skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with patents is that litigation is extraordinarily expensive.

Yahoo are apparently borrowing from IBM's playbook. "We found these ten patents your product/business is infringing, and it would be horrible if something were to happen to it". Note that for the second time, Yahoo are confronting a company immediately prior to going public, during its quiet period.

If the ten patents turn out to be of poor quality, a proof which will cost $1-5 million of court and lawyer time, Yahoo will dip into its portfolio and pull out another 10 patents.

Rinse, wash, repeat.

Eventually (depending on the depth of the portfolio), paying $20-$100 million for the problem to go away begins to make a lot of economic sense. IBM has the largest portfolio of any company (for a time it had a target of $1b in annual licensing revenue, though as I understand it's pulled back somewhat from this objective), and can play the game very effectively.

Even if the patents themselves are bullshit.

What's curious here is Yahoo's positioning. They're not making themselves any friends, and are possibly hurting themselves in front of at least two potentially interested parties (FB & MSFT). I see implosion in the cards.

Maybe Aol. wants to buy them....
"Push It" by Garbage. Also, I don't think I could work at a startup that would place me in an environment where I would hear "The final countdown" more than once a year.
I use PowerMock with Mockito for this kind of thing.
How does an investment work? What happens to the equity?
I have a question concerning investments from private investors. Assume the following:
-We have a company with a total equity of 20,000$
-Investor wants to invest 50,000$, he receives 10%.

What actually happens to the company? I thought the following would happen:

-Equity-owners decide to increase the companies' equity by 10%.
-Every equity owner drops the right to purchase the equity and gives it to the investor. The equity in the company will be 22,000 euro.
-Investor then puts a reserve into the company for 100,000 euro.

Is this correct?
Great article, why no man here?
Do you feel the Apple has some sort of reputation issues (in fields that matter to them)? Because I don't.

But I believe lawsuits like these will eventually push people to acknowledging that software patents are a very bad idea.
I tried to find an example where Google sued a company for infringing on PageRank, but it doesn't appear that has ever happened.

If everyone really just uses patents for the threat of a possible lawsuit, is it still worth having them, even if you hope to never use one?
> The cache dropping is actually useful when you are doing benchmarking...

Agreed.

My response was more to the "Let's Put 'echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches' In Cron and Get Free RAM!!!!" thinking, which sadly seems to be widespread.
We now have consumerism disguised as hacking, in my opinion.

iOS jailbreaking and Cyanogenmod, for example. A few clever people doing the hard the work and the rest of the users out there clamoring "WHERE IS MY FREE THING THAT I WANT NOW!".

Rpi will be the same thing. Someone resourceful and determined will get XBMC, or Android, or whatever running on this chip and the rest will dutifully follow the instructions and either a) have fun for a week and throw it in the drawer or b) live on the forums forever and bitch about what else isn't finished.

Even stuff like Arduino is on the fringe of this. We've taken a fairly simple microprocessor and wrapped it in IDEs and plug-and-play boards to the point where most users have learned nothing about embedded systems development, save for how to wire up an LED or stepper motor without frying your power supply.
The guy is a VC with over a decade of experience investing in technology companies and selling a portfolio company to Yahoo for billions of dollars. He may know a thing or two about software patents.
I know nothing about Joda Time (though I am pretty familiar with calendrics and am the author of YetAnotherToyGregorianCalendar routine). But I have to argue with the premise of your statement:

You cannot work reliably with dates and times, period. Even using the right software doesn't save you from a representation that sucks. Every spring in most places there are time values that don't exist. Every fall there are time values that are ambiguous and happen twice. Every year a bunch of governments change their time zone definitions and muck up a bunch of stored "future" times.

Do your work with "time" as a numeric quantity on a number line and convert to (never from) human-readable dates on output. If you need to parse a date, ever, you are doommed.
The basic support for said functionality is all there in Python, minus the operating system (although I'm sure someone could write a Python OS for fun). You just need 3rd-party tools to make use of it.
"There does not seem to be any way around the issue."

