skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Thats the patent version of what would have happened if the US and USSR had started throwing nukes around...

Not even remotely. The damage so far is measured in legal expenses (a few million dollars, chump change), and headlines. They can stop at any second, and can in fact reach some licensing agreement that would make both stronger (MS because their are now immune, Motorola because they can go on to other fish with the precedent that "Microsoft settled because our patents are so strong. You want to fight with us?").

When you start throwing nukes around, you cannot fix the damage so quickly, and you definitely don't come out stronger.

> Seriously, replacing development and business operations by law suites only will get you so far.

far enough for 99% of the companies out there, unfortunately. They are in the business for the money, not technology advancement, or the betterment of mankind.

> Maybe I should switch careers and become a patent lawyer!

Selling your own soul can produce good income, but potentially comes with the hefty price tag of losing your soul.
Nope, it's far worse. It's just a spam link to another search engine that does a search for "Vintage Xxx Tube". SFW so long work doesn't consider search results containing descriptions of porn sites to be unsafe.
That's silly. No one in their sane mind would serve web requests AND do heavy processing in the same thread - no matter what language.

In Node, you would have a process responding to web requests, and launch a separate process -- via a convenient child_process with built-in pipe communication -- for doing the heavy CPU work.

The only case where that wouldn't make sense is if you need BOTH a ton of concurrency AND heavy CPU work. In that case, threads would make sense as they would be cheaper memory-wise. But my point remains: CPU-heavy applications don't necessarily rule out Node as a feasible alternative.

PS: V8 was 40x slower, not 400, in that one benchmark result you picked.
Looks like this was a test Google recently deployed, more information here:

http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/03/15/dislike-youtube-cons...
42floors.com comes to mind as the new hotness, though I haven't used it myself.
This doesn't look like spam at all....

https://www.google.com/search?q=Because+I+drove+the+night+sh....
The only time I take exception to a religion or philosophy is when either it commands one to do evil, or when its adherents use it as an excuse to do evil. As for individuals, so long as they reject all evil commandments and retain their humanity, I will not criticize their choice in religion or philosophy.
Ah, I must have been confusing these with Stephen Horlander's early mockups. Thanks for the detective work.
thanks, just thought we'd have some fun and if someone wasn't really paying attention - they'd think it was social proof
This is the route I've gone. The core CRUD part of the app is PHP, and the real-time chat and document collaboration aspect of my app is node. Works beautifully. I've had so much fun working with node for the last few days.
Ridiculously Effective Technique for Online Lead Generation
This is probably referring to local business directories, which Google uses in part to drive their local search listings (the results with the map & location pins).

That being said it's ironic that Yahoo is providing a service to help people rank higher on Google.
In fairness, while his test is biased towards dbs, it's also testing the claims that he made in his top level comment, which specified smaller files.
> So, from the perspective of a business which is trying to find clients/customers, sure, there's a tonne of value.

Excellent. And I'm sure you'll agree that's something of a leap from "it produces nothing"? Also, there's a corollary to this: This enables competition by lowering barriers to entry, which massively benefits consumers.
We're gonna have a little East Coast vs. West Coast competition here, it looks like.

It's good the leading universities are splitting like this, it'll advance things even faster.
Most consumers put a huge value on convenience, and don't feel inclined to sneak around copying files. The studios cause the file sharing by making it inconvenient to buy, as you yourself describe.

Look at mobile apps. Easier to pirate than a movie, but piracy is not a problem because it's so easy to buy the apps. Look at the growth rate of app revenue.

Look at Starbucks and how much people are willing to spend on a coffee.

We'll see how it shakes out, of course. But the problem now is that the studios fail to make their product available, not that people don't want to pay for it.
Not exactly a joke per se, but take a look at "Improving your social life with git":
https://blogs.oracle.com/ksplice/entry/improving_your_social... :)
Amazon Cloud Drive for desktop
There is a lot of dogma in the sciences too. To paraphrase Khun: A lot of scientific revolutions and advances happen not because everyone realized they were wrong, but because the old guard slowly ages out of relevance (and eventually die off).

You can see this in the current culture wars surrounding sustainability and factory farming. Arguably dogma about the best approach is hindering progress and perhaps even causing great harm.
Referring to [1]?
That's already a huge step worse than copyright, and just starts on the path to "Well look, I published an API to upload files with a progress callback. And you clearly wanted to do the same thing and even named it Upload, but you just moved the parameter orders around."

1: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120126/10515817552/uk-cou...
Analog SMS Texting from Moleskine
Because it isn't true. Because it's a hackneyed creation of a shallow imagination peopled with cardboard characters, made to press the emotional buttons especially popular today. Because real people don't say "You gave an old woman a little moment of joy". Because death and loneliness and loss and memory are all so much more than this Hallmark card of a story.

