skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really enjoyed listening to this and it was especially helpful for me as somebody transitioning out of an academic environment like Ryan did before starting node.
Honeywell has no choice but to licence their patents to Nest. The question is simply are the patents valid, did Nest infringe, and how much can Honeywell charge Nest. That said, if a company as large as Honeywell can only point to say 50,000$ in sales for their patent protected product it's hard for them to justify outrageous licencing fees.
Those are great points, and I think your last paragraph is particularly spot on. I think that's the future we're going to have to live with, unfortunately.

Sure, the user incurs some 'cost' in piracy. To the producer, however, there's no difference between someone spending 10 hours for access to a product, or free (note: I'm not saying this is lost revenue).

I definitely agree that Hollywood should be smart and build something like the OP suggests and monetize it. I disagree with the OP's claim that such a product will eradicate piracy.
Either way the market goes, it will be interesting to see the adaptations. One thing the tech market shows, there's no way of knowing which technology will explode (and it's not always the most useful tech that wins).
The biggest problem I have with this approach (and believe me, I love this approach), is that it makes it hard to finish things.

For example, over Christmas, I built a small pretend-natural-language CLI controller for iTunes. I made a working version in something like four hours, spent a few days adding in crazy half-thought-out features like speech recognition and a web interface - and then I basically stopped development.

I didn't stop development because it got boring - I stopped development because I'd solved my own problem. Not beautifully (certainly not from a coding perspective), not efficiently, but the problem I had was solved.

The problem, then, is that once the "suffering" is gone, or sufficiently lessened, there is no real reason to keep building.

(oddly, my password for my old account no longer seems to work. I was hebejebelus)
Why not make a command-line tool for this? That would make the whole process even faster :)
Like http://volcube.com ?
Startup Advice from RockThePost.com's co-founder
There is a generally-accepted way to write software that works, even if there are alternative approaches.

With finance, there is not one generally proven way to make money. Once you get your feet wet in a financial market, there are no rules on how to make money or value stocks and other investment instruments. Experienced finance types lose money all the time. Someone that only completed an interactive learning game is bound to lose their savings.
Do you have any evidence to supper your assertion that it is dangerous to train people in investing? I know its popular for people to throw up their hands and give up and claim that index funds are the way to go. I also know that many people who have done so, would prefer to think that they are doing the smart thing, and so they claim that this is the smart thing, despite the fact that it is really easy for anyone who thinks about it for a few minutes to beat those returns. Take an index- say the Dow Jones[1]. The companies in the index don't change very often at all. It would be very easy to buy a few shares of each company and simply hold them. You have the commission fees in the first year, but with discount brokers, that's pretty small, and then there would be no more fees. Meanwhile the people who gave up and just handed their money over to be "managed" in an index mutual fund are paying %1-%2 a year in fees. Spending an hour making a spreadsheet and you can keep your replica of the Dow Jones balanced by adjusting where you put new money in.

Why pay %2 of your investment, every year, to managers for something that would take you an hour to do once?

Over 10 years that's %20 of your investment, not even counting the effects of compounding.

Over 40 years that's %80 of your investment, not counting the effects of compounding which will be much more significant.

[1] IF you don't have the funds to buy the whole index, you can buy just the heaviest weighted ones. Further, when companies do leave or get added to the index, you can trade this when its announced, rather than have to wait like the index fund does, which means you get a better return because the index has to buy them after they've appreciated due to being announced as being added to the index.
Thanks for the tip, I was just about to start debugging it for IE.
My first year out of high school I took a ton of philosophy. It's forever changed the way I view the world, other people and how I solve problems; it's been valuable for my CS and math education. Philosophy taught me to explore problems from varying perspectives and to play my own devil's advocate. There's been nothing like it in any of my other classes or life experience. It wasn't a productive year in itself, but it's a year I wouldn't do any other way.

That being said, I found the title a bit misleading, or not fully informative. I thought this was an article on how engineers ought to be running companies!
I kept wondering what a "Docs Demo" was
We've recently started do a lot more acceptance testing in browser, writing unit/integration tests in response to bugs. The acceptance tests are slower, for sure, but the do cut "deploy and wait for bug reports" out of the dev cycle a lot more often.
Thanks! I'll check those out.

We've built an app that dynamically generates images and serves them up inside of emails. People skim through emails pretty quickly so it's important that the images load as quickly as possible. And we usually can't use a CDN since the images are often personalized for each user. The images vary in size, but for the smaller images I'd like to see if slow-start tuning could help.