Do something different. Write software that solves real problems and give it away. Fund yourself by coding for companies that solve real problems.

This isn't complicated.
I've been trying to get "Out In The Fields" as our official push song for the past few years, but nobody seems to love it as much as I do.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsKpazeA5L8
Changing the Subject: Spam Makes Friends Across Continents
I would definitely use "Push" by Matchbox 20 if I felt a need for a push song.
Funny that you should mention Dan Brown! Dr. Seracini is the only real person in Dan Brown's "Da Vinci Code"
Help! Hacker News link ate my Bandwidth
One other thing: It can be read on several pastebins that once anon/antisec had secured access to the StratFor data, sabu unsuccessfully tried to get Wikileaks to pay for the data. Which didn't happen of course. The incident also made him seem highly suspect to other members of anon/antisec as that clearly violated their M.O.
Which to me, all seems as if the FBI accidentally stumbled unto a chance to try to stick severe charges against Wikileaks (which they have been trying to prosecute for willfully cooperating with the enemy all along) and blowing it. Still, they will have gained interesting insights into how submissions to WL work now and perhaps, to everyone's surprise, they succeeded in getting to Assange somehow.
Which indeed is talking about stream processing. Play's stream processing uses iteratee IO to correct control inversions often suffered by networking libraries.

However, Play does not offer automatic facilities for having variables (and interface) update when other variables change, as described in the Wikipedia article. For examples of reactive programming, see Knockout, batman.js and Ember.js (all primarily client-side).
Many others have already pointed it out, but how closely it parallels nuclear weapons philosophy is startling.
And Hacker News ate your website :-/
You can cheat in Python 2.x by giving the inner function a keyword argument that defaults to the value you want to close over:

...
def count(i=i):
...
...
Well, if you don't understand it, you must read some basic book about modern computer architecture.
Short answer: It is possible to reserve memory address space without assigning actual physical memory. As your program runs it can dynamically assign physical memory pages to its address space when it needs it.
Again - you must read a book if you want to understand it.
Obfuscated Python ("Python's Ellipsis explained")
That's true; I should have mentioned that I'm only familiar with the situation in the US. In practice, I haven't heard anyone complaining about the handling of design patents (or any of the other types of IP that you listed). That means that they're either not a problem, or (more likely) that I don't move in the circles where it is a problem.
Awesome to some of the work I'm ( indirectly ) part of on HackerNews! I'm part of Dr. Seracini's group here at UCSD, so if anyone has any questions feel free to ask and I'll pass it around to my colleagues if I can't answer it myself.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't think you provided a link.
The Founder's Dictionary[infographic]
@Jason - Did you get any feedback from readers as you wrote the book? Or did you mainly retool articles from your blog and use the comments as feedback?
Thanks for the great comment. I really wish more people like yourself at least understood Linux memory management. I think it will truly help you to be an exceptional DBA. I can also understand how an expert DBA might not know or care too much about the OS underneath his software, although I would argue that if you understand the OS fundamentals, you will be that much better at whatever specialty you have.
Building A Concurrent Web Scraper With Haskell
Recovery of Pen Drive Data
SysTools pen drive recovery software can rapidly recovery of pen drive data without any complexity. This deleted pen drive recovery software is helpful tool for all users that can easily recover pen drive data with great result.
It's a cute toy for running Linux. You can play Quake 3 on it.

Other than that, it might be useful for teaching programming...?
Living the dream, and then I left. (w/ audio)
The BBC were careful never to say "Acorn" on-screen (same as they never said Sellotape, it was always "sticky-backed plastic", to the amusement of the entire population).
Um, what?

They could backorder them like everyone else does. Advertise a product and price. Accept orders at that price for existing stock and scheduled deliveries. And repeat that process as more become available.

