skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
RS Components only, has 200.000 applications of interest (and growing at 10/minute). Farnell may be close to this number too. I can easily guess that you never ever tried to sell ~400.000 products and you have no ideea about what this means logistically. If they tried to sell them themselves, It would have taken years to get a warehouse, employ and train enough people to handle those orders, invest in warehousing equipment, management etc. Although I don't like to wait, I think they handled it rather well until now. The best thing they can do from now on is to make sure that RS and Farnell don't remain the only 2 channels of distribution.
Thar be some good ideas here mate, thanks for sharing.
I don't argue against having multiple ways of accomplishing the same thing - that should be limited but is certainly useful in many circumstances. The issue I have is designing different interfaces for the same feature because you can't think of a way to provide a common one for two use cases or user types. A classic example is wizards, which are terribly abused by Microsoft as an alternative to well designed configuration pages. These wizards don't teach the user how to actually configure the system, are often not reusable, and are only sufficient for a subset of use cases.

Another example is encouraging have customization of tool bars. Well designed menus and toolbars don't need to be dragged, dropped, renamed, etc. Allowing this confuses other users of the same software and makes fixing interface problems down the line nearly impossible without undoing all that customization.

Need to edit your user account? Do we need a different interface if you are an admin? Probably not - just a few more fields. Need a file chooser? The same one works for opening word documents as selecting a file for upload.
Looks really awesome. I want to note I had to restart Chrome to get it to work though (before it was hanging at the 'we're uploading your bookmarks' part).
Horrible. Do founders not care about their own products anymore? Or is this just forced-by-the-VCs?

I don't generally mind when this happens with a services firm, or a tool with very few users, but Posterous? We all moved our Wordpresses there. True enough, we all got it for free so we can't complain, but I can't help feel that the Posterous owners let something lovely fly. Ahwell, no 10x ROI eh?
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The 10 patents Yahoo is using to sue Facebook (and what they really mean)
Darpa director leaves Pentagon, takes job at Google
Status Of Free Google Books
Deploying Existing Play Applications to Jelastic
And race, and wealth, and even political views:

> Mean number of offspring

> Wealthy liberal women (n = 35) 1.60

> Wealthy conservative women (n = 43) 2.49

> The difference is statistically significant. Wealthy white conservative women average 55 percent more kids than their liberal counterparts.

http://inductivist.blogspot.com/2012/03/fertility-among-weal...
Please Don’t Tell Me What You’re Watching on Netflix
Best 5 Used Cars for 2012
Why has the cost gone up so much, and what can be done to reduce it?
But it's not because you don't need years that nobody else would. And it's not because you immediately link ARM to smartphones and music players that that's the only use for a power-efficient CPU. Think a little harder :-)
Six Month [Stupid Apple] Rumor Report
Developing a Formula That Predicts Celebrity Marriages’ Length
So instead of private companies employing the top researchers who are jockeying for success in an open market that decides the winners and losers through doctors' and consumers' choices, you end up with winners and losers being picked by politicians, bureaucrats, and lobbyists.

Then when the whole system is ineffective, corrupt, counter-productive, and an enormous wastes our tax dollars (see the current FDA, PTO, DOE, etc.), what will happen? Well, at best, nothing. At worst, the Statists will use the lack of success as an excuse to take over even more of the system. Maybe the FDA would then want to hire the researchers to design and test the drugs in the first place. They would need a bigger budget for that.
I've given up on the native Date/Time stuff in favour for Joda Time (http://joda-time.sourceforge.net/)
Read the claims.

http://www.google.com/patents/US7406501?printsec=claims&...

The abstract doesn't define the patent. The claims are what defines the patent, in combination with the notes in the patent file which can often limit the claims even further.

Yahoo is claiming a specific method of seamlessly converting an instant message communication into an email one, not the general concept. Claim 1 narrows the claims from that general case immediately.
[quote]US/UK switch? Probably basically free for both, if both are > seen as equally desirable. But citizens from "less desirable" countries would pay ($30K/yr?) to have to the right to work in the US/UK. And, for example, US/UK doctors would receive money ($30K/yr?) to work in third-world countries. The rates would vary depending on each pair of countries and relative demand.[/quote]

So for the same job one would receive a different salary based on his/her country of origins ? More specifically: people coming from poor countries would receive less money for the same job compared to "natives" of the welcoming country while people from richer countries would receive more money than "natives" of poorer countries they are working in ?

It looks like a tax based on origins and (I am not american) seems to remember it is one of the founding myth of the american independance, am I wrong ?
In general what you say is true, but there are some exceptions. The Hasidic Jews are one of the most fertile groups in the US, and they are low income, highly religious, but urban (most of them live in New York City).

