skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why not just have all companies pledge not to settle frivolous patent suits? The way the trolls make their money is by realizing that its cheaper for these companies to settle than to duke it out in court. The lawyers don't even care if you aren't infringing because it really doesn't matter. The trolls survive because people aren't willing to fight it out against them and they can pick on the weaker and smaller companies. If everyone said at the outset, "I will fight to the death a frivolous patent suit with all of my resources" the trolls would run out of easy targets.
What’s the Value of Free?
Tests show fastest way to board passenger planes
interesting offer - will definitely send you a message once we launch:)
I think that approach used to be more relevant before cheap 100+MHz CPU's, interactive IDE's, and the web. Now days most developers need to focus on API's far more than the language and operate in a more abstract environment. People spend far more time writing boilerplate code to leverage powerful system and care far less about how those systems work. Most of the day to day problems relate more to these systems than the actual problem so people spend far more time reading how other developers solved the same problem than writing code from scratch.

Granted some people are still working on embedded systems and low level networking code etc, but that's hardly the default.

PS: Today I needed to break out a decompiler because a client lost the source code on a small website. When exactly does that show up in an interview?
This absolutely impacts performance for JS code in general, but has no performance impact whatsoever for WebGL demos like this. All of the work happens within the shader -- the entire goal of the WebGL code is to compile the shader, set parameters on it, and draw two triangles per frame. Everything else happens there. Removing all these tricks might get you -- at most -- a 1 fps boost.
The PNG bit was my favorite. That's just wild.
You can't make this claim without know how it would have done with the alternative design. All you can say is that it's design didn't kill it.
hear hear! Also, wasn't it supposed to be ported to websql (or since that dies, to IndexedDB)?
Not when you're trying to hit a size limit. At that point, performance is only a secondary concern.
gmail does not allow executable attachments - even when zipped, it will inspect the inside of the zip file and reject the executable.
Justice Department Lawsuit Could Kill ATT, T-Mobile Merger
Is there a way for other companies to make the pledge from that site? Or is this limited to friends of PG for now?
Shopping Of World
shopping,tienda de ropa y grandes descuentos,bonos,ofertas y nuevos articulos en shoppingofworld.com
How do you know that it is the design that sells it? Did you A/B test with the native controls vs your controls?
I personally think that its sometimes the small details that make up the man (sorry, or woman!) and because Steve Jobs is seen as such a success people want to look at what he does partly to look for traits to emulate and naturally partly as curiosity. Yes, there are elements here which are purely 'celebrity' but the interesting thing for me about some of these stories is just how 'ordinary' the guy is. I read one article about his house which is not ostentatious at all. There's a lot that can be learned from people like this and you have the choice to read (or not read) them.
Great idea pg but what exactly does it fix? After you have 26 employees they will take you down like before the pledge. What can a company with 26 employees do against a arsenal of lawyers and patents? Do you think after having 26 employees you should have enough money to counter the attack?
The Economy, Viewed as It Should Be
Well done Pawel, love the UI, too!
The thing is, does software innovation happen in companies? Yes, but also no: universities and free software also play a role.

Patents are largely a problem of companies buying government. But what about the people?
Chandler's Culinary Festival
have you read the 1st paragraph of the page you linked to ? That seems to exclude a lot of use cases:

"These software licenses are provided for use at your company’s primary business location only and must be used only for internal business purposes, conducting demonstrations with your customers, and training your employees. These licenses may not be used for direct revenue-generating activities (such as website or e-mail hosting, or custom solution development for monetary compensation). They also cannot be resold or used for personal reasons. "

>gives me 10 seats of a lot of cheap software including Windows 7 Pro

Huh? reading down the page:

"Windows 7 licenses are upgrade licenses only."
Not necessarily a meager payout. They don't want to kill the host (as per PG's essay), but non-practicing entities are much more likely to swing for the fences - asking for, litigating toward, and receiving large damage awards. They have less to lose.
Minor correction: Identicons were created by Don Park who open sourced a Java implementation. Scott adapted it for WordPress and gives credit to Don credit for the idea in your link[2]:

"A couple weeks ago I made a WordPress plugin to generate unique monsters for each commenter. Don Park came up with the original idea for representing users with geometric shapes. Since I already had the framework in place I thought I’d make a WordPress plugin for the original geometric Identicons."
An author, as opposed to just someone who has written something, is someone whose writings people are willing to pay for. In the original post's discussion of Wikipedia, for example, there is no authorship involved, and I for one would not be willing to pay anything for access to Wikipedia. It is convenient when I am online, sometimes, but to me it is not worth spending any of my resources on. On the other hand, I have thousands of books, all of which I have spent money and time acquiring, every one of which has a known author or authors that produced the work.
Actually the problem may be that OS user interfaces, for all their native functionality, have not kept pace with browsers at showing text and images on a screen. Hypertext is an innovation that is hard to ignore.
Thank god for Git.
New Helmet Technology Could Improve Post-Trauma Treatment
18 million hits/day with 120 MBytes of RAM
How long until Tumblr creates the exact same thing?
It's not hard, no, but it usually doesn't happen in the average application. That's the issue: it's not built in, it's not standardized, and every SQL database is fully mutabile by default.

If your system operates in this journaled/event-sourcing way at the most basic level then you have the ultimate future-proof storage layer. You could decide to completely change the way the data is stored and represented (in-memory or otherwise) at any time, as long as you have that raw history.
I think that the idea is that if you declare the taxable value, then later try to sue someone for a much higher value, then you've now committed fraud against the IRS.

Of course, the easy work around to this is the claim that it's value increased suddenly when the patent became more useful; you start paying more tax when you start suing others.

Considering that low maintenance costs don't prevent domain squatting, I'm not sure this would be an effective tactic to prevent lots of silly patents.
1) It was an optional removal. You had to voluntarily update your PS3 system and they no longer wanted to maintain linux support in future updates.
One of the most amazing things about Palo Alto is that the city-provided services are actually good enough that people like Steve Jobs use them, in preference to private schools, fortified compounds, etc. At least, this is amazing to me after living in a bunch of third world places where even lower middle class people try to avoid any contact with neighbors, government-provided services, etc.

(my girlfriend actually went to a Palo Alto high school with Lisa Jobs, too)
I like this. It reminds me of this:

Michael Gilfix and Alva L. Couch, "Peep (the Network Auralizer): Monitoring Your Network With Sound" Proceedings of the 2000 Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA00), New Orleans, LA, USENIX Association, Dec 6-8, 2000. Voted best student paper of LISA 2000. http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/lisa2...
Ask HN: How do you really influence people in a competitive setting?
Ok, I read enough HN to know the standard and most popular response here about being "genuinely caring and honest to the other party" but really, how do you influence people into doing what you want when others are also trying to influence them? How do you get the guy in the other table to give you the contract/sponsorship/time/money etc?

If you want to make this general question into a case study:
Your competition who is also vying for their attention is three companies runned by psychopaths willing to say anything to get what they want, one company with an incompetent manager but has a whole lots of cash, and a company or two in China willing to copy what you did to get your future customers.

For the sake of this discussion, let's say (in your opinion) your off the shelf product is better than average but unproven compared to your competitors. To counter this, your genuinely more than willing to invest in the client in making sure it works best for their system - even if means creating fully customized solutions for that client and spending major R&D funds to satisfy the client which also improves the base product.

The other companies ran by the psychopaths are willing to lie to the client saying they too will spend just as much time as you but when they really aren't. The rich incompetent company is willing too but their product is less advance and they are well, dysfunctional.
Thanks! Hope this tool will come handy for you guys. I'm using it on a daily basis for ruby dev.
The difference in features between the free and the paid ($9/app) plans are

1)Usage based pricing, 2) Infinitely scalable and 3) an SLA
MailChimp Acquires TinyLetter (ask me anything)
But aren't the users who need cross-continental/cross-country service the edge case? I would gladly trade-off inferior quality on a national scale for superior quality locally.
I fully agree it's satire or a really bad survey, but that doesn't disqualify Ubuntu from being an operating system.
>I think it would be more constructive to begin the discussion of what patent reform should resemble so that companies and individuals can show support for it.

Here's a (possibly already proposed) idea: Why not have much shorter terms for software patents? With software advancing at an ever increasing rate we could reward developers who hold patents by granting them exclusive rights for a year--an eternity in today's world.

Perhaps this timeframe would make patents difficult to enforce (which has its pros and cons) and it doesn't fix the problem of frivolous patents, but a year-long term would (in principle) protect your "invention" long enough for you to get a head start on the market.
i've seen live demo today, pretty neat!
Java can be significantly faster than C
I don't understand this. Why would you want to work with someone that doesn't have a basic understanding of computer science?

I work with a bunch of people that wouldn't know a tree if it fell on them, and it's amazingly painful. They write amazingly slow-running code simply because they don't even know that there's a such thing as an O(n^2) algorithm.

I've interviewed at Google and the problems they ask are great. They don't care about trivial minutia like what programming languages you know. They care that you can approach a hard problem, apply your knowledge of computer science, and generate a solution that's simple and efficient. That's the kind of codebase I want to work on, so that's the kind of interview questions I would want to ask.
Or type Windows key, "env", enter. The real problem is the bizarrely small and unresizeable dialog.
This is why I think the subdomain should be included...
The 'Lunchbot' sounds something like what I wrote a few years back, me and my girlfriend always had trouble finding films to rent and watch, so what started out as a simply imdb scraping bot turned into a web app where it would select a random film to watch, with trailers, ratings and also a database behind that of what films we had watched.
People buy hardware, software, services all the time.

There is a big difference between hardware and services, and patents. Software is a whole other deal, and I object to the whole model of proprietary distribution as well, but that's besides the point.

Fact is, an idea is an abstract concept, not a physical good or a services. One cannot own an abstract concept - the very notion of that is completely nonsensical. If somebody has a an idea, and tells (gives) that idea to somebody else, both people will have that idea now. You cannot say the same of a physical good or a service.

Besides, arguing for the status quo by citing the status quo is a circular argument.

the idea to just throw it all in the trash bin is a bit black and white.

We have a system built upon paradoxical, nonsensical and self-contradictory basics which does nothing but help create artificial monopolies and slow down or halt technological progress for the benefit of a few big corporations.

There is but this only option, and that's to completely scrap it and never try it again. I'm honestly tired of seeing 'but that's black and white thinking' in defense of a completely indefensible position. Sometimes there are things which are simply bad - patents are one of those things.

You could for example have (international?) patent courts that
would prevent monopoly-by-patent things.

The solution to a massively broken system that, in large parts, relies on huge amounts of bureaucracy is even more bureaucracy? I think not.

You cannot fix this system - it's broken by default.
> Doing this in-memory in java via someAtomicLong.incrementAndGet() sounds appealing.

Just for fun, in Clojure:

(def current-id (atom (long 0)))
(defn get-id [] (swap! current-id inc))
So many missing languages. No Scala? No Erlang? Trends aren't going to be identified if the up-and-comers can't even be entered.
Thank you for posting it.

I should say this: When Steve Jobs talks about intersection of Liberal Arts and Technology people think it's some marketing gimmick. But he was saying pretty much the same thing in 1982, when he was at the top, the same thing in 1997 [1] when the chips were down, and the same thing in 2011 when he was back at the top.

I think a breadth of experiences is pretty important. Whether in a specific field- experience with different types/levels of languages, having done both academic research and grunt work. Or in life- hallucinogenics, life-jeopardizing risks, depression, unfulfilled love. Not to say that one should always have to be a wreck as a person, or never settle and focus on a project or set of languages. But a little time spent increasing your breadth goes a long way than incrementally bettering your depth. And more generally, I have met too many people who always did the 'right' thing to do, always got straight As, but are pretty clueless when they step out of their domain or world view. Creativity, empathy, connecting-the-dots may sound as buzz words because you cannot learn them through books. But not all of it is genetic; a lot of it comes through the breadth of your experiences.

[1] "I wish him the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger." talking about Bill Gates in 1997.
There are plenty of exceptions in digital advertising - pre-roll for web video, page takeovers, and other stuff that is unbelievably annoying, since your expectation as a web user is to not be interrupted.

I don't know if I'm unique, but every single time I'm presented with a pre-roll ad, I close the tab I started the video in. 100% of the time. I always wonder if stats on that type of thing are collected and given to the "right" people. (I'm 90% sure they are not, but I thought I'd ask, since you're an expert.)
I think they do take it seriously.
No, since they can be opened inline.
I have the same reasons for being a single founder.

http://www.chimkan.com/2011/07/05/the-pros-of-going-solo/
It's the Gentleman's rule for patents.
Quad Core Smartphones, are they really necessary yet?
If advertising didn't work, than the companies blowing millions and billions on it would be in a million/billion-dollar sized hole vs. their competition, and they would be promptly outcompeted, or cut off their own spending. That they are not is rather strong evidence that yes, it does work, inasmuch as a dollar in ad spending can bring in substantially more than a dollar in revenue.

(No, it is not a sufficient counter argument to say that they just spend because everyone else does; if advertising really didn't work there would no forces holding it up, and a lot of forces pushing it down. If you flipped a switch and made it not work somehow right now, advertising would be gone within a handful of years, if not faster.)
UUIDs should let you merge any two streams of events without conflict (unless there are other business-layer data constraints that would be violated).
True.

Incidentally, for those who are curious, the three patents used against Fototime (as well as more established companies like Flickr) can be found at http://www.google.com/patents?id=uiAPAAAAEBAJ, http://www.google.com/patents?id=0J8DAAAAEBAJ, and http://www.google.com/patents?id=-QEWAAAAEBAJ. The first two actually feel substantial and specific (probably too specific for Fototime to have been infringing); the third one is just a simple database schema and a flowchart, which is madness (though it, too, is so specific that it's unlikely that anyone was actually infringing).
Interesting.

I asked the question with Blackboard Inc. in mind. Their patents effectively give them exclusive rights to make proprietary course and content management software for educational institutions, and they've effectively excluded all for-profit competitors from the market on penalty of lawsuit.

I don't know. I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to me that Blackboard is up to something fishy. Your thoughts on the matter?

On a related note, you might find Antitrust Guidelines for the Licensing of Intellectual Property [1] informative, if terribly boring.

[1] http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/guidelines/0558.htm
I don't understand how "here's a hard-seeming problem, solve it please" is a "comp sci trivia quiz". What specifically are you referring to? Have you ever interviewed at Google?
This was arstechnica's summary of the 'voluntariness' - """It's pointed out that this update is strictly voluntary, although if you don't download the new firmware you won't be able to connect to the PlayStation Network, play any games online, play any games or Blu-ray movies that "require" the new firmware, play any files kept on a media server, or download any future updates. To put it simply, if you don't grab the update, the system will become useless to you as a gaming or media machine."""
Report: Apple employee loses iPhone 5
Why would you have to memeorize algorithms for those? Without thinking about this I don't know how to it. But I know what a BST is and I could figure this out in a few seconds/minutes, I'm pretty sure.
No you can't, the search volume wouldn't be sufficient for Google to use it in their auto-suggest algorithm
>Technology companies win by attracting the most productive people, and the most productive people are attracted to employers who hold themselves to a higher standard than the law requires.

The problem is, the ones doing the suing (like blackboard which PG mentioned in a comment elsewhere) are the weaker companies with a lot to lose (as mentioned in "Are Software Patents Evil") who probably aren't attracting the best people to work for them anyway.
>Technology companies win by attracting the most productive people, and the most productive people are attracted to employers who hold themselves to a higher standard than the law requires.

The problem is, the ones doing the suing (like blackboard which PG mentioned in a comment elsewhere) are the weaker companies already with a lot to lose (a situation described in "Are Software Patents Evil" http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html) who probably aren't attracting the best people to work for them anyway.

I think the pledge itself is, at best, a way to keep the "good guys" from crossing over to the dark side, which is certainly worth something.

In my eyes, the most significant thing about this announcement is that we've got PG bringing attention to the issue. We need more of the major players in our community to step forward and make some noise about this. That, in my eyes, is the only way we will be able to right this ship.
Thanks for the kind words...

The story is true, but somewhat exaggerated to make it a worthy read.
Oh god, this is such a brilliant idea.
App Engine seems like a great platform, but unfortunately it's a pain in the ass to switch away if you decide you want to. Unless I'm building a small/quick app I do not want to be 'locked in' to App Engine.
YC Winter 2012 - applications are already open
If you want to try Subjot you could start with HN on Subjot: http://subjot.com/all/hn OR tell us about your startup: http://subjot.com/all/startup and the feedback tag is getting lively too: http://subjot.com/all/feedback
I think this might be the nail in the coffin for this merger. The only problem is T-Mobile (whether this deal goes through or not) isn't exactly healthy. So what happens if/when this deal gets blocked? Do they shop themselves to Sprint? Does Sprint want to pony up the cash to offer all T-Mobile customers phone that can actually work on their network?

I just don't see an easy solution here, but a merger with At&t is definitely one of the worst suggested.
That is correct. It depends how you interpret it. The full terms are delivered during the signup process. The valid interpretations are (all confirmed by MS partner support on the telephone before I signed up)

a) I am a registered sole trader as are most startups and freelancers in the UK so it's covered under business use as there is a trading name. Training, certification, continuous product evaluation for clients and integration testing are suitable cases for personal use but do not include leisure (ie dont run a media centre with a license).

b) You can use the licenses for any purpose on workstations, server licenses for development, on machines which are portable and can be taken off site which are registered at the licensed location (confirmed by MS Partner support) and the windows 7 licenses can be used against OEM machines shipped with lesser versions of Windows 7 using AnyTime upgrade. You can run your fileserver and internal exchange with the license if you desire as long as you do not resell.

c) You should never bother hosting on your own licenses - that's what Hosted Exchange, traditional hosting and Azure are for. You'd end up paying for the kit anyway. If you don't use any of that tech, ignore it.

It makes financial sense when you consider the cost of a few windows and office licenses and a fileserver for a small IT business and it's 100% legitimate.
How is that different from what windows is doing? Their metro style is based off of the UI that was shipped with the latest windows 7 phones. If I write an application for winphone, it wont run on windows 8 (and vice versa).