Because it's so fake, and so corny.
While I appreciate the sentiment and agree with his point of view, his simply telling Google 'go fuck yourself' doesn't really offer an in-depth critique of why these changes or wrong -- it just smacks of the same old 'Everything that's new sucks' sentiment that I can and do find on IRC every day already. Leave the analyses to the real UX folks.
There's a big distinction between SQL and Java in that regard. SQL being published as an ISO standard implies that its creators intended for others to be able to produce their own implementations of it.

Sun/Oracle did no such thing with Java, and has always officially claimed that implementations needed to be licensed by them. It was almost 15 years ago that Sun sued Microsoft for implementing Java in a way they didn't like.
How to build a news aggregator with backbone.js - Part 2
Nice to see that Class Central has already been updated to list edX alongside Udacity and Coursera.

http://www.class-central.com/
Thanks for the feedback. I haven't seen flow mentioned before, certainly something to consider.

I'm from the land of poets so no underrating here
That's exactly what occurred to me as I read the story.

I graduated from college 20 years ago, and a few years back I drove through the old neighborhoods there and something just blasted me in the gut, or heart, or something. A flood of memories of friends and lovers and struggles and parties and fun and hurt and everything.

What is that? Is it a realization of time passed, or opportunities missed, never to be available to us again?

I can't imagine what it would be life after 80 years or so, and knowing that the door of life is closing quickly. Wow. Didn't mean to wax sentimental but I do love these ideas.
5000 IU, isn't that a bit overkill? I'm staying on the safe side and taking 1500 IU every day.
ITunes: Enabling “Show in iTunes Library”
Monster beats by dre NFL Detroit Lions headphones
LASER 2012: Summer School on Innovative Languages for Software Engineering
Nice work guys. Can't wait to see how people react to it.
For me, all results on first page except one are porn.
Thank you for the tl;dr review.
Assassination Politics for Diablo 2 & $1m Bounty for D3. Can Game Devs Resist?
Thanks, and nice graph :)

Marc from Beta List. ('keesj' is an old nickname of mine)
So computers and the internet don't have value... Why are you here?
Yep, a bit of a vague term, but PC has kind of become a synonym for "Windows Machine" -- even though a Mac or Linux box is technically a PC as well...
Sounds like they'll have more classes now but still no information regarding a way to make the classes meaningful to most employers (certificates, credits, etc...).
Shortly after Zynga bought OMGPOP, my profile disappeared. If I wanted to play games, I would have had to create a new profile with no way of knowing if all of my coins/colors/current games would carry over.

I didn't care enough to sign up, and this time around I was forced to link it to either my email address or Facebook, which I did not want to do (before I could just create a username without linking it to anything else).

This friction is what led to my uninstall and is no doubt a consequence of the sale.
Very touching story. I got a chance to ride with a taxi driver for a night one time -- those guys have really interesting jobs. It's kind of like being a cop, except without carrying the gun (Though i think some do carry). Never know who you'll pick up for a ride.
The story brought to mind the movie Crash (2004). I remember thinking "wow, this is basically just manipulating me as a viewer to bring a tear to my eye" – and it worked, just as this story did.
OpenBSD 5.1 Release
EA's $4.99 Rock Band iPhone Game to Stop Working on May 31st
I'll give it a couple of hours to allow for some more replies before saying what it is we're working on.

Thanks for the misspelling tip.
Bar charts should always start at the x-axis (where the value is 0) because otherwise it warps how large the difference is to a casual reader.
Because I get email forwards like this all the time, written by some bored political pr email hack on his lunch break just sharpening his craft (you know the guys who create those shady emails about Obama that get forwarded around right-wing circles).

Seriously, #1 on HN and it's not even remotely about hacking.

Flagged.
The quality of the Coursera material is much higher than the quality of The Open University.

I've earnt 150/330 points at L1/L2 towards a Bachelor's around Software Engineering with the Open University UK. I pretty much just took took exams and wrote the required essays in order to pass.

NOTE: the level 3 courses have programming projects connected to them.

Right now I'm following Compilers and Finite Automata with Coursera. I've learnt more in a week than I've learnt so far with The Open University.

With Coursera, I actually have to work to pass the class.

So yeah, I hope that Coursera have a plan to turn credits into real degrees. They can charge real money for it.

The one thing I see standing in the way of Coursera et al is identity verification: the OU require you to physically sit exams and provide proof of IT. I can't see how Coursera can get past that.
Using the latest Chrome dev (20.0.1123.1 dev, OSX 10.7.3), I've been stuck on a black screen for the past 15 minutes. I do see the number of FPS and there are some x/y/z values which change in the top right when I press the arrows on my keyboard. Rendering issue ?
agreed, and this is something that is lacking from all online ed. unless you learn python and js and html and then build some amazing website, there's no way to tell how valuable you are. In fact, coding seems to be the only thing you can learn online with some sort of measure of success available (ie, you build a webapp).
I feel as though he should have taken the money from her. There was nobody to leave her money to.
Well, in Java I serve rpc requests and doing heavy processing from the same thread all the time, and it works great.

