skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a simple solution: stop subsidizing useless degrees.

If someone wants to pay money to spend four years of their life studying Gender Studies or Semiotics then good luck to 'em, but make sure they're paying the full cost of their degree, preferably up-front. Underwater basket-weaving is a fine hobby for the idle rich.

I they want any aspect of their education subsidized, they should be studying something both useful and hard. Every university degree should include serious mathematical content.

What about the students who aren't good at mathematics? They're probably not benefiting from a university education anyway. Let 'em go get the low-level white-collar drudge jobs that they'd wind up in after graduation anyway, and let 'em do it at the age of eighteen and start building up some wealth rather than forcing 'em to wait 'til they're 22 with a net worth in the negative six figures.

This, of course, will never happen. But it's nice to think about.
Thanks for the comment Thomas. We created WhiteyPaint to address all of these issues. I suggest you try it and if you hate, we will refund you.
Libwebsockets
When reinvention is too common, and converging solutions to a given problem can be readily devised, it's not a patentable idea by the constraint of "non-obviousness". But such patent applications readily get granted still. That does not mean the concept (including non-obviousness requirement) is flawed. I agree that it may be impractical given that non-obviousness is not measurable.

The duration of the patent in my terminology is also an implementation issue and not a conceptual issue. I agree that in today's world, twenty years are a bit too long. Or rather inventions that can be so readily made should be failed on "non-obviousness" basis again.

The real issue is this: Not the patent system, but the companies are interested in protecting "everything" they do. The law does not provide protection for everything. Copyright applies to specific material or implementations while patents apply when those three constraints are met. There are clearly things that are not protected by either and they should remain as such. The issue is that they don't (and both companies and patents office are responsible for this).

To fix (the implementation), the bar on non-obviousness, novelty, etc. as well as the duration of the patent needs to be made commensurate with the reality, taking into account the low investment costs and timeline that you mention. Maybe even by having varied durations for different domains just as the non-obviousness bar is different for different domains just by virtue of being unmeasurable.

All in all, I have not heard any real reason why software patents should be distinguished from other patents, other than possibly having the bar on them and duration adjusted accordingly.

Edit: Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.
this is the correct way to approach the problem, because it puts the client in control. if you tell them flat out that you don't support IE6, they will see that as a deficiency in you or your agency. you need to let the client feel like they are making the decision to not support IE6.
Bobby, this is our first run so pricing is expensive. This stuff us not easy to make and we've already tried to be the lowest price in the market. Nonetheless, we will work on a cheaper price for bootstrappers since that's exactly what we are.
Leadership Word of the Day: BRANDING
CIA Drones may kill you without knowing who you are
A large portion of the US economy is based on consumerism, of which many would agree is completely unnecessary
This is a frighteningly naive article. Consider the following extract:
"There are at least three reasons to exclude software from patentability. First, software development is an individual, creative activity, more akin to writing a novel than designing a jet engine...Second, software patents are especially prone to litigation...Finally, software patents are unnecessary because software is already eligible for copyright protection...As long as programmers write their own code from scratch, they can be confident they aren't infringing others' copyrights."

The idea that software development is the sole province of the lone inventor is both wrong and irrelevant. The reason that our constitution facilitated patents was nothing to do with how many people invented something but rather with encouraging disclosure of the result.

If we stipulate that software patents are frequently violated...so what? Without further analysis of why or whether specific improvements to the system would be helpful this is a dangling factoid - no more.

Finally, the idea that copyright provides any kind of protection for software is so ludicrous the writer's naivety is laid bare. Copyright protects only the expression of an idea. In the case of a work of art such as a novel or painting the expression is critical to the work and copyright is a valuable protection. But if a programmer sits with original source code before him and rewrites it in another language thereby benefiting enormously from the original work but changing the expression completely they may indeed be programmers writing "their own code" but it certainly isn't "from scratch", and whilst he is right that "they can be confident they aren't infringing others" it is blindingly obvious that they have copied. Copyright is worthless if the expression doesn't matter and all that matters is functional equivalence. And guess what, users don't give a rat's ass how a program is expressed so long as it works.
Weekend Project- DIY lojack + notifications
Ask HN: Favor performance after resignation or success in next job?
I joined a company 7 months ago. I like the company and my co-workers a lot, but my manager and I never got along. When he gave me a negative review for reasons that had nothing to do with performance, I took that as a cue to run like hell and decided to get another job. That worked well and I'm moving on to a position that's definitely a better fit. So it's a happy ending, and I put in my notice today and my last day will be the 23rd.

However, I may want to come back to this company in a few years (probably in a more senior role and definitely with a different manager). And I'm going to need a colleague as a reference.

