skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with "fixing" the problem is that his company now has a huge stake in the system not changing, or at least in not loosening restrictions. Now that the company has extracted so much money from other companies, it can very effectively lobby Congress to ensure that the patent system doesn't undermine his business model.

It's now self-perpetuating. Look at some of Lessig's videos on Change Congress; he's talked about how Congress, while restructuring and changing regulation on the telecom industry in the 90s, was careful to ensure that what was left over would be able to contribute to re-election campaigns.
Street View and walking directions come to Google Maps for mobile
You need to provide further details both about yourself and your own programming experience as well as the industry you are looking to enter into and any specific needs they may have, to even have a chance of getting a ball park number.
Web boom in English-obsessed Korea
How much for a Google Android phone?
Powerset's First Live Search Projects
Dead man's switch via email
Picture This: Tech carnage on Wall Street
Well it doesn't hurt to have a CCW permit...or worst case scenario a tire iron within reach
Well, yeah, but in the afterboot(8) (http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=afterboot) man page, the first two points after how to use man and find installation errata are how to deny remote root ssh logins and a note essentially saying, "Make a non-root user and add it to the group 'wheel' for sudo, see below.".

Of course, having daemons run as non-root and chrooted/jailed (hello, apache) is just as important.

(And yeah, I know this article is supposed to be a joke.)
At least when I was in the army I got to shoot real guns.
That would be a "feature."
Oh I love Koreans; except the ones that play, I mean pwn, Starcraft.
I think you mean "Hear, hear".
The reality of software book publishing seems to be that you can make much more money writing a book, typesetting it into a PDF, and charging for downloads off your own website.

I have absolutely no problem with this at all.
Gov. Palin is under the protection of the Secret Service, and it is a crime committed in the context of disrupting a U.S. election, so the full investigative power of the federal government will be brought to bear. Plus I suspect Yahoo will be very cooperative.
I'm a large fan of web.py running on appengine. I've converted my site (overstimulate.com) and several of my projects to it.

I extracted the basic parts of a web.py appengine site and put them on http://github.com/anotherjesse/webpy-appengine-helloworld/tr...

I'm also working on abstracting my forum/blog/wiki/cms site (running overstimulate.com) to http://github.com/anotherjesse/fobliki/tree/master - but it isn't ready yet
http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed.msg.html
And, of course, taking advice from a Web page with a giant, obnoxious interstitial ad is always a good idea..
Look at where every other company that tried search - besides google - is now though.
I guess they are using the standard features knowing the loopholes in the client. They know for sure that these calls cannot be wiretapped. This, I guess is one of the reasons why they are using skype instead of other gazillion clients
Iam not sure if skype has a backdoor solution. rumors are that some folks have reverse engineered the client. So far, i have not heard anyone claiming to have succesfully reverse engineered the client
Basic HMM algorithms in Lisp? 
Hello All,

I am in a rush and I am almost certain that if I did some better searching, I could find such code without having to bother all of you, but...

Does anyone know where I can find some LISP code that does all the basic HMM algorithms (forward, Viterbi, Baum-Welch, etc.)? I could definitely roll my own, but, like I said, I am in a rush these days.

Regards,
MM
This is an interesting idea. However, what assurance do you have that this service will still be running when you need it?
http://www.mylastemail.com/

edit: This is a very old idea.
I once said to a tech legend that patents should not be transferrable, because the owner has to be the inventor.

He said that was naive, but I still believe it.
Is it actually illegal to make false claims in a radio or tv ad?
This is not something new. Law enforcement official have the ability to wiretap voice calls over landline and mobile. The issue is with the Voice calls that take place over the internet. I agree privacy is an issue here. However, we are missing the bigger cause here. These backdoors, if used genuinely can save lot of lives and stop crime and terrorism.
Sorting Digital Photos @ "Face Value"
It's all just an abstraction. You could sub in any of the other layers of abstraction in place of "terminal" and it would make just as much (and little) sense.
is spam morally questionable? or is it just frowned upon by social norms
Hmm. Here's a really stupid question.