You might think they're an insignificantly small group, but the counterintuitively fast nature of exponential population growth means that they'll become surprisingly large surprisingly quickly. They're culturally immune to the influences that caused fertility to collapse in others and they're unlikely to voluntary limit their fertility.
Your portfolio looks great
I can't believe nobody has mentioned its laxative effect. My chemistry teacher used to tell every class about the tough guy who thought he could ingest some phenolphthalein and didn't even make it to the door before relieving himself.
No I'm just saying that you aren't benefiting the consumers after the discovery has been made anymore than a generic copy because copying knowledge is free/it's not a scarce resource once discovered. You might not cover your investments which is why I say you should be compensated for your invention based on the estimated investment cost, plus any other investments made and profit on top of that.

All I'm saying is that if we accept that there is a market failure where you can't recover your investment because you don't have enough advantages on the market (without IP) we should consider compensating the innovator in a way that would stimulate further investment in the area, and when that is the objective you can measure/model what is the minimum profit incentive you need to provide to guarantee acceptable levels of R&D investment.
"I converted both my [pdf] book and my [pdf] copy of Objects on Rails to TXT files"

We need a terminal that can display graphics in place and still allow all the text tools to work exactly as they do today. I imagined reading a text-ized pdf, and having to bounce back and forth to the actual pdf to see the graphics, and that seems much more annoying to me than just reading the pdf.
In a nutshell a layer comp is a saved state for your layers. It can include any/all of: visibility, position and layer style. A combination of these should let you create alternative views for practically any sets of states provided the original layers give you what you need.

For example, a navigation interface, complete with hover and selected states can be all done with the same text and icons (say) if you have a vector shape layer for icons, and then apply separate appearances for each interaction state.

The example you give can be done as simply as toggling the visibility of a layer you don't want to see, and moving other elements up to fill the void appropriately, then saving this as a separate comp.
Putting the fun in funding: Angel investing in indie games
The reason for the timing is because of the IPO. Yahoo! is using this as a way to make Facebook desperate to settle, so that their pricing is higher during the IPO.
Web Development and Mobile Application Development
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I would expect the hostility to rise towards the end as you realise that you're still locked in to a format that is no longer technically competitive and people start dropping support for it in ways that inconvenience you and force you onto an unnecessary upgrade treadmill e.g. see current state of mpeg-2 support and the near future for Xvid/MPEG4.
Plastic mesh
Their public finance pages are the best I have found (until some time later this year when we release, that is)
It's a chicken-egg problem. The game will only stop once people stop playing it, but people won't stop playing it until the game stops.

And you can be sure that companies once they have lots of patents will lobby mercilessly to keep the current "game" in place. Who wants to stop playing when they feel they are winning?

Apart from some sudden massive outbreak of sanity, there is no way out.
These chips are not going to be used in phones.
Designer turned coder, here.

Going back and renaming every layer isn't supposed to happen. Instead, the designer should name them when he creates them, preferably with a consistent naming scheme that makes sense with regard to the final medium. I did it for years (and still do it) and it works very well and isn't a waste of time, at all.

> this is just your, developer's job

Part of my daily job ,halas, consists in coding HTML emails. No matter how many times we repeat (face to face, in meetings, in internal documents…) to the designers that image backgrounds are a NO-NO behind HTML text or that emails destined to be turned into .OFTs should be as simple as possible or that there must be more HTML text than images… we always receive comps with textured backgrounds or shadowed HTML text, unnamed layers, impossible font sizes (12,72px) or whatever. When I receive such comps, I usually only have a couple of hours to do the job, or less, and I spend a large part of it arguing with the AM about impossible graphic details, undoing many silly effects and trying to find my way though a jungle of Layer 256, Copy of Layer 456…

Just like the print designer MUST know how printing works, the web designer MUST know as much as possible about HTML and CSS.
The close analogy, for me, was Oracle's attempt to shake down Google.

Patents are a game that's a lot like Poker.

I couldn't blame any startup for accumulating a patent portfolio because that's something of economic value -- it could help an acquisition because a larger company would like to put together a broad portfolio.

So long as you can get value out of it that way, it's all roses. Once you get to a lawsuit, it's ugly, largely because the result is unpredictable -- if people settle out of court you get the desired result, but if your opponent can fight you to the end, you're very likely to end up with invalidated patents. That, of course, is why companies like this broad portfolios -- if there are ten patents involved, it's much more likely something will stick.
Important questions answered on buying and selling websites
Google vs. Yahoo! would be even bloodier than Google vs. Oracle has been.
pass phrases do provide a better source of memorable entropy as compared to traditional passwords, but look at the result the the comic comes up with. In this context, where the pass phrase isn't associated with a user name and the "hashes" are globally published pass phrases made up of four common english words would be relatively trivially brute forceable.

