skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Something else that stands out to me about this post is the comparison to Mark Zuckerburg's very first press interview.

I wonder how other startup founders have seen change in themselves over time?
Originally I thought Amazon Payments was attractive because many people (this could be an over assumption on my part) already purchase items on Amazon and have their credit cards stored with their account. This way, they wouldn't have to take our their credit cards and enter the information again.

That and the trust that Amazon invokes, as opposed to a new startup in which I have no idea how they're processing my credit card.
I think we're watching it now, actually. Big companies get the short end of the stick on crappy patents. It won't be long before they're lobbying to get it fixed.

If a major company like Apple, Google, Microsoft or IBM sues a tiny company for violating an "obvious" patent, it gets all over the tech media and the big companies reputation suffers.

And there's not much money in suing small companies, so it's not worth it. And the other big companies have enough lawyers and safe guards to make sure they don't violate patents (or at least make sure nobody finds out), so there's no money there, either.

On the other hand, the big companies are major targets for patent trolls, as this case demonstrates.
Speeding up social data access with memcache
Don't forget to also take a look at mnemosyne; http://mnemosyne-proj.org.

It's another free, well supported, SRS system that runs on a multitude of platforms.

I used it daily.
It seems to me that all of these applications would be in trouble under Australia's fairly strict privacy laws. In particular, you are allowed only to collect details reasonably useful to your business and you must give a great deal of notice that this is happening[1].

Persons wishing to bring this issue to Apple's attention might wish to engage an Australian lawyer or bring the matter to the attention of the Attorney-General's department.

I don't have an iPhone, so I'd have no standing. Fellow Australians, call your lawyers and start raising a stink.

(IANAL, TINLA).

[1] http://www.privacy.gov.au/materials/types/infosheets/view/65...
5% cut? No way. Dwolla https://www.dwolla.com/ takes $0.25 per transaction and NOTHING for amounts less than $10.00
Dragon's Lair documentary, soon on a screen near you
Interesting to note, the law-firm representing Mr. Doyle pays new graduates a starting salary of $177,500. [1]

[1] www.mckoolsmith.com/careers-summer.html
I'm not a lawyer either, but from what I've read, the courts seem to evaluate all four of these bullet points when fair use is invoked. It's quite possible to be in complete violation of one or even two points and still qualify for fair use.
To address your first point about patents, I really think that would be a bad idea. Making the patent code more complicated just rewards the people who spend lots of effort on mastering its arcade rules and not making something people want. In this case, a requirement that your product had to be in production would be an easy thing to get around if you had money and know-how (just make a small run of the product that meets the bare minimum requirements), but could really mess up companies that don't have the money to do that, or haven't lawyered up and don't realize they have to.
My statement stands.
search results for "hiring feb 2012" and "job feb 2012" don't turn up much... am I missing something, or should we just start a list here?
That's pretty normal for a top tier law firm.
"Great save for a bad mistake."

I'm not so sure.

The updated iPhone app does the right thing.

What do the apps not updated to the latest version do? Does it re-upload the contacts? If it does, what does the server do with the data?
He wrote that code for his earlier course on geometric folding algorithms:

http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.849/fall10/lectures/

You'd enjoy it if you are into computational geometry.
Thanks for the helpful clarification/explanation.
“University Memes” Viral Craze Temporarily Takes Down MemeGenerator
Isn't it companies like Microsoft and IBM that supported software patents in the first place? You live by the sword, you die by the sword.

That being said, I have a hard time believing that they patented the "interactive web". My legalese is poor, but from what I read, all you would need is prior art where you had a basic client-server application that displayed information from a server, and allowed interaction between the two, no?
Oracle NoSQL on AGPLv3 license (ACID)
Wouldn't it be easier for all these companies to pool together, pay these people off, and then come to some sort of agreement with the patent office and the judicial folks to stop giving trolls wings and venues? It seems that would be far simpler than to try to reform the patent system, which will probably happen as soon as pigs start flying.
I don't know how it was ordered originally. I imagine just whatever order the scraper returned data.

putting it throughs sort ordered by tpb's id, which I imagine are assigned in chronological order. The low-numbered torrents seem to be from 2004.
Oracle NoSQL First Impression
Ah, so it's not a compound test.

"More like ... guidelines".
Python Metaclasses, first class objects, and a lesson from SICP.
I highly agree with linguist on this point. It's very unlikely a homophonic substitution was used here. It's more complicated than you'd think. A great read on the subject can be found here: http://www.amazon.com/Code-Book-Science-Secrecy-Cryptography... if anyone's interested in learning more about cryptography. Very interesting.
Kout doesn't really seem to be launched (you can only sign up for list). Whereas Gumroad lets you sign-up right now.

Gumroad's design is also a bit more inviting.

