skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Change is needed. However, its not going to come from our government.

Nor will it come from putting yet another sacrificial lamb on the pyre.

> If Yahoo were to be awarded 50 Billion Dollars from Facebook, I think consumers may take notice. And don’t think that 50B should be an impossibility.

I don't think consumers would bat an eye. So long as facebook.com remains online, they won't care. If it goes offline, they'll migrate to Twitter, or back to MySpace, or Google. There is enough competition to Facebook right now that if they vanished overnight people wouldn't clamor for their return for very long.

> This is what patents are for, right ? To protect companies with original IP from smarter, faster, aggressive companies who catch the imagination of consumers and advertisers. What else could patents be for ?

At this point I suspect the author is just trolling. Nice job. It doesn't take much research to learn that patents were meant to encourage inventors to share the details of their inventions to Society, so that Society could benefit in X years instead of waiting X+delta years for the chance something gets reinvented and shared freely.
It's a story, you silly fools. It's called fiction. It's pretty good, though I feel like a lot of the length was kind of redundant; it would have been better shorter. Or, as George Carlin put it:

>I’ve also grown weary of reading about clouds in a book. Doesn’t this piss you off? You’re reading a nice story, and suddenly the writer has to stop and describe the clouds. Who cares?.......I’m not interested. Skip the clouds and get to the fucking. The only story I know of where clouds are important was Noah’s Ark!
Sure he does! But he should also be humble which reminds me of the quote, "we stand on the shoulder of giants."
Tips for Picking Up Women in Bars
NASA, General Motors team to build robotic glove for human hands
A similar story with more details: http://ploum.net/post/working-with-patents
Nah FB can drag this through the court system for years or even decades and then find some way to kill Yahoo in the meantime.

FB must have made a lot of improvements in online ads, which as far as I am aware, is what makes Yahoo money (side note, do Yahoo actually earn money?) so that would be an obvious place to attack. An alternative is to team up with Microsoft, who desperately needs some sort of social media strategy and have very very extensive patent portfolios.
Same here I thought it was going to be free. Wishful, naive...
You might be able to use the thermal stability you have underground to help cool the house. Granted, this is more expensive, but probably far less costly in the long run. The basic idea is to bury a heat exchanger (coils of tubing) deep underground and circulate a fluid to move heat from hot to cold.

You can use this two ways: You can use it to try to cool the house directly by embedding tubing in the floor/walls or some other approach. Or, you could use it to improve the efficiency of an air conditioning unit by providing supplemental cooling of the A/C unit heat exchanger coils.
Ask before telling
If you've created or are in charge of a product (or something else), you're going to get a lot of questions from various people. Answering questions is important, so finding a way to make this scale is critical. When come asking, turn it back on them. I believe this approach not only teaches them to be self-sufficient (to some degree), it also helps you by getting in their head rather than just giving them the same answer you've given dozens or hundreds of others.
The new typesafe-stack deb package also wants to install all of OpenJDK as well, even if you've got Oracle JDK already installed and on the path.
> it will take about 15-25 years for solar energy to become cheaper than fossil fuels

You neglected to account for the change in price of fossil fuels. Natural gas is extremely cheap right now and is expected to only get cheaper.
This unlikely scenario is in fact true on my campus where I'm an admin. In fact, we are dissuaded from even NAT'ing because it complicates central auditing and internal charge backs.

Every single wired host (including printers) has Class B public IP address.
>>You think that Apple and Amazon don't care about their bandwidth charges?

> I really didn't say that, and you know it.

The person who wrote "They are in the business of distributing digital goods with the highest marginal price possible, so they have little incentive to reduce their marginal costs as much as possible." either thinks that bandwidth costs aren't marginal costs for content distribution or did write that A&A don't care about bandwidth charges.

> They don't need to eliminate those costs in order to be profitable.

So? Lots of companies are profitable without eliminating certain costs, but that doesn't imply that they don't care about those costs.

You seem to think that a company that has "enough" margin doesn't, or shouldn't, care about costs. Some evidence would be nice.

> Minimizing their marginal costs is not their top priority.

Move those goal posts.
I do hope he is speaking entirely about software patents rather than all patents in general.

There may be issues with non-software patents but under any system their problems are trivial in scope and solution space compared to software patents.
I clearly got sarcasm, from that last quote. He was being facetious, if you missed that you probably missed the point of the article.

It's a broken system and change needs to happen. After the quiet period for Facebook, they should really try and make aware the flaws of the patent system by explaining what each of these ten patents relates to. After reading the 5th obvious one, I stopped reading, so perhaps the next five were really innovative...

But yeah, you totally missed the sarcasm in that sentence.
I was wondering why I hadn't heard anything about it :P

I found the whole writing style very fast-paced. You just get a snapshot of what the character is going through as he finds himself whisked into... Fame? Fortune?

