skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What should happen at the very least is they should be required to disclose publicly exactly what investments they have made.

Also, while they may be immune from prosecution, it should be considered an ethical violation to fail to disclose if you have a financial interest in pending legislation, and/or to be profiting in a way that would be considered illegal in another context.
Mozilla Firefox Got Hacked
This was a nice read, congrats to the author, and I always had a good feeling about the balsamiq creator.
18 Features an African Smartphone or Tablet Must have
TiVo is a set-top box that blocks advertisements. I know a lot of people who use it, and even I used to use it. I thought it was a necessary part of the watching experience.

There are two main reasons why I stopped using it:
I started to use a HD TV. This was quite a while back and TiVo didn't work on HD then. So I decided to go without it.

The second reason was when I worked at NBC and an employee noticed that TiVo started blocking NBC ads. It felt hypocritical that I blocked ads but worked at a company that relied on advertising.

At first I thought I could just whitelist shows, but then what about one time programs that have good segments? Why deny them advertising revenue. Think about how many shows rely on advertising that you watch. Lost, Fringe, Futurama, News, Seinfeld, Adult Swim (Questionable Content I've always noted specifically).

So I stopped using TiVo and honestly the experience hasn't been that bad. There are a few shows that show annoying ads like 10 minute Shake-Weight commercials. But for the most part, ads aren't that bad. The age of the really really obnoxious ones have been stopped or perhaps I watch different channels than I used to? Either way, I haven't had too much trouble or annoyance.
Time, effort, and concentration are limited resources. You only get so
much of each of them in your lifetime. If you wish to spend your limited
resources experiencing advertising, it's your choice. If you'd prefer to
spend your limited resources elsewise, again, it's your choice.

If Google and Facebook curled up and died tomorrow due to no one being
willing to spend their lives experiencing advertising, something would
take their place. Whether said "something" turns out to be better or
worse is subject to debate. There are plenty of possible business
models, yet relying on revenues from advertising has a proven track
record of profitability due to most people not being savvy enough to
make advertising ineffective.

Personally, I've got better things to do with my life.
Have you tried hootsuite (there are alternatives, but that's not the point)? You can schedule your tweets and FB updates with it, very handy if you don't want to be on Twitter and FaceBook during your day job.
Very tragic. It's the strong mind people that are some of the most vulnerable.

RIP Ilya
Curious as I am learning CL. What did framework did you use with SBCL?
Facebook now posts to Twitter
I'm embarrassed by my ignorance of geography, but quite intrigued, so I'll ask: can anyone identify the crooked little vein of light that's centered at 3:48 and again (though to the left) at 4:38?
It's not a misunderstanding, it's a different theory that also falls under the umbrella of "singularity". http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/schools

To me, the name actually seems like a better fit for Vinge's or Good/Yudkowsky's predictions than Kurzweil's. They both have specific "singularity" points, while Kurzweil's "singularity" is just an ever-growing exponential (or super-exponential).
Sorry, what I meant was, if you didn't know he was a brilliant scientist (and learned in many other areas), you would think he was someone of only those qualities, rather than someone who has those qualities and was also a stellar intellectual and scientist. IMO, sometimes those qualities are seen as mutually exclusive.
Seems more of a trade-off than an improvement.

That's exactly the point. Instead of trying to compete directly with the iPad, Amazon is serving a different part of the market.
Yeah stop using it, selfish people.
servlet + web server + (guessing) crazy number of libraries - is it still a 'hello world' app?
From what I recall Australia has a higher minimum wage compared to the US that is way the price is scaled.
Show HN: I wrote a JS keyframing library, but I didn't like it and rewrote it.
I'll take your word for it. Though "Surely You're Joking" reads very closely in style to his letter and with "What Do You Care What Other People Think?", in which he's listed as author with Ralph Leighton as editor.
Bezos: For better or worse, it is really not a part of our culture to look at things defensively. We rarely say, “Oh my God, we’ve got to do something about that existential threat.” Maybe one day we’ll become extinct because of that deficiency in our nature. I don’t know. We look at things through a different lens. We say, “Oh, here’s this incredible phenomenon called social networking. How can we be inspired by that to make our business better?” I hope we find something.

