skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes. Palm patents have the potential of creating another Nortel type situation. That is possibly a part of "optimization of webOS revenue". Would be interesting to see who gets a hold of this pile.
Big fan of skitch, hope they dont kill it! Evernote is getting bloated...
I worked for Andy for a few years at Danger. He's a great guy. He's got a great mix of technical skills, business savvy and being a generally nice bloke.

He's also ridiculously generous.
Also, he builds cool robots for fun (or at least used to).
This one line sums up all the issues of the Enterprise and Health care information technology and everything that is broken about it.

Startupreneurs who are looking to white-label to enterprise, STOP. dont waste your time.
Open WiFi and Liability for Copyright Infringement: Setting the Record Straight
You can use thinner copper and make longer extensions, because active cabling help compensate for attenuation and crosstalk. Really you can put any kind of DSP you want in there: skew, equalization, etc. DisplayPort is only spec'd for 3 meters over a passive cable, but goes up to 33 meters over an active cable. Also, although I can't remember a source, the Thunderbolt over copper uses about 25% of the power compared to the original optical version.
Florian Muller seems to have a much better track record of accurate predictions about what will actually happen in patent cases than Groklaw. And he seems to be better at reporting the facts dispassionately. Groklaw seems to focus more on cheerleading for entities they favor (Linux, IBM, Google) and against ones they hate (Sun, Microsoft).

I really don't understand why so many people seem to think they are better than Muller, other than perhaps because they enjoy being told what they wanted to hear regardless of truth.
But $/patent is a silly measurement, and there is no indication that HP is interested in selling or Google interested in buying.
Aaron is quite well known on YC but it's not surprising that many people don't know about him. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

Having known him through his writings for several years, I can vouch that he is not a troll.
And then there were four: The new smartphone landscape
Steve Jobs got burnt badly by the enterprise market with NeXT. Look up enterprise object framework sometime.

Apple is clearly going after the enterprise market on their terms, and their terms alone.
Yep, that would be me. Sorry if I broke something, it started as an attempt to remove the random lines obscuring the drawings and text. When I noticed the fade out effect on the lines, I had already erased everything D:
"I'll likely drop out after getting the discrete math, algorithms and other math-intensive courses I likely would not study on my own."

I think that statement right there is why degrees are still valuable. To earn your degree you will have to study subjects that an independent learner would not likely study on their own.

So far in my career, the amount of math I was required to take to earn my CS degree has been very valuable. I have to use it a lot. (Graphics, GIS).
More LTE iPhone Evidence: Apple Seeking Engineers For LTE Field Tests
I have found firsthand that the lack of a college degree has increasingly become a scarlet letter in our society. It's not quite as bad for coders as it is in the rest of tech(the fact we have open source projects to prove we know what we're doing helps a lot) but it's still disproportionately difficult to get a job that pays a living wage unless you have the degree to "prove" you know what you're doing.
Two large chain steakhouses are hardly the ones to beat.
The worst part is when Firefox gets to 500mb+ and I want to restart it to free up some memory. I used to save all the open URLs in a notepad file then reopen them, but lately I've just been killing the process then letting FF recover them itself... this is probably bad practice.
Actually, Apple sold out their Lisa stock after they rebranded it "Mac XL". Turns out there was a market for a "professional" Mac with an internal hard drive back then.
HP Kills TouchPad & webOS Devices, Will Spin Off PCs
Someone did.

Listen to the "When Patents Attack" podcast: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/w...

Someone created a system where they can enter a claim and go back and see how many times that claim was already granted in a patent. The one they looked up found something like 5000+ prior claims.

Why the USPTO doesn't use this software before approving patents is beyond me.
A number of years is explained in my blog, though I guess it would have been worth adding to my resume. I started with HTML 6 years ago, but I started compiled languages 4 years ago.

My github profile only has 3 repositories because I only consider 3 of my projects to be of enough consequence to post. They were just added because I just learned git version control through Pro Git (http://progit.org/book/) this week. pypermute and QkNote are from May, while pysendfile is a new project.

The resume is just a summary of what I know. I want to give the best idea possible idea of what I know and have done to any audience reading it.

My HN profile is new, as I have never had a reason to post. Almost everything I read comes from HN or large sites like Techcrunch or Engadget and are already linked. It's recent with a minuscule amount of karma as I've only started linking my content to HN.

Thanks for your best wishes, and I hope I have put in the effort.
Or it's a sign that you love your job.
Bacongate: Tweets prompt Chipotle to reveal secret ingredient in pinto beans
They could do something exceptionally creative, they could sell them at half-cost with full schematics and data sheets for all of the parts. Plus documentation on the boot process, identify jtag/test ports, maybe boot rom source code.

This would save them from an expensive e-recycling bill.

It would put a lot of now 'open' tablets on the market which would give a huge cadre of people who would give it a shot a chance to do something amazing. It could change the world.

