skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think getting kicked out of MPEG-LA is so easy. If Motorola is a member and does have patents committed to their pool, wouldn't a kick mean that those patents that are submitted would no longer be part of the package? If that's true, then Motorola would have even more bullets.

This only goes to show how nobody is protected from patents, even if you're careful about buying licenses.
Spotify For iPad is Music to Our Ears
ShareJS is also designed to be integrated into existing applications. Etherpad is a standalone product.
Sorry if I offended. The article said 300kg and I "toned it down" to 250kg to better match with the idea that the Hulk in the picture basically looks like two heavyweight boxers in one. I see that the official number is closer to four heavyweight boxers, and I apologize.
I'm betting this is the calculation:
hours of product development X hourly bill rate = $300k
The current situation is a joke. No small player can get above the radar at basically anything software or else they risk being sued out of business. Big players calculate their movements because they all have a big portfolio and they reach agreements. Most people cannot resort to this.

Hopefully a clusterfuck between two industry giants will cause a fundamental change in the rules of the game.

I wish all the devices you mentioned would be outlawed overnight to force a decided reaction. I'm willing to go full OSS and open formats, I'm mostly there anyway. Remember static GIFs? Here's hoping they do enforce all these patents to the fullest.
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Big Maconomics: How McDonald's Explains the World
People still use qmail? I thought the more rational sendmail alternatives had gotten alot more traction?
Well we can all see the benefit to Apple. Apple are making a killing with the App Store, this much is easily visible in their earnings reports. However, I think you are way off the mark with the value that 30% generates for users.

What Apple are doing with the App Store is not expensive for Apple. They hire a few people to run some servers and a couple more to filter apps. It's incredibly cheap and as many of us know you can run a content vending business pretty cheaply as it is. Sure, the benefits of using Apple's UI are nice but they are not, in my humble opinion, worth 30% of every purchase.

To put this another way, I read an excellent article about iTunes (http://thetrichordist.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/meet-the-new-...). Apple takes on zero risk in its iTunes business and nets 30% minus trivial operating costs for vending out some files over the internet. What do you call a business model that asks for money without taking risks? Rent seeking. The App Store and iTunes are both examples of rent seeking behaviour.
Bing design = retro Google?
Apology accepted. ;-)

It would be interesting to see it re-calculated with the accurate weight. His average height is also estimated at around 8 feet if that helps. No records exist to indicate his foot size however the do appear to be disproportionately large for his size.
The BSDs do not have "distros". That's a Linux-ism.
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A local cellphone company called Micromax has been offering a projector phone in India since last year, and its been doing rather well. Anecdotally, people [in Mumbai] seem to be using it as a TV replacement, both due to the lower cost and higher portability (important because of the impermanence of the chawls and slums that house just under half of the city's population).
Is it just me who finds these little spats between huge companies a little tedious? It doesn't affect my life, or my work, if Microsoft or Adobe or Apple takes Google or Motorola or Samsung to court for another expensive round of willy-waving.

I find it incredibly hard to want to cheer for any of these organisations, or get behind any of this stuff. These are just big, faceless corporations, each the same as the next, when it comes down to it. It's a bit like supporting professional sports teams, I guess.
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Old, expired patents, so that wouldn't be a stopper.
4 Questions That Keep Users From Using Apps
Yes! And they should!

The reply people on HN have been giving about these issues is "Don't hate the players, hate the game". I say it's a false dichotomy. You can hate both the game and the players.

But I love players who, like Motorola is doing here, demonstrate that and make everyone hate the game.
I'm not necessarily thinking that the laws will change, just that we'll go back to the situation of a few years ago where enforcement was a little less vigorous.

Merely the potential for dumb rather than the ongoing implementation of dumb.
Web-based live demos of the new UI:

Linux: http://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/files/australis-design...

OS X: http://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/files/australis-design...

Windows 7: http://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/files/australis-design...
Ask HN: When do you read HN?
I did a quick search and this does not seem to have been asked before. Knowing when people read HN can provide some useful insights.
Thinking about it, it comes down to the level of analysis you choose. If you assume constant space per integer, then it is indeed solvable with O(1) additional space. For example, this is usually assumed when analyzing sorting algorithms and I guess this is also what the author had in mind.
Yes. That's exactly what I want: a phone to make calls and nothing else. There is, in fact, such a market - and I'm surprised almost nobody has taken it seriously.

I carry an iPad darn near everywhere I go. I don't want another device which demands yet another data plan. I don't need GPS, camera, projector, gyros, etc. in it. I want a phone which makes calls really well ... and I haven't found it. The phone I use now is a years-old POS candybar thing that the Verizon dealer found in a back room after I spent half an hour ranting about how I want "just a phone" that's thin and simple, one that's not an inch thick in my pocket and/or loaded down with lots of other "features" which just add weight, volume, and cost (methinks he was delighted to finally sell the thing to someone for $1).

"Winner" doesn't have to mean "huge hit" or "includes kitchen sink". "Winner" can be something that a reliable niche is willing to pay a premium and serious markup for. I want a phone that takes great pains to make every nuance of the call perfect & pleasant. We're so used to what's wrong with making calls that we don't realize it's wrong. Make a phone that's small, thin, ergonomic, great sound, great voice control, great battery life, auto-syncs contacts, clean robust Bluetooth earpiece support (if not built into the earpiece entirely) etc. - done right, that will be a winner for a non-trivial market. Someone did make a laudable effort at it ("John's Phone"), but failed by putting space for storing a paper-and-pencil contact list, and by focusing on form over function. Someone, please, take the simple act of making a call seriously without any cameras & GPS & sensors & gyros etc.