This is precisely the reason that I think Google will not succeed in their Google Plus approach to social networking.
Seems like the full page link is broken. You can use Readability by clicking on readability view here,
or just go straight to the multipage article
http://rdd.me/rdnylmgg
What is the orange and/or green glowing envelope that seems to be surrounding the earth? Is it light reflected off the atmosphere?
The author is talking about hosting web applications. If you have half a dozen toyapps, which have an audience ranging from 0-10, you couldn't host them on separate JVMs on a VPS. There's not enough RAM for this scenario.
The Beauty of Paper Sizes
Fun moments in driving a demo for the engineering team at my last company, which was in the advertising space, was spending several minutes trying to debug a problem with the demo before the CTO informed me that my toolbar indicated that AdBlock was still turned on and Ghostery was probably eating my company's tracking cookies so the demo was unlikely to work...

Did I stop using those tools? Not a chance. Advertising is for suckers. If your site or service uses it then I wish you success, but I will not feel one iota of remorse for taking every opportunity to reduce the clutter and distraction of advertising from my life. If you want my money have the balls to ask me for it rather than trying to sell me as your secondary product.
To Make An Already Critical Literature Review Even More Critical
Professors are more focused and experienced so it is easier for them to look out for the flaws in a student is assessment but no hard feelings for there is certainly a level of difference between a learned professor and a student.
>They make no distinction between more and less legitimate patents.

It's a valid position to question the legitimacy of the patent system as a whole and to consider all patents illegitimate. There are multiple levels on which the entire system is ridiculous, both ethically as well as economically.

I won't take a position on the paper since I haven't read it (yet).
AMD's 16 Core PC Microprocessor
Untrue. JRuby can run an app in under 200 MB easily, and close to 100 MB if tuned right.
"hello world" - win xp 32 bit, sun jdk 6:

public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
Thread.sleep(10000);
System.out.println("hello world");
}

Heap - 5M, Used heap - below 2M. All defaults.

(the "sleep" is there to have time to connect Java VisualVM)
It goes to show how elegant and simple the humble bicycle is. I enjoy cycling because it's fast, efficient and peaceful. I'm not sure that this design meets that criteria at all. It might look pretty when viewed at certain angles but on the whole (particularly after hearing the sound it makes) I think its ugly.

Yet the traditional bicycle wheel with spokes works surprisingly well. It's light weight, rigid and overall quite simple. I'm averaging about one broken spoke a year at the moment but it's not too difficult to replace.

Though certainly there are incremental improvements that are useful, such as making frames/components lighter while maintaining the same strength through the use of various alloys. But I don't think I'll be changing to these new wheels anytime soon.
I believe the row of lights at 3:48 is the India-Pakistan border (viewed approaching from north to south)

http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2011/09/06/photo-a-space-...
The OP reminds me of O'Reillys 2003 piece (buy where you shop) http://tim.oreilly.com/articles/buy_where_shop.html

In his piece Tim OReilly warned against people who browsed at bookstores, but only shopped online.

I suspect the same is true here.. if you use $service regularly, and $service exists through advertising, then maybe whitelisting their ads is a reasonable trade-off to make..
I don't appreciate the assumption that my time and attention are commodities that others inherently deserve to profit from. When I want to find a product that fits a particular need, I'll go looking for it intentionally; when I have other purposes for being online, I want that to be respected. Websites aren't free to run, but depending on your actual costs you have other options that respect your readers, from making your content a paid service (for larger enterprises) to asking for donations (for small blogs).

