skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, the only way for this to play out is in the courts. You cant just have the gov't (executive or legislative) just broadly declare "no more software patents". All that would do is make the existing software patents much more valuable and reward those who have them. Because you can be sure that you won't be able to get them away from everyone that has them.

So the only real course would be for the courts to declare that they weren't valid to begin with.
I think people like the author are missing the point,

I'm pretty sure 20 years old and less people really don't care about their timeline privacy and if they do, they can easily change that.

People that "care" about those issues are 25+ tech people, my mom do not care, and teens in my family reallly do not care

the new facebook features prove that facebook is really moving forward in the 'social' space and are succeeding. Google+ a threat? I don't think so, maybe for the old facebook, but not this.. I can already see all new moms going crazy about that timeline feature.

It's boring to see so much articles about how bad 'privacy' is, how creepy facebook is and etc. Seriously anyone can see that.. there is privacy if you look for it, if you don't it simply to assume that you want your profile public..
The best thing that the software / information management community could do here to massively disrupt the whole ball of wax is to make medical tourism as easy, intuitive, well-reviewed, and transparent as travel for other reasons. A lot of rationale for this can be found here:

https://www.opencures.org

https://www.opencures.org/content/open-cures-speed-clinical-...

Doing this shouldn't be (as) hard, and it certainly doesn't require you to become another cog in the the bloated regulatory command and control structures that's hamstringing the pace of progress in medicine. There should be greater competition between regions in provision of medicine and strictures on research, and helping to make that happen is a noble goal.
Have you tried looking at venture websites? They often have a job board for their portfolio companies and I know for a fact that startups are desperate for interns

Some examples:
http://www.trueventures.com/jobs/
http://500.co/startups
Interesting and extraordinary discovery that offers an alternative to verbal communication not just to those who literally cannot vocalize but also to those who at times, for whatever reason, cannot "be on the same page". Whether a gap is generational, cultural, gender, or whatever, mind-reading technology presents a different way for all of us to bridge understanding.
Fed. Government Pays IT Contractors Nearly Twice As Much As Its Own IT Workers
I shy away from this sort of thing because it fragments the community. I don't want HN to turn into a mere customized feed reader, where each user sees something different.
I am curious to know how well you are doing with your Android sales as I am looking to release an Android app soon. Is Android as hard to monetize as people say? Did you dual launch your apps on iPhone and Android? Are your apps paid or ad supported or both? How are you marketing your apps? Thanks in advance
Wow, my math is bad:) I'm sorry I wasted your time.
Fat fingers or tiny virtual keyboard, either way, thanks.
What's So Great About Video Sales Letters?
The positive about London:

This weekend london has two hack weekends, CharityHack and Seedhack, a couple of weeks ago Startup Weekend was in London, next month Launch48 has a London event and there's a StartupWeekend Education event. There's also 2-3 specialized hackathons.

There's typically 50-75 tech/startup events a month in London these days. Pretty much by any standard it has an active social scene. Facebook Developer Garage London and Devnest are the largest monthly Facebook and Twitter developer events in the world.

The negative about London:

New York is still a better place to raise investment. We've no USV, we've no Fred Wilson. The number of VC funds is far smaller.

The number of tech angel investors is fairly small, the majority of the angel investors in London are not from tech backgrounds which obviously makes raising money harder.

On the other hand the number of US investors who are now investing in UK startups is actually growing pretty rapidly. Being based in London doesn't mean having to raise money only in London.
His number is way too small, if anything. There was an awful lot more to the bailout of the US economy than the TARP program.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-21/wall-street-aristoc...
Wasn't it Cardinal Richelieu who said "Never write a letter and never destroy one." ? :-)
I think comparing Facebook to having access to water or power is a bit of a reach.
I think that, given the web's evolution, you should assume that the whole world WILL see anything you so decide to put online. It's kind of sad to see that there is so such thing as online privacy.
Did Facebook really kill these timeline startups?
I agree with Armstrong. It is indeed very embarrassing the US has no human launch capability left at all, especially given our enormous lead. Hopefully that will be rectified with the work SpaceX is doing.
> "I could have sworn that FB now lets you choose..."

For me, it's the "now" part. The Facebook management can decide to make that information available to others, openly or behind the scenes, if they deem it to be in their financial interest.

Sure, maybe they won't. I just don't like voluntarily building such a collection of information and leaving its fate so completely in the hands of others.
Throwaway account here.

I've actually done work for the owner of this website, on this particular service (front end) and another couple services that he runs (back end). He is a good guy - I believe people are reading into this a bit too much. In the end, he is just like us; trying to build a business/s. He runs a few websites that are fairly successful, and I believe he sold one a year or so ago - good for him. I don't think he means any harm, or is trying to make a political statement - or be righteous in any way. He is just a guy, trying to make a buck. Maybe he made a mistake in the way he handled this, maybe he didn't.

