skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of his supporting arguments cuts both ways.

Apple's patent on "hand scaling velocity" simply gives a mathematical formula for the sentence: "scale at a speed proportional to how fast the fingers are moving."

There is nothing groundbreaking or advanced about the math here, or the idea behind it. Anyone implementing a multi-touch screen is likely to come to discover that a fixed scaling speed sometimes feels sluggish or awkwardly fast, and so that speed should adjust based on user input. And now, without realizing it, they've infringed on Apple's IP and are open to being sued.
On your last remark, I've come to realize this assumption is false. Two points: (1) In the same way that hackers have practiced thinking like hackers all their lives, gifted business people have been practicing what they do well since a very young age. (2) What makes it "hard" for business people to learn to code may not be that it's hard to learn, but that the ROI isn't great enough.
The problem is that those charts comparing memory usage all refer to future versions, so I have no idea how it'll compare to 5, the current version that I need to restart every 3 days to clean its memory usage.
"Apple's app policies" pretty much state if you play in our ecosystem, you do so entirely to keep it holistic. Of course they are a business and these policies ensure that their "walled garden" is maintained, much in the same way Amazon's ebook DRM does for them.

RDIO did the smart thing and adopted in-app purchasing w/ a surcharge if you do it in-app. The intention seems to be "pay for the convenience" as well as making sure their ARPU is intact regardless of method.

That being said: has anyone calculated what the per-transaction overhead would be if a developer wanted to institute in-app purchasing themselves? Considering Apple handles CC processing, chargebacks, customer service on the purchase, verification, etc?
Show Me the $$$: The Who's Who of Check Writers for Startups in Canada
Just like with any online survey, remember that the survey results are utterly meaningless. There is self selection bias for one. Even the initial post title for this survey was "How much does external API integration suck? (survey)". Thus you are already inviting only developers that really hate using external API's, for one reason or another (maybe they are gasp bad developers).

You also had timing bias: the post got only 20 upvotes, so it likely did not stay on the front page for that long. For the few hours it was there, most of the developers around the world were asleep or away from HN.

That is not to say, that your results are not interesting/thought provoking. Just pointing out that they are most likely not statistically significant in any way. As in, don't say "we should take pain X away because it got more votes than pain Y".
Microsoft, Sony Sued Over Storing Player Preferences
>They typically state that they live far away because they don't want work to consume their lives

People typically have long commutes because they a) can't find suitable employment within a reasonable distance of their existing home, or b) can't afford to live within reasonable distance of where they work. Not everyone can simply pick up and move. In a two-income household, it's a balance in commute distance for both parties. Some people would rather commute an hour for work and live near family. Some people simply can't sell their homes. I've never, however, heard anyone say that they live far away because they don't want work to consume their lives.
It seems likely that the majority of the industry will follow suit, particularly when they realise that no one else is willing to give Apple such a large share of their profits for simply hosting their apps.

But Apple is doing more than "simply hosting their app" they are facilitating payments as well.
nodata told you. Highlight characters not expected in my locale. My locale right now is en_US.utf-8. In security-sensitive contexts like file names and domain names, it's not actually that hard to figure out which characters are a surprise for me. And if I have a file that is named entirely in non-ASCII-subset characters... which I do... then light them all up. It's OK. It won't be hard for users to figure out what's going on, even if only subconsciously.
I believe most people in the name spinner business use a cached zone file rather than doing live lookups. Perhaps look in to that.
When explaining becomes a sin
What software do they use for FTP? Cyberduck? FileZilla? WinSCP? They can keep using those. Just tell them how to generate an ssh key or set one up for them.
I've been using Rackspace Cloud for ~6 months. No complaints so far.
Forcing one or more digits has little value. You are better off with 1 uppercase one lower case and 2 non alphabet characters. (Users are very likely to be replacing a letter with 1,0 so 2options * 8posistions = 16 possibility's = fail.)
Check out the second example, where you can have a .exe file show up as a .jpg, which is much, much nastier.
It's funny to think that a hapless vimmer who happens to be running Windows would have never noticed this, because they would simply have typed ":edit $SYSTEMROOT\system32\drivers\etc\hosts" and gotten the real file.

