skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you want more people to read patents, you need to make them more understandable (as you say), and get rid of treble damages for potentially accidental infringement of a patent you "should have" been aware of because you were reading patents.
Imagine if he keeps doing this... One day I'll have a pretty bad ass directory of comedy mp4's... :)
Debunking Myths about Gender And Mathematics Performance
This is one of the problems with text-based communication. While I personally don't understand how Topolsky translates MG's automotive analogy into "class warfare," these types of misunderstandings are common when people aren't having a real-time conversation. If Topolsky were to talk about this on the phone with either MG or Gruber, he'd find his entire viewpoint changed within minutes. It's very possible that he is attributing "elitist" attitudes where they don't exist, but that's hard to know without a direct, real-time conversation.

I've seen this with my own co-workers on a daily basis. What seems like a contentious conversation via email/IM becomes a complete non-issue when discussed by phone or in person. The difference can be striking.
There are banks that offer refunds for atm fees on their accounts. You should consider switching.

A quick google found this [1], I'm sure there are more.

[1] http://www.bankfox.com/c/no-atm-fees/
My biggest thing when working at AOL was no upward mobility. If I wanted to manage developers, literally 70-80% of my time would be sucked into the ether with meetings and product reviews. There is so much management overhead there that it's a nightmare to actually get anything done. Once you manage even just one person, you're going to have no time left to do what you actually like (and are probably good at): programming.

So why not go to a smaller company where people listen to your ideas and you're able to do what you love and make a difference? I think the thing people want the most is to know that they're making a difference. This is nearly impossible at a large company.
It's probably just "failure of imagination" in preventing this hack - inertial navigation tech isn't exactly new (was pioneered in WWII and really came to age building ballistic missile navigation systems) so I doubt cost/classified technology would be a factor. It's just sad because having an intertial navigation system and a GPS system working to agree with each other or else some fallback (inertial homeward bound since that's an internal system, your accuracy would be off but it'd get back to friendly territory at least) would have prevented an attack like this (I believe at least - please tell me if I'm wrong).

Found this through a quick Google search - "DIY drones" http://diydrones.com/forum/topics/autopilot-system-for-full-...

I'm not sure what hardware in the system is really making the Iranian's mouths water - obviously the stealth tech has to have a great monetary and military value...I wonder how much the internals of this system compare to a predator drone that they already have captured many of as the article stated.
I won't comment on the UAV in the article, but you'd have to be a pretty wealthy person and have some really weird stuff on your kitchen table to have what is on the global hawk. I won't comment on specifics, but there is nothing simple about its gps and inertial navigation systems. Your categorization of UAV's was fairly simplistic and there are many more categories than two.

The Global Hawk is a much more expensive aircraft than the RQ-170 and is in a completely different category of aircraft. What happen to RQ-170 could not be done to the Global Hawk with they way its navigation works.

I don't want people thinking that autonomous aircraft are some simple thing that anyone can do. If that was the case, other countries would make them instead of buying them from the US.

Good luck making a laser ring gyro with a walk of < .002 deg/hr for $50 (or even $20,000) http://www51.honeywell.com/aero/common/documents/myaerospace...
Why? Why should there be a percentage-based fee at all for financial transactions? This is an idea that credit card companies have pushed onto the world, but there's no reason it needs to be accepted as fact.
Private networks are now clouds too, how cute.
Top10 Launches Music App on Spotify
If you've ever lived in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, or any of the small midwestern cities you'll feel that San Francisco is a paradise. I've had a gun pointed in my face in Philly and New York. The worst random violence I've ever had is I caught some guy with a grinder trying to cut through my bicycle lock. He high-tailed it, and I stole his grinder.
I buy legos 1-2 a year for my four girls, I never get anything with themes tho.

Only basic blocks and let their skills do the rest, you'd be amazed what they can do.
By "argue that", did you mean "argue against the point that"?

Sorry to sound nitpicky, but I was confused by the rest of your post after reading the first sentence.
Yeah, I hope more artists follow this example, because it's very successful for the artists and far more satisfying for the audience. Another person like that is Howard Tayler (author of Schlock Mercenary, among other things) who is a very, very clever author/businessman who is very inventive in how he interacts with his audience. For example, Howard holds parties to get people to help him ship out his books. They manage to mix fun with work and come out ahead.
Student builds iPhone app in 3 nights. So impressed that we bought it from him.
This summer, Tyler Bell (http://twitter.com/belltyler) contacted us at LMGTFY to ask if we wouldn't mind making the app he just built the official app for LMGTFY. He sent us screenshots, and wanted to work for free, as long as he had the oppotunity to work with us. He ended with, "either way, I'm going to finish development on this app and upload it to the App Store to promote LMGTFY."

We were smitten with his work. So much so, that we couldn't accept his offer to work for free. We instead bought the app from him, and now he's part of the team.