I for one was entertained.
NASA worker claims he was fired over intelligent design
This is a pretty neat gadget, but the last thing I want is another email distraction while I'm trying to work.
Very, very nice collection. Thanks.
If you allow trademarks on the characters and such, you end up in a worse position than when you started: Nobody can reproduce the original work or create any kind of derivative work without permission. This lasts in perpetuity as long as it is defended, and permission will likely never be given out of a belief that the trademark needs to be protected.

In other words, you're free to do anything you want with the Harry Potter movies, so long as you remove all instances of the name "Harry Potter" and all likenesses of Daniel Radcliffe wearing a robe?
While I can't claim to speak with authority on this matter, a far more likely outcome would seem to be :

1. Yahoo sues Facebook
2. Facebook settles for some large-though-not-crippling amount of cash
3. The public forgets and moves on, since no-one's actual day-to-day user experience is affected (and we collectively do lack a bit of an attention span)
4 [epilogue]. Companies are further incentivized to leverage patents in the pursuit of financial gain

Of course, MC knows this, which is what I'm sure prompted this post to begin with.
Glass blocks UV which isn't ideal since it heats things up and UV has useful energy. But it's cheaper than quartz.
Even most modern "real" (non-software) patents don't seem to be useful for actually teaching people how to implement technologies, which was one of the major purposes of requiring the disclosure.
Adele Lyrics
All of my coding is done with Ratatat as background music.

As for the Pandora station, I'm not sure. turntable.fm has a coding room, though.
It meshes well with the way Blackberry handles incoming messages (email, IM, etc.) and the Blackberry has a public API to allow 3rd-party access to such incoming messages.

iOS has no such public API, and the various types of incoming messages (email/SMS/IM) are not unified in iOS like they are on BB. It's always been a weak spot on iOS. The iOS 5 notification center improves the situation quite a bit, but there's still no public API to enable a device like this watch.
Google tax! Hail to our new Google overlords.
You are grossly underestimating the amount people would care if Facebook went offline. The world would freak out. People have memories of their lives tied up in the service with the combination of photos, friends, and messages. The pent up data generated over the years is truly meaningful.
I suspect this raises the value of the shell of Kodak, too (they have some imaging patents, although Apple is suing them for other imaging patents, perhaps defensively).
For a general purpose testing framework, Nose is great.
For web testing, combine it with Selenium.
The error is in assuming that applying a simple permutation to a word increases the entropy by a meaningful amount. Capitalizing a letter, substituting a symbol, moving your hand's position on the keyboard, or repeating a letter are common things to do. A dictionary word that has had one of these things done to it, for purposes of password strength, is still a dictionary word.

People commonly think they are being random when they modify their passwords, but in point of fact, they are doing the same thing as everyone else. You cannot ever trust yourself to be random; the only things you can trust to be random come out of random number generators.

That is why I say probability does not work that way. In order for a modification to make a password or phrase meaningfully secure, it must come from a genuinely random source with a large number of live outcome possibilities. Mutating a phrase in a clever, original way that everyone else uses is pointless. It does not make the passphrase "very hard to predict". It makes it "slightly less hard to predict than it was, which was not very hard in the first place."

Fundamentally, "probability does not work that way" in the sense that just because the outcome looks random and the process feels random, that doesn't mean it is.
It's more physics than pure maths, but artist & art critic Matthew Collings made a documentary for the BBC called "Beautiful Equations". More info here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00wltbm
+1 can you please backup your claim? Scala does not need to be Java popular to be usable (probably no alternative JVM lang will ever be as popular as Java - especially now that Java is evolving).

also, play is not "betting" on scala. Just because it was implemented in scala and provides a scala API that does not mean you can not use the framework from Java (or Kotlin, or Jruby etc.). If you do not care about the scala API, that's fine, use the Java API instead.

HTH
Anyone got a mirror of the contents? It requires me to log into Google before I can read the post.
Poe's Law strikes again. I guess I should have typed "I strongly suspect trolling". I went on, however, with the standard reply that patents were supposed to be about Society, not the individual inventors, because it needs repeating anyway.
Why mess with a winning strategy, see this quote:

Google and Yahoo settled the '361 patent dispute in August 2004. Google disclosed the settlement in an SEC filing just before its initial public offering (IPO). The relevant excerpt from Google's SEC filing states:

Overture will dismiss its patent lawsuit against us
and has granted us a fully-paid, perpetual license to
the patent that was the subject of the lawsuit and several
related patent applications held by Overture. The parties
also mutually released any claims against each other
concerning the warrant dispute. In connection with the
settlement of these two disputes, we issued to Yahoo
2,700,000 shares of Class A common stock.