AdBlock disrupted the advertisement-based revenue system. Are you going to defend the old ways or embrace new ideas?
Is Neuroscience the Death of Free Will?
It was never a scary thing for people. The entire walled-garden-curated-experience versus open-standards-loose-confederation-of-providers generates heated discussion only among a small, small sliver of geeks. For most of the population, this is an irrelevant technical detail like what flavor the CMOS on the device is. Users lack the insight and vocabulary to even identify which world a particular device or ecosystem belongs to. (So do geeks, because this is primarily a matter of tribal affiliation rather than technical reality, but that's another matter entirely.)

The underlying philosophy of your device matters not a whit to a 14 year old girl. She wants to listen to the same music, read the same books, and watch the same movies that her friends do. These are her core requirements for your device. The rest is boring geekery.
I don't know, I got it in the mail a week after checking out adwords but not spending anything. It said Google on it and the person I talked to was able to see and edit my account directly without me providing my password.
Use a smaller servlet engine. Most of them assume you will be fine with a larger heap and prepare caching structures, etc with that in mind Others are smaller and lighter.
Ads are one issue. Sending information about (almost) every website you visit to Google is another issue. That's my main reason for blocking pests such as AdWords, +1 buttons, and Facebook buttons.
I simply deactivated flash by default, and only activate it when I want (on both Chrome and Firefox). This way I still see ads, but not those which eat my cpu, hog all my memory, and distract me to death. I think this is a good compromise.
Kindle Fire review | The Verge
> Group think and excusing things because you don't think your contribution matters is not an argument.

Sure it is -- it's a damn good argument. it's just very selfish, and breaks the spirit of Kant's Categorical Imperative.
It's against broadcasting rules to publish anything relating to suicide. Especially euthanasia.

I gather that exceptions are made for exceptional news.
"lost wealth"?

How can we lose money we don't have to begin with?

Revised title: "The Opportunity Cost of Patent Trolling: Estimated at $80B/yr"

What is a patent?

Ask that question and you get a wide variety of answers.

Does it require the grantee to do anything? No. Except pay fees.

Does it give the grantee permission to manufacture, market and sell anything? No.

Does it guarantee the grantee protection from competition? No.

So what is a patent?

It is a right to sue. (And thereby a right to threaten to sue.)

And currently, I believe the patent office is granting around 200,000 of these annually. The number keeps increasing.

Are rates of innovation in line with this the number of grants? What percentage of patents are actually practiced?

Are the numbers of new technologies and products reaching the marketplace increasing in line with the increases in the number of grants? Are there more inventions or more inventors, or do inventors just need more and more protection year after year?

How about the rates of patent litigation and threats of patent litigation (patent trolling)? Ah ha.

We can talk about innovation and incentives, motivation and effects, and get lost in academic arguments about inventors and economics, but it does not change what a patent is:

Pure and simple, it is a right to sue.

And selling this right to sue (or should we say licensing it), now by the 100's of 1000's each year, has itself become a major source of revenue for the government. It's a business.

Grant the right to sue indiscriminantly one hundred thousand times or more each year and you just might start to see some grantees exercising their right to sue (or threaten suit) ... without any intention of ever manufacturing, marketing and selling anything.

Never underestimate the path of least resistance.

Manufacturing, marketing and selling versus threatening patent litigation and asking for compensation. Which of those two do you think is an easier route to profits?

The point that many miss is that only one of the two is actually using the patent.

That's because a patent is a right to sue.

It grants no other permissions. It carries no obligations other than the need to pay fees.

As such, trolls operate squarely within the system. They are exploiting patents for their true worth. Patents are expensive to prosecute and maintain. Go figure.

As others point out, the system is the bigger problem. You do not need to be an expert in intellectual property or economics to figure out what incentive is created by granting the right to sue, a hundred thousand times each year.
I think it's only scary if you can see the walled garden. There are a lot of people out there who can barely manage to get pictures off of their digital cameras.