Moral of the story: Stop talking about doing something. Actually do it.

LMGTFY for iPhone: http://mobile.lmgtfy.com/
Apparently it's a heat map of courier paths, not endpoints. So the dots on the bridges just signify that deliveries are going out of the city.
I think that the general idea is that if a girl wants to play with 'boy' toys, people shouldn't look at her weird like there's something wrong with her. If boys and girls in general will trend to certain types of toys, that's ok. It's the "Billy is playing with dolls, let's make fun of him" or "Billy is playing with dolls, let me beat the crap out of him because I don't want no gay son" attitudes that we want to discourage.
Except Christians were the first ones to replace Christ's name with X, the first letter in the Greek Χριστός.
Lego Star wars is MASSIVE. It sells by the boat load. Kids lap it up. Same with the other movie tie ins. Why would it not?

I play Lego star wars the game, and obviously I now want all the characters in real Lego.

Doing movie/character tie ins, gives customers what they want.

I was pretty excited to see http://www.legosuperheroes.com/ (Lego are making a new superhero range in January).

And for people who don't want the movie tie ins, there are still tons of generic building sets you can buy.
> it's mostly strange that nobody else has it

For what it's worth, we're working on adding it to Dart. I don't think it's a done deal yet, but I believe we're close to having something finalized.
I felt like the numbers were too big compared to the text describing them.

I agree that it looks impressive; but I wouldn't say it was as easy to consume the data it is trying to show.
I think the implication is that researchers aren't discussing the possibility of someone else using their system to take control of your car. If you are security conscious, and your car can be controlled externally, you might want to assume that it will be controlled externally until you can prove otherwise.

Look at it this way: if driverless cars are widely adopted in Country A, and the new Country A government decides to go rogue and oppressive on its citizens, the rogue government could prevent people from getting to protests by shutting their cars down remotely.
Yeah I guess you're right. Just with everything I'm reading about "how it was done", I'm finding it really hard to believe that these subsystems weren't audited for flaws before they deployed.
> this drone model requires no human intervention

No, the article clearly says that Iran severed the pilot's communication channel.

> "By putting noise [jamming] on the communications, you force the bird into autopilot. This is where the bird loses its brain."

> made the drone “land on its own where we wanted it to, without having to crack the remote-control signals and communications” from the US control center

I believe this channel is over satellite, whereas the take-off/landing channel is line-of-sight like your R/C plane.
The most important factor actually is the distance - but as i said we will have a more dynamic pricing soon. We wanted to launch with something that's easy to understand.
How Mark Cuban Helps JungleCents Win at Daily Deals
tl;dr: Gruber is too smart to pull shit like this, which makes his pundit-like editorializing even more disappointing.

Gruber recently addressed criticisms about his lack of "objectivity" on The Talk Show [0]. He substituted the word "fair" for "objective," then demolished a straw man where people want "$FAIR coverage" from him, where $FAIR = "don't pick on the short kid."

Here's the problem: "objective" doesn't mean "fair." Like Dictionary.com, [1] I use "objective" as in "report the whole story, and stop spinning everything to accommodate your world view." This is what Fox News does, and I've started noticing that Gruber does the same thing.

Consider that his "linked list" articles take two forms: positive links on Apple performance [2], or negative links on Apple's competitors with snarky commentary [3]. Take the Galaxy Nexus: if someone wants one, they just don't get it! [4]

Or...they're like my brother, a graphic designer who wants to do more with his phone. Or they're a coder like me, worried about a future where closed systems dominate. Or they're like my friend, who hates the elitist Apple attitude--the one where people who don't buy Apple products "just don't get it." Or they want a cheap feature phone, and don't have the $99 for a iPhone 4 right now.

Gruber is too smart to make generalizations like this. Hell, he likes David Foster Wallace -- whose books aren't exactly high-school reading -- and posted this a few weeks ago:

That’s why Wallace’s work serves as a beacon, a yardstick, for my own.

As incisive as his writing could be, DFW almost always eschewed cynicism in favor of humanism and emotional sincerity. In a way, Gruber's recent stuff provides the opposite: an unyielding pro-Apple view, a scoop of cynicism and disdain for Apple's competitors, and a black-or-white view of the mobile scene that doesn't reflect reality.

Seeing this from someone as smart as Gruber is really a disappointment.

[0] http://5by5.tv/talkshow/71

[1] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/objective

[2] http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/12/13/nielsen

[3] http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/12/05/verizon-google-w...