For other people making comments about double standards when he obeys US law, but is circumventing laws of other countries. The fact is, he is a citizen of the UK, not the US. Just put yourself in his shoes - You run this website, the US govt. comes knocking at your door looking for records - what do you do? Thought so.

It happened. A guy committed a crime in a country with a lot of influence. Said influence persuaded another guy to hand over records and he complies (or else face the consequences). Move on.
America has stopped dreaming. Remember all those futuristic visions of tomorrow and the optimism America had? That all stopped once we stopped going to the moon. We just need to make this a priority over say, two wars and a military presence in hundreds of countries.
Amazon Media Event Set for September 28th, Tablet Announcement Expected
HTTP, HTML, and Javascript. (I will say, though, that I'm holding out a sliver of hope for Google+ becoming a federated platform.)
Always interesting things to see what HN downvotes.
If you are serious about this, I suggest handing this off to someone with some at least semi-serious writing experience. It reads horribly as is. The errors are such that the original author probably isn't capable of making the necessary corrections without total direction. The spirit is laudable; the execution is very lacking.
All content on timeline follows the same privacy settings as the object has. So if you have been posting things as Friends only, all of the content will also be Friends only. If you have been posting Public updates, then it will also be Public.
What do you guys think of this side project?
http://www.learnfrom.it

i work a full time job and am running a successfull online business with couple of partners. Just for fun i noticed a lot of success stories being posted on HN so figured i'd put together a website where people can share their success stories and others can learn from it.

it was literally put together in 3 days so it'll probably contain lots of bugs!

what are your thoughts on the idea? would you personally use it? what should I do to get people to start posting their stories on the site?

thanks
<friday_flight_of_fancy> Ah, Ada, Ada! I wish I was born about 150 years ago, to a wealthy family, near Bath perhaps, and get to first see you at an evening gathering and thinking you're ravishing go over and strike a conversation, be flabbergasted by the breadth of your ideas and intellectual prowess, be hopeless enamoured with you. We would sit in your study and you would explain to me, starry eyed, the marvelous future of these computing looms, how they will change humanity and the universe. Maybe you wouldn't die so young then! </friday_flight_of_fancy>
This is my first stab at writing our blog. Please share feedback or thoughts.
Ah, that makes sense. But I wouldn't call it a lazy solution. You're doing more work. Edit CSS once vs space & new line every paragraph every post.

To each his own.
Our site (http://gre.magoosh.com) serves up content for a variety of exams, each of which is accessible from a single subdomain. Since content is developed for the exams somewhat independently, we have to be able to roll out releases at different speeds per exam, so we needed a solution a bit more complex than just feature flags -- here's the solution I built:

We keep a table of feature releases, each with a reference to the exam, a slug to identify the feature and an number from 0 to 100 indicating their status in the release cycle (100 = disabled, 75 = alpha, 50 = private beta, 25 = public beta, 0 = full release, etc.). Then each user is also assigned an integer which indicates the point in the release cycle at which they get to see features (0 by default). When we want to give them access to a feature, we just adjust their release access accordingly. All this is controlled through the admin interface.

We then use a helper (in views and server-side), feature_active_for?(feature_slug, user) which returns true the exam has the feature enabled and if the release status is less than or equal to the user's release access, so we can do stuff like:

if feature_active_for?(:lesson_videos, current_user)

# use video template

else

# use plain text template

end

This has worked really well so far, giving the non-technical content producers and customer support the ability to manage releases as they test content. However, the biggest advantage is that we can now give customers access to features before their public release to build goodwill after support requests and gather feedback. (we've been giving out a fraction of the refunds that we did before the release control)

I haven't actually removed any of the feature flags yet (we can reuse the release process for each other exam that we develop content for) but I'll probably remove one when it if becomes an integral part of the product across all of our exams. It would actually be pretty easy to just add to the helper to intercept release status checks and ease up on database requests.

This is probably all a bit more complicated than what you'll need, but I hope it helps.
Brentuximab Vedotin
Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos?
The timeline will help you find and delete things you intended to be ephemeral.
>'Disrupt' has an entirely different meaning when you're working in healthcare or government

if it has any meaning at all there. You just can't provide an alternative government (like better police, tax collecting, military or child protective services ... :) or other official monopoly protected services (law, medicine, ...) for it is just illegal (ie. they are protected by the real threat of government's violence).

Look at Uber which even didn't try to provide an alternative cab service, they only tried to provide a partial alternative _to_ cab service which is official monopoly (again - protected by government's violence, and yes, Silicon Valley, especially new generations of it, doesn't deal well in the realm of violence)
The sky is always falling to some people.

