skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yea, I was lumping "aestetics" into "functionality" as opposed to trademarks, which are "informative". That was wrong terminology. I also was thinking that the readability of a typeface would be covered under a design patent, but upon reflection it would not.
The burden of proof needs to be on the ones complaining, the MPAA and the RIAA, not the site (who may or may not be innocent).
Without a group lunch, a hypothetical nerdy new employee might not reach out to people socially, and his equally nerdy co-workers might not reach out to him.

A company who relies on group lunches to make a company work normally needs new management, period. Surely there's an HR/hiring problem if people are being brought on board who require informal interaction outside of a work context in order to do good work. You might think I'm being all Sheldon about this, but work-life balance is important to me, and lunchtime is a part of that.

It's a very basic biological necessity that I think has deep, tribal roots as a bonding experience.

Sure, but as you say, this is solely your belief. That doesn't make it fact, and it doesn't mean it applies to anybody else. If you can only work at a company that subscribes to this belief, that's your option, but it's not fair to say that every company should hew to your beliefs.
It's the way life works. If we reigned in the best achievers to the same level of achievement as the worst level of achievers to make everyone 'equal' then we might as well just fire off all the nukes cause humans would be doomed.
Read some Atlas Shrugged, the bottom of the pyramid is necessary. Without it we'd have a flat line, and you know what else is a flat line? The way a no longer beating heart reads on an EKG in a hospital.
No, not really. A million dollars in the United States isn't enough if you have multiple people depending on you, like children or elderly parents, or siblings in trouble, or if you yourself develop a debilitating disease, or get into a car accident. I'm sure it's more than enough for someone in Somalia, but I don't think the OP lives in Somalia.
Ask HN: What are the best songs to listen to while cranking out code?
I'm doing a survey and wanted to get a sense for the most popular songs or types of music that everyone listens to while cranking out code.
Another option you might want to think about is licensing your engine to larger outfits (and/or this company that has approached you). You would basically give them access to your back end and iPhone app and let them integrate it with their offering. Instead of a one time cash hit you get recurring revenue and you can deal with multiple online dating sites offering them a new service they can offer their customers.
Can someone explain how far along this is on the spectrum of creating a constraint-based UI toolkit like OpenLaszlo or (I think) Flex? Constraint based programming is amazing for the view tier, and I've been waiting to see if someone comes along and builds one comparable to the Flash based ones that have been around for years.
Mobile Q&A App Opinionaided Rebrands As Thumb
Solving the Mona Lisa Mysteries (new images discovered)
Christmas Movies Reviewed: The Best Look Behind the Scenes 
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A practical resource for managing advanced persistent threats (APT)
coming from the other side: in HS, I did a science fair project relating to the effects of various carotenoids on cancer cells in vitro. I (top part of the class) didn't even really understand what a carotenoid was; my HS, as is probably typical, did not have an organic chemistry class. The only reason my project was anything impressive is because my dad runs a cancer research lab and could foist me off on his grad students. It was a great experience, and I learned tons about what laboratory biological research is like, but it wasn't really my own original effort.
AMA: Eric Ries (ericries) on Sprouter
Self-destruct on interference ... of a stealth drone... in enemy airspace... because it is presumably damaged to the point where it can't fly east.

It's stealth, so they shouldn't have been able to track it. It's encountering this over enemy airspace, so it should interpret this as an attack. The untethered drone has a few options: (a) fly east, (b) self-destruct, or (c) land.

It's bizarre that it chose to land under those conditions.
The Operational Details of the Apple HDTV
You could still use javascript with a hash in the URL to keep track of the current page so that it can be bookmarked.
Dude.

my @allfiles = glob '/somedir/*';

Now you properly report errors and you don't have to chomp.
We seem to stay pretty well connected at lunch.

Selection bias.
Thank you for all the comments. So far I have been using vim/textmate.
Or XML! https://gist.github.com/1074339
Brilliant - didn't know websocket.io had been broken out. I was patiently waiting for @miksago to update https://github.com/miksago/node-websocket-server however it had become clear this was a very low priority for him (fair enough).
Thanks for your suggestion, Matthew.

We do anticipate some applications wanting more than one instance. There are two scenarios where this comes up.

1. You want separate connections per instance. This is useful in load testing, among other things.

2. You want to provide different default options for different instances.

Neither of these scenarios is supported very well in this release, but we expect to add support for them shortly.
Because no one can spell queuology
or queuistics.
Computer-Related Incidents with Commercial Aircraft
"""Marco's "what will be different in 6 months?" question gave me a chuckle when you consider that native development for the iPhone is only about 3.5 years old and the rapid pace of change in the industry."""