[4] http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/12/14/siegler
Firefox adoption just keeps going down
Are "constant", "variable", "integer" and "is not" so long? Not really. People just like shortcuts.
Show HN: My roommate expense tracking app
I built this for my roommates and I, really quickly over a weekend. Some of my friends are telling me I should take the time to promote it and try to charge for it and turn it into a revenue stream. What do you guys think?
Seconded. There's no way in hell my kids would keep the pieces from one model together, anyway. We probably have tons of "unique" pieces, but let me tell you, they all get remixed just the same. Another reason to not keep them as kits: all Legos eventually are considered communal in our house after a certain period. It was just too hard to keep track of whose little orange brick it was that they were fighting over.

This Christmas (don't tell!) they're getting five pounds of bulk bricks. Also, no kidding, this for storage: http://www.harborfreight.com/mobile-double-sided-floor-rack-... . The mess was getting to be a problem.
Yes folks, it’s artificial artificial artificial intelligence
Hey, it looks like the garbage collector finally got around to doing its job... :) OK, it's a stretch, but...

(If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution. -- Robert Sewell)
I disagree that any of those things are "evil".

Apple makes a product and service and clearly lays out what its for. Consumers can choose to buy into that or not. Apple isn't "forcing" anyone to accept their terms, people choose to accept them in return for certain products and services from Apple. If you don't want to, don't buy an iphone!

"just by having that data, they have a force to do evil" -- sorry, but having a force to do evil is not in itself evil. EVERYONE has a force to do evil, I could go and chop up some bunnies for fun right now, but I choose not to, therefore I'm not evil.

How is serving you ads evil? I really don't get that argument. Yes it's annoying, and sometimes distracting, but again, the price I choose to pay for products and services. No one is forcing you to use gmail, even by default; there are plenty of other options.
I am interested in trying AWS as well, and this is my fear. I have a django project that is hosted on a server at my school. It would be quite useful to people if they could access it from outside the school. This being my first run through, I wouldn't want to make a mistake that ends up being financially costly.
Small Businesses with Social Media Plans will Move the Needle
This doesn't address getting investment, nor finding a technical co-founder. You don't mention how much personal money they are bootstrapping or have access to either.

I've been doing this a long while now and after bootstrapping and making mistakes, I am seemingly still not near being able to do what I want (either through getting investment or finding a technical co-founder).
But as you say, they aren't redistributing the flash files. Those packages are glorified `wget`s hardcoded to point at Adobe's flash releases.
Here's the article (Businessweek) amirmc is referring to:

http://www.businessweek.com/printer/magazine/lego-is-for-gir...
I guess my experience was probably a little different from the usual. My parents simply bought a sack of old pieces unprompted from Goodwill one day and gave them to me and my brother. I suppose they could have been acting on marketing they saw though.
I built this really quickly over a weekend for my roommate and I to keep track of who owes who money.

I've gotten a few friends to use it, and some encouragement to turn it into a pay-for app.

What does HN think?
I agree that it is easy to defend that the original presentation "was shit" but that it could be loved. Not only was the final text far superior, setting it to a pop song sounds awful (coming from a Seal liker/lover).
اسرائيل
I don't see anyone saying that what Iran did is wrong, do you? It seems that prevention is expected.

The secret of international law is that it doesn't really exist. Or that the "law' in "international law" does not mean the same meaning as the "domestic law" within a country's borders. All you have are agreements between countries but with no true external body that can enforce penalties or punishments without the threat of war. So what happens is that the most powerful win arguments.
We are trying to move away from doing that type of thing, as those packages tend to be fragile and cause a lot of problems for our users.
Are those companies really doing that many web transactions? I assumed most of their business immigrants wiring cash home from storefront offices. Which Dwolla isn't really a competitor for.
The person who invented the original traffic signal patented it in 1923 (http://www.google.com/patents?id=EHJoAAAAEBAJ&printsec=f...). The idea was unique, novel, and non-obvious at the time. It's easy to see an invention now that is ubiquitous and say that it's obvious.
Trademark dilution is illegal under the Lanham Act and the The Federal Trademark Dilution Act of 1995. (http://www.bitlaw.com/trademark/dilution.html)
Remove them from the repo, leave them installed, and figure out a better way to inform users of the risk. Some people would find that risk acceptable. Some will take the notification and uninstall or update the software.

Personally, i don't think that's a decision the developers should make for the users. You don't force them to use your proxy servers or firewalls, why are you taking it upon yourselves to forcibly remove software from their machine without being able to install a newer version? What this update does is fix half a problem and introduce an entirely new one. You can't be the software police.
This is correct and good.
Whats funny, that typeof NaN is "number" :)
Once the browser plugin gets uninstalled by the package update, visiting a web site that requires a Java plugin will cause the browser to automatically suggest installing OpenJDK/icedtea-plugin.
My daughter loves legos and seems to really love the Harry Potter legos. I do agree that getting generic legos instead of boy centric seems more challenging but they are out there.