I hadn't heard of either of them until today, but one is definitely in a place where I would share the link with buddies, and the other I wouldn't.

You ask about "buzz" and I definitely think launching a working product is more newsworthy than a beta sign-up page. That said, Kout seems interesting as an idea.
I applaud the angle the Phoenix chose to take: using this as a platform to petition for copyright reform.
Ugly is culturally relative. Fifty years ago, people would be horrified to find out how many people were gay. Today, we're horrified to find out that gay people felt the need to stay in the closet.
We're talking about the web the year Mosaic was released. Before 1993 there were no web browsers that ran in Windows. There were no web search engines yet. There was little more than static hypertext webpages for research labs. There may well not have been other client-server applications yet...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web
Apple couldn't make it without help of Adobe.

For years (even after iPhone shipped) Adobe only had "Flash Lite" to offer, and allowed it to lag many versions behind desktop version (e.g. Opera on Wii had trouble when YouTube started dropping support for Flash 7 and Adobe simply didn't have anything more modern available in "Devices SDK").
Amazon.com: Zenith Men's (Read the Reviews, after you see the price)
I think parent is talking about Monolith[1], which in fact that article specifically references:

I think Colour is what the designers of Monolith are trying to challenge,
although I'm afraid I think their understanding of the issues is superficial
on both the legal and computer-science sides. (...)

[1]: http://monolith.sourceforge.net/
There are no straw man arguments in this entire thread, let alone the comment you replied to.
Very nice. I've used a similar effect for a few years on my homepage - http://arpad.co.uk - albeit with a far more primitive algorithm ;)

Annoyingly I didn't make a note of where I found the algorithm and I can't find the source now, but I remember being struck by its simplicity and deciding I had to find a use for it.

The meat of it is:

z = (sum of surrounding cells) - z;
z -= z >> 5;

Does anybody recognise it?
It's things like this that make me wonder why there are so many people that defend the government of Iran.
It probably would help if they had an outside auditor to verify the actions that were taken. Still wouldn't be final proof to anyone who believes that they might still be hiding something but is a step further than just saying "trust us".
In that case, I'd say we're both right-- though it's an open question what's the "right" behavior.
Microsoft is probably making just as much off the patent system as any other troll. They get money from android because of thier patents.
The other touchpad kernel source from HP (android dump)
Not everyone wants to seed all the time so splitting up the program into a BT core and BT file manager might be an idea.

The BT core program looks after the online user and search data, sharing this with other clients. This could be always on.

While the BT file manager looks after seeding / leeching through the BT core program. This allows you to participate in the group acting as a super peer and having up to date search data while not having to have a full blown BT client running.
Don't Forgive Path (they already lied about storing data in the past)
This is pretty cool! It's worth saying that the paper [1] referenced in the script source is also really quite interesting.

[1]: http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/people/stam/reality/Research/pdf/...
US ex-Marine working for US Department of Defence visiting an enemy country is arrested for spying, well, that was hard to predict.
What's scary is that Pei Wei, had he obtained a patent, would probably be able to defend it.
Whether this is good or bad is impossible to know without knowing the net value of a customer. If they added a million customers who each had a $100 net value, this was a fantastic quarter.

My sense, though, is that the net value of a Groupon customer is very low and may, in fact, be negative. Customers are expensive to get and don't seem to bring a lot of repeat business without incurring re-acquisition costs.

I would imagine Groupon has an idea what that value is, and if it was high, they'd be trumpeting it to ward of the negatives of the loss.
Going Native C++ Conf Sessions Online
that would be amazing! I can email you if you'd like, too. otherwise I'm marcy at polymathic.me – thanks so much!
Scott Aaronson: Why I'm Wagering $100,000 on Quantum Computing
> Your neighbours to the north

Confused me a bit, b/c I don't think that jacquesm is from the US. I was thinking 'neighbors to the north' meant Scandinavia or Iceland.
Conway's game of life?
I don't think many people defend the government of Iran, they just don't want to start a war with them and feel that if there is something wrong with the Iranian government, then the Iranians should bloody well sort it out themselves.
At CodeEval, we're hosting a bunch of coding challenges for companies that are hiring.