I love the new profile, and love the idea of timeline. I have wished for some time that I can easily go back in time and see what I posted 6 months ago, a year ago, 2 years ago..,. my life was so different then. Can't wait for this to be active.

If you add people as Facebook friends who you think "it would be creepy" if they know things about you from a year ago, that's your fault. You're using it wrong.

I put my friends into lists long ago, and don't share anything with people I only met once or twice. Facebook, keep going! This is awesome!
Man, gmail is down again?
One reason that the Fed Gov spends more in the short term on contractors (in addition to all those reasons in common with most private employers, like insurance) is to avoid pension costs.

It is also very hard to fire a GS employee.
>to massively disrupt the whole ball of wax is to make medical tourism as easy, intuitive, well-reviewed, and transparent as travel for other reasons.

well, considering how Google was hit for advertising Canadian pharmacies, you wouldn't want your medical tourism review/info startup be under US jurisdiction.
KRSchultz is basically correct, please don't downvote him. The last Hubble repair mission went way beyond the Hubble's expected service capabilities, which was an amazing accomplishment.

However, it's vastly more economically sound and safer to bring an aging device down in controlled descent and send up a brand new one with all the latest bells and whistles than it is to send up the Shuttle with a crew and do space walks for a repair and upgrade mission.

The shuttle weights 4.5 million pounds not including cargo. The Hubble telescope weighs 24,500 pounds. Most of the cost is getting things into orbit, and when building devices the cost of a second spare is insignificant compared to the cost of the first one. Obviously sending a 4.5 million pound shuttle as payload with crew into orbit costs considerably more and also destroys more of the ozone layer than sending a 24,500 lb payload.
By all means, jump in and post a better execution. Or if you know someone with semi-serious writing experience, bring them in!
Economic dataviz from the IMF
A "public" post versus a friends post[1]. And the option to switch any previously public posts to friends[2].

[1]: http://cl.ly/ANI0
[2]: http://cl.ly/AMpv
NASA: low chance falling satellite will hit U.S.
You are assuming that only people that you have friended will be able to see your stuff. How long before facebook changes their polices again, so that all information is viewable by default to the public? Or before they sell it all to markters? Or before another app developer finds an exploit in the API to let them access anyone's information? When beacon came out, the outcry was loud enough to make Facebook back off. But that doesn't mean they won't try something similarly bold again.
Just append a nonsense url parameter to the article URL and you can submit it again.
If NPEs are trolls, that implies 'lacking starting capital' is trollish. Small company locked out of an industry? Troll.

Robert Kearns pitched his wiper system to Ford and Chevy, but they preferred to build it without paying him. "NPE = troll" means he was the villain. (He should have, what, kept his invention secret until he built a rival car company?)

There are several other definitions of 'troll.' Lawyers who own patents. Groups who buy patents from others. All of these catch some sheep with the goats. (I'm leaving these as an exercise for the reader.)

It's far more direct to attack patents rather than people. Attack the patents which are obvious or prior art.

As a bonus to this approach, it smacks less of a sort of blind bigotry against the poor, lawyers, or investors. (Even if you do hate one of those groups, attacking the problematic patents directly affords a way of being discrete about it.)
I remember seeing your Apple developer video (an year later) and then checking out your blog, and finding out that it was rather dormant. I thought you were only enjoying your newly earned wealth, and did not care about work or anything else. Good to know it was a learning experience as well; friends do change and it's pretty weird to find old pals to react the new success.

It sure would feel good to say 'first app store millionaires', I hope you make many more with your next thing.

Edit: Thought the Apple video was an year older than it was.
Distributed Systems with ZeroMQ and gevent
Most importantly, they're not presenting the finding as fact. They're really asking for anyone that can prove them wrong, because they don't believe it, and are almost positive that there's something wrong with either their methodology or measurements.
At least they aren't working on interpreting audio signals into the playback too. Once they start doing that, we'll all have to close our eyes and put our fingers in our ears whenever we are around a police officer because we would effectively be recording their actions and could be arrested in several states for being in their presence. :)

Yes, this is a significant exaggeration, but the scary thing is it is easy to see how that could become a viable interpretation of the law if this technology advanced to use outside a lab.
自体脂肪隆胸安全吗
It is unfortunate how true these statements are. I followed to standard path of starting in QA and moving to development. While I do not think it's a bad path of itself, I think it is unfortunate that a lot of really great QA analysts hang up their QA title in order to develop. I think one of the core problems is that QA is treated as entry level; which is odd, because as you point out, most devs are practically incapable of testing effectively.