I don't see any disruptive forces to have emerged those 3.5 years. The iPhone retains the lion's share of smartphone profits, and still is where the lion's share of mobile app profits are made. Trending upwards. Android expanded mostly in the low margin, bottom of the barrel, market category, and that's why they have a problem with apps.

Do you see anything TODAY that would challenge that in 6 months, or do you believe that something will magically emerge in, say, 3 months to do it?

All this "rapid pace" of the last 3.5 years is because a reaction to the iPhone, not something inherent in the industry.

The 10 years preceding the iPhone the smartphone industry was boring, with very slow evolution, and marginal differences between models. I know because I was there, using some monstrosities of the era (by Nokia, Sony, etc) and hoping someone would come and build a better f&%^n phone.
Well, this is embarrassing: I remembered that story from somewhere, and it turns out somewhere was another Hacker News thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2007818
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Facebook Confirms Corporate Reorganization
I agree, it may well be a moot point. I am using gmail for the test and have stopped anything being sent to the spam folder. Anything the filter would have caught should still be labeled as spam though so I should be able to include that figure in any results.
regulation of financial services, regulation of financial markets

This isn't going to be rehashing the Glass-Steagall myth, is it? See, e.g., [1]

regulation of campaign contributions

Isn't this in itself a repudiation of democracy? We're not talking here about Blagojevich-style corruption in the election process. If you're worrying about campaign contributions, that boils down to how much advertising a campaign can buy. If you're worried about a candidate advertising a lot, that's pretty much a vote of no-confidence in your fellow Americans' ability to weigh options and vote rationally.

Also, if you're one of those people horrified that corporations can now contribute to campaigns, can you tell me where the line should be drawn? I'm sure you don't object to my right to contribute to a campaign, nor my right to pool money with a friend to do so. If two of us can do so, why not, say, my whole club (e.g., my hypothetical flying club wants to have elected the guy who promises to grant a permit to expand the airport in town)? As this scales up, at some point we need a formal structure to organize things, which is legally recognized by a corporation; why can't my incorporated flying club make a contribution?

[1] http://blog.heritage.org/2008/09/22/the-glass-steagall-myth/
What kind of disabilities are you talking about? Physical disabilities, or emotional and cognitive disabilities?

My mother was a special education teacher - her students had emotional and cognitive disabilities. While she taught inside of a normal elementary school, she was really in a school-within-a-school. All of her students had emotional disabilities, and they had a separate staff and reporting structure than the rest of the school.

Some emotionally disabled kids can go into general education later on, but not all of them can.

Now, physically disabled students is a different matter entirely. They have the same emotional and cognitive abilities as everyone else. I think they should be in the same classes, and the general educational system should accommodate them.
>Litigating an entire case ex parte and sealing the record so that the accused never even finds out what they were accused of should be quite troubling to anyone who believes in due process.

seems like definition of due process has been changed, secretly to avoid unnecessary disturbance to the public peace and enjoyment.
Indeed, since I got a smartphone I no longer dread long lines in supermarkets, etc. Just more time to read HN.
The old "appeal to pity" fallacy. People in the world are starving, therefore $1M is enough to not worry about money anymore.
USB and PDMI are standard connectors. What part don't you understand? And, btw, how do you rip off the cable?
No, Knuth's version doesn't handle those words either. Here's how he defines a word in his literate program:

Let's agree that a word is a sequence of one or more contiguous letters; "Bentley" is a word, but "ain't" isn't. The sequence of letters should be maximal, in the sense that it cannot be lengthened without including a nonletter.
The Windows 8 tablet train wreck
How would an outside copyright enforcer know that?

Well, for one, there is no such thing as "an outside copyright enforcer." The only people allowed to complain at all about a song's presence on a website are the people who own the copyright. That's it.
Maybe it's just me, but I find this idiom incredibly gross:

var prop = model.get('prop')

It seems much more elegant to write:

var prop = model.prop()

You can do the computed properties and binding thing the same way, it's really just a small difference in the model API.