Warner Bros, Milo, DeviantArt, Shopply, Factual, Modcloth, Verical Brands, Rapleaf, Thumbtack, lolapps, Ampush Social, and Ravn

They're all hiring software developers, solve their challenge to apply, or do it just for fun!

www.codeeval.com
Ask HN: Is "the web" an anachronism?
I edit medical research papers. On occasion, an author will cite a URL, e.g.,

> the investigators used the calculator for pancreatic fistula and DGE using the ISGPS definition on the Web (http://pancreasclub.com/calculator/)

I routinely change this to "on the Internet". While these authors are invariably citing port 80, certainly few sites with "www" actually participate in WWW consortium activities. What does the CS community do?
I don't know what you mean by "defending" exactly, but if you wonder why people are sceptic on US-Iran relations, you must go back before 1979 - when a good ol' US buddy named Reza Pahlavi was brutally murdering it's citizens and US was in full support of his ruling, yet since he's gone US is on a 3-decades rampage of sanctions disturbing Iran's ability to function economically on the international scene.
Being Lazy Is Awesome
We (www.sensenetworks.com) are looking to hire a (junior-ish) admin as well. I haven't advertised the position yet, so there's no competition! :-) If interested, email to techjobs@sensenetworks.com .
It breaks the page on Chrome 16.0.912.77m on Windows 7 x64.
Fair enough. It's hard to see where these kinds of write (but normal read) speeds would be necessary, even in a server farm, but I guess the beauty of enabling technologies is that they allow for use cases no one could have imagined when they were conceived.
The Huffington Post is the Judas goat of journalism
This is awesome. I've asked professors at my university to have this class, but didn't happen. Couldn't be better to have Erik Demaine teaching it. The video has a great quality and the synced lecture notes are indeed impressive.
Dave Morin, 2010:

Path does not retain or store any of your information in any way.

Source: http://gawker.com/5883549/dont-forgive-path-the-creepy-iphon...
"In the interest of complete transparency we want to clarify that the use of this information is limited to improving the quality of friend suggestions when you use the ‘Add Friends’ feature and to notify you when one of your contacts joins Path––nothing else."
Is "complete transparency" == me trusting you just because you say so?
Awesome work, I really appreciate tutorials in this style.
I use R almost daily, and sure, for tasks involving math (& statistical analysis in particular) R is fantastic; however, to say "for hackers" (at least in my mind) would involve a less domain specific language -- like a scripting language (python or some such similar language) that has statistical analysis capabilities. Perhaps a matter of semantics, but in a similar vein, I imagine a book of the same title that used Octave would not be considered "for hackers" by most due to the specific/constrained functionality.

Just seems like "hacker" is such a buzz word now that it gets tacked onto a lot of stuff just to generate interest.
Aaand I think we (and techcrunch coverage) just killed your site, hehe. Really slow right now.
Considering the insane hours legal associates have to work for several years for the do-or-die chance at making partner, I wouldn't begrudge them that salary.
Dwolla doesn't let you take credit cards. People buy things online with credit cards.

It's also inappropriate for the flow this app wants. You click a link, enter your CC#, get your content. Takes 5 seconds.

With Dwolla: click a link, sent to Dwolla, create a username, password and PIN, add an address, wait to receive a phone call or SMS, click a link in a verification mail, add your bank account, wait 2-3 days to verify your bank account, go back to the site and finish your payment...
It seems people respond to what you have built more than a course.
Well, I'm just speculating idly of course, and yes, there's no sound reason to start suspecting anything more sophisticated than a substitution cipher yet, but cryptography was reasonably topical then. People used ciphers to conceal messages they had to send via telegraph (having to watch someone read and tap out a private message of yours mustn't be pleasant) and to encrypt messages put in personals sections of newspapers. Things like Poe's contest in Philadelphia and the Beale Papers apparently caused a public stir.

The reason I suggest a homophonic cipher (or similar) rather than something like the much more secure Vignere in use for telegraph messages (only recently broken for the time) is because the Vignere system is more complicated, and requires more working out than I would expect someone writing a private message to tolerate.

Homophonic systems, on the other hand, are fairly easy to invent and remember on a personal basis, and can offer some security against amateur analysis. Though the technique for solving them was known, they could still prove robust - the partially homophonic cipher of Lous XIV was still unbroken at this point, despite being over a century old.

I'm very much an amateur (though I have read that book) but it doesn't seem that ridiculous to suggest a homophonic cipher. At any rate, It's only something to consider if it turns out to be something more complex than a simple substitution cipher.
Settling for the Best Lace Front Wigs in Terms of Comfort
This answers my question, thanks. I wanted to know if you had set up your own customised flow for publishing.
Hmm, I seem to remember that story, but have it filed under 'Damon Knight'. I most clearly remember a scene set in the bathroom where the protagonist, the inventor who has realized the implications, shaves and then flips the bird to the mirror, as if to say to future generations, "Yeah, wadda you lookin' at?!"

I can't remember a SF story where a lack of privacy is considered a good thing for humans. Other species, yes, but in STV even some members of the Borg attempted to create their own private space to maintain a sense of individuality and non-Borg unity.
I have a hard time seeing how it doesn't fail all the fair use tests. Calling it a "textbook" case is huge overstatement, IMO.

1. The purpose and character of your use.

Verbatim republication, including original layout, etc. in a commercial publication - NYT.com is a paywall and ad-supported site.

2 The nature of the copyrighted work.

Originally published at some not-immaterial effort and expense in a reputable independent journal. Well known in the industry.