From this article: http://www.techuser.net/gcoverup.html

Of course the case isn't as strong this time, but it is a period of time when a troll has more than the usual leverage on the victim.
The thing is, even if Facebook used all of their cash for lobbying against software patents, there are many more entrenched companies on the other side of the fence that have spent billions already on patents and will defend their investment and "competitive advantage". That's what Google realized and they bought Motorola.
En Route
New study suggests cap-and-trade results in decreased innovation
He's being literal. He hopes that Yahoo wins the patent fight so that Facebook's lobbyists and the public backlash hit the current patent process firmly in the groin.
If I run a big clinical trial pitting a placebo against a useless drug, the odds of getting the same results from both are low: one is going to appear more effective than another. If I run a hundred of these kinds of trials, I'm virtually guaranteed to see a few cases where one appears much more effective than another. And if I test my worthless drug against an existing treatment that was approved through the same process, I may as well be testing against another placebo.

I'm not suggesting all drugs are worthless; only that drug companies do not need to produce effective drugs to stay in business.
Borland's hacker ethos is what greatly diminished the company. The company indulged a well-known programmer tendency to bulldoze and rewrite code.

The company, as in management, took wrong decissions. But the blame still manages to fall on poor programmers :-)
"Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."
-- Henry Spencer
An even better example is that many (most?) folks don't choose the most expensive health-plan at work when they have to pay the difference between it and a less expensive plan.

And then there are Flex spending plans. Folks put money into those plans so they can pay for health care with pre-tax money, giving them lower out of pocket costs for healthcare.

Look at how people handle their deductibles and co-pays - again, they try to minimize their costs.
>Giving amphetamines to children is certainly debatable but amphetamines are not neurotoxic. Methamphetamines are neurotoxic, especially in recreational doses, but non-methylated amphetamines are not.

At least do your research if you're going to act so certain about something. This post has links to a few studies demonstrating said neurotoxicity - http://www.longecity.org/forum/topic/47231-amphetamine-neuro...

>Why? What's wrong with SSRIs?

Gee, I don't know. Maybe the horrible withdrawal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSRI_discontinuation_syndrome) combined with the fact that their effectiveness is statistically insignificant (http://www.science20.com/natural_medicine_101_jeffrey_dach_m...).
I'm probably the wrong audience for this story, just like I'm sure doctors are the wrong audience for Grey's Anatomy. Just like a doctor would think, "this show makes it seem like doctors have sex constantly in storage closets," I'm thinking, "what VC makes and closes an offer with over the course of one meal?"

Still, entertaining read, thought it was clever the way email and tweet graphics were used throughout.
Sure...

Nuclear power generates 21% of the US electrical usage, of which residential consumption is roughly 1/3 of total usage.

The math won't work...
The Finite, Irreplaceable Hours of Your Life
My Google+ Hangout Speed Painting with Artist Cliff Roth
I agree with what Al Gore is saying, but his talk of TV being a negative distraction in politics is a little hypocritical- he owns Current TV, which amongst other things broadcasts the Keith Olbermann show. That guy sometimes manages to be the Rush Limbaugh of the left.
Sounds like a webservice with a REST API. Every non-Windows computer comes with a client out of the box.

In fact, for some of these things, I think I've seen REST APIs in existence, for the text and image conversion ones. The imagined "ru" command could just be a function or alias to curl/wget.
Code repositories and version control are gone
Where does this rate on the Joel Spolsky work environment scale?
At least in my opinion, the ultimate goal of Free Software is to kill copyright. In a perfect world, everything would be public domain and at the utmost, we'd have a right to attribution (ie, you may demand to be named as the creator of something you made). Copyleft is, right now, just a "necessary evil" to bring us closer to that goal. In a sense, it's a form of using the enemies' weapons against them - but what we actually want is mutual decommissioning.
Screenshot http://i.minus.com/iPG7fjox3BalE.PNG
Insight into Google's Input/Output machine
>Funny thing about meth is that it's not that dangerous

Are you completely fucking stupid? Read these and stop spreading dangerously wrong information - http://www.amphetamines.com/neurotoxicity/index.html - http://www.aapsj.org/view.asp?art=aapsj080248
That's what I meant when I wrote "Big reserves on deposit". Maybe it wasn't worded very clearly - sorry.
> At this point I suspect the author is just trolling. Nice job. It doesn't take much research to learn that patents were meant to encourage inventors to share the details of their inventions to Society

Isn't that a consequence of what he's saying? Patents are meant to encourage inventors to share. Yes. But how are patents suppose to achieve that? It encourages inventors to share by protecting others from executing the ideas faster and better. If you assume that the original inventor was always faster and better at executing his ideas. Then we wouldn't need patents to encourage inventors. They would share anyway because they wouldn't be afraid of the competition.