I think to some people the Kindle Fire will just make sense. They don't have the kinds of abstractions that most geeks have formed about digital information. They might not understand where the walls of the walled garden are. They just want something that works.
Best Black Friday TV Deals | TV Black Friday Sales  2011 TV Online Store
Android, Barnes & Noble, Patents and Microsoft
When's the last time you asked someone how their startup was doing to get a reply "not so good", founders are expected to be eternal optimists and this expectation can make it harder for those struggling or suffering to ask for help from their friends (who are often from the startup world themselves).

So true, the need to keep that positive projection can really eat people up. It can even be really hard to complain or talk about the downside with friends and family. A mentor who's been through it themselves [1] may be one of the best ways to not only get advice but also release the stress by being really open about problems.

[1] best if they don't have a financial interst.
Anyone know how to get at whatever this is supposed to be from an iPad? The site is putting up one of those "download our useless app" pages, and doesn't have any apparent way to get past that.
I refreshed his page (with Adblock on) a few extra times. Just out of spite I think.. I'm an asshole sometimes.

But in my defense: every website I've made and still have up has never had a single advertisement on it. I don't like them, so I don't push them on people. However, I do whitelist sites I use daily for free such as Reddit and Imgur.
TakePart 30 Ways in 30 Days
747's are big flying Unix hosts
The only possible time I'll stop using AdBlock is when these are met: ● Browsers do not allow popups or pop-under windows
● Flash is totally eliminated, and along with that, are SuperCookies, and Flash itself.
● No more noisy ads.
● No more ads that get in the way of getting things done (e.g. Ad Page is displayed for 5 seconds before it lets you read an article)
● Deceptive ads that pretend to be "Download" buttons (usually in software download websites).
● No more ads that mess up the usability of the websites, usually by emulating OS controls.

What are great example of a good ads? ● Bing and Google ads are honest, plain, and non-deceptive. ● Facebook ads are perfect. You can even report if an ad is not interesting; You can block an ad from a specific advertiser.

For the meantime, we can use AdBlock as "AdUnblock", meaning, we pick the sites who deserve ad views.
A Kinect Primer
Hi William.
Great to hear the booming Australian start-up scene getting some deserved dedicated coverage. I work for Flippa.com - worlds largest website marketplace (over $61M websites sold so far) and BRW Fast Starter + SmartCompany Innovation Award Winner. We're based in Melbourne so happy to shout lunch if you're ever in the area!
How about someone creates a new AdBlock EasyList-based filterset that doesn't blacklist sites that don't have obscene ads while blocking the major offenders?

Or does AdBlock allow for (allow,deny) type rules like httpd.conf where you can specify a whitelist? If so, a whitelist for certain sites may be the best approach.
It's Flash for the mockup part and plain html for the rest of the app.
Dress Code for an Interview…
True, but wouldn't you agree that nl's suggestion is the maximum likelihood guess?
Off-topic: Patrick, you strike me as a geek's geek. And that's a compliment. So why is it that so many of your HN comments have you shrewdly observing the world as seen from the vantage point of non-geeks? About 80% of the time, I can tell I'm reading one of your comments because of this penchant you have for telling geeks that the things they're arguing about don't matter to normal people or to businesses. How did you develop your understanding of non-geeks?

Bonus question: what do you think about QR codes :)
WhatsApp Now Delivers 1 Billion Messages Every Day
-XX:MaxPermSize=128M
This is pretty much what I do, flash ads get blocked but I would imagine many ad sites will start having fallbacks for mobile browsers. No data on that though.
AJ has already plugged noosbox, but the other Startmate companies are

Chorus http://www.getchorus.com - in this batch at 500 Startups

Grabble http://grabbleapp.com - just sold to Walmart

IRL Gaming http://www.irlgaming.com/ - not sure what they're up to...

and us BugHerd http://bugherd.com - were in the last batch of 500 startups.