Would it be possible to write a proxy which would convert IE-only (or IE6-only) webpages into equivalent standards-compliant webpages on the fly?

(I don't know CSS, and especially IE's mangling of it, well enough to know if this problem is AI-complete or not.)

Edit: In case it wasn't obvious, the point would be to make the app work just as before. Simply running an anti-htmltidy would be pointless.
Has the Business Week site been cleaned up from its recent compromise (that was Business Week, wasn't it?)? I've been avoiding the site until I hear the "all clear".
Sounds like an easy way to harvest passwords and other such important information..
> Essentially, this is a highly tangled problem and a simple solution won't do.

Bingo. There's a nice discussion of just a bit of the economics involved in health care in "The Undercover Economist". It's really a very complicated subject because it is not your typical market for something like shoes, to use someone else's example. Pure capitalist systems will leave at least a few unfortunate individuals to die or suffer from easily/cheaply curable diseases. Pure state run systems throw out all the useful information that a market provides and introduce inefficiencies of their own.
I gotta play with a city when I was 12. Hell, they gave me nukes, aliens, riots, hurricanes, tornadoes; I used a whole class of disasters.
Put up your hand if you've successfully sold into an enterprise.

No one?

Then come back when you have.

The ability for the IT shop to have control over their users is a real reason that apps don't get deployed. Walk into the mouth of LDAP once and you'll understand. When you have 10k users, with 200 people worth of turnover or changes a day, you won't understand why they "won't just use our web interface!"

Until you believe it and understand it, you're going to keep writing off customers because their priorities in keeping their users happy and functional don't jibe with your new whizzy app.
Financial Services Meltdown Puts Chill In Tech Sales Outlook
Google Looking to Buy Valve Software | TechJaws
Java Move Over PHP Still Has Punch | TechJaws
Oh ok. I see it now. And the advantage then is that you begin with a full stack. Cool.
Kids Likely to Misperceive Own Weight if Surrounded by Obese Friends & Family
riya.com never pay attention to its software. Google comes, who can say the face recognition feature is a killer app now?
Notably, Moskowitz explained that Firefox -- which you would think would be designed to easily administrate with Group Policy -- cannot be controlled. The reason: "It uses JavaScript files," he says. "There's no Group Policy way, right now, to handle 'odd' file types like .JS or XML files."

So it's Mozilla's problem that Microsoft's Policy tools are ridiculously rigid and inflexible?

Actually, I don't know anybody who cares if IE wins or loses in the corporate browser world. It's nice to delineate your business/intranet and public/personal activity into other browsers. In fact, to me it's preferable that there's a "legacy" browser to fulfill the web application equivalent of fax-machine duty. I don't envy the work that the IE team has to do to maintain compatibility with ancient and awful applications kludged together for IE 5.5, and I _really_ don't want that stuff in the browser I visit public sites with.

As for the set of people that think the power goes from the wall into the "hard drive" and that the internet is a blue "e" icon on the desktop, I stand by a previous comment I made ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=302947 ), in that I think IE should be vehicle for modern web experience ActiveX controls.
if person.has_idea? && person.can_afford?(patent_attorney) {
business.start!
}

makes an entrepreneur hope that his idea stays under the radar.
What about some sort of rating of ads by an external, independent body (something like FactCheck.org). When you go to a movie, they make an announcement: "the following movie has been rated {(P)G(-13), R} by the MPAA". Why not do the same with FactCheck: "The following ad has been rated..." You could make this entirely voluntary, but add in incentives to do so, like discounted air-time rates.
What’s your favorite “programmer” cartoon
Thanks for the links. And thanks for all the advice guys.
The trouble is - the vast majority of the dishonest and dishonorable lies are coming from one side. Obama isn't deliberately lying - McCain and company are. Repeatedly. After the lies have been exposed. On national TV.
With a service like Lulu, you can print any PDF-based (bound) book for about $20. Not that cheap, but getting better. I've published my own novel. There is no minimum - you can print one copy for that $20.
They would then have had to clone s3 as well, is there a Jumpbox for that?