The question is: assuming I don't piss anyone off, does it really matter if I get anything done in the remaining 90-odd hours of work? Or am I better off optimizing for success at the next job, by learning the new company's technologies and relaxing well enough to show up refreshed and ready in the new position?
I think there are plenty of examples of poorly designed web pages out there (most are poorly designed). The trick is describing what makes a great home page and why. Even without the color coding I think many of us could see how poorly laid out this page is.
Dippin' Dots Bankrupt =0
Already tried that, but I can't find a good reliable realtime datasource.

I could only find the news.ycombinator.com/bigrss feed (which blocks Yahoo YQL, so I can't convert it to jsonp). The workaround would be a proxy that circumvents the block, but I'm not sure if that's okay. Anyone from HN who could help me out?
It happened because short-sighted and sloppy authors failed to use progressive enhancement over a pure HTML version that worked on every browser ever to exist. Instead they picked one browser they liked, wrote bogus code that happened to work on it, and declared "if you aren't running what I'm running, fuck you". In five or ten years we're going to be hearing the same kind of whining about how the Chrome and Firefox holdouts are holding back Web 5.0, blaming user agents when it's their own bad authoring at fault.
by "writing great software" do you mean writing software that other programmers will admire? or writing software that your users will love?

you shouldn't let the first one get in the way of the second.
"OP" roughly meaning: "walk up the comment tree, including comments and authors, all the way to the article and whoever submitted it, stop at the one I'm talking about, which should be pretty clear from the context of what I'm saying".
"Here’s what you do instead: write integration tests for the critical parts of your application."

Yes! The "unit" in unit tests makes sense when "units" are what define your code -- because you are delivering units. If you are delivering applications, focus your efforts on having quality tests for those.

(Of course competent coders will develop units, and collections of units aka libraries, along the way, and of course unit tests as such will be right for them. But the measure of an application must be taken at the application level, not at the unit- or aggregate-of-units- level.)
This K machine is a months-old story. Why the sudden jump in news stories on it?
I don't offer IE6 support, offering IE6 support keeps the browser alive, and it has to be killed collectively.

I'm guessing that an example of a client that would ask for IE6 support would be Car Mechanic shops that have CRT monitors and super old computers. And probably a corporation that can't upgrade all people at once and their secretaries don't know what a browser is.
True, it didn't explain the principle but that wasn't the point of the article - it was to show it in use and document this particular case study. It's up to the reader to pull out lessons learned.

I'm personally a fan of using the pomodoro technique to break down tasks into manageable chunks with mini deadlines. A simple countdown timer does a lot to get my competitive juices going and just get started.
Persistent XSS Vulnerability in White House Website
"Smartphones (portrait)" even though my iPhone is in landscape.
So What if I buy any available apple.xxx domain names
I mean, writing software that is usable, useful, maintainable, robust and reliable. This is the type of code that both other developers AND your users will love.
California Residence Safety
If you check the rest of the site, you might notice that it is a very Linux centric blog. Nothing wrong with that. Also I don't see his image in a logo anywhere on the home page. Only on the Linus interview pages. Seems reasonable to customize sections of a site.
> Especially because it forced my high-school math teacher to think more about preparing students for college-level work.

I think the intended preparation is actually really important. With AP the flow is Learn ch2 algorithm > learn ch3 algorithm>...> do well on test > not have to take calc in college. If you actually prepare a course for rigorous understanding, I suspect you might end up sacrificing your AP score somewhat for much greater gains later on. However, the system only cares about that short term result.
This is very unsurprising. The majority of IPOs are underpriced and in some ways the underpricing is a measure of success.

There has been a lot of research done on the topic of underpricing for book-built IPOs (like this one). The most popular conclusion I have seen is that it's a form of compensation for the underwriters and their clients. Underwriters pick their best clients who in exchange for doing business with the firm and revealing their "proprietary information," get access to IPOs that are very underpriced.

Raising money isn't the singular objective of an IPO. What the issuer wants is the creation of a liquid market for their shares, analysts to follow said market, and to be perceived as a successful company in order to enable follow-on offerings. Raising less money in order to enable these things, especially for the creation of a liquid market and analyst following is well worth it for the issuer.

Investors want to be compensated for their research and taking on risk. Underwriters allocate shares to their best customers in exchange for their information.

This comment isn't very clear or convincing. Jay Ritter from University of Florida has a lot more information and links on all of the above: http://bear.warrington.ufl.edu/ritter/ipodata.htm and http://bear.warrington.ufl.edu/ritter/ipolink.htm.

Basically, leaving no money on the table is much costlier than having the IPO underpriced by ~50%.

Groupon is an interesting IPO, not for how much it's stock rose but for the problems in its business model. A much better indicator of how well their IPO went will be the closing prices 1, 6, and 12 months form now.
What's the deal with tribute bands?
Agreed. We did the same with our web dev firm (cut support for old browsers), and nobody seemed to notice. Anyone who "needed" support for IE6 we would have happily given them the names of a few other companies in the area that can help them.