Its a shame that winning the lottery is more likely than this outcome.
And one sign of a "mature market" is that barriers to entry rise. So for the big players the game of patent poker is the price they pay to keep the innovations down to a dull roar and to "manage the competitive environment", for actual innovators It just means that the slope is steeper, and if they are at all successful they will attract predators like Lodsys/IV.

And while a few more entrepreneurs getting ground into hamburger by lawyers isn't that big of a concern in the larger scheme of things; it does mean that innovation in the tech sector is tamed and that we lose out on great products that never get a chance to compete in the marketplace.
Also, the chip inside a cable and/or its firmware can be tuned to that cable, and the chip could offer some overcurrent/spike/whatever protection.

Blowing a $50 cable is no fun, but blowing a chip in your laptop is even less fun.

[I do not know whether see cable do either of those]
That depends though. Isn't there a way for the PDF page to be an image, but for OCR to produce an index of keywords, so that you are viewing the image, but the index is searchable? This doesn't solve the increase/decrease text size issue (though it does solve the searching issue).
'the Microsoft boss later grumbling that after 10 hours of browsing the Internet, he "had not seen a single Word .DOC, AVI file, Windows .EXE (other than content viewers), or other Microsoft file format," then adding, "I did see a great number of Quicktime files"; and his determination to "match or beat" the services offered by Netscape, a "competitor 'born' on the Internet" who then boasted "70% usage share" in the browser market.'

This seems to confirm my biggest problem with Microsoft. Why do they need to have their own version of everything? What do they get from this? How come they don't try to innovate as much as open source does, instead?
Have been waiting for this since early 2005. Now I wonder when they'll take a stab at severe weather.
The Axis of Eval: Notes on delimited continuations
@mtogo

d i c k
But I'd rather it be off in the vague future.
Yet somehow the same strategy is not working that well for Android tablets and STBs.
This is a cool idea but it is a bit sad that it is necessary. Sad because it is wasteful. Books are written in a digital format. So we are using natural resources to make them, turning them into digital (which they already were, and probably in a better format then PDF like LaTeX, specially for technical books), and then destroying the physical copies after they consumed resources.

Of course it's necessary because not all publishers release digital versions or they release it with a ton of DRM, etc..

Still, it's a bit sad.
This doesn't use Google Accounts, it's a standard form. You just need to trust DMS, not anyone else.
I totally agree with the information overload. I usually use http://weather.ericson.net/
It's quite possible that Google realized Motorola had some non-stupid patents. Motorola has been in the mobile space a long time (from the first cell phone) and has done tons of innovation.
I'm developing software for a health organization in Canada, and you should see the reactions I get from users when they realize that I listened to their concerns and tailored the software to them. I feel like Santa at Christmas.
I think you're ignoring the group of people who both work smart (as you define) AND work long hours. That combination would probably have the highest correlation with success. It's not either / or.
“I went out for dinner with someone new, but my date was late to pick me up, the car was uncomfortable, the place I was taken had terrible service, and I had the runs after eating the food there.”

“Yeah, but your date has learned a lot from taking people on dates like that and most of that stuff has been fixed. How about another date?”

Not making fun of your factually correct statement, obviously, just pointing out that in many cases you do not get a second chance to make a first impression.
GDP Growth per Person per Country since the recession
Pretend like it's called the "Firehose" instead of the "Stream" and then add everyone who you find even mildly interesting. Then use the circle editor to create less noisy channels – e.g., "Friends" for people you know IRL and "Tech" for tech journalists/bloggers that you find particularly interesting, etc.

IMO, this is the best of all worlds. You always have fresh content in your Stream a la Twitter; open the "Friends" circle for Facebook; "Coworkers" for LinkedIn, "Tech" for industry news; etc. Lastly, mute posts that are becoming annoying.

Thanks to circles, the main Stream is not particularly valuable real estate that you need to protect. You can always create a new circle called "Stream Sans Scoble" and add everyone except Scoble. :)
How best to authenticate users for a website that sells event tickets?
"Since I'd been very young HP had been the highlight company for engineers" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMRmG72LBU8

I wonder what Woz thinks now. It must be a sad day for many HP engineers.
So in principle the Chrome gallery has the tools in place to prevent these abuses. The extension listing page states what permissions the extension will have (if it says "access all web pages", then you certainly should think hard before installing it!), and the user reviews and ratings mean users can call out bad behaviour (like this sneaky affiliate link adding) and warn other users.