I think the best solution in this case would have been a hardwired connection with a EVDO card as backup.
On a single-user machine, screwing up as root and screwing up in your unprivileged account is pretty much the same, since the most valuable you're going to loose isn't that 20 minute Ubuntu install, but your files. And the user you use, privileged or not, will have the power to wipe your files out.

Only other benefit (apart from all those programs that will complain or actually refuse to run as root) is if you run something questionable, it won't be able to install a root-kit, open a backdoor and hide the process.
You would also ensure that every voting member of the populace had been exposed to military discipline and doctrine during their impressionable post-adolescent years. Much of the message of military training is that you should accept orders, respect the chain of command, and resist the urge to second-guess the motivations of your superiors.

It's a great way to keep a bunch of heavily-armed people trained to efficiently kill other people from turning on each other, but it's not necessarily the thinking you want out your voting populace, unless you want to make sure that society never moves forward.

The military attitude also strikes me as being pretty much anathema to hacking.

Now, if you want to talk about mandatory public service, where that two years can be spent doing social work, student teaching, etc., then I can get behind the idea.
There was a big ad to click through. Linkbait, I think.
Originally when we were talking about building it on other platforms, Qt was the main consideration.
Or they can be abused, eg by china or by Bush's telecoms. I'd like to think the right to privacy isn't just for people we like, same as free speech. But this is irrelevant, voice is data & data can be encrypted, as was said earlier. Law enforcement will just have to adapt.
http://www.deadmansswitch.net/about/

"Since this service is provided free of charge, it comes without any warranty, neither express nor implied (even the actual sending of the messages is not guaranteed, but we'll do our best)."
There's probably repositories for small complete tutorial apps somewhere in django land, as for rails. This is the best way to bootstrap yourself, to start with something that works, then start editing code , reading code and books about code. Edit the style sheets, the routing, the queries , views and controllers, see what breaks. Better yet, learn the unit testing framework at the smae time. This is how a lot of Rails texts teach programming (TDD), and it's very effective.

The trickiest parts: tracing how data flows in from a form thru validation, sanitization, into sessions, gets tied together by associations foreign keys, saved to database and then read out of DBMS, ... Javascript is the other tricky part, i would leave it for last, even if you only have to support one framework (JQuery) and one browser (firefox with firebug). The Oreilly "Missing Manual to Javascript" is an excellent intro to Jquery and Javascript. Parts that look tricky but are intuitive once you get the feel of it: REST, routing,

Some other books people find helpful Jeremy Keith "DOM Scripting" and another one he wrote, i can't remember the title. McFarlane CSS Missing Manual (same guy who wrote JS miss'g manual). Crockford, "javascript, Good parts"

And while you're at it, spend some time poking around stackoverflow. The mini tag communities around ruby, rails, python, haskell, erlang ... are really nice.
sight, not site.
WEbook raises $5M more to crowdsource the novel
Google: Partnering with GE on clean energy
Funny, I think I've heard that one before.
For me, Twitter shows potential of contributing to the "third places" of online life. The informal coffee shop where you're free to overhear conversations and join in when you want... but just as free to keep reading your book. No harm in sharing what's on your mind, no expectation to reply to what other people say. It helps that right now, it has a self-selected group of people who are pretty open-minded and have something interesting to say (but the narrowness of this self-selection will grow weaker with popularity).

I just started using it... I'd like it a lot more if Twitterific didn't keep automatically popping itself into the foreground with another "Twitter Error". Incessantly drives me nuts.
If you could unilaterally establish any rule at your startup/company...?
What would you choose?
Who's Going To Watch College Football Online. Maybe People Stuck In An Airport?
I'd make each instance of copypasta in code require board-level approval in writing. :)
I think feedburner just needs to update next time I post. The plugin seems to have also borked the feed and feedburner is responding oddly (though my updates still come through.)