So I don't think yours and his description are mutually exclusive. You're just completing his explanation.
Oh there would definitely be mourning of the lost data because people don't keep backups, but I really don't think it would last that long and I don't think the mourning would lead anywhere. When people don't even care that their loved ones die enough to donate to anti-death institutes, it's hard to imagine any major effects would happen if all their data disappeared.
Show HN: extremr: what's the loudest, most danceable, most energetic music?
https://github.com/badamson/extremr.com
It's definitely geared towards someone who likes an exciting story but has to get to work sometime today. Very appropriate for this audience.
I think gcc and (maybe) clang have good support for C99:

http://gcc.gnu.org/c99status.html
Matt Cutts posts:

One of the more fun gadgets I've been playing with lately is the inPulse smartwatch. It can silently buzz when you get a new email and show a preview of your email. It's has an API that works with many Android and Blackberry phones, so you can program your own custom apps to do things like move forward in a PowerPoint presentation or show stock quotes. It's pretty geeky, but in a very space-age way. I can see a lot of people wearing watches like this in a few years.

http://www.getinpulse.com/
Highly entertaining. I'll admit, I wasn't positive it was satire until the Anonymous bit. Still, a thoroughly enjoyable read.

Also, SoreGoggles actually sounds like a fun idea for an app.
Meet Ben Silbermann, The Brilliant Young Co-Founder Of Pinterest
The quickest surefire way to patent reform is by threatening Facebook users that they may have to go back to using Yahoo services. People will be revolting in the streets.
I'd pay lots of money for a stylish watch or bracelet for my wife that would alert her to incoming calls and texts. She (like many women) keeps her phone in her purse and rarely answers because she doesn't know it's ringing.
parallel --onall my-command

Done! (Assuming you've added the SSH logins to ~/.parallel/sshloginfile)

For example, to use them to convert a bunch of images from PNG to JPG:

find . --name '*.png' | parallel --onall --trc {.}.jpg "convert {} {.}.jpg"

This takes care of sending the PNGs and retrieving the JPGs. Now you just need a few aliases to hide the parallel.
Virtual reality that doesn't suck: "it felt like the future"
Yes, I know what virtual memory is, I'm a computer engineer and I work on operating systems. I'm just extremely impressed that they needed 1.5 GB of address space, for christ's sake.

Insert here some pithy comment about Apollo missions and Twitter, or whatever.
> Nah FB can drag this through the court system for years or even decades and then find some way to kill Yahoo in the meantime.

It's a big distraction for FB. It's not a distraction for Y! (because obviously they don't have much business left in their business). So my guess is that FB settles to get it off their plate.

If FB instead takes the strategy you mention above and blows all that money, I'd love them to death for it. ("You wanna piece of me?! Come over here and let's rumble!" It would tell patent trolls that they are going to have to blow serious money in the future.)
I'm patiently waiting for the meta moment when a 3D printer can fully print a functional copy of itself in one piece. At this rate, it's going to happen.

But more seriously, seeing all this happen gives a very clear glimpse of the future. Stores full of merchandise will be slowly replaced by online catalogues where you can preview your object, optionally modify it as you like, and send it off for printing. Items may be eventually printed at home since every family will have a 3D printer just as every family now has a computer, but for short-term future there may be whole companies that will set up printing factories with high-end printers, and they will mail more complicated objects to you.
In software these days I feel like patents are analogous to chefs patenting cooking techniques and then running into the middle of another chef's dinner service and saying he can't use cream in his mashed potatoes because of the 'creamy mashed potatoes' patent #78.1 Maybe a decade or 2 ago there was more science involved in software but these days, it seems to fall more under the realm of craft - patents need not apply.
17% have no coverage at all.

56% get it from their employer, and 8% buy their own private insurance.

Source: US Census Bureau, 2009 figures
http://www.census.gov/prod/2010pubs/p60-238.pdf (Starting on page 22)
The dot com bust is officially over - Nasdaq over 3000
Making it wider is enough to get me to use it.
They should charge the $900 and not give away any hardware without announcing whether or not they're going to. They'll be able to have $400 tickets next year without selling out as fast.
'Pig MRSA' Came From Humans, Evolved Via Farm Drugs
Basically the same thing. It's been several hours, right now it says it has 644 MB of explicit allocations, it is 675 MB resident, and has 1,633 MB of virtual address space. When I looked at about:memory right after composing my original post, the numbers were within a few megabytes of what htop reported.
If only we could then still find the rare ones. :( This same attitude is what leads to hundreds of "articles" that are just "I read an article on some other website and summarized it on my website", making it impossible to find any of the actually useful or new content on any new subject. :(
The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly. - Abe Lincoln
>Don't hate the player, hate the game.

In case you missed it, it's the players who make the game and keep it running - a self-sustaining spiral of endless bullshit.