But really, what I'd love to see is more model-agnostic tools. Why do I have to buy into SproutCore or Backbone's model implementation just to use the other features?
Yeah there are a lot of phases, but each phase takes a while. (Though the first couple phases, which are mostly about ensuring that the drug isn't poisonous, don't take too long.) Clinical work has to move at the speed of biology, which is very slow compared to computers. Skin cells, which have a really short life cycle, divide every 15 days. For a disease like cancer, if even a handful of cancerous cells hasn't been destroyed, you could experience a relapse--but it would take a while, perhaps even years, for the cancer to build back up to detectable levels. If your disease takes years to confirm that it's gone, the clinical trial is going to take years to confirm that it works. It really sucks, but that's just how biology works.
Quality Is Overrated
Bad code plagues business applications, especially Java ones
I thought the British were the world champions of queuing, even in situations where there are no affordances, Brits instinctively know how to queue and suffer no jumper.
10 Strange and Hilarious Bootleg Video Games
I use it to sync the contacts on my iphone with my computers.
Biology 2.0
Echofon does it somehow? I'd rather have form over function, but I'm probably in the minority.
5 Things An Entrepreneur Should Know Before Dating A Girl
Right. I wonder what would happen if we try to include a measure of perceived fairness from the customer's point of view into this type of analysis. I always feel I'm picking the wrong queue at stores... single queues going to whatever cash is open seem fairer, if that makes sense.
Heritage Foundation...really?
Mercedes luxurious design of cars is nothing like Apple's design of tech.

Apple is BMW of computers and BMW is Apple of cars - just look at this and honestly tell me this is beautiful and simple:

http://l.yimg.com/dv/izp/mercedes_benz_e_class_e320_bluetec_...

Compare that to the 5er sedan of same year (if we go back to e60 of mid 2003 things look even worse for Mercs)

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autoblog.com/media/2009/09/19-bmw...

I'm not even talking about A6

http://0.tqn.com/d/cars/1/0/1/P/1/09a6_interior.jpg

This is all personal I suppose, but I take issue when people relate Apple with Mercedes, just not the same level of attention to details between the two.
I have the same personal rule. Too often junior engineers think that the worst cardinal sin is to have a small amount of duplicated or less abstract than it could be code.

This really isn't the case. Until you really understand the commonality of the problem, attempting to abstractly define the solution will make your future work all the more difficult when it turns out you didn't really understand all the edge cases and exceptions.

Three use cases are a good number -- by that time you're much more likely to understand the problem, and by avoiding premature abstraction, you'll have an easier time doing the work.
PHP Is Not An Acceptable COBOL
For those interested and not already aware, PBS aired a documentary about this on Feb. 16, 2011.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/crash-flight-447.html
Any company wants the best programmer that is a good fit in their environment that they can afford. Budgets and environments tend to dumb down who actually accepts the position. I've turned down positions based on the quality of the management or the working environments before. I assume it happens every day.
That, and half of US political society wants to murder the entire concept of government.
Am I the only one who hates design patents?

Wait, you're telling me you created a screen with rounded edges? There's probably over a 1,000 people who conceptually designed iPod/iPad type devices since the late 90s on.

None of this is new. It's absurd to claim it's original.
> Did you look at the test?

Here's one HN thread, with links to a Florida test.

(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3327847)
Apple declares Camera+ the top selling app of 2011
Twitterrific has done this for a long time. It was hard to make it perform well, but not impossible.
Talking to Newspapers: A Cautionary Tale with Moral
I was in Odyssey of the Mind as a child for a number of years, and absolutely loved it. To be fair, it was not run by the school in my district which is apparently pretty abnormal (most are school-based). As such, we had a lot of motivated and enthusiastic parents working as coaches and mentors, instead of burnt out teachers who were only doing it for the stipend.

Its a great program though. We competed in the "structures" division, where you build balsa wood structures and see how much weight they can hold. You also have to perform skits (think mini theatre performances) and do "spontaneouses", impromptu activities designed to make you think creatively or work as a team.

Totally awesome program, definitely on my short list of things I'll get my kids involved in.
IANAL, but this sounds like they didn't have a very good lawyer.
US hospice industry worth $14 billion, under  federal investigation
Parent point is that once you have a nontrivial queue, very already lost, so it doesn't matter which style is faster.
Am scared of the potential surprises that'll come along.

I shared a google map (you know those created your maps things) and I didn't realise that it showed up on my g+.

All I thought was, wtf. I shared it from google maps and didn't have any intention of whatever circles it went to, to know about it.

Super confusing and worrying.
it would be modern version of the
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Beams
I have a Galaxy Tab, too and there is no USB connector. I'm quite sure of this because I had to buy a $20 add-on that hackishly turns the PDMI port into a USB port and looks freakishly ugly while doing so. PDMI is, of course, an industry standard.

I really wish they had put an actual USB port on the thing, or at least a place to put a micro SD card. But if anyone is copying Apple's whole "we don't believe in strain relief" nonsense, I really do hope they stop that. Damaged cables are not beautiful. They make the device look like junk.
Before I give some examples, just remember that claiming one device has an overall better design is highly subjective. However, build quality is more easily recognized.

Asus' new Transformer Prime tablet is probably the best example of a product that matches or exceeds the build quality and design of an Apple product.