I'll keep an eye on it. Thanks for the tip.
With a desktop app, the windows of the app is part of the interface. With any SSB, the window just takes away screen space.
My hand is up. (You said "No one?" too quickly.)

True, the enterprise is a different animal, but it can be sold and you can make a difference. Some of my most memorable successes have been turning an ocean liner by selling them my software and creating a win-win-win for everyone.

The ability for the IT shop to have control over their users is a real reason that apps don't get deployed.

Not my experience.

you're going to keep writing off customers

I have never "written off" a customer because they were hard to sell. I only "write them off" if I don't see a profit opportunity.
I would love to think you're correct and maybe you will be. I do think these events will characterize a major milepost in our financial history. Historically, Wall Street has trimmed the fat during bust cycles and then hired fresh faces when things turn around only to have these new people make the same old mistakes 5 or 10 years into their employment when the market goes through a correction. If what we are seeing is such a cycle, and we are nearing the bottom or the "trough" of this current cycle, then anybody getting hired to start next summer will be getting into the industry at a good time...that's where I got the buying low and selling high. Perhaps this series of events will buck the trend though...you never know.
I don't ever have a problem with people exploiting a broken system. Even in a society with strong patents, companies like this would exist, and it isn't extortion, rather than a form of investment.

Without knowing what sort of patents he's purchased and is enforcing, it's impossible to make a moral judgment.
The stuff you are learning is useful in and of itself. I'd say you are on the right path, and continuously you will have to converge to something more concrete, like implementing some more specific idea or project. You may know, that not all websites are coded from scratch, for some projects it's good enough to take some open-source content management system and just go ahead with that. In other cases, you do coding.

So my advice would be, try to come up with some more specific idea for the website and then implement it using available technologies. Good luck dude!!
> Their business model is to buy cheap patents from people who just do pure research. Then they go and sue the pants off people who do real work and make a honest living by doing things that make real products.

Doing pure research isn't making an honest living?
Anything is possible but the end result would be a clean response stream thats' compliant but the application would be horribly broken.

My mind melts just thinking of the king of regex matching you would need to do to pull this off.
I think this is really good advice. Start building simple apps first to learn the foundations (which is very important), then go after your grand ideas.
Well thought-out. I agree almost entirely.

Our current patent system clearly needs much improvement, but almost certainly encourages progress far beyond none at all.

I don't see prizes as being too effective. The nice thing about the market is it decides what problems are worth solving. Prizes put that decision in the hands of whoever organizes them.

There would clearly be prizes for fighting cancer, aids, lack of potable water, etc. I'm not sure there ever would have been a prize for a pot with a tight fitting lid and holes in it, but the Pasta Pot, simple as it is, is a miracle. Same with wheels on luggage, the SpinBrush, etc.

But our current patent system has a solid prize that encourages innovation from products as small as those all the way up to nanotech.
I read this article about Intellectual Ventures earlier this year and was struck by how he was trying to engineer ingenuity:

"They had different backgrounds and temperaments and perspectives, and if you gave them something to think about that they did not ordinarily think about—like hurricanes, or jet engines, or metastatic cancer—you were guaranteed a fresh set of eyes."

"At one point, Myhrvold asked the surgeons what, in a perfect world, would make their lives easier, and they said that they wanted an X-ray that went only skin deep. They wanted to know, before they made their first incision, what was just below the surface. When the Intellectual Ventures crew heard that, their response was amazement. “That’s your dream? A subcutaneous X-ray? We can do that.”"

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_...
Yeah, I can't imagine playing a sequel to Portal in a browser.

If it did happen, would Valve members be compensated with stock and cake?
I've been intrigued by barcode scanning on mobile phones for quite some time.

I'm wondering what UPC database they query? Does anyone know of a company that provides an API? (aside from http://www.upcdatabase.com/)
Good example but not what I was referring to.