(This isn't a "look how cool command line junkies are" comment; I was just musing.)
The title is about software patents, but the text had almost nothing to do with software as distinct from other technologies.
It turns out that you are mistaken.

Your favorite book is almost certainly chosen from the 129 million books that Google knows about: http://www.fastcompany.com/1678254/how-many-books-are-there-...

That gives you 27 bits of entropy.

The average book length is probably not over 400 pages. An average page probably doesn't have over 25 sentences on it. So the whole book contains only ten thousand sentences.

That gives you 14 more bits of entropy.

The total is 41 bits of entropy. This is one-eighth as secure as a 4-gram composed of random words from a corpus of 2k, if we measure strictly by entropy.

The situation is actually much worse, though: your favorite book is probably a popular book. So the number of bits of entropy provided by the choice of book might be a lot smaller than 27. I would guess that it's perhaps 10.

And many of those 129 million books are not very different. They contain quotes from other books, reprinted short stories, folk tales, set phrases, and so on.

In practice I think it might be difficult to mount a password-guessing attack using the Google Books corpus, because it's hard to get access to that corpus. The Project Gutenberg corpus would not be so hard.
TwitchTV Growing Like Crazy
I've started using song lyrics when given the option of an extra-long password. I can get a very long string with little effort, and it's trivial to remember.

The best part is that any automated attack would have to deal with ringtone popups.
I'm aware of od, xxd, etc.

I'm wondering if there's a way to make it more obvious that doesn't require running od. It should be immediately apparent any time there's a file with a whacky name, not something you find out two minutes into investigating a compromise.
Can someone summarize what the hell this guy's point is? I read 5 different paragraphs closely and skimmed the rest (he needs an editor) and can't figure out what he's saying, besides calling people who have a beef with software patents "lazy".

What's his solution to Intellectual Ventures, et al? One of the paragraphs I did read compared them to buying up land in the middle of town and setting up a strip mine. Which isn't a favorable comparison and, incidentally, we have zoning laws against that.
How common? Pretty common. I actually considered trying to make a business model of building low content/automated sites and monetizing through these guys. The amount they pay in general beats adsense by a factor of 10 (or 100) on a low traffic site. Their interest is the link, most sites with no maintenance or work are getting low/no traffic but may still have ranking weight. So it's an easy way to make them profitable.

Consider WP Blog + cheap hosting + domain. We're talking costs of ~$10 per site. You take average $150/year on an ad. You only need 1/15 sites to get approached to make this profitable. I'd say I get approached 5-10 times per year on 30-40 sites. The math is mildly attractive if I lived in a low cost country.
Here is a way to fix patents:

When you apply for a patent you have to show plans for producing the thing and and the price per license to give it out (no upper limit so if you want to only produce, set it to $10^24). For every year that you don't produce the thing and nobody licenses it, the officially recorded license price gets halved. For every year that someone does license it or you produce the thing, you get to adjust the price to whatever you want. Thus companies like Lodsys can only hold onto an unused patent for a fixed number of years before it becomes irrelevant.

Obviously the timing is not ideal: a better half-life for an unused patent might need to be adjusted. However, I think there is something to this idea.

Edit: A better way to determine the half-life would be to tie it to the initial price or the price at the time of reduction. Basically, no matter how high you start out, if you are a patent troll, your patent expires in 5 years.
Correlation is not causation. While his sleep patterns could have caused the problem it may have just happened at the same time.
Thanks to Apple I will never have to re-derive first order finite difference formulas!
I think I saw these in a TED talk video a while back...
"Shouldn't be too hard to build such app with existing Facebook API."