We also were in the very good position of being able to turn down work, though, so it's easy to tell people off. I think it depends on your situation.

Idealistically though, it seems like a huge step backwards to bother supporting IE6. The more people that do, the worse the internet becomes as a whole because of it.
> where if I had written unit tests I would have found myself essentially rewriting all of them to respect the new abstraction layer.

Here's your problem: You're either not writing unit tests correctly, or you're writing bad unit tests. If you have to rewrite all your unit tests to respect the new abstraction layer, you're programming astonishingly poorly - that should be a change to a few different tests, not all of them.
Do a Barrel Roll on any site.
Yesterday I had 15 minutes and a plan. Barrel Roll any site or image url. http://barrelroll.me/#http://news.ycombinator.com Should work in Chrome and FF. Most large enough/major sites will probably not work as they've set X-Frame-Options appropriately :)
Our ISP (WPEngine) did a full scan and couldn't find anything fishy, and we can't figure out how to reproduce the issue (none of us sees the warning). Can you please email me if you still see it? So sorry for the hassle.
Generally, I think the statute is applied only to "lesser" crimes, because after a certain amount of time, the clarity of the testimony from witnesses is likely to degrade and investigators' abilities to gather evidence are greatly diminished.

It also probably was created before video cameras existed.
Let's look at this a bit more precisely.

True that mathematical formulas and laws of physics are not patentable. However, a specific use of either to solve a specific problem is patentable provided the three constraints (non-obviousness, usefulness and novelty) are satisfied.

Software is not mathematics -- A computer science algorithm could arguably be, but "software" is not. Software is a specific implementation using that mathematics that sits onto your CD or hard-disk where "mathematics" cannot sit (sure copyrightable representations of that mathematics do). And software gets appropriately subject to copyright laws.

Applying software to solve a specific problem is no different than applying hardware or mathematics to solve a specific problem. If those patent-ability constraints are satisfied, there is nothing wrong with software patents "in principle". Fixing the practice is another thing.

Second refutation I have comes from my personal experience. No, most of the software developers are not mathematicians. Often far from that in practice. Many don't even understand computer science (including myself partly). We can still however make software inventions that satisfy the three constraints.

I know this topic remains debatable. And at least a part of the reason is that the issues are often not correctly understood by people and the law-makers. Add to that the pace at which laws are adjusted to changing practices in the industry.

Edit: Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.
Have you LOOKED at the patent system as it exists today? It does not even REMOTELY look like what you described.
Checkout the test server on this - really cool stuff.
they're talking about the GREEN indicator, on top of the screen (which shows the iSight camera's status), not about sleep indicator (the WHITE, rectangular thing, beside the IR receiver).

http://venturebeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/macbook-air-w...
Scrolldit.com is bugged in Opera, I tried to fix it but can't find out what goes wrong and how to solve it. Is there anyone here who can shed a light on it?
Miami Dolphins vs Kansas City Chiefs live nfl week 9 online stream.
While I certainly agree that it can seem naive, when it comes to law it is taken to such an extreme that it's almost to the point that definition of "is" isn't "is" anymore.
I think it's hilarious that most of the comments I'm seeing here so far seem to be doing the exact over analysis that this article is trying to dissuade us over-analytical types from doing ... maybe?

Just build it motherfuckas?
It really depends what problem you're solving. Not all problems require elegant solutions that other programmers will admire. If that's the case, you have several options:

1. Switch to a "harder" problem (however that's defined), that necessitates an elegant solution that will impress other programmers.

2. Ignore the desire to impress people who don't matter to your business.

3. There is no third option.
It thinks my Droid is in landscape mode, even in portrait, and even if I refresh.
It's also possible Anna Ardin is suffering from multiple personality disorder and one of her alternate personalities threw the party for Assange, tweeted about how cool he is, and invited him to stay with her 4 days after the rape.

We could make up all sorts of implausible, but theoretically possible scenarios.

But at this point, the most likely possibility seems to be that Ardin and W are jilted lovers who want revenge against Assange.
Anyone can see that freedom fighters and protest organizers will use distributed technologies, because frankly they can't afford or manage a centralized technology. This has its trade offs, but it's easy, cheap, and fast.

The only thing it is lacking is verifiability, and in many cases this is an asset not a detriment. When things are easy, cheap and fast you can crowd source verification so that if someone tweets out, "The rioters at $local_location have turned violent and are burning down the $city", everyone there can verify this and drown out the propaganda and rumors relatively quickly.

So the first part of his statement isn't so much of a surprise. It's like saying, "The next political revolution will take advantage of electricity." It's very obvious.