This is our service: http://movableink.com
In General, Long Term Disability insurance is relatively less expensive compared with short term (since the likelihood of a long term disability is lower than a short term one).
They will do that at some point, however at the moment it's probably cheaper to pay off politicians and keep the old model going for as long as they can. it's as simple as that.
They fixed that in Windows XP. (Although in Vista they made the Start button circular so it no longer appeared to occupy the corner pixel, the entire bottom left corner did remain hot, and remains so in Windows 7.)
You can let this comment float to the bottom, but I just want to say that this makes me want to cry. When this product came out, it gave me so much hope for a few ideas that I've been working on related to tuning HVAC and lighting with better interfaces and control systems. Now I'm incredibly discouraged.

Thanks US patent system.
Thanks Tim! We're just getting started... =)
I'm using Firefox 10 and it works great for me. Do you have weird custom javascript settings, or are you using any extensions like No-script that might be interfering with it?
Alternate submission wording was "Capitalism rewards understanding: Why your business needs Philosophers." But yeah, I thought I might capitalize on the CS worldview ;)
Men don't like to be called that either though...

Interestingly enough, going by industry statistics, chances are in this case whoever was meant to read it were men.
Not all patches are bad. They can be very beneficial, adding new features, for instance.

And there's the obvious bug fixing. You are stuck with a defective device if you can't update it.
How We Built An Awesome Deck (to sell devs on fax)
Most good index funds have fees much less than 1%. Vanguard offers them for about a 0.15% fee.
Idea: Non-profit that will buy patents and offer them open-source
Thoughts?
It's never a bad idea to learn how the stock market works and how political/social/economic/etc... changes affect stock prices.
Actually, I think the way a post gets to the front page is this: first, it has to get about 4 upvotes during the half hour or so it stays on the first "newest" page (depending on the time of day this could be longer). This is the critical point. After that, most upvotes are received by posts that have made it to the front page and are somehow distributed among them, possibly based on merit, points for discussion etc. But it's that crucial stage of getting those 4 votes or so in such a short period of time that excludes much of the good stuff, and lets "brand-names" a certain spot.

In addition (once on the front page) there's this whole cult following thing. E.g., anything about GitHub is certain to get a whole-lotta love.
Bootstrap is free. Designers are not. A custom design would be better (read: fancier) for my solo projects, but as it stands, my coding skills are sharper than my designing skills.

I'll continue using bootstrap in prod.
Valid points. If I recall correctly, the Obama administration is also pushing for a nationwide wireelss network (http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en&tab=nw&q=obama%20w...) , and I believe Lightsquared made a pretty good pitch to them to be able to use the spectrum. I also knew a lawyer who was doing work for the FCC, that was examining the possibility of buying back some of the lesser used satellite bands, for both the lightsquared type of work, as well as for mobile carriers.
A lot of people who are complaining are most likely suffering from Baby Duck Syndrome. I haven't had the opportunity to try out Windows 8 yet, but I'm sure this is a calculated risk which can hopefully appeal to newer generations.
Opinions of Rubygems differ greatly and I would consider cargo culting gems as a distribution and dependency management infrastructure for Chef cookbooks to only be great for those who are strong with Ruby.

Each community has its own requirements and those of the Chef cookbook authors in general are different than those of Ruby library authors.

Lets say that I right a cookbook for apache2 on Ubuntu. What should I name the gem? Many other people will write this cookbook, particularly since mine only works for Ubuntu. Perhaps 'chef-apache2-ubuntu-btm'? Where do you store such metadata so a user can find, use, and contribute to a cookbook?

This isn't a simple solution and is a bit unique, which is why Opscode has been crafting a solution at http://community.opscode.com. It is easy to get a copy of a cookbook from the repository using 'knife cookbook site install COOKBOOK_NAME' and you can search the site through the web interface and using 'knife cookbook site search' to find the cookbook you're looking for.

The community site development has been slow, but continuous. In December we added source browsing so you can review cookbooks without downloading them.

http://www.opscode.com/blog/2011/12/14/chef-community-site-c...

There's still much to do, but I think we're (I work for Opscode) headed in the right direction for the project and community.
I think the complaint in this article is laughably petty. I've never noticed a lag. But on the topic of mice, I bought a Kensington mini-mouse about three years ago that I've used with three different laptops (2 Macs and a Thinkpad) and to this day I've never noticed a difference between any of the computers. I would recommend it just for its size and functionality, it's the best mouse I've ever used. I didn't even have to install a driver for it, it just works immediately when I plug it into my Pro. It does feel faster than the trackpad but I think it's just because of the nature of trackpad vs. a mouse and not because of any noticeable lag.

The model I have is very similar to this one: http://www.amazon.com/Kensington-K72346US-Netbooks-Buttons-S...