What would we have to do in node to get the same level of performance? We'd need a front end instance delegating requests to 8 back-end instances for each core? Writing all these bytes over internal pipes and blowing L1/L2 cache all the time as the data moves across cores? At a certain point, isn't it just way easier and more effective to have one thread spinning an accept loop and a threadpool handling the requests, all within one process bound to a port?

As I said upthread, I'm using node for a side project right now and I'm liking server-side js for a variety of reasons, but squeezing every cycle out of the CPU is not one of them.
The engineer behind ShareJS worked on Google Wave for two years.
Now that it's on HN frontpage, that'll probably need editing ;P
It's perfectly reasonable that Google would try to consolidate their properties. You used to need a YouTube account to do anything, and they own YouTube and don't feel like managing disparate databases about their users. It may be a minor inconvenience because it's a change from what people are used to, but it makes sense logistically and serves their business interests. They ARE a business after all...
you've earned 0/1 points towards spelling Bachelor's correctly :P
I'm fortunate to have the opportunity to interact with many people in a similar way.

I'm a volunteer EMT with the ambulance service in my town, with several 'assisted living' facilities in our district. My rough guess would be that 25-30% of the folks we take to the hospital are in the last year of their life, and likely will spend the rest of their days in the facility where we picked them up (with occasional 'field trips' to the ER).

While it's popular to complain about these sorts of calls (they certainly lack the excitement of a car wreck, or the glamour of saving a child), I generally enjoy them. Even in the grips of dementia, many of these people have fascinating stories to tell. We're stuck together in the back of the truck for 20 minutes... I can either get a head start on my paperwork, or I can engage them in conversation. In the past month, I've met a WW2 bomber pilot (who flew in a pathfinder squadron) and a former Rockette (plus a schoolteacher, a librarian, a surveyor, and several others I'm sure I've forgotten). I learned something from each of them (well... most of them... grumpy old people are still grumpy...).

The statement "I just try to treat my passengers the way I would want my mother treated," really rang home for me. I've heard that same sentiment (practically verbatim, just s/passengers/patients/) from several providers, all of whom I regard very highly. I think it's one of the best predictors of someone's ability as an EMS provider. While I know a few extremely capable medics who have a lousy bedside manner, every medic I know who seems to genuinely care about their patients is a top-notch medical provider.
I don't think it's meant to be an in depth critique, it's his feedback as a user. He doesn't need to be a design expert or UX expert to know that as a user something is annoying. The real UX folks should be listening to users, they don't have to agree or implement everything said, but they should be listening.

The point seems to be don't rob people of functionality they've come to expect just to push sign-ups.
UX folks? This is an actual end user expressing strong dislike of something and explaining why. That should have much more weight than "UX folks", unless it is a rare piece of dissat in otherwise glowing feedback, though I doubt it. I have a Google+ account but I would not sign in (or up for one) just to rate a video, I would just say "meh" and wander off elsewhere on the internet. I doubt that would be an uncommon reaction and would change the meaning of the up/down votes from "What do most people think of this video" to "What do Google+ users think of this video". Those are two very different metrics.
That do not match my experience in a Chinese Web company. All my colleagues are very good hackers but only some of them are confident at writing English. Most important literature is translated in Chinese, and they prefer reading translated versions. Comments in the code are in Chinese. It is sometime a bit more difficult for us for variables and functions names but it works.

I would agree that a good coder must be able to express clearly and unambiguously complex processes in mother tongue and his programming language of choice but excellent grasp of English is only a "nice to have", when your local community is developed enough.
> Also, who is to say that $4bn/year isn't "fair" when video is an essential part of Microsofts products?

Anyone who's sane. $4bn/year? That's nuts. It would be nuts even if that was the licensing fees for complete H.264 coverage. However, it's not complete coverage, because there are hundreds of patents in the H.264 pool. http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avc-att1.p...

It's not clear to me whether these two particular patents are in the pool or not. I assume not, because otherwise Microsoft would have a license for them through MPEG-LA already. However, given that Motorola was involved in the creation of H.264, it seems that their patent assertions here might be illegal. Some of Qualcomm's patents were apparently thrown out because they didn't disclose them properly and include them in the patent pool. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264#Patent_licensing
Always wanted to ask: Isn't google's diff-match-patch library suitable for the same thing? It can apply patches to altered input pretty nicely.