As an optimization, allow a fixed-sized queue of "pre-orders" at the same price. Though you have to be careful with this because you're selling things you aren't guaranteed to get. Amazon can cover the losses from mistakes here, small vendors can't.
Development of resource-intensive applications in Visual C++
I think there is a middle step here that Daniel could tackle.

Building small- to medium scope tools for himself that can be dressed up with affiliate links to serve as lead gen for a 3rd party site/service.

The trifecta of building something he would use, potentially making some profit, and building his portfolio at the same time is very compelling.

Targeting the web, building on open source, and deploying to a free(mium) platform (eg. Heroku, free tier of AWS) addresses some of the cost concerns.

The final piece is effective marketing. Get the tool in front of like-minded users (HN & consistent tweeting/blogging) to build up your user base over time. Refine the tool as needed.

Of course the devil is in the details, but given what I'm seeing about Daniel's case this is the advice I would give.
I quite enjoy the pitch videos on Kickstarter and this one is no slouch.

"Would I f-n be here if I made Angry Birds?"

Too funny.
The virtual size of a program includes all shared objects (shared libraries, shared copy on write memory pages, the read only executable pages and other shared memory) that a process uses in addition to the memory that only that particular process is using (its resident set size.) Shared objects like shared libraries can be mapped into memory by multiple processes and thus don't use any additional physical memory for each additional process that uses it.

The RSS thus usually indicates the amount of heap and stack a process is using that is unique to it.
Am I missing something? Does Firefox not use unused RAM for cache in a similar manner as Linux uses unused RAM?
Is that really uncommon these days? I think I personally deployed code 5 times today.
Short and overly simple answer: If a program allocates 2GB of RAM, it might not need to use it all right away. The kernel pretends like it just gave the program 2GB of RAM, but it doesn't really need to flush all those unused pages of cache yet. It can still use them for other things like disk cache, and when the program tries to access those pages then the kernel will dynamically page them in and out as needed. This explains why a program might have 2GB virtual but only 128MB is resident in actual physical memory pages.

This is overly simple and there are a lot of nuances such as shared memory segments, etc.
This is still the best post I ever read about it, and it just so happens to contain the birth of the Lean Startup marketing phenomenon as told by Eric Ries: http://timothyfitz.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/continuous-deplo...
They did drill holes, however they were tiny and in places that were undergoing restoration. The holes were even drilled in the presence and under the supervision of the people who were doing the restorations.
The SXSW Experience
I think this is an inherent side effect of advertising-based revenue models. As they say "if you're not paying for it, you're the product being sold".

If you sell something for money, there's a single moment where your interests diverge from your customers -- when you accept payment. But the rest of you customer interactions are all about adding value.
Attention has been gotten.

(Notice that the one Google employee who has replied in the thread is being derided for not doing enough quickly enough. It was 9 AM in California when he replied. This is why nobody speaks up until the issue is resolved.)
Apple's Siri not as smart as she looks, lawsuit charges
New 3D printer could create nano-devices in minutes
Impressionist UI – User Interface Pack
Impressionist UI is the world’s biggest user interface elements pack. Huge pack that contains over 300 elements for webdesign that represent almost anything one can imagine.
It's not very effective to hate.
I would prefer "fight/act effectively against the people who make/are responsible for the rules of the (dirty) game."
it's funny you mention this. yahoo actually got several maching learning algorithms in place, constantly adjusting headlines and summaries to get a higher CTR on the articles. i've visited the site occasionally and noticed and immediate desire to click on some of the links. Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/23/yahoo_core_personali...
Yeah, there are lots of frequencies that are good locally, but not many that are good globally. If there were frequencies that were even just good in three of the US, Europe, India, and China that would probably be good enough.
So maybe it's better to ignore the MIT guy's advice and cower in the corner.
"installd" is a completely undocumented (outside of Apple) daemon that is somehow involved in installing your software (it runs while installing App store programs) and checking to see what updates you might need. It has no user visible existence. No one would ever know about it unless they ran "ps" or something similar. They will find no hint at what it does, or if killing it is safe.
Ajax Domain Checker Application with JQuery
I use Roll Out or Push It as my main deploy songs as well, but it doesn't get far into the song before the deploy is done. Once in a while, I throw Muhna Muhna into the mix.