Yes, I want a phone in my pocket which is just a phone to make calls and nothing else. I've already got a tablet which does everything else.
If your competition is the one that you have to give away your 30% to, maybe your competition is rigging the game?
My "take-away" from all this is that, if this can affect Microsoft so profoundly, how much more damage could be done to startups and small businesses in the technology arena? Most of them couldn't afford the fees to start the legal process, let alone pay for a protracted fight on obscure areas of copyright.
The lawers are happy about it. The law we have are just made in a way that it is still worth fighting instead of producing. I am not an expert on the law in general but I know that a lot could be much easier.
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Please help a desperate hacker: Looking for an apartment in NYC
Hi all,

Me and my team have recently been accepted to Dreamit Venture's New York.

It's all really great, but we are coming from abroad. Trying to find a nice apartment in NYC from Israel is proving to be nearly impossible.

Apart of craiglist and AirBNB, what other solutions are there for finding reliable sublets from abroad?
I agree it's not that difficult and prior to OpenSMTPD I've been a user of Postfix for 10 years, so I know the software is good and far easier to setup than the big S. ;-)

However, here's a better example of a configuration that is simple with OpenSMTPD and slightly more complex on others:

listen on em0 tls cert "mycert" enable auth
map "vmap" { source plain "/etc/mail/virtual" }
accept from all for virtual "vmap" deliver to maildir
accept for all relay

This will have the daemon listen on all addresses of interface em0 (both IPv4 and IPv6), it will enable STARTTLS using certificate "mycert" and activating authentication for system users (no pop-before-smtp, no cyrus-sasl and whatnot). It will accept mail from anywhere for all virtual domains in the mapping "vmap" and deliver to maildirs, while relaying mails from local users to the world.

That is a fairly basic setup that quite a lot of people use, yet the effort required to achieve similar setup on other software can range from just "slightly irritating" to "extremely painful". Here it's done with 4 lines that are almost readable by someone who has never used the software.

Some other features like relaying through remote MX that require auth; tagging; forcing secure channels; allow more complex setups while retaining the same simple syntax.

/!\ warning: as a major contributor to OpenSMTPD, I'm biased ;-) /!\
5 things Entrepreneurs should learn from Indian Movies
It's a laser projector. The beams are non-divergent so it's "focus-less".
Google Wins $35 Million U.S. Government Contract Over Microsoft
I'm interested in how your experiment comes out, pay-per-story/story-points. Please do blog this. (I'm also interested how this interacts with pressure from Chickens "Oh, it can't be that many points" etc.
At the risk of spreading the trolls, for more civilized discussion check out the wiki: http://sharejs.org/wiki/Main
The "gentlemen"'s agreement is that big corps, via things like FRAND and patent thickets insulate themselves from competition from startups and other outsiders (e.g. Apple entering the mobile phone world, Linux or Android stepping on Microsoft's toes) but don't enforce those patents against the other incumbents, that's why they never bothered to actually nail down what their rights and obligations were.
Isn't that exactly what MS are doing by moving their operations?

"Finding a way around it" does not imply they are avoiding any cost in doing so.
I'd agree with this if it wasn't for wanting my contacts synchronised. That's enough of a reason to have a data plan on the phone for me.

(I guess if someone did bite off this market, they could find a way around that.)
> The sudden rejection of dropbox apps is blamed on 'bad user experience' by Apple, most of us know that its due to iCloud .

What? No. Did you read the linked forum thread, at all? It's due to the presence of a "Sign up with Dropbox" link in new versions of the SDK.
It like with poletics at one point you just have to laught because nothing makes any sence anymore. It just ...

Its not this case but the general state of these laws.
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I actually prefer when apps respect the UI guidelines of the OS they're running on. I understand the desire for one unified interface, but there's also much to be said for intra-OS UI consistency. FF has done really well in the past with that, but I guess they're jumping on the Chrome bandwagon.
You can't see this unless you're set to United States in your preferences, but it does look extremely like old Google, which is no bad thing.
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That's not really fair, tbh, (and I'm a huge fan of Clojure). It's dog-slow on Android. I don't know the details, but I think it's has a lot to do with differences between Dalvik and Hotspot.
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Not yet it doesn't. They're still working on the final elements of the deal (approval in China I believe), though it will almost certainly go through before any such liability might become due.

And for clarity, it's Motorola Mobility they're buying, not all of Motorola.
Thats the patent version of what would have happened if the US and USSR had started throwing nukes around...

I always thought patents were there to protect against such attacks, a balance of awe and destruction. But who the heck was stupid enough to start that? Seriously, replacing development and business operations by law suites only will get you so far.

Maybe I should switch careers and become a patent lawyer!
I really love Metalab, I always looked at them for inspiration and seriously I'm proud of those guys.

They took the other road, the road which is in my opinion the best and the wisest. You must work hard to get to your point, being funded is not working hard (opinions may vary that while you're funded you can focus on your project instead of money but I think this is a very good part of the startup concept).

Once again, Metalab inspires me, my projects are starting to get real and I'm doing it the Metalab's way. I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one and that this method is successful as well. (I couldