skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is that really what they're doing though?

The reason I ask is that their attempt to get discovery on the Apple license suggests that they don't know what the license covered (remember it was taken out not with Lodsys but with a previous patent holder).

If that's genuinely the position then they don't know what sort of case they've got. At the very best it would seem that they are hoping that there is enough wiggle room in the license to give them something but the request points to this being, at least to some degree, a punt as much as a clever legal move.

But to me what this really looks like is what we suspected it was all along - a legal shakedown of small, vulnerable developers without the finances or expertise to fight it.

Lodsys may or may not have a water tight legal case but from what we're seeing here they're certainly not geared up for a hardcore legal fight rooted in a solid basic case. Instead what they're doing seems to be throwing everything they can at it regardless of merit and hoping that something sticks.

In some situations that's a perfectly reasonable strategy - essentially if you're trying just to delay things and rack up costs for the other side to make settling look appealing - but against Apple who have enough money to fight this from pocket change and a vested interest not just in winning but in crushing you to put anyone else off the idea of ever trying this sort of thing again?
I'm not sure I agree with that quote.

We can agree that what computers can do these days is quite different to human-style thinking.

But to imply what machines can do is somehow different from thinking, just as submarine propulsion is different from swimming, implies that thinking is different from computation.

Whether computation, a mechanical process, encompasses what we consider thinking is not a settled question, but I think there's a pretty good case for believing that computation does encompass thinking.

[EDIT: wording]
'cause SSDs are not as reliable as they appeare to be to withstand the server-side workload. Enterprise-grade SSDs are significantly more expensive than consumer-grade ones. You are not looking at $1~2/GB price, but $10~20/GB. Given the capacity required for most use cases, SSDs are hardly good choice for critical servers as primary storage.

In addition, most RMDBS are optimized for mechanical disks. Optimization for SSDs becomes interesting only recently when the price of SSD drops to be barely reasonable.

However, SSDs absolutely rocks as big cache.
"Virtual memory" is not a synonym for swap space: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory

Virtual memory is what lets us write programs pretending that we own the entire address space, and it is very useful.

Swapping pages to disk, though, has been useful for a very long time. Yes, once your high-performance application starts swapping all the time, your performance is going to suffer by several orders of magnitude. But occasionally swapping pages in and out of disk is part of what makes modern operating systems useful. You left a large PowerPoint presentation open for several days, but never got around to working on it? Not a problem, since if the OS needs that memory, it will just swap out the pages. Without that ability, the OS would need to go around killing processes. (Which it will do if it has to, but it's a rare event because it can swap out pages.)
No other CEO? What about John Chambers who took Cisco from $1.6bn in revenue to $40bn?

I'm sure you could easily find a lot of CEOs who are not worth their paychecks, but it probably isn't hard to find the opposite too if you look.
I thought it was great that they discussed what user's actually do within Windows Explorer before they decided what to change with it. Too often I feel like changes are forced for change's sake, and, despite my own opinions on the design, it's great that they're open about their reasoning.
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/765005/the_vim_text...

Some suggestions for .vimrc to change movement behaviour and line wrapping. I'm not a vimer by the way, still using Gedit.
Improvements in Windows Explorer
I'd love to see this in emacs.
Crecen ventas por Internet en M�xico
Behind Apple's products is long-time designer Jonathan Ive
For whatever this is worth: you really don't need to have your third-party designers using Sass to ship a Sass product. You have other options:

(a) You can convert the designer's CSS to Sass (designer CSS is going to be suboptimal anyways)

(b) You can convert some of the designer's CSS to Sass (the parts you're going to be "playing" with, like box and form styles) and leave the rest static.

(c) You can leave the designer's CSS intact as a static CSS file and then extend and override it with Sass.

One of the more common bits of Haml/Sass FUD is that "designers won't use it", which is true, but irrelevant.

(Having said all that: the last designer I worked with was excited to learn Sass, and did a great job with it).
"This is not "my" way - this is the way of the human brain. You can't do that many things at once and you can't focus on that many things at once."

Exactly. So he offloads that memory into tabs. If the browser will handle it, it's as good as file cabinets, in/out trays, ReadItLater, or tall yellow stacks of National Geographic.
Online Marketing Program: 1.1.2 Navigation
What your not taking into account is that thousands of small servers will likely fail faster than dozens of big servers. I think you'll find that this and the fact that you'd have to maintain much more hardware (the servers themselves and switches) tips the balance.
Windows Phone now open app developers.
I don't see why they made commands like copy and paste into buttons. It seems like they could simplify their interface by using more conventions and fewer ribbon buttons.

I tend to dislike the ribbon in general because it feels like their designing software for the user who likes to click things and not for the user that uses keyboard shortcuts.
Get 10 GB of space on the new Minus.com
Full changelog to the latest version here: http://blog.minus.com ^^
(Hi Kevin.)

Thanks for the enthusiasm.

I'm watching the logs stream via tail -f right now, and the Rascal is holding up OK. The post is near the bottom of the front page now, and it's handling around 10 hits per second fine. The Rascal is serving both the light control and all the background pages ("what", "story", "technicals") as well. I'm actually more worried about the cable connection to my house than the Rascal. (Eerik put the angerlights in my basement while he moves to California. By the way, he's looking for a job: http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=89147645)

More beta units are on the way-- the hardware beta was successful; software testing is underway.

I'll write up a post-mortem on the HN traffic and put it on the Rascal blog (http://rascalmicro.com/blog/) in a couple days.
No they didn’t get their license from Apple, but that doesn’t mean Webvention screwed Lodsys over. I suspect that Lodsys have an odious but well-understood plan to troll companies that are thought to infringe, but saw this as a fairly low-risk opportunity to try for a big windfall. I think they’re hoping for some hush money from Apple, but if they don’t get it they’ll go after smaller fish that haven’t played the shakedown game with Intellectual Ventures.

For example, if someone gives away free software for some kind of Open Source store on Linux with whatever it is they think infringes their patents, they’ll go after all the developers who use it, and there’ll be no umbrella licensee to intervene.
First, I don't think your specific point is true. Second, and more importantly, the benefit of hardware isn't that it changes the constant factors; it's that it parallelizes the search. The whole point of scrypt is to create a state explosion that prevents that parallelization.
The Amazon/Kindle Tablet: Speculating on Speculation
When I used Firefox, Tree Style Tabs was the first addon I always installed. It's wonderful, and it's one of the two things I most wish Chromium had (the other being good bookmark management).
Well obviously I’m speculating out of my ASSets, but legal discovery goes beyond “show us the contract.” They get to grill the lawyers and managers who drafted the contracts, review emails written about the contracts, and so forth. they ought to get a look at just about everything that might come up as evidence in a suit.

So I don’t know for sure whether they know what’s in the contract, but I would not say that just because they’re asking for discovery, therefore they have no idea what the contract says.
I have no idea what he means by that.
Thanks for the guide. If I might suggest another small gem that beginners would appreciate, is a way to copy text with a mark. I.e. ma go to the end y`. It may be easier than vwwwwwwww y or something similar.
>I tend to dislike the ribbon in general because it feels like their designing software for the user who likes to click things and not for the user that uses keyboard shortcuts.

I guess the vast majority of users like clicking on things.

>I tend to dislike the ribbon in general because it feels like their designing software for the user who likes to click things and not for the user that uses keyboard shortcuts.

Did you read the post fully? They have expanded the number of keyboard shortcuts and there is a way to minimize the ribbon. I don't see what you're complaining about, are you saying that they should force all users to find out and use arcane keyboard shortcuts instead of exposing the functions via the Ribbon UI?
MSFT's dig at VMWare? - Don't get stuck in IT's past
Bridgeport Limo
I've never understood how Alexa stats are considered relevant.

Because all outside web statistic providers suck.
It couldn't mean when each unit communicates independently to the central location. The app uses the app store independently from the upgrades to purchase upgrades. Instead of talking to the upgrade locally and "carrying the results of the two-way interaction" to the app store.

That's my opinion on the legalese because Apple shows screenshots of the app store in the middle of the communication process.
Number one, patents. Number two, the cost of licensing a good training database.
I disagree. Rand was as transparent about the process as he possibly could be. Why should the other party be held to a different standard by the community? Would love to see a response by Neil to defend his position.
Upgraded my Cr-48 to a 40 gb Intel drive over the weekend. An SSD with room is a marvelous thing. So, I have a late 2008 macbook (white), looks like a very similar processor (core duo 2.4 ghz), and 4 GB RAM, running Lion. I've been looking at the Crucial 256. That or the Intel 160. How long have you been running this drive, and are you running Lion? How did the upgrade go? Did you need anything besides Time Machine? Do you use macports, postgresql, or apache, and if so, any problems after the upgrade?

Also, have you looked into 3g inside your macbook? Is there any way to make that work? A dual function wifi/3g mini PCIe?
If you select the "fake address" it transforms to the normal path - which feels a bit gimmicky to me.
Facebook's new privacy controls: Still broken
I have had good success with 2 OCZ (Vertex1 and Vertex2) drives but had an Intel SSD that failed hard on me.
even better, use viper mode in emacs.. you get all the keybindings of vim and you don't have to write vimscript to customize your editor
Personally, I can't stand Finder. I used a Mac for several years every day before I felt like I really figured it out, and even then I didn't feel like it was user-friendly - it just felt incapable of doing many advanced things (for example, how would you "copy path" in Finder?).

Not only can you hide the buttons in the ribbon (which is nice if you typically use keyboard shortcuts), but the experience is consistent with other recent Microsoft applications. I'm not sure a computer novice or even 50% or more of non-power users would have any idea what the buttons on Finder do (does anyone know what that eye button does before they click on it?), and I think that's the target demographic here. Power users know how to hide unwanted buttons or the text that goes with the buttons.
The Future of Marketing is Crowdsourced
I used clasp+gringo for scheduling candidate interviews for a technology company. It worked great.
No-Reason Sale is on at Zoho Creator, application building platform
Amazon’s tablet will make or break Android
CTRL-F1 to minimize/restore the ribbon works on the Office apps now as well; I use it _constantly_.
It's like Microsoft/SCO all over again, only this time it's Myhrvold/Lodsys.
Ask HN: How many applications do YC startups hiring usually get via HN post?
Very cool ... but why teach paste before cut/copy?
Control-[ is also escape (writing that in vim style <C-[> ).
you can basically forget that you've got it in your bag

Except you can't, because you're worried about crushing it, due to a relatively frail case, or you're worried about scratching it because it looks pretty.

This is why I ditched an MBA and carry around a netbook.
The Monetary Woes of Hurricane Irene
Tylenol is added to Vicodin to discourage drug abuse, also causes liver failure
All he's saying is that it's not a lot of money for accountants.
To a javascript mortal (i.e. someone who lacks sufficient proficiency to write or contribute to a library) this is refreshing. Looking forward to ignoring event.keyCode in my next project. Thanks for this.
There are users -- LOTS of users -- that have no idea that you can go into the menus or use a keyboard shortcut to cut & paste. To them, if there's no button, it doesn't exist.
My point was that my application needed 166% more phyical memory than what I had at the time.

Paging out to a normal "disk" was not even an option, the performance ranged incredibly horrible to completely unusable.

Paging out to SSD was not only usable, it was only a percentage slower than 'real' RAM.

I think that's amazing. Having the option to use SSD as memory in a pinch is a great 'win'.
Raspberry Pi ($25 PC) runs Quake III
Thanks. I was wondering who this anonymous other partner was that got to cash out 4X that amount of liquidity that rand would get ($4.75MM v. $1.25MM).
I like that MS is so open about its development. We even get videos.

This video about Win8 has more than 5 million views already: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p92QfWOw88I

I am curious how much hype around Win8 they will have built when they ship it.

I think the last time I felt so excited about Windows was in the Longhorn times. (I use OSX)
That's true but at the very least it suggests a weakness in what they have in place at the moment.

And what's written in the contract certainly can't be contradicted by anything before it. At best they're going to be able to fill in the gaps.

EDIT: I am also not a lawyer but this seems to be relevant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parol_evidence_rule

Essentially where something exists in the contract in writing it can't be amended or contradicted by any other source.

What other material can be used for is to prove / disprove validity, provide clarification around ambiguity and so on.

That would seem to suggest that Lodsys at the very least aren't confident that the contract as written completely supports their case.
I want to make the bulbs die remotely.. Can we do it with a script toggling them on and off in a rapid rate?
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The problem is that finder sucks compared to windows explorer. I've used mac os x for two years now and I still do most file management tasks via command-line. This is not the case in windows and linux, where file managers are usable.

I don't like ribbon ui at all, though. But for newcomers it's probably going to be an easier way to manage files. Small anecdote: my grandmother had never used a computer until 6 months ago. One of the hardest things to explain to her was windows context menus. With buttons in the ribbon it would have been so much easier.
When you use the arrow keys to move the cursor around: a nice mental break.

When you use the mouse to move the cursor around: an utterly evil, productivity-destroying action, because you take your hands off the home row (oh wait...)

Hacker News, don't ever change ;-)
Pandora clocks 1.8 billion listener hours in quarter, ups revenue
3 Grandes Errores en tus Pequeños Negocios Rentables
It definitely seems like a jump. Did they interview users? If so, why not reference that data? If not, why not? And what user data prompted them to create 203 buttons if some of the (far less than 200) commands they have now don't get used in more than 1% of user sessions?
The ribbon was great in Office because there is a hell of a lot of stuff it made simpler. There was a learning curve but I think it was overall a good choice.

In Windows Explorer though? It just looks like clutter. I'm no 'novice' but even I have trouble with the thought of getting used to that mess.
Why To Write Tests For Your Code
Yes, John Chambers looks like a good candidate to be in the exclusive club of "worthy" CEOs. Bill Gates too.

For smaller companies, there are plenty of CEOs who are their company, and deserve all the credit (or the blame).

There just happens to be so many public companies that are run by MBA-type consultants, managing for wall street, with no product or industry vision. And they tend to make as much or more money than the other CEOs.
I'm confused on this -- Is Webvention another IV spinoff like Lodsys, or are they an actual independent patent holding company?
I used to think I was a freak for having, sometimes, as many as 20 or 30 tabs open. My kid looked over my shoulder once and laughed at me, said "Really Dad?"

But I see by the other comments that I'm not a freak. In fact I'm an amateur.

I can now hold my head up, and not have to slink around and hide my browser and its completely normal 15 tabs.
I'm pretty happy with the 256 GB drive in my MacBook Air. I would have considered this limited until recently, but wireless networked storage is cheap and easy to implement(I basically just connected a cheap 3 terabyte drive to my router) and Thunderbolt or USB3 storage gives us a lot of options when more high-performance storage is necessary. Also, cloud services (Facebook/Flickr for photos, Rdio for music) have made me much less of a data packrat. So I increasingly consider the hard disk "working storage" for applications and the most crucial files.
feedback is really appreciated. we still have some work to do, but we wanted to get it out there and see what people think.
Post-PC Era is a Myth: Relating the Evolution of Cars to Computers
If I took all that time to customize my command ribbon, I'd certainly want it to look the same across every computer I use. Will there be a way to synchronize my preferences for settings like this anywhere?
Play on Heroku
I have a lot of friends using 'consumer grade' SSD for their DB workloads and the difference is night and day.

This might be a horrible example but my one friend had a installation of FileMaker Pro running on a completely tricked out XServer (RAID with 15K SAS drives). With 250 concurrent users he was completely max out on CPU and many queries took minutes to complete.

When he moved to a 256GB SSD his CPU load now never goes above 20% and not one query takes more than five seconds, period.

Also, please reference my old HN post from over a year ago.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1584998
You can sign up from the link in the article. I just did. Funny thing is, I had a friend invite me a month back, and it wouldn't work because Google closed the invite system. In that month, he and all my other friends have stopped using it, so I sign up and see nothing now. That doesn't compel me to use it...
Entrenched interests and corrupted systems
Rotations of Rubik’s Cube in Haskell
You're welcome to try. The problem is that the Rascal fetches a new image from the webcam after every click. In order to make sure that the bulbs have turned on (or off) before the image is updated, Eerik added a 1 second delay in the loop. I think this makes it impossible to toggle the bulbs at more than around 0.5 Hz (1 second on, 1 second off).

If it weren't for the delay, you could hit 300 Hz or so. You could probably even dim the bulbs with PWM if you wanted.
I doubt anyone could maintain that focus for three days on a consistent basis. This was a speed programming contest, I do not think he routinely programs that fast.
I used to work with Carl, and he is a super talented guy who has built an impressive team in a very short amount of time.

Congrats on the launch!
Apple Granted Solar Charging Patent
C-[
Interesting project, but based on the title of the post I expected more thought and analysis about the challenges of building an application in 48 hours. It'd be interesting to hear about the experience from that perspective, especially for those of us working on weekend or side projects who try to get a lot done in a short period of time.
Previously on HN:

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2935773

2. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2932910
20 fun, tweetable facts about the Inc. 500
With physical connections, one high bandwidth connection will always be cheaper than many low bandwidth connections. So long as your p2p network is working over the internet, the reasoning still holds. Using expensive, last-mile bandwidth any more than necessary is not a good idea.
Two Okies and a Little Italian:  A Fiat 500 Roadtrip
Flip camera founder opens new restaurant, The Melt, in San Francisco
No need to justify it. The documentation for HN on what is appropriate says:

Anything that good hackers would find interesting.
That includes more than hacking and startups. If
you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer
might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual
curiosity

Mathematics should almost always be OK.
According to the docs it's using Linux on a smartphone class ARM (AT91SAM9G20) with the ethernet MAC on-chip http://rascalmicro.com/docs/software-guts.html

The hardware should have no problem maxing out its own network connection. Whether the application software can keep up would be my question.

It's clearly going to perform much better than a nanode http://nanode.eu/ Which is being pitched as an HTTP enabled sensor node, still relying on Pachube or other cloud services.

But, the Rascal may have enough grunt to run its own services. I wonder how capable it would be of servicing many simultaneous connections? (running Twisted/Node/etc.) Perhaps RAM is the limiting factor?
Jobs makes consumer electronics, so it makes sense that his work is the most visible to us. How can we even begin to judge CEOs working in e.g. Agriculture, Pharma, etc etc? Clearly Jobs is a god among CEOs, but without really doing quite a bit of research it seems like poor form to say that no one else is worthwhile.
Method to generate 40 character passwords
> There's already a bazillion C unit testing libraries, ...

Do you know of any comprehensive list? I'd love to see a comparison.

> ... how is this any different?

In this case, it's short, clean, and written by someone I know and whose code I trust.
Extending your comment with some words from the article: "If you collapse the ribbon (double-click the tab, or click the Minimize arrow on the right side of the ribbon), you get even more vertical real estate with our new approach."

I double-click on it a lot when working with Office to get focused. When you hide it, if you hover it it will show without taking up all the space it does when it's open.
I think you're already less happy, because you've succumbed to minimalism. You miss your guitar, you miss cooking, because a bunch of blog posts and a book convinced you to throw out your pots and pans.