I changed my co-worker's song to Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up nearly a year ago when he was AFK. He hasn't changed it because now every time he deploys code, I get to listen to that damn song.
How to convert power point to Flash (.SWF)
Many U.S. Government Officials are MegaUpload Users, Kim Dotcom Says
May be the real solution is a combination of tiered pricing and cut of all sales revenues by generics. The cost of this decision for Bayer is yet to be seen. Considering the number of users is only a few hundred at the current price point, Bayer should be ok.
But, it will be interesting to see a breakdown of r&d costs of bayer in total. Considering India is one of the most popular destinations for clinical trials by drug firms, I cant shrug off a karma play here.
http://www.scidev.net/en/health/clinical-ethics/news/fines-e...
I think that this will be a good move for them provided they can implement it correctly. I think this would only work for machines with multitouch displays.
WARNING: it's another one of those OnSwipe mobile sites that crash your browser.

I wish there was some way to opt out of OnSwipe and just load the desktop version of a website on my iPad.
Pass the code around to group-think.

Test-Cases!

Pray to Buddha to bring you a pony and a plastic rocket.

'Read' your code. Start at the top, draw your way (manually) all the way down through each line, each decision structure, until you have reached the end. Then go back up and do it all again but with a slightly different path. (Not for large code segments; more just for smaller, components.)
Profits considered immoral by open source community?
Most of the apps are landscape or are better in landscape (e.g. YouTube) so the decision may not be as natural as it seems at first glance.

Another thing to consider, though, is that a high proportion of books for under 3s are in landscape too (in my experience at least). So maybe the book industry has also had this question crop up over the years too.. :-)
Last night while taking a break from coding to organize some playlists I though to myself, "I wonder if there's any correlation between the type of music people listen to VS the type of coding they're doing?"

On that note, does anyone know if there's a Pandora station dedicated to hacking?
I agree the particle accelerator is pretty cool, of course transporting power around the globe is not as easy as stringing a wire, for every mile of wire you lose power due to the resistance of the wire. This is the problem of 'power transmission'. This is the same reason you can't build nuclear power plants in the middle of a desert 500 miles from anywhere and ship the power out sadly.

That being said, at .40/watt you can cover a lot of rooftops economically and that means that you cut the top off the 'peak' usage for a city or town. Cutting that peak off is a huge win because often power companies have fossil fuel plants (called 'peaker plants') which they bring online only during peak power requirements.

The cool thing about having the buildings support the power load is you get a benefit of not transporting it very far (few losses due to power line resistance). And yes, even on the most overcast day solar panels generate power. The ones on my roof in California can generate nearly 50% of their best days on overcast days. That does not hold though for panels covered in snow so there is some requirement to keep them clean.
The creative destruction alluded to in this post is well covered by John Boyd's life work, although Boyd presented things through a military perspective. For a teaser, know that Boyd's philosophies underpinned the U.S. plan of attack in Operation Desert Storm.

If you want a dense white paper try Boyd's mangum opus: http://goalsys.com/books/documents/DESTRUCTION_AND_CREATION....

and here's his excellent (and quite accessible) biography: http://www.amazon.com/Boyd-Fighter-Pilot-Who-Changed/dp/0316...
An analogy is not a comparison. You know that. But lawyers love to play stupid, don't they? It sells in East Texas.

Don't worry, I'm quite aware of the mechanics of our patent system. I also know a lot about Hitler. But I believe it's intellectually permissible for others to condemn Hitler in a sentence - without my extensive training in Hitler Studies.

The worst in this case are not full of passionate intensity. It's their wallets that are full - and their minds which follow the money. If I take a drive in Palo Alto and see a fancy new building, five to one it's yet another branch office of Dewey, Cheatham and Howe.