Even though most orgs do not officially treat the positions as an entry level (QA), and a mid-level (junior dev) - I think the general unspoken understanding is that devs are higher on the food chain. The two positions need to be established as more distinct and less like rungs in the same ladder.
This guy is a world-class asshole, and takes 10,000 words to explain it to us in great detail.

His actual complaints about the Microsoft group he was in can be succinctly summarized:

. Politics

. Lack of Strategic planning

. Difficulty executing

All reasonable points for nearly any Microsoft group, but I have to wonder why it is he feels such a determination to burn any possible bridges he may have left behind.

My own read on Silverlight is actually all strategic problems -- unfortunately a group that could have been working on something like V8 with awesome UI enhancements for metro three years ago spent their time competing with, essentially a dead platform.

The major break in architecture with Metro is a gamble, but not a bad one. It's an aggressive, fairly fast gamble from a company that's gotten way too slow over the past five years. I think we'll see better product coming out of MS over the next three years if they can keep this up.
> "Yeah, ..."

There's a difference between saying 'no more software patents from now on,' and 'all those we granted before are automatically invalid.'

My take: while the first one is probably ok, the second would raise specific constitutional problems.

It sounds like you feel both issues are best left to the courts, for public policy reasons independent of the 5th Amendment.

Against my better judgment, I should point out that those positions are not really the same, and that you probably don't actually agree with me.
Perhaps countries that are popular destinations for medical tourists might want to fund incubators for medical tourism startups?
Currently playing about with the timeline, I can't see any easy way to choose which list sees your past posts, unless you want to manually go through every single one and change it.
Thanks for the extra feedback. I like focusing on the tags and interests. Some curation done by the system (or a human) could go a long way. I already get most of my views on the featured stories, so people definitely resonate with being steered where to go.

I want this to be a place that people will go if they're looking for something interesting to read, or if they have something interesting to tell. I appreciate the feedback as it will help me get there sooner!
Ugh indeed. And it's not like this issue hasn't been mentioned a time or two before now. Joel Spolsky in 2000: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000067.html

...and again in 2010: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/01/26.html

...(with more than a couple of other mentions in between). I've worked at ISO 900x shops that worked to the letter of the law, so to speak, without actually understanding what software QA was all about. A really good tester is "chaotic neutral", and the best we can come up with as testers of our own work is "lawful evil".
it sounds neat.

but its not as neat as providing safe drinking water for the majority of the third world. or staving off infectious disease. or even providing individuals food and shelter affordably.

until we tackle these issues globablly; a social network site will never change the human race.

i'm sorry, its a down perspective, its arguementative, and its not in the spirit of this site...but i'm tired of seeing intelligent people fawn over things that dont truly improve the lives of people who need help. in 10 years, this comment will seem silly. i may be wrong...but probably not.
Take any software engineer at MSFT and find out how many people are between them and Steve. Frankly, I think that'll be a telling (damning) statistic.

I'm a software engineer with no reports at MSFT; there are 5 people between me and Steve. YMMV.
Great insight into the character, thanks!

"Anything important will come twice," Minsky said.

Next time it may be more important -- bills have a tendency to grow.
An interesting take on three emerging Cyber Threats.
Do people really care about karma and try to get karma by posting good links? I guess it works too, but 99% of my karma comes from writing smart comments (hopefully), which is quite valuable to the community too (I hope).
I've read the article[1] and what they do is compare the proton flux as measured in Geneva with the neutrino signal measured in Gran Sasso. The proton signal is timeshifted a small amount until the curves overlap maximally.

Where the leading and trailing edge are is irrelevant here, as the complete shape of the pulses are compared.

1: http://static.arxiv.org/pdf/1109.4897.pdf
Patents are not property. That's the problem right there. The patent system has been hijacked into a new form of capital.
Not a surprise. To recap a hand-on preview [1]:

* $250
* 7", backlit; 10" coming Q1 2012
* Android fork; Kindle app integrated
* Tabbed browsing
* 6 GB
* No camera
* May come w/ free Prime subscription

1: http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/02/amazon-kindle-tablet/
Does anybody know why they were doing this experiment (measuring speed fo neutrinos) at all? Were they assuming that neutrinos travel faster than speed of light in the first place?
Same thing that happens to the ones that don't end up at NASA: they work on incremental improvements to some quant trading platform to squeeze more "productivity" out of it. Sikorsky x2 don't fly and fuel themselves to west Hampton you know.

I kid, but no really.
These costs were included in the analysis, according the project's Methodology page: http://www.pogo.org/pogo-files/reports/contract-oversight/ba...
I disagree, broadcasting video to your friends is not innovative, nor is it more innovative than their initial app. Startups like Bambuser, Ustream and Qik have been doing this for years.
Tesla v. Einstein: Transcending the speed of light.