Unfortunately both of these things are pretty broken in the Chrome gallery at present. The warning about what the extension can access is fairly muted, and you have to notice and read it - unlike when you install a Facebook or Android app, when the permission dialog interrupts the install flow so you have to at least see it before you can install. And the implementation of user reviews is terrible - there's no way for the extension author to reply to a misinformed or misleading review, except to leave his own "review" (yes, you can review your own extension).
Another CEO did the same thing. Steve Jobs when he came back to Apple. Jobs brought in his own team and basically just kept the Apple name. Seems to be working so far.
Yes, it deteriorates over time but you are confusing subscribers with businesses. The sales effort to acquire business customers is included in SG&A, not marketing.
This is solid shenanigans prevention.
The question is: How much did it cost for this defense? Would a small player without outside help have a good chance of reproducing this positive outcome in the face of a patent holder in the wrong like in this Lodsys case?

Otherwise this outcome doesn't do much to quell my anxiety as a small entrepreneur.
Somalia Famine,Dark side of a darker Scene | Human Victims Of Human
You should get your own domain, then you can move at will.
in my view MS did have a game changer

http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/05/microsofts-courier-digita...

It still makes the iPad look half baked.

but as is the way with MS they killed it and settled for mediocre.

I'm beggining to wonder if MS are actually scared of being innovative.
I agree. It just clears the air up whether i can create and work for my own. The other part that I feel is impeding is the minimum wage requirement. Its hard to pay myself 45k (or whatever is the min wage).
Why is everyone treating this as something new?!?!

you run code on your machine, you have to trust it.

Heck, i don't trust even stuff i download from the app store! and I still limit the talk of my wii with nintendo servers on my router.

the chrome extensions just add a little insult because it 'seems' official or something. Much better the grease monkey way, full of warnings so the user remembers that he has to think for himself.
Check Out This Nearly Undetectable ATM Skimmer
Have you seen Stormpulse? Our goal is to eliminate information overload even when the weather gets nasty.
I think it's important that these long hours are the exception and not the rule. You do hit a burnout point eventually and this can be devastating for a start-up where you need your best and brightest being exactly that and coming up with new and better solutions to existing problems that will help put you ahead of the current and future competition.
Lodsys is their lawyers. It's not a real company. It's a patent attorney who registered a company specifically as a vehicle to monetize the four patents they purchased/licensed from Intellectual Ventures.
Evolution of Technology Solutions in Logistics
As far as the nature vs. nurture division, there's a good amount of new evidence from twin studies and adoption studies which back up Elon's conclusion about the heritability of traits. Bryan Caplan covers some of this in his new book "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids."

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xj9b1h_selfish-reasons-to-h...
Beautiful idea if it works. I wonder how much lawyers will like it, though, since they get to charge hundreds an hour to task an associate to be the mechanical Turk inside diff. They might not want to be efficient.
Numbers Add Up For Intuit Co-Founder
Why is Groupon-supporting commentary considered trolling or shilling? The fact is the Gorupon's marketing spend is building an asset that has lasting value and accounting for such is not unreasonable. A 100 million opted-in email list has almost as much value next year as it does this year even if it stops growing.
i say patent has grown obsolete.
Congrats guys, this should help make HA more feasible for small teams!

How do you plan to price this? Will it just be twice the price of the non-replicated MySQL service? (If so, that would seem a little high given the slave can only be used for standby and not for serving requests.)

It would be awesome if this supported having the master and slave in different AWS availability zones / AWS regions / clouds.
Well, the code base is really kludgy and pretty much indecipherable. Just a pile of Mesozoic-era spaghetti code and Webforms.
The chips are doing some kind of signal conditioning; they're hardly NICs.
I still haven't been able to find an API to get yesterday's weather. I've been trying to make a site that doesn't show straight up temperature but a percentage based on known value (yesterday's temp).

For current conditions, you could try YQL, but I'm not sure if it's really current. (A good article: http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2009/12/extending...)

The NOAA service (http://www.weather.gov/forecasts/xml/rest.php) that I've used before just does time series, so you might be able to get the most recent time, but you're right, I haven't been able to find a NOAA API for current data.
Would love to see that, please post on HN when you do
Show HN: Codecademy.com, the easiest way to learn to code
I've been a longtime member @ HN, but I haven't been a developer. In fact, my only HN submission has been one asking how to learn to code (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=820741). My cofounder and I decided to solve the problem by making a simple, interactive way to get started with Codecademy. We'd love your feedback. If you're interested in helping us to get more courses up (on any topic!), please send us an email at HN@codecademy.com.
"Why would anyone be interested in purchasing a failed-to-launch tablet product when Android tablets sell well and the software is free"

a) webOS is an OS that has been shipped on much more than just this latest tablet. It's a fantastic OS, but has been hampered by poor execution by Palm & HP.

b) Android tablets are not selling well.
I agree.

On the more competitive business part, on average a developer only has about 3-4 peak hours of productivity during any given day. The time when your programming in the "zone" and get huge amounts of work done in minimal periods of time. The remaining time tends to be filler time, minor code cleanup, changes, being stuck on problems you would never encounter when still fresh/awake. etc.