Asus' original transformer tablet, while not as thin or light as the iPad, was also an extremely well-built and stylish device. I think that I would actually prefer an iPad 2 over the original transformer, but that doesn't mean it isn't a nice piece of hardware.
Some people actually like writing javascript ;^)
any first year CS student who's done queueing theory knows that SQMS is more efficient than MQMS and SQSS
apt-get has some very disturbing properties, such as the default being system install.

Bundler (an extension of rubygems) and Maven (for Java) and SBT (for Scala) have the nice property that different applications can have different versions of the same libs. And this is the default behavior.

Actually Java, through OSGI, goes out of its way, into allowing different parts of the same application to require different versions of the same libs.

Developing software is more complicated than using it. Therefore it needs more specialized tools.
> This is presumably much better for throughput, but much worse for making sure that what you're leaving with is what you purchased.

Admittedly, yes. But there are usually random checks.

> (Also, how does it accommodate a decision to put something back? I've never seen such a system.)

You press the "put back" button and scan the thing you want to put back.
Kind of wish the Engrish from Jurassic Boy caught on instead of that from Zero Wing's.
When somebody thinks your a idiot because you do "reading", they can go to hell anyways.
considering Iran's hacking of Diginotar certificate as a precedent, i don't think it is unimaginable.

Similar possibility without actual hacking of C&C channel encryption is that the drone (or its windows command machines in Nevada) is just plain infected with a drone virus (like it was recently reported) which has a code "if (it is a steath drone flying over Iran) then (land)"
I suppose it's nice that http://kitenet.net/~joey/code/alien/ finally has some competition. ;)

I'm unsure of the wisdom of conflating package format conversion (rpm, deb, puppet) with package building (from gem or python sources).
I'm a bit late to this party...

I liked the article title but the article is weak. First of all, there are many ways to create a viable tablet. Apple's approach to enumerate the challenges/problems associated with the new form factor and then to solve them not come up with an ad hoc hack and to protect their unique patentable solutions.

At the same time, other companies were creating netbooks because they were to lazy to figure out how to design a fully functional computer and cram it into a notebook form factor.

Probably one of the key breakthroughs was their realization that it didn't need to be a full computer. Seems so obvious now doesn't it? Also that they needed to augment the current state of the touch based UI. All very obvious in retrospect.

If there is prior art then it will remove some of the violations. If you are going to post stuff like this, do the necessary research on when the iPad IP was patented.

Its appalling to see companies blatantly copying better technology and then selling it. They should respect it, either license the technology, develop their own or work on something that Apple hasn't done yet and isn't in the process of doing.
Problem is, the iPad was designed for finger input. Raises bezels would mean you can't touch a segment of the edge of the screen without pressing hard enough to force your finger into that triangle. Any designer working with finger input would recognize that and design a screen flush with the bezel.

With previous devices, they were generally designed with a stylus in mind (Palm, Newton, slates, etc). A flush bezel, while not required, is a no-brainer when you think about it.
Design patents cover design, not function. As this article points out, minimalist designs are highly constrained. They wouldn't be minimalist if there were lots of other ways to do it.
> I can’t help wondering, though, why he didn’t use head -${1} in the last line. It seems more natural than sed. Is it possible that head hadn’t been written yet?

I'm not sure when head(1) was added, but I doubt it was added by anyone in the Unix core team at Bell Labs, it certainly didn't make it to Plan 9 because it is redundant with sed as the example illustrates.

sed 11q is concise and clear, no need for shortcuts, but if you really have to, you can write your own head shell script that just calls sed.
What I don't understand is why a meeting with the government lawyer was the final action and why what they say matters? What prevents the blog owner from filing a suit to get the property returned? The government failed to provide proof that they were legally in possession of the property. File a suit to get the property back and then they have to produce the legal order allowing them to keep it. I know money might be a major factor in this but the article's author acts like there was nothing else that could have been done.
I'm guessing you're not looking to re-locate? If relocation was an option, I'd pick some hot-spot urban areas, and make your search geographic oriented. I would guess the majority of the companies that would employ you are based in a city, (especially if you're looking for work at a startup) and you'd have the best luck in SF, NYC, or Boston, as they're pretty techie. But that's just me, I'm not a big fan of Ohio...
Indeed, that does address the pin configuration. What about the connector housing and strain relief, though? Hell, Apple's strain relief sucks – you need a pack of Sugru to rescue older dock connector cables. You don't copy that for practical reasons, right? The specimens you linked look very different from Samsung's dubiously unique interpretation.
How Dr. Terry Wahls Cured Her Own MS with Dietary Changes