The only people who support the patent system are those who profit from it. I'm quite sure you're one of them. Hey, everybody's gotta eat - but try not to kill the host, OK?
The Five-Minute Rule Ten Years Later (1997)
Google Trends (and Insights) down?
https://developers.google.com/events/io/ Just went live. Registration will be live and first-come, first-served at 7am PDT on March 27.
Because it's expensive.
atop is what I use these days, very flexible.
Not really. Those who act unethically bear the responsibility, and saying that since system is broken it's OK to abuse it just doesn't cut it. With that said, of course the system needs to be blamed (and changed) as well.
Git vs Mercurial: Why Git?
They had a choice - not to use those patents they know are worthless, to make money from FB. So yeah, I'm also perfectly fine with hating the player in this case, too.
I disagree on the fact that JSON is a second-class citizen. A lot of effort went into good support of JSON. But obviously, Scala and Java being statically typed languages, you can't expect to use JSON in those languages like you use them in Javascript.

The reason why everyone encourage you to do so is because typeclass serialization is much more robust that introspection. With introspection you may have runtime exceptions, but with typeclass serialization you know at compile time when something is wrong.

Also, Jerkson is included in Play 2 (that's what we use as base for the Json lib) so you can use it directly if you want introspection.

But if you choose typeclass serialization, you can still define serializers easily, in one line, without losing the type-safety:
https://github.com/playframework/Play20/blob/master/framewor...
If accurate, I really hope this guy doesn't get hammered for stepping outside corporate comms protocol.
That's funny, because I was thinking it should be the opposite: R&D by government scientists so that discoveries can be made available to the public as cheaply as possible.
He's also got a restaurant in the Marshal Field's food court. I can't remember the name but it was tasty. Lower price lunch type fare that beats the hell out of the usual stuff.
Attribution doesn't necessarily mean it has to be in the users' face, just ask her/him if a line in the footer or in a credits page or even just in the source is OK.
Google IO registration opens March 27th
Introducing: New Rdio
And developers are still putting up with Microsoft why?
installd is part of framework that handles installed packages. It's fired up as part of the normal software update process (although it really shouldn't be taking a core for itself). Killing it would probably abort the software update process.
Bike Thief (Stealing your own bike in NYC)
2 minute fix: get people to use htop, not top.
One Ring is Crux of HP's Photonic Supercomputing Project
The outstanding problems in computer science don't seem to require ingenuity in how the code is written. Rather, solving these new problems requires ingenuity in how the problems are approached and in how the algorithms are designed. For example, I was shocked to learn that on my campus, some of the coolest work in A.I. (machine learning, or whatever you want to call it) was being done by statisticians, not computer programmers.
No, no one forces them to play it. The fact that they play it is a good reason to disrespect them already.
No. But I would argue that Apple is a very different company. The Yahoo services I mentioned are very developer-centric, and their reputation amongst the developer community is important. I'll think twice about using Yahoo Maps now, for example. Apple doesn't really have anything like that. We use XCode because there are no alternatives.
The point is not that it's 9am in California, the point is that it's the 13th March already, and the first human answer we get, just minutes ago, is a developer of the new 3-man team being assembled to take over that derelict product -that processes millions, by the way. Is this a joke? no, it's just the Google way, it seems.
Developers have to give Google 30% of revenue and this is the kind of support they get. Not customer relations, not support, a lone developer of a meager, newly assembled team who used his good sense.
It's probably true. However, if it's true that facebook is earning from yahoo's properties, I think they have the right (and probably should too) to sue facebook
Rescue City Full – Premium Brain Games For iOS[FREE]
At Facebook, hackathons for advertisers too
Cool! What is their idea on the next step? Are they going to try to remove the front wall with the entire painting enact?
High Resolution 3D Printer Prints 5 Meters per Second
Tiny, cheap, and dangerous: Inside a (fake) iPhone charger
Are you seriously comparing patents to genocide? Is that really what's happening here? One, get some class. Two, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwins_law