What I really connected with more in this article was the advent calendar with the cops and robbers. My wife told me a while back, "I got this cool lego advent calendar online". I was like, "cool!". Then I saw this cops and robbers theme and I told her, "Is this really what Christmas is about in the US now? <santa voice>Hey kids! Be careful out there as there are people that want to break into your house and steal your stuff!</santa voice>"

I know, I know... If I don't like it then don't buy it. I agree. I still think it's a strange advent calendar even though my son actually likes it.
They use OpenGL instead of DirectX for hardware acceleration. Microsoft's obviously not going to do that; using DX plays to their strengths in every possible way, from what their developers and toolchain is already optimized for, to what's already rendering the entire desktop in WinVista/Win7... so it could even mean IE10 on Win8 tablets will be better on battery life than FF/Chrome. I'm not an expert on this, but DX is likely the objectively better choice for hardware acceleration on Windows -- the reason FF/Chrome use OpenGL is because they have to support other platforms IE doesn't, and doing everything twice in OpenGL/DirectX to get the best result on Windows while still supporting Mac/Linux has obvious downsides.
You can erect the headstone when you can do everything in the cloud ... at 40,000 feet over the middle of the Pacific, without horrendous latency issues.

Well, not quite. I don't use any e-mail software any more- the Gmail web interface is better than most desktop clients I have ever used. With HTML5 it's possible to provide a version of Gmail that works entirely offline (they used to have one with Gears), so that would remove the latency issues.

In that respect, offline web apps could easily replace a lot of desktop apps. But once you have something that requires real processing power the web stuff fails. Native Client may change that, but you're still trapped within browser chrome.
I tend to agree, but there's a missing element in this economic model, though one that others have mentioned (cf. sunahsuh's comment): marketing. If you look at Marx, or even Smith, it's clear that the wants and demands of the consumers are not always organic, but are often fabricated by the companies themselves. Smith thought this was cool, Marx thought it was evil; in any case, you are right to some extent, but few people go out of their way to buy something they haven't been told they want.
What about the argument that a military plane would have multiple levels of internal defense such as automatic destruction? I read an argument by a supposed engineer who wrote that the auto protect mode would cause the plane to fly vertically towards the ground to cause as much damage to the plane as possible, which is why he/she was skeptical that Iran had a fully intact aircraft. See http://www.offiziere.ch/?p=6868
"Evil" isn't really a useful term, it can be taken too many different ways. How exactly would you define "evil"? And how does that definition relate to capitalist corporations?
Quick tips for securing cookies
How about leaving it installed, not allowing it to be reinstalled, and showing a notification that the software needs to be upgraded manually?
Why create your own courier company? Why not leverage and consolidate others. For example, http://www.phantomcouriers.com/ Phantom Couriers is the Web 1.0 version of Postmates up here in Canada. I could see them benefiting from a new UI like Postmates offers... they would already have the contracts with law firms, etc....
Here's the main quote from the post I replied to: "why doesn't Lego sell to girls? Why doesn't Barbie have more realistic features? Why don't car manufacturers offer an electric vehicle? Why doesn't McDonalds sell salads instead of fries? Why do record labels offer such crappy music?"

It references gender once and movie tie-ins not at all.

I actually think movie tie-ins are pretty reasonable especially from one of the best movies ever made (Star Wars, not the pre-quels) as well as some of the best animated story-telling and characters ever made (Pixar).
I take massive issue with this.

We start the training with regard to gender so early that it's hard to tell what's "nature" and what's "nurture". I'm watching the choices my sister makes during her pregnancy with fascination. Gender is the earliest thing we bombard them with -- painting rooms pink, buying gendered clothes, choosing certain toys.. we don't even thinking about it because it's so normal until, for instance, you make a conscious effort to try and raise your child in a gender neutral environment.
If people find having the risk is acceptable, they may use apt pinning to force the older packages to remain installed.

Our users are expecting that the normal software update process ensures that software they are using is maintained in a secure state with timely security updates. To leave Java at a known vulnerable version would be irresponsible, and most likely not what our users are expecting.
Need to recover from ‘startup overreach’?
I think it's a more cogent and more substantial point than it might seem at first glance.

Anecdotally, I honestly do notice a class axis between iPhone and Android (though there are other axes, too). Just like there was a class axis between Facebook and MySpace for a while.

http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html

No one denies that consumer electronics can be status symbols. They can also be counter-status symbols.

And I think what Topolsky is reacting to here is the subtext of division. "You either see it or you don't," implies "I see this and you don't" which implies "I'm better than you." Which is an attitude in general that can exacerbate class differences.

And, as kenjackson has noted elsewhere, there's a distinct sense that some evangelists don't just observe the success of their chosen subject, but cheer them on and -- worse -- enjoy the failure of the others.

I think it's a good thing to expose. It's a better, more useful division that Topolsky is making here, I'd say: between advocates and observers, not between Android fans and iPhone fans.