I just finished an app with 51 separate modules, every one hard coded in infinite detail, and much of the code duplicated, 4000 LOC in all. Crazy, right? I used to think so, too. I could have written one very flexible parameter driven module in a few hundred LOC.

But guess what? Even though I bitched and moaned the whole time I wrote the monster, I was able to refactor and "genericize" it in one day. Start to finish time was much shorter than if I had written the flexible module first (that is, if I had ever finished).

This was a non-intuitive lesson for me. Write the specific case and extend later. I always used to try to write the most comprehensive "able to do anything" code until I realized that sometimes, the long way around is actually quicker.

Thanks again Jason, for #3.
Agreed.

There's not even an attempt at a "Well usually we wouldn't publish someone's personal email but in this particular case we think it's justified because [insert justification here]"

I guess I may be expecting too much of a site called "gawker" though. Still, here's hoping that someone (not me!) hacks Barack Obama's personal email soon so we can check whether they treat it the same way.
How do you attract top talent if you are only solving easy things?

A hard problem is just a bunch of easy problems tangled up together.
I wasn't claiming speculation has no good effects, just that speculators don't create wealth. You don't have to create wealth to have good effects on the world. Good laws, for example, have good effects without creating wealth.
This is true. However, this does not mean the country has a lot more laissez-faire than any other in the Americas. I don't know why this is the case, but I know that it is the case.
Ask HN: GitHub Slowdown?
I have been experiencing a lot of timeouts and slowdown on GitHub over the last couple of weeks, and have talked to others who are having the same trouble

Has anyone heard the root of the issue? Anyone not having trouble?
Economists don't assume that preferences are transitive between people. But within one person, I think they do.
McCain-Palin 2008 Campaign Manager Rick Davis: 'This is a shocking invasion of the Governor's privacy and a violation of law. The matter has been turned over to the appropriate authorities and we hope that anyone in possession of these emails will destroy them. We will have no further comment.'
Startup idea: ultra-secure webmail (accessed via one of those little physical key-generating token thingies).

None of this "I've forgotten my password but here's my mother's maiden name" crap.
You only need a mock, not a clone.
If you were going to actually use this service it would be more fulfilling to pay and have some guarantees.

side note: I wonder if they are relying on two-form viral growth :).
Read most of it a month ago. Great read!
> Not afraid that people will take their ideas and build a restaurant right beside of them.

Really? Then how come all the bitcheness around HuddleChat How disingenuous. (the lesson is correct, too bad they don't live by it)

I quote "We're flattered Google thinks Campfire is a great product, we're just disappointed that they stooped so low to basically copy it feature for feature, layout for layout," said 37Signals founder Jason Fried.

I know HN is suppose to be a cuddlefest where only the "right kind" of people are but I really think you guys need a devil's advocate post once in awhile to shine some reality on your rampant fanboyism.
What a great advertisement for getting out of enterprise IT and starting your own business!

I'd always prefer to just try a new idea, then to get permission from my manager and my manager's manager to try that same idea.
The ones that die before paying dividends are the bad bets.

What wouldn't seem right would be if there were no bad bets. In something as risky as tech startups, most bets should be bad.
"updated version"?
"Possible impossibility of ever finding the faulty genes behind many mental illnesses"?
Exactly. Those are resultant problems from a fairly simple opening idea. YouTube: how can we put video online? Google: how can we make searches relevant?

And, while the details are usually tricky, I find that Google's solutions to problems tend to always be brilliantly simple. Like their translate features: they figure out a basic problem and they solve it simply and often unexpectedly. Calling it a Gordion knot is actually the perfect description, yeah.
> These backdoors, if used genuinely can save lot of lives and stop crime and terrorism.

Don't forget kiddie porn and money laundering! They're feeling a little left out here.

"Bigger cause" ? Physics does not work that way. The only leverage over Skype is that it's closed source.

Crypto genie is not going back in the bottle.