3. The amount and substantiality of the portion taken.

All of it, and the kitchen sink.

4. The effect of the use upon the potential market.

Destroys any chance the owner had of charging for this material.

You make assumptions about what the NY Times knew and didn't know that you yourself can't possibly know. My opinion is that it would have been easy for the Times (a crack news organization) to find the owner.

Also, you say that the Phoenix didn't know the story existed, despite the fact that the author clearly indicated that the story is legendary.

Long story short: spurious analysis of a complex issue.
Oracle NoSQL Database Performance Tests
Certainly along similar lines ;)

Sod's law, 10 minutes after posting I think I've found it, http://freespace.virgin.net/hugo.elias/graphics/x_water.htm
The network itself is still resilient.

Skype's issue was getting the P2P network back up and running ASAP because 1) people pay them for a service that was down and 2) (voice|video|text) chat generally has a higher priority than file sharing. People wouldn't be as ticked off if the P2P filesharing network went down for a few days (or a week) before rebuilding itself.

What happens when all superpeers go offline at once is that the 'normal' peers then start DDOS'ing any remaining superpeers (or the few superpeers that are able to get back up and running quickly). As people settled down with trying to reconnect to the superpeers, eventually the network would rebuilt itself (possibly with completely different superpeers). Once you knock out all superpeers at once, the network becomes quite a bit less distributed.

That said, once all superpeers are down, it could be easy to continue manually DDOS superpeers as their appeared on the network for a targeted attack. If someone was being malicious, they could keep up the DDOS even as regular users are letting up on their inadvertent DDOS due to the sudden change in network makeup.
Go read the AF 447 accident report and you'll see why humans are both the weakest link and still completely necessary. Sensors fail.
Yeah, so changes to Easy Book need to be open sourced, but books written with easy book are kept as is.

IMO MIT should mean MIT, not a modified form of GNU.
It gets worse. He held dual US-Iranian citizenships, so what he did was the textbook definition of treason, regardless of how you feel about Iran. If anything, this proves he is too stupid to have been very effective in his job as propagandist. I feel sorry for the guy and hope that someone intervenes on his behalf, but he is clearly an utter imbecile.
What was that old adage about advertising? something like 'half of all advertising money is wasted, but nobody knows which half.'
Google to pay users to track their movements online
No. But they did suggest that launching in unusually cold weather was a very bad idea.
No further back than that when GB and Russia needed oil during WWI

Someone was bribed/paid to over-throw replace the Father with the son..
WOW! That is unbelievable. Usually things get better with more tokens. What a broken library.
The writing was a draw at first, but now I never read the copy. Just scan whatever deals they have that day.
The internet is global, legal jurisdictions are national. If the business risk of infringing patents becomes too high in the US, it creates an incentive for companies doing business online to move legal jurisdictions, or for other countries to offer incentives to internet based companies by guaranteeing that they will not support software patents. Presumably at that point pressure for patent reform in the US would increase, but by then it may not matter.

In a different context, favorable regulations are one reason that e.g. The City (i.e., financial district on London) is a global financial hub.
Scott Cycling Pants
Not on account of making it easier to multitask, I think. But I had an internship where I spent a decent amount of time taking comments and revisions from Design Review and making the changes in AutoCAD, for which two screens would have been a huge time saver. It's much more time consuming to do that sort of editing when you can't see the comments and the drawing you're working on at the same time.

It was a small office, and the workstation I was on was only used when they had an intern, so it wouldn't have been a high priority. But you can get a 17" screen for $100, and I'd bet I would have had at least $100 more productivity on drawing revisions if I'd had one.
Printing a 3D world: bigger than the internet
I hate to use the site as an example because I feel the quality of it has been totally lost over the years, but Slashdots meta-moderation could be an effective idea but only for downvotes. As system where if enough meta moderators disagree with your downvoting enough times, your privilege is revoked, if it happens too many times your account get's a permanent down vote ban. As well maybe have a mechanisim where any user can flag a downvoted post for review as possible downvoting abuse to enter the meta-moderating system. It would have to be implemented correctly but if it did, it would put an end to the growing group think and dog piling that is seen when a site get's popular.
Clojure/West Conference
Thanks for pointing it out, i'm bleeding out the fingertips wanting to play with fluid physics now.
Encrypted video/voice data looks like encrypted Bittorrent data.
The Mystery Monk
I wonder how they'd go about making the Address Book stuff require permission without breaking existing apps. They could insert a permission dialog, but there'd be no way for existing apps to handle the rejection gracefully as it would likely be a new method in a new SDK.

I guess they could just make all the "get" functions return empty data sets if the user doesn't agree for apps using the current functions.

They'll need to maintain backward compatibility to at minimum iOS 4, there's not many new apps that are iOS 5 only at the moment.