Is there a conceptual difference? Diffs support all types of operations - insert, remove, replace. I'm really curious about realtime collaboration, but can't decide which is the right tool for the job.
Possibly. The cache of Harvard/MIT definitely puts it in good shape to be the victor.

But, increasingly, and especially in technical fields, degrees are being supplanted by other talent or qualification indicators. Open source work is a great example. There are significant numbers of folks without CS degrees (or even degrees at all) who have found gainful employment as coders based on their open source work alone. Whether it will be accepted by the Fortune 500 crowd remains to be seen though, and certainly the "show me what you can do" idea doesn't really work for non-technical jobs.

At least in the short term offering a degree for these online courses might help.

I wonder if for the non-technical crowd who can't show what they've learned an online degree will be thought of in the same light as a traditional brick and mortar one. It isn't so far, but that will almost certainly change if that degree comes from some place like MIT or Harvard.
After Testifying in Oracle-Google Trial, Scott McNealy Speaks Out
To me it's a step backwards. The non-apple smartphone makers - I'm looking at you Samsung, Moto - are reusing their same old feature phone strategy, but applying it to smartphones by making gimmicky one-trick ponies. The "projector phone." The "notepad phone." The "maxxx battery phone." The "swipe typing phone." The "social networks phone." We've been down that road before with feature phones.

Experience with the iPhone might tell you though that consumers are looking for something different this time around. (not an apple fanboy here, btw)

Pico projectors are cool technology, and ought to be used more, but this phone is not a killer app.
"It doesn't affect my life, or my work"

Unless you buy their products I guess. Lawyers are expensive and I assume that expensive eventually filters down to their customers. I wonder, for example, how much, if anything, consumers have paid for the 'Android tax' Microsoft has been applying to various companies.
Customizing VLC 2.0's Mac interface. How to get rid of playlist or sidebar?
Agreed. Flag it.
"It's probably more accurate to refer to this more aggressive public movement as antitheism"

I disagree that this "movement" is aggressive. It is only perceived as aggressive because people are not used to having their religion publicly questioned, and held to the same standards of rational scrutiny as other products of human thought. I also disagree that it is "probably" anti-theist. The "new atheists" sometimes ridicule theists, but concede that merely believing in a personal god is fairly harmless in itself. I think they are definitely anti-dogma.
I mean if you want to say that they don't resemble one another, that's fine, but I think that might be a bit of denial.

The first thing I thought of when I looked at the ChromeOS screenshot was it was a cross between Windows and the iPad. The toolbar/taskbar at the bottom is very Windows-y in its appearance, and the grid of icons looks like the iPad launcher (also the Honeycomb launcher too).
What are the ramifications, if Oracle win in the USA but isn't protected by EU legislation?
Progress is not the same thing as perfection. Praying does not a 3GHz CPU make, but people tend look for progress in terms of last year and ignore things that happened say before they where born. In practice a lot of published research is junk, but most religions are hundreds if not thousands of years old, on those timescales science is a wondrous new idea. On a long enough timescale we may run out of reasonable experiments to run, but should 'science' and 'religion' actually become indistinguishable it will be a lot closer to the truth than talking snakes.
OS X Mountain Lion Preview updated with Do Not Disturb feature
We're running a nodejs+nosql+js-heavy-client project right now. While evaluating any stack component is an important task, it is certainly more so important in this environment.

This guide is OK, but it's insufficient. If you're going to do a technical evaluation of the node/nosql/js-client stack for risk assessment, you're going to need to get much more granular than what this guide offers. This is a fine guide for a project lead, but this is somewhat useless for the system designer.

For example, in reference to "nosql+node+buzzword+bull$#!t", the advice is to use nosql when you "really" know it, otherwise stick with mysql/postgres. While the devil-you-know-vs-devil-you-dont is a fine project mitigation strategy, it's not a very good technical strategy. Maybe the guide's author assumes one would do so, but the nosql/rdbms comparison exercise is not trivial and requires you to do your homework. Understanding and contrasting the finer points of comparing nosql operations vs. relational data stores is much more useful than a blanket comment.

Like I said, it's a fine guide, but it's much more useful for those who aren't necessarily responsible for determining the stack's applicability to a given project.
Here's another comparison in case people are interested:
http://blog.capography.com/comparing-traffic-from-betalist-w...

I should point out the comparison isn't totally fair as in this instance HN traffic is directed to specific blog posts, while the Beta List post linked to the homepage.

Disclosure: I'm the founder of Beta List (Marc). The post was written by one of the startups (Capography) featured on our site.
A word of appreciation for the highlighting of the search words in the cached page, such as Google had and lost.

(Having to bulls-eye a dinky little triangle to click 'cached' in a single-item drop-down ... not so much appreciated.)
Grading The Online Dating Industry