at http://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/. The demo is here: http://www.getevilgenius.com/. It should work in any browser.

It'd be fairly straightforward to get three.js responding to SM2's level API calls.
Regarding your first point about mediocre programmers: I find this patronizing. True, DSLs have the potential to obscure your code, but so does every construct that allows abstraction - even the humble subroutines ("If mediocre programmers give names like bongoBong() to a subroutine, then how can we tell what the program does?").
All of the companies I have applied to have asked that I spend several hours solving programming problems before giving me an offer. And why shouldn't they? My experience as an interviewer has been that such great things as "decades of industry experience designing and implementing very complex systems", or a Ph.D, or a 4.0 GPA from a top school are only very loosely correlated with whether or not a candidate can code his way out of a paper bag. As such, it is reasonable to think that there is a profit to be made filtering out the >80% of candidates who cannot code their way out of paper bags.

I've never been particularly desperate or unemployed (though I did not have a job while I was in university), and I think that the few minutes necessary to solve any of these problems is a reasonable use of time if it can signal a potential employer that you are more likely to be competent than a huge majority of their applicants. You are correct to say that nepotism is a better way of getting places, but I don't think it is reasonable to expect everyone to do it.
Just as alcohol will make aggressive people more aggressive and friendly people more friendly, cannabis will make aloof people more aloof and empathetic people more empathetic.
Most annoying. It makes no attempts to delete multiple contact data. From all the syncing each non-facebook contact has 13 listings!
If you haven't already seen examples of someone's work before you contact them, maybe you shouldn't be hiring them.

Because obviously all great programmers are expected to have built their online cred before applying for a job, right? I'm sure candidates with background in, say, HFT love sharing their work on their blog, or enjoy hacking on their pet projects after toiling away at their 60+ hour work weeks.
Create a custom RSS 2.0 XML Feed for your WordPress blog
We're talking about the Fukushima disaster, not the Chernobyl disaster. Fukushima has caused no deaths from radiation thus far.
everyone freaks out because "oh man your computer will get hacked in N seconds on the defcon wifi". lets dissect this a little bit.

if i put a computer on the defcon wifi, it'll probably be say, modern linux (ubuntu, debian, or redhat) running either a minimal subset of services (ssh) or perhaps nothing, with firewall policy applied, or a modern windows (windows7) with the firewall on. i'll be using a modern, fully patched web browser, also perhaps with some additional mitigation technology (thought nothing out of the ordinary) think perhaps noscript and EMET.

and also this is the one time of the year when i'm ready for this. every other day of the year i go to the coffee shop i don't know anything about the other randoms there but i assume they're drifting office droids hacking on their excel macros or recruiters cruising linkedin in between meetings.

so, if someone exploits me on the defcon wifi ... where else will that exploit work? everywhere, probably! it's probably a super awesome exploit that has super awesome properties that targets super popular software and is also unpatched. someone owns my openssh 5.3 on my laptop on the defcon wifi ... if i pcap that ... i'm a rich man. i can own boxes like mine.

so ... as a hypothetical attacker, why would i do this? i'm surrounded by people like me. they're alert. they're cautious. and they are the most capable people in the world to detect what i am doing and reveal it to everyone. oh and there are a whole bunch of law enforcement people there too, AND the entire thing happens in a casino which has heavy security and is already wired for sound and audio everywhere you go.

... anyone who is smart enough to be able to own your box at defcon, is also going to be smart enough to realize that they might as well wait until the week after when you're sitting at a coffee shop.
This is especially true when security is involved.
"it only applies for low-contrast backgrounds, like in these examples, for high-contrast backgrounds it doesn't necessarily make scanning harder"

Not sure what you mean... It seems like these examples are very high contrast, no?

There are multiple places where a pixel is (255,255,255) and an adjacent pixel is about (63,63,63), for example.
Thanks. To see protected messages and photos, yes. You are able to toggle protection on and off in real-time so you can easily choose to send simple, less detailed, messages in plain-text and more detailed encrypted.
There may be more than one thing wrong, and one of those things is Google may not be appropriately organized to operate in some of the markets it has chosen to enter - e.g. the mobile phone industry.

This really irks anyone who, like me, believes that the only limitations on a tech company should be from the laws of physics, the current state of technology, and basic ethics (e.g. don't blatantly rip off competitors).