But not with the current T&C. Developers can access friends' photos, but cannot store them. Even relationships between users can only be cached for a modest period of time, not stored.
Ending the war will cut onto spending but what are you going to do with all the soldiers out of a job. Don't forget that the military de facto works as social welfare. So you will have to figure out what to do with them.

Someone have to pick up the bill and I have a hard time seeing who that could be besides the american taxpayers.

And just because it hasn't been done before is obvious no natural law
Uh oh, France: On the Brink of a Downgrade?
The U.S. debt crisis, Greek default and Italian/Spanish woes have, for the most part, allowed France to fly under the radar for some time. Only when investors took notice that the cost of insuring against a French default was rising did it finally click that France could be in more trouble than most countries being scrutinized. As it stands today, France is the fourth largest debtor in the world and that is rapidly escalating ($1.7 trillion and counting). Last year, France ran a deficit of 7% of GDP. Debt / GDP will total around 90% this year, and is expected to hit 95% by 2012. That’s around the same levels that earned the U.S. a downgrade. To compound its increasing debt load, France enjoys a government similar to the U.S. - there are separate elections for the President and the legislature which creates an environment of intransigence and dysfunction (ring a bell?). Additionally, President Sarkozy is extremely unpopular (he scores in the mid 20’s in polls) which is making it difficult to enact needed reforms. On top of this, any bailout of Spain/Italy will mostly be paid for by France and Germany. Germany, at the moment, can afford this. France, on the other hand, can’t. Once you add Spanish and Italian debt to its balance sheet, France looks in terrible shape.

Many are speculating that a potential downgrade to France’s credit rating is on the horizon. Some analysts believe it is just a matter of time before France gets notched by the S&P. To be sure, this will be a huge psychological blow to the already fragile markets. But it’s effects will be more than just psychological. French debt is far more widely held than other countries - 38% of French debt is held internationally (compare this to Italy at 24%, U.S. at 21%, and Japan at 2%). Thus, any French downgrade will have significant impact on the global financial markets. France’s hope to avoid a downgrade will likely depend on its ability to implement planned spending cuts and budget measures to bolster its fiscal standing. Anything below spectacular is not likely to end well.
The Ecommerce Solution You’ll Find Refreshing
yeah, but Iron Man didn't have a big tether he dragged around. Battery tech seems like it is really the limiting factor in usefulness here.
See also the discussion from a few days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2864565
This is definitely a great book. But be aware that every lawyer and VC worth their salt has read this as well.
I've noticed some multi-variant testing on some of the design elements, and have rolled things out to beta testers first in the past, is there anything juicy behind the scenes powering these features?
The other comments are really spot on (Yc as a VC incubator and cost being almost neagative except for the opportunity cost that get it back to zero),
But the most often overlooked point is the fact that, thanks to the "almighty facebook", an previously unbelievable share of the world population is now trained and ready to use interface tools that belonged until know the geek realm.
The barrier to user adoption for software as been reduced to zero: anyone is ready to use software as long as it feels a need.
Poor headline writing on the article. It is all about Countrywide emails, not Bank of America emails. After the events in the emails, which led to Countrywide's failure, BofA bought them.
Red Hat Expands OpenShift Platform as a Service with Java EE6 and Membase
This is probably not as secure as the xkcd scheme if you don't make up the phrase yourself. See my comment above with calculations about a variant of this scheme. I suspect that both of your example phrases are among the million most quoted phrases in the English language, giving them entropy of under 20 bits.
An interesting article, but I think its main point can be summed up as "Look at all these dumbos holding signs saying to end slavery, when interviewed they can't even give good reasons! Haha, here's a few reasons why slavery is actually good!"