When you increase work hours across the board you increasing this filler time of not especially high productivity work. At the same time you tend to decrease the amount of peak productivity/in the zone hours developers see each day due to the gradual effects of burn out.

It's not good for business.
"Please, fix the problems instead of hiding them."

I want to comment about this conclusion, lest anyone reading it actually follow the author's advice.

You should absolutely be hiding notices/errors from appearing. This is orthogonal to whether or not the errors should be allowed to occur. When during the course of assessing a web application I (or anyone who does this for a living) gets an error message generated by the framework or server (like ASP.NET's yellow screen of woe), that's an issue (albeit usually a low severity issue). If that error can display user input in a non-sanitized fashion, it's a more severe error.

The recommendation isn't to "make sure the application doesn't generate any errors" (although, hey, that's a great thing to shoot for), it's to capture those errors and not display them to the user (usually by displaying a generic error message that doesn't leak useful information to an attacker).

This includes things like disabling debug functionality.
Basically, the cable is tuned to its specific length. It also reduces cost for people who never use Thunderbolt.
Yeah, it's useful for both checking revisions of a contract and for comparing an initial contract vs a 'standard' template contract to see the initial pressure points.
If whatever framework or libraries you're using don't hide this from you nearly completely, you might be doing it wrong. Just use the default Unicode format of the OS and framework or standard libraries you're using and never think of it again.

Much like dates and times, correct handling of Unicode is best left to the poor souls stuck dealing with them full time, all the time.
I've been a longtime member @ HN, but I haven't been a developer. In fact, my only HN submission has been one asking how to learn to code (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=820741). We decided to solve the problem by making a simple, interactive way to get started with Codecademy. We'd love your feedback. If you're interested in helping us to get more courses up (on any topic!), please send us an email at HN (at) codecademy.com.
Hackers place a high value on veracity of information. Altering a search result page without complete transparency ahead of time is not cool. Altering a search result page in a way that filters money away to someone else is exactly what some malware does.
jsdalton was merely proposing ways this demo could be enhanced by linking it's behavior to a source of data. You're the one going all over the place with your disdain for progress bars, suggesting they are inaccurate & "a scam", then taking it back or questioning what a progress bar is... I am really not sure how a progress bar for a video buffer is all that different from a progress bar for a file transfer.
This doesn't OCR them, it's just an image, so the blind are still out of luck.
Getting rid of them isn't a perfect solution, but it's arguably a better situation than keeping them.
There's not much risk for a one-time transaction, but Bitcoin daytraders need to keep a balance at the exchange.
That's why I said:

"You have authorisation to work for your new employer"

But the actual transfer is not complete. You are not guaranteed to be able to continue your work. The chances of problems are small, but it does happen.
Surprising Way Your Neanderthal Genes May Affect You
I'm a little suspicious of people who claim to think "everything" through from "first principles" (whatever those are).

Where do you get your first principles from?

If you get them from observing the world around you, how do you decide what parts to pay more or less attention to?

While you're deciding things from first principles (and coming up with those first principles), how do you make decisions in the mean time?

Note that in physics, computing things "from first principles" is often done to attempt to recreate a result that's already been reached by other approaches, to attempt to verify that you've got the right set of first principles.
I have no experience with ZeroCater but I can tell you that providing food on any regular schedule for my 60 person company is a nightmare.

We don't want to provide catered lunch every day, but on any given day there are probably 2 different lunch meetings that order food in to try and make a meeting more bearable. Coordinating it, paying for it, ordering and all the other details are painful.

I absolutely welcome any service which aims to make this better and can actually do it.
Good article in 2600 on squid setup and chrome (or whatever) else is chating to strange servers behind your back.
HP already has a hold of this pile. I wouldn't just assume that because they're exiting the hardware business they have no (future) need for that portfolio. Heck, if anything, they'll have to hold on to those if they hope to license webOS to other handset makers (the latest rumor).
Processing UTF-16 would only be easier if you have a valid byte-order mark and/or know the endianness in advance and you can guarantee that no surrogate pairs exist. Otherwise the same pitfalls exist as when processing UTF-8, plus the endianness issue and the possibility of UTF-16 programmers not knowing about surrogate pairs.
Cool -- do you have more details? We are curious...
Gadgets that every bloggers must possess.
This is karma coming back to bite Palm for doing nothing with the BeOS rights.
> "I'm beggining to wonder if MS are actually scared of being innovative."

This might actually be a pretty good summary of MSFT's corporate culture.

The impression I always get from the inside is that it's a company dominated by middle managers. They've got so many PMs in so many layers that you'd wonder if it's just PMs all the way down.

The combination of mature, gigantic company, lack of strong leadership, and extremely generous benefits has combined to create a population of people who are there for the stability and extremely afraid of rocking the boat or killing the golden goose.