It used to be on the Apple store website where I bought it but they seem to have removed it.
It's called a "weekend project", not "this is a rock-solid, time-tested piece of software that works in absolutely every browser perfectly". If you would like to help out, go ahead and download the source and make the necessary modifications to make it compatible with IE8.
Valentine's day engagement Help
OCSP isn't an optional step involved only if you don't present your CA's intermediary certificate, it's in addition to it. The whole point of it is "I have this guy with these legit looking credentials you issued, do you still stand by them?".

You can't work around that with chaining, it can only be disabled from client code, or by having the CA issue a cert that doesn't include an OCSP address (doubt any do this now, given the number of legit certs issued to attackers in the past 2 years).
Typing random passwords that long is simply a waste of time.

70^15 ~= 10^27 passwords assuming a 10 billion computers each checked a 100 billion passwords a second after 10,000,000,000 years there would be a 0.1% chance they cracked your account.
We definitely have customers that would find something like this funny, but we have plenty of large customers that wouldn't. When your ASP is around $100k a year, you really want to avoid losing even a single customer to something silly like using unprofessional language in a test email.
Minecraft-style Google Earth in WebGL
Another way to boost discussion time would probably be to cut page load time in half.

What's the current excuse for 4 second page times (on nearly pure text pages) and up to 30 second new-post times, with hundreds of advanced developers around offering free help?
إصابة لواء شرطة وخمسة ضباط في هجوم على مديرية امن السويس
Does Amazon Unbox have a Mac client? I know some of their videos can be downloaded to Unbox, I don't know if all of them can.
FWIW, UTF-8 was designed by Ken Thompson: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/utf-8-history.txt

So his inventions of Unix and UTF-8 now dominate both the back- and front-ends of the internet.
Yes. I'm reading the filename of a document in Gmail and typing it into search to quickly call it up.
Don't forget to check out livequery.

http://docs.jquery.com/Plugins/livequery

"Live Query utilizes the power of jQuery selectors by binding events or firing callbacks for matched elements auto-magically, even after the page has been loaded and the DOM updated."

Oh so awesome.
Lady Gaga founding Social networking site for her fans
That's interesting. It seems very focused on specifically training traders, and in options, for market makers, and the like. Something like that targeted at a broad audience might be really useful.
Just because someone isn't targeting you doesn't mean they aren't innovating.

It reeks of HN bias that no one in their right mind should ever become an employee of some corporation because they aren't making a shiny box or a X, Y, Z website (substitute your favorite tech of the month for X, Y, and Z)
Ask HN: What would you do?
I'm a (first semester) junior studying Computer Science. I took last semester off to work with Lift (funded by & partners with The Obvious Corporation), and that was an amazing experience. I figured since I was halfway done with school and this much invested, that I would return back and finish up my degree.

And then I started taking Calc II.

I've been to tutoring 3 times/week for the last 2 weeks, worked through more than the assigned homework questions, and visited my prof for help, but I'm just not getting it. By not getting it, I mean I failed the first two quizzes and recently got below a 40% on our first test.

Unfortunately, this is the 4th to last math class I'd have to take if I wanted to get my degree in CS. So, I've been thinking about changing to Entrepreneurship with a minor in CS, or re-taking Calc I this summer to prepare me more for Calc II (although that would push back my graduation date... and cost much more).

I'm interested in hearing if any of you have had similar experiences, or any thoughts on how I should go about this?

I ask because what got me the job with Lift (and a job this summer with Rdio) were my side projects. With how heavily math-based our CS curriculum is, I'm worried I won't have any time to put into side projects and still get above a C- ("passing grade") in all of my classes.

I would appreciate any help whatsoever - thoughts, comments, concerns, etc. My contact info is in my profile, but I'd love a discussion to be started here, so others that may be going through the same thing can learn from this as well.

Thanks, HN.
Show HN: I made a social network for musicians
Being a good engineering team manager
Great work. Love the humor too :) I second the other comments about choosing a different background - took me a while to notice the parallax effect...
If you haven't read "Thinking, Fast and Slow" it really summarizes the problems in a lot of decision making in a very clear way.

I'm still reading through, but, you have two major actors in your brain. A "fast" side, and a "slow" side. The fast side makes gut decisions, and the slow side, well, applies more complex judgements and can include a more unbiased view of the world. There's a ton to this process, but importantly, the fast side is very happy to jump to conclusions when presented with missing information.

The lesson of Moneyball, then, was that the "fast side" thinking clouded judgements of baseball prospects by filling out ridiculous statements like "he's got a hot girlfriend, must be able to have the confidence we need on the field".

I'm not sure how you can use the baseball metaphor in terms of software design, though.

But, you could easily say that we're presented with an incomplete amount of information when building software. (What's going to happen when it runs? Who knows! Just build a nice API and continue.) So we definitely all probably have a lot of "quick learning" techniques and processes we just adopt to. For example, Googling before you just stop and think. Or using the UI techniques of other applications, because "that's how the big profit-making companies do it".
Man, and those kids sure turned out badly, only doing things like modern computing and Moon landings.