Also note that most people following similarly given instructions would actually construct a pass phrase in the form of "subject adverb verb predicate" or "subject verb adjective predicate" or a few other constructions, dramatically reducing the implied entropy of the phrase.
Another DDOS tool from Anonymous - HOIC
Ah yes, this goes hand in hand with my mantra: a product (be it IT or physical) is only worth as much as people are willing to pay for it.
There's nothing stopping high birth rates in areas where quality of life is low - it just has to be balanced by high death rates. Suppose there's a country where it's possible to feed a million people, and there are already a million people. There is no economic growth. Suppose about a quarter of the population is women of childbearing age, and they each have a baby every five years, so each year there are 50,000 new people. That's perfectly sustainable as long as 50,000 of people die each year.

That's 1/20 of the population dying each year, so that implies high death rates and short lifespans. It would suck, but it would be sustainable. And that's pretty much how the world was for most of history.
But most of those R&D costs are for getting "FDA" approval. I don't see why India (or anyone, really) should pay for lining the pockets of the USA's inefficient and corrupt bureaucratic machinery.

Or I could be wrong and those $12B really goes into equipment and lab workers wages, but you won't blame me for finding it real hard to believe until I see at least a rough breakdown of how those costs are summed up.

From the article: "Bayer tried to justify its high price by making claims of high R&D costs, but refused to provide any details".

That either means they don't know themselves, or it means that the larger part of the budget got "lost" in requesting approval forms paper pushing greasing cogs and lobbying politicians.
CNN, you had me at “Mama’s” (Philly cheesesteak)
You're talking about an infinite timeline where they are the sole seller of a drug that is used indefinitely.

This is false.

When patents expire the drug is also made by generic drug making companies for cheap. So upper bound of getting a ROI is the lifetime of a patent (30 years for drugs iirc, 10 years longer because it takes about 10 years to develop, so still effectively 20 years).

For every drug that is successful, they pour tons of money into drugs that are eventually considered useless. So the R&D isn't solely for the one successful drug, but also for the losses.

A competitor might come in 5 years with a drug for the same problem, that works better. Now the timespan for any ROI has been cut short to 5 years.

Looking at the profits of pharmaceutical companies: sure, most medicine is probably overpriced. But saying that they can get a good ROI at any price is false. They will need to recoup the billions spent on R&D.
So the government then picks "successful drugs" and hands out massive amounts of money to those companies based on the definition of success as determined by politicians, bureaucrats, and lobbyists.

Sounds like a nonstarter to me.
Well, he got his info through a game of Chinese whispers. He heard it from a Palantir spokesman, who got a brief from Palantir PR, who got a brief from the Director of engineering, who got it from meeting with a dozen scientists and engineers. So you can see that along the way, stuff got simplified and bastardized to the utmost.
There's only one advice from me - ditch Photoshop and use InDesign. Do not ever bring PSD to me. Ever.
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Ecoled offer a huge range of LED Flexi-Strip and Tape, single colour or colour changing for home, retail, signage or commercial applications.
It's scary to think that it that method goes mainstream any robber would simply need to point a knife to me and say: give me your brainwallet.
Every drug we enjoy today was once a future drug. Your reasoning promotes the equivalent of seizing all investment dollars from VC and IPO investors and using it to spread existing inventions and innovations to a broader base.

Lives are being saved and quality of life improving...for everyone who doesn't have a disease we haven't yet cured or which hasn't become treatment resistant (biology is adamantly lassez-faire).

The industry needs regulatory upheaval and new ways of financing itself. But if the response is to throw away the ability to recoup the initial investment profitably, medical research will just start devoting funds to making treatments exclusive, e.g. only invest in custom/on-site medicine.
See also:

(March 31st, 2011) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snOErpOP5Xk

(November 11th, 2011) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV0BpoRTv38&feature=rela...

Dramatically lower resolution, of course, but probably $100,000 cheaper. No granite optical tables required, for one.
Think Different: 5 Truly ‘Original’ Photo Blogs
>> For each level of markup nesting, try and indent your CSS to match.
> Nope.

Happy Cog does this (http://happycog.com/a/c/screen.css), Jason Santa Maria (http://v5.static.jasonsantamaria.com/c/screen.v2011083002.cs...), and many other well-respected designers.
If they're going to do this, they should still not support AAC in html5 audio tags, even if they support it in video tags when bundled with H.264.

With MP3 and Vorbis (with Opus a potential new entrant) you already have wide compatibility (everyone that supports AAC supports mp3 too) and top quality covered and mp3 patents expire a lot sooner than AAC. Ubuntu also has a free (as in beer) mp3 decoder available.