I'd also recommend getting on to Startmate directly, http://startmate.com.au and speak to Niki. There is a new batch coming up in January (applications close in a couple of weeks).
New Desktop Interface Flops
you have a point, I'll update the post.
Aviation business
innovaxl offers business aviation services, aircraft management services, aviation services, quick aviation services, corporate aviation services. There has been a growth of airline-specific infrastructure, new products, services and distributions channels. Aviation industry comprises civil aviation, airports, travel agents, holiday homes, freight forwarders and related infrastructures as a part of its business ecosystem, and offers good employment opportunities.
Domain Registration,Domain Name Registration,Ballistic Domains
For domain name registration you need to pay a small amount in hands of domain registrar. He takes the fees for the service he is providing to you and also has to pay a substantial amount to ICANN to get grant of the domain name.
Whoa, this is really good - beat me to it - but why oh why is the code minified/obfuscated?

I really want to see how their solution pares up to what I was trying out.
This is why in-app purchases are so effective. Charging everyone the same price all the time doesn't make sense with digital goods
Wired Kindle Fire Review
Until any given thread consumes too much of the heap and the jvm goes catatonic. See this all the time with jruby with 6 rails app in a single jvm instance.
Ipv6 nodes require multicasting support. This could be an incomplete solution to a problem that is already on the way out
Not to mention if we're ever going to map the galaxy within a mere 200 million years, we'll need autonomous probes capable of making copies of themselves.
Unique Piercings
Map Projections: Summary
Table 1 reminds me why even if these algorithms are available it's a big step to being able to understand and apply them. It's clear the author doesn't have a lot of familiarity with them.
The existence of patent trolls shows how far the system is out of control.

Patents are designed to provide an incentive for companies to invest in heavy research and to publish the results, while being guaranteed a limited monopoly on the invention in order to monetize it. (Or at least that's what they should be for).
That is in the interest of society as a whole.

What is not in the interest of society as a whole are (1) patents on inventions that did not incur any cost (2) passing on these monopolies to entities that do not plan to produce anything.
Thanks.... let me know if you have thoughts, feedback, or comments! Would love to hear !
I get your point. But it's faulty.

My issue with this view is that the viewer makes himself seem like this victim. Let's put ourselves in this scenario again. You, the viewer, are on my website. You're using my server bandwidth while using my website functions, which probably had a lot of investment go into them whether they were services or content. Multiply you by a 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 and now we have a problem.

This you take for granted. This you don't pay for.

It's my website. I choose how to monetize it. If you like that, great; otherwise, stop using my website. Until we generate some automatic way of blocking you from ever using my website while you're on AdBlock, then what you're doing is stealing. No one forces you to use my website.

A lot of examples in the real world apply here. There are adverts on highways, buses, buildings. Removing that clutter-creating huge banner ad from the middle of the mall; how's that different from removing a leader-board from a blog?

How can removing ads completely and automatically - from websites that earn their entire existence from adverts - while still accessing the website's content and using their server bandwidth anything less than a cowardly immoral act of theft? And to hide behind that as some sort of hero for having the mental capability of installing AdBlock is just downright delusional.

Blocking advertisements from people that live off of them while still using their resources is theft. Plain and simple.
Agreed. It helped me get Quipol pared down to just the must-haves in a very short time.
Why is e-commerce such a hot area in venture capital now?
I think maybe I'll turn my adblock off when advertisers quit blasting me with loud auto-playing video/audio ads that start automatically.

It really blows to open a dozen tabs and then suddenly have one start playing some goofy "nerd saves the day with MAGIC TECHNOLOGY" ad that I can't find and shut off. On a loop.

Advertising could have been unobtrusive like the author claims but advertisers chose otherwise trying to one-up each other. This is why you can't have nice things.
> since when did our elected officials rise above the law?

Since the first article of the United States Constitution, Section 6 Clause 1?

> [The Senators and Representatives] shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.

This makes it very tricky to try house members for any reason at all. As a result, few try as it's so hard to handle in court.