Poor stunted unfulfilled beings!
The market they're going at seemed initially insane - how do you get your head around all the chaos that is ride sharing? But this is clearly a team that loved the idea and can execute beautifully. The hard out-of-the-comfort-zone work that I've personally seen Jason Shen put is probably worth a series of posts alone. On top of that, they're actually making the world better.

I don't know if they've announced their team motto, but I'd invite them to lay it out for inspiration on how to respond when someone asks why you're able to solve a hugely difficult problem.
Think Or Swim, is an options trading platform, that has some very good software for analysis. You can get a free paper trading account from them. Probably some of the best training you can get would be to take that paper trading account, reduce the amount of cash (it starts with $1M) to the amount you really have to invest, and then start investing.

It lets you go back in time and buy or sell on specific dates in the past. This allows you to back test mechanical strategies. But for working with real time events, paper trading lets you make your trades with no knowledge of the future, see how you do as time goes on and have no money at risk.

Always a good idea if you're going to do anything with increased leverage (like shorting or options).
Shouldn't it be that getting into the zone and becoming an expert are two different things? I've definitely been able to get into the zone as a programmer, have been for a long time, but I'm far cry from anywhere near expert level. So why do they couple those in the article?

>Yet you don't have to be a pro to experience it - some people report the same ability to focus at a far earlier stage in their training, suggesting they are more naturally predisposed to the flow state than others.

Or maybe flow is what happens when your brain is concentrating, regardless of your knowledge/experience level.
"There's a cost to the 'free' route" - your mistake here is thinking that people actually compute those costs. "Free" is a word that lights-up irrational neurons in our brains, like "all you can eat." It almost doesn't matter the cost.

That said, I can prove to you right now that this scheme will not work: On the music-side of the media world, I subscribe to Rdio. It's $10 per month for all-I-can-eat music. I listen to it via my computer, via my home stereo using Sonos (I can play up to three different songs simultaneously via Rdio using Sonos -- more than I'll ever need). And, I can download the songs to my iPhone and listen to them offline.

Yet, even with Rdio and the many compatible competitors (Rhapsody, Spotify, etc.), people still download music illegally "for free." For $10 per month, I can have millions of songs available on-demand for instant playback or I can spend my time downloading songs, installing them in iTunes, syncing with my mobile device, etc. Why would anyone choose the "free" option? Personally, I don't know, but they do.

One difference... In the world of Rdio, songs are not free of DRM, but no one should care -- I certainly don't even though I was one of the people celebrating the move of music from DRMed to non-DRMed -- because six million or more songs are instantly available anywhere I might want to listen to them without any hassles. If I can get at the songs anywhere, at any time, from any device, without hassle, why do I care about DRM?
Your Service Provider Should Provide More than Just A Service
I have a Deathadder 3g Spawn and I don't use the Razer drivers.

If I look at my mouse in the app "USB Prober" I see OS X uses a 2ms interrupt to poll the mouse. If I'm not completely off that's 500Hz. More than the 125Hz that seems to be default USB polling frequency.
Tips on finishing a game
Google+ Launches Developers Page, So How About That API?
It doesn't look like there is a Mac client currently. Bummer.

Is DRM really that important if the legal option is guaranteed to provide the best experience (fastest connection, highest picture quality)? I shouldn't need a "client" at all.
What does the author mean by fraud? Do people submit junk results and hope they slip through the screening process, or it it something more insidious?
Thanks for the comment. I didn't expect people to be so bothered by the popup. I will remove it.
Add a twist to it. Make a specific licensing agreement that requires a payment to the Non-profit in the amount of .001% of profits in trade for use. You could even stipulate a floor and ceiling (minimum payment 10000 max 100000). Being a non-profit all the money returned should go directly into purchases of further patents. This could even be explicitly stated as part of the license agreement making it more of a paying it forward agreement.

The idea here is that you are getting a risk-less technology, but if you do hit it large you have to pay it forward in a very minimal amount. And of course you are afforded the 'patent umbrella' by utilizing tech you know is in a portfolio and properly documented/owned.
Thnks for the civilized reply.

> I personally do not want to work for this class of people, let alone implement or analyze their trading strategies.

Excellent :p
It's more like shutting down a restaurant for sanitation violations.

If they open up, they might have trouble getting business if everyone thinks there are probably still rat turds in the food. So they need to advertise, maybe "change management", maybe change the name.

Who cares if the old domain is dead, if a new one can be set up that runs the same way and is just as popular?
Syntax for JavaScript Continuations
Trade Trade Secrets: Thinking about Disclosure
Voting Paradoxes and Combinatorics