Instead, they appear to have rushed the development of Android without proper due diligence in order to be first to market with (operational and technical merits of Android aside) what could be called an "iPhone knockoff".

Android was under development years before the iPhone was announced. Google bought Android before iPhone development started. The Openmoko project was also announced before the iPhone was announced. The iPhone is simply a single (very good) implementation of an idea that had been brewing in the mind of the Technium.
In that, we are in perctect agreement. With leadership and sane economic policy, the US could still be an economic juggernaut without the need for a military that could take out any two nations on earth simultaneously. It can still be by far the most powerful, without needing to cost as much as the next 8 combined.
The big question I have is, being on a major network owned by a well-known conservative mogul

Murdoch is Australian, and conservatism and Christianity don't have nearly as much overlap as they do in America.

I would be extremely surprised if Murdoch himself were anything other than agnostic/atheist.

Incidentally, I've never been sure why anyone ever thought that religion was supposed to be "reassuring". I was raised Catholic, and all I got from religion was the assurance that God was going to torture me for all eternity if I didn't correctly obey a set of impossible, largely contradictory and incredibly vague rules. That's the least fucking reassuring thing you can tell someone.
17 of The Best Startup Articles On Alltopstartups
At least it is better than getting asked questions about the O-notation of the solution you've just whiteboarded. There has to be a better way...
Yes, it is. I hate it, too. But that doesn't affect the truth of the matter.
Perhaps surprisingly, he's spent a lot of his career defending the First Amendment rights of pornographers. This position he's taken seems to stand out as one of his less reasonable opinions, and may be brought on by the fact that he needs this legal theory to be successful in order to overcome the lack of clear and convincing evidence in the cases he is pursuing for one of his biggest clients.
It's a big decision for anyone to make, in my opinion.
Codility has a great test feature. You can load test data and see if the output is what you expect it to be.
How to promote your mobile app to the right blogs to get publicity
RTFM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech#United_States

"Laws prohibiting hate speech are unconstitutional in the United States, outside of obscenity, defamation, incitement to riot, and fighting words."

Which means if I say "women are all stupid" I should be able to avoid getting sued because of the 1st amendment.

If, however, I decline a job position because someone is female, and she or someone else will be able to _prove it in the fucking court_, then I will be guilty of violating the law in your link.

Do you or do you not see the difference between saying "man, I'd really like to punch someone right now", "I would like to punch >you< in the head", and actually punching somebody in the head?

First is just a general statement, second is a threat, third is violence.

Again, if I say "I don't want to hire women" and then go ahead and employ a woman just because I need an employee and she's qualified, I'm fine in terms of the law. It's similar to me saying "hey, I'd really wish I could rob a bank right now" and then obediently following the law and not robbing a bank.

Please do not step on my freedom of speech in the future.
...a lot of Microsoft's patents were created through old fashioned in-house R&D - exactly the sort of innovation which should be protected.

Only if that "innovation" is actually novel, non-obvious, specific, and useful, and certainly not for 20 years (roughly 13 generations in tech years).

It may have been in Google's interest to turn Andorid into Open Source in October of 2008 due to the liability incurred when Microsoft acquired Danger's patent portfolio earlier in the year.

If Android was always based on the Linux kernel, then they probably had an open source plan from the beginning.

Edit: With Android Google stepped into a mature market for the first time and appears to have committed rookie errors

This sounds like code for "Google stepped into our territory and didn't pay its protection money."
It's almost as if everybody from Jesus Christ to James Madison warned you against mingling religion and government, and you didn't listen.
I wish articles about rare earth mineral use in high-tech devices would be more specific about which minerals are used in what components. They love to say that LCD monitors, cell phones, etc. use rare earth elements, but why, and how?
Well yeah:

// then scramble
var r1, r2;
for( i = 0; i < numpieces>>1; i++ )
{
exchange( Math.random() * numpieces >> 0, Math.random() * numpieces >> 0 );
}

Easily enough fixed by just "manually" sliding a random piece adjacent to the hole a couple thousand or so times, but yeah... Making any sort of game, no matter how simple, is harder than you think :\
If you value your sanity, I'd suggest steering clear of the comments on this article. Although I guess you could say that for comments on most article on CNN.
On second reading, you're right. I'm now trying to decide if I should delete by original comment.
Nuance speech-to-text ‘Dictation’ functionality revealed in iOS 5 beta 5
have any tips for applying? i sent in a resume the other day, but is there anything i can do/write/show to get a leg up on the process?
I think rss is still important since people want to get personalised news. Twitter ofc removed it, wants people to go to their site, it's the wise thing to do.
As far as ff rss removal, really I don't know...
I think that the more information we get in front of us, the more we need tools to help us get what we really need
And the USD became the world's reserve currency.
Thanks. Comment posted to your blog.