I'm all for pragmatism, but there's still utility and principle in avoiding unnecessary reliance on patented codecs where possible.
More than 25% of the top 1000 websites run on Nginx.
The almost-myth of the fiduciary responsibilty of company executives to be irresponsible. I wrote elsewhere [1]:

> A point about the morality of companies angle: the so-called "fiduciary duty" of companies that is an overriding duty to maximise shareholder returns within the constraints of the law above all other ends is a legal obligation in only a few countries. In most countries, including most states in the US, executives have a legal responsibility to be honest and open about their performance and honest (if not very open) about their strategy, but have no legal obligation to prefer a more profitable course of action over another, which is obviously right since there is usually no knowable fact of the matter about whether one business plan will turn out to be more profitable than another.

> In short, the idea that companies have a moral obligation to act immorally if it pays is mostly or always a myth.

There is no chance that Yahoo executives would go to jail if they decided not to pursue a cursed-earth patent troll strategy. Fiduciary duty is about executives not putting their personal interests before that of the shareholders.

It is not even obviously in the company's interest, what they are doing. If cash-rich FB refuses to settle, all 10 patents get invalidated, and Yahoo has to pay heavy legal fees, then Yahoo is left with a smaller warchest of patents, and one whose firepower has been seen to be lacking. Does the quiet period make that such an unlikely outcome?

[1]: https://plus.google.com/u/0/103703080789076472131/posts/K74a...
Does anyone else find it appalling that the American government and American companies have the gall to complain about intellectual property violations in developing countries like China and India? Until the late 1800s, American IP law explicitly excluded foreigners from IP rights. That's right, forget about lax enforcement (like you often see in developing nations nowadays) - you could violate foreign IP rights in public view and not a thing would be done about it.

And that's exactly what Americans and American companies did - they went to Europe, took the latest IP, brought it back to America, and copied it. Charles Dickens went on a tour of America to try to get people to buy legitimate copies of his books, which no Americans were doing at that point. By the end of his tour, he realized this was a pointless venture, referring to America as a "nation of pirates". Doesn't sound that different from what contemporary American industry trade groups call China and India, does it?

And it wasn't just international - domestic IP rights violations were endemic as well. The reason the movie industry developed in California was because the movie studios (the same people that are now crying foul about copyright violations) were trying to escape Thomas Edison and his patents on moving picture technology. Not only was Edison's lab in New Jersey, distancing them geographically, but the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (which covers California) took a more "relaxed" view of IP rights.
Don't forget a huge expense: Battling lawsuits (mostly frivolous) from users of the drug and potentially paying out huge settlements.
Can Too Many Pages Hurt Your SEO?
There's nothing wrong with deliberately having a high false positive rate. Airport security does that too. The problem is if you treat everyone who gets flagged up as irredeemably guilty even though you know you have a self-positive rate.

This would be akin to having airport security send anyone who sets off the metal scanner to a maximum security prison without right of appeal.
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> Why else would they file for patents if their intent wasn't to defend "their ideas."

As the original article said, most SV web companies claim to file patents as a defensive measure - so if they get sued by someone else, they can hit back. Suing first is extremely bad form.

> If we're calling out Yahoo's patents as junk, we should be doing the same for facebook and the rest

I don't see anyone saying that Facebook's patents are fine and Yahoo!'s are junk - Yahoo! are being criticised because they're attempting to enforce their junk patents. If Facebook attempted to force theirs they would get exactly the same flack for it.
Play framework 2.0 released
Apple.com upgrading to high-resolution images ahead of Retina iPad launch
McDonald's is actually in the information business. It sells information about its food.

What people buy when they buy a Big Mac are two things:

1. the actual Big Mac

2. insurance that a Big Mac always tastes like a Big Mac

This second thing cannot be bought from a local restaurant not part of a chain. You can't be sure what a random burger will taste like, and you can't esp. be sure it's not going to be awful.

That's why more people go to McDonald's than to other restaurants that they don't know: they hate uncertainty and would rather eat something that is consistently average than take a chance every time.

This is also known as the "Lemon Effect": http://blog.medusis.com/are-you-a-lemon (shameless plug).
The "identify this animal" example has a serious bug. This:

def identify(animal):
if animal.is_vertebrate():
return identify_vertebrate()
else:
return identify_invertebrate()

should be

def identify(animal):
if animal.is_vertebrate():
return identify_vertebrate(animal)
else:
return identify_invertebrate(animal)

Arguably this mix of OO and procedural code is bad as well. But less arguably, the initial example (with a simple identify function) was far better than the rewrite.
If the board decide to pursue bogus patent lawsuits, throw millions of dollars at at and lose the case, should they go to jail for making a poor decision?

If they go for it, win, but every single talented engineer at Yahoo! quits in disgust and the company falls apart, should the board go to jail then as well?
Yahoo! Pipes is extremely useful.
Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, And Elisp Compared