Nearly every big cause, right or wrong, has its supporters that may have just happened to be on that side, or thought about it seriously once and have since forgotten the details, or indeed have written many essays or books about the subject. I'm sure there are pieces more elegant and detailed than this that argue for abolishing the patent system; characterizing a position by the existence of uninformed supporters seems useless to me since pretty much all positions have those. The sentiment of educating the masses is nice, and I can agree with it, but on the other hand this is why we have skill specialization--I can give some money to someone who has spent lots and lots of time on the issues to continue their fight, I don't have to spend the same amount of time myself.

I know basic algebra looks brilliant to most ordinary people scared of math but I thought "Patents publicly disclose some of the most advanced work ever done by some of the most creative and resourceful people in history, and it’ll all be free for the taking in several years" particularly amusing after the Apple screenshot. For startups and other companies outside the Valley (where there's a strong sense of sharing), how often do actual game-changing things get patented instead of made into a trade secret?
First of all, there is no such thing as a contract CTO. If you are contract then you don't have a title or any stake in the company, ask for market wages for your skill set and experience. For 80-120 an hour you are a Sr programmer with expert level experience in your specific field as an independant contractor. Note, this doesn't mean you've built 2 websites with Rails and don't know shit about scale or performance. If they have no other technical people on staff and are BS'ing you with a title, run away, this isn't going to work out for you.
> Finally I have two blank desktops that tend to get eaten up by tabs that I use when people come into my office asking questions that I don't know the precise answer to off the top of my head.

Why do you keep the tabs open after you've answered their question?
It would be interesting to check to see what David Cameron said in response to North African governments like Egypt who did the same thing this year.
New York to LA in less than 12 minutes
Came here to suggest this site as well.
Android Patent Trouble Worsens: Motorola Considers Collecting IP Royalties
Satire much?
Standard and Poors was right to downgrade U.S. debt
How Small Businesses Engage in Ecommerce [Infographic]
His main idea is that the way software patents are classified now does not make sense. He then suggests that a new class of patents be created just for software with special rules and regulation.

I'm not too sure why his title blames people because in the end he ends up blaming the current laws.
Interesting TED talk/demonstration of the technology created by a different company.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLnOPA7oMxY
You know there is wireless communications other than cell and satellite.
Doh. Thanks, Andrew. Fixed!
I'm surprised they wouldn't prefer to leave them up but subpoena the data afterwards (or even require realtime backdoor access to it).
Most likely, VCs are thinking about how much their investors will give them. If they could splash out in a recession, they would, but they can't. If they don't have much money to play with, they may be better off protecting the best startups that they have already invested in.
Don't know if you'd accept this as proof: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent#Rationale
Wouldn’t a means-tested Social Security system be subject to fraud?
I agree with that statement, but many times, people might not realize that they are sharing their phone number or some other piece of personal information with the world. I only recently signed up to develop Facebook Applications, and they required me to verify my account by giving them my mobile number so they could text me a code. In doing so, this tied my cell phone number to my account and broadcast it to the world until I checked to make sure it was not doing so a day later.
> Chrome becomes very unhappy under such circumstances (since it uses about ~100 MiB per tab)

You must be looking at very media heavy sites, then. Looking at Chrome's task manager (shift-escape opens it), my per-tab memory usage ranges between ~2.4MB (HN pages) to ~44MB (a youtube video). The root process is using 120MB, GPU process 50MB, and Flash 94MB. So, in total, for 20 tabs I'm using 545MB, or 27.25MB/tab. A far cry from "~100 MiB per tab".

Note that I'm on Windows 7 x64; while you may be entirely correct about Chrome on your platform of choice, it sounds like FUD to me.
Disruptor - Concurrent Programming Framework
Apple files against Motorola for Xoom design
Ha! I couldn't bear it either.
Out of all the articles about patents that get posted on HN, this is one of the most knowledgeably written I've seen.
With the exe as jpg example, it'd be even more misleading if the exe used a photo for an icon, launched the photo viewer app for a matching jpg photo, and launched an insidious process in the background. Even harder to detect from whence the malware came.
Is it me or is there a mistake in the cited part of that patent too:

"where d(FI[n],FO[n]) is the squared Euclidean distance between the fingers"

The formula that is then given is under a square root, i.e. it is the Euclidean distance NOT the squared Euclidean distance.
what should companies do when they are subject to two mutually exclusive laws? they don't really have a choice: they need to break one of the laws, and pay the penalty for that. the only question is which law to break, and the answer to that is the one with fewer consequences.