The microdata spec is uncommonly level-headed. Devs who are more at home slinging jQuery than they would be writing OWL ontologies could get on top of the spec with little effort.

Efforts like schema.org will only help push microdata into the mainstream.
I totally agree.

Last year I interviewed at two YC companies, AirBnB and Heroku. At AirBnB the interview went great, but then I was given a 3 hour programming challenge that including a written analysis of my code. The challenge was not at all related at all to building web apps, and even the use of a database was not allowed to be used to solve the problem.

At Heroku, we discussed a real issue they were having and halfway through the interview we were both up at the whiteboard bouncing things back and forth, drawing things up. At the end of the Heroku interview we both knew how the other worked and how we would work together.
If you're blackhat, sure. But I'd venture to guess that a good portion, as greyhats, are there to do just what this article suggests: raise awareness of new potential threats, claim bragging rights, and improve security for all.
I've never seen it used that way except from our marketing staff. Any technologist should know better.
That's well put. The internet provides us with a vast pool of borderline-interesting activities, and almost nothing of actual interest.

This comment was borderline-interesting for me to write. I hope it was borderline-interesting for you to read as well.
Thanks!
My finance buddies in IB/PE like to say that finance is the only portion of econ that actually works. The braindead portion = econ minus finance, is only good for academia, a shot at the Nobel and a job at the treasury :)

I actually think econ is a huge distraction net-net, because of the compelling number of contradictory narratives that cannot obviously all be simultaneously true. In that event, the only objective function is the asset price. In that sense, its important to latch on to asset prices and functions of those prices, understand how the slopes of those functions change, and then understand how the vector sum changes if you take a bunch of those products in tandem. Personally, I've been able to protect my portfolio only by not getting distracted by the underlying economic explanations( assuming those are even valid, given the dubious nature of the source ie. right-wing economist vs left-wing vs freshwater economist vs saltwater vs libertarian vs pseudo-socialist vs social-democratic vs conservative vs religious-conservative vs fiscal-conservative vs 100 other flavors ) and just focus on market indices that matter and derivatives that hedge those indices in case things go south.

I will go out on a limb and claim that if you spend $100 subscribing to 4 trading forums/chatrooms ( whether day-trading or swing-trading or commodities or derivatives or fx ), you are saving yourself a lot of grief than if you spend the same $100 buying econ publications. Atleast the former opinions can be validated by simply buying/selling whatever asset they advocate ( not necessarily with real $, just paper-trade ). The latter cannot be validated at all. I remember attending a lecture where the reputed economist says unemployed people must be taxed at a higher rate because they are consuming oxygen but not paying revenue towards the GDP! That is actually very sound economics from some bizzaro school of thought ( http://healthcare-economist.com/tag/oxygen-tax/ ) taken to its logical conclusion! Rather than think about this dismally depressing scenario, tell me the price of such oxygen contracts and I'll see if the market is sufficiently liquid so I can take a position in those contracts :)
I think this is applicable:

"when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow exclude people. so create."
-Why The Lucky Stiff
Was expecting rather huge project and got 650 lines of python. Impressive.
What’s coming up in Google+
There's a subtle difference between "sharing" (which I was talking about) and "syncing." The examples in the previous comment focused on sharing (music sharing, photo sharing) and thus were really about the magic of cloud storage like S3, not anything unique added by Dropbox.

You're absolutely right that syncing is a classically hard problem that Dropbox has addressed impressively well for consumers.
Tangentially related to post. Don Norman's essay on how command lines are better suited in a graphical world for various reasons. (of course a lot of us here feel this here already).

http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/ui_breakthrough-command_line_inter...
I like this one.

I read about writing DSLs in Scala and then tried to backport as much as I could to good 'ol Java.

Now I write Java that looks like it's half LISP and half COBOL and I'm pretty happy with it, I don't even complain about null.
I was Google employee No 59
by owning random boxes on the wifi? no, "claiming bragging rights" is what onstage demos are for :P
Invite Your Friends To Google+ With A Shareable Link