So really, what we are evaluating is can they predict unrest in Egypt reliably using Twitter and tweet content. I believe it's possible. Take for example, that calmness can predict the stock market[1]. Or pronouns can be used to predict any number of things[2]. Is it possible that the CIA can watch for shifts in calmness to anxiety or shifts in the number of pronouns used in reference to a particular leader and measure the likely hood of political uprising? That seams plausible to me.

[1]http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/twitter-crystal-ba...
[2]http://secretlifeofpronouns.com/
That also applies to the proposed conspiracy theory between the two women.
I am assuming this uses the isotope jquery plugin, if anyone else is thinking about using dynamic grids like this I would suggest taking a look at the project. (free for non-commercial use) http://isotope.metafizzy.co/
Why would I want to use this instead of tileboard? Tileboard is less than $1 a square foot at Lowes. It provides a very smooth surface even on a textured wall, and is easy to install (no painting, just cut, hang, done).
4 Rules for a 4 Hour Work Day
You can be a top performer at any tech company in only 4 hours a day. This article cover four simple rules of triage techniques to cut your time as an office drone in half.
Indie Productivity
I think the statement was made in the context of Intel moving to multiple cores and abandoning the higher-and-higher clock speed approach, which is something ARM licensees can do as well. "Moving up" wasn't meant to read "getting as big as Intel." In that sense there really isn't "ARM" - there's a bunch of ARM licensee's with different strategies so it's not one company against another, it's Intel vs. a different architectural approach.

It's not that Intel doesn't have everything it needs and more in terms of technology and resources, it's just that Intel stands for a certain type of processor and ARM for a very different one. Intel could start making ARM chips again (remember XScale) but that would cannibalize their monopoly on PC and server processors.

Personally, I wouldn't count Intel out quite yet. There's a lot more to building a powerful processor than a core and all those years of building chipsets counts for something.
In what way are those first year Calculus courses different at Caltech? I'm quite curious.
THE OCCUPIED /B/
Also with a maxed out 13" air, had it for 3 weeks. Can't imagine going back to my (previously maxed out) 15" MBP. If you need the screen space plug into a monitor (I've got one 24" and one 27")
Here's another from one of my favorite subreddits (SFW):

http://www.scrolldit.com/?r=humanporn
I'm working on something similar but a little more like an HN-specific Flipboard in the browser.
Science / Math courses force you to very objectively face how good you are at the subject being taught. Fields which are more subjective leave your expertise as a much less defined concept and hence do not force the student to confront the limit of their abilities.
noprocast doesn't work for me. I have Hacker News added to my "Top Sites" and Safari likes to refresh those every so often.

When I did have it enabled I was locked out more often than not making it particularly useless for me. What I have found is that I have started finding a lot of the articles that make the frontpage are boring and I have naturally started visiting less and less.
Note that Rust-Oleum also has dry erase paint, available from Home Depot, Amazon, and other such places, that is also much cheaper than Ideapaint. (Also available, bafflingly, from Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/p/rust-oleum-dry-erase-paint-g...). Prices vary a lot, but it looks comparable or even a little cheaper than the Whiteyboard paint (but note that it is white, not clear)).

My guess is that Ideapaint is so expensive because most people have no idea dry erase paint exists. They stumble across Ideapaint while searching for whiteboards. It is such an obviously good idea, there is a tendency to assume it is very rare or else you would have heard of it before. Since it is a good deal compared to whiteboards from the regular office supply stores (even the "low use" whiteboards from those stores), it puts the customer in the mindset of thinking they have found a great bargain, and they don't go looking for an even better bargain.
Hm. I don't see how those count as "a whole lot of nothing", but then I'm a physics student, so basic science research doesn't bother me. What sorts of benefits would you want to see from supercomputing for it to be "useful"?

There was a recent Washington Post article on the DoE's supercomputers and the uses they're put to:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/national-security/sup...
Ask HN:DippinDots is going bankrupt can someone buy their 4.5 MIL Facebook fans?
I saw the link on HN that Dippin Dots was going bankrupt and I clicked to see their Facebook page. They have 4.5 million followers and it would be a shame for a company that put so much effort into building their social media presence like that to have it deleted without some profit.

Is their a way for a company in the same market like Ben and Jerry's or Hagen Daz's to purchase the account. I'm assuming this violates some of Facebooks guidelines but it thought it would be interesting..

We may see companies liquidating their social media accounts as they do other commodities and assets.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-04/dippin-dots-flash-frozen-ice-cream-maker-seeks-bankruptcy-protection.html
Is Groupon Worth $18 Billion? 90% say no
I followed those links, and was rewarded with what I believe to be one of the best discussions on HN. Thank you for having taken the time to share that.

In hindsight though, I am saddened at how much more often conversations like that used to occur on HN, and how rarely they seem to now.