The EU must enact sanctions against google for this, if they don't they are essentially letting all multinationals know that EU laws are less important than American laws.
Not bad, thanks!
Douglas Crockford: Weight-loss & Beating Sleep Apnea
Finding signal: Humans vs Machines
Facebook Wins “Worst API” in Developer Survey
Ok, so software patents as presently litigated are the problem. Thanks.

I thought he was going to blame people for exploiting poorly written laws, in which case I was going to offer to sell him a bridge somewhere.
The era of Internet anonymity is over
This won't work in this case, since the verification code is emailed to the number as an SMS message (11235551234@mycarrier.net), which Google Voice numbers do not support.
There's a comment on slide 43 about finding a way to replay access logs. Siege is a great tool for this, as it takes a URLs file as an argument.

You can get a list of URLs from your apache access log with

cut -d ' ' -f7 /var/log/apache2/access.log > urls.txt

And then hammer your test server with

siege -c<concurreny rate> -f urls.txt
definitely negotiate acceleration on vesting for any situation where you leave before the cliff, or there is liquidity. do not be flexible on this point. my guess is you're also going to be asked to take a 20-50% haircut on market rate.
Not necessarily. If only one-fourth of all English words are grammatical after an average prefix, then you lose two bits of entropy off each word after the first. I suspect that the actual situation is not as bad as that. You might end up using "uncommon" words like "deceased", "advent", "fearful", and "ram" to compensate, instead of more common words like "strongly", "contains", "afterwards", and "corporate", but that doesn't seem like a major loss to me.
If Title 35 was a good description of what the US patent system was like in practice then our patent system would still be working.
Zediva shuts down
This isn't a big deal for me. If they would've asked, I would've let them. Now, not so much.
If Django makes too many things official, installing it will become a pain for some people, especially newbies.

They have to walk a careful line in that regard, and I think they made the right call on offline docs.
This would prevent the economic separation of inventor from producer. That separation is key for specialization and therefore economic efficiency.

There's no reason that a scientist/inventor in a laboratory is going to be any good at running a business selling his invention, just like there's no reason a farmer is (or should be) any good at running a grocery store. It's much more efficient for the farmer to simply sell his produce wholesale to the distributors so he can concentrate on farming.

Don't take offense at this, but I think this idea (that the problem with the patent system is the separation of inventor and producer) is especially prevalent within the start-up community. Such entrepreneurs are used to thinking of the entire process as occurring in their figurative basement: identification of the problem, invention, patenting, production, and sales. When this is possible, it's awesome...but it's not usually possible. In many industries/disciplies, each one of these steps is done by a different person (who are very good at it because they are specialized) so it is crucial that they are able to capture their value-added at each step.
except for when things go wrong and they just say "I'm using firefox and your site is broken".
Could someone help identify why Firefox saves and keeps such a ridiculous number of Cache folders in \\Application Data\...\Profiles\... They're all 0, 1, 2...and then 01, 0A, 0B. I mean, what's the point here?
I have been using a Mirra fulltime for more than 2 years. When my former employer was getting new offices and furniture, I piggybacked on their chair order so I could get a discount on two chairs for the home office.

I now work from home and think it was one of the best investments I've made in myself. The chair is very comfortable and they adjust very well for tall or very short people (my wife).

Rating: Would buy again
Also, he talks about how patents of well known things aren't a problem, because current law prohibits that.

EDIT: Of course, I don't agree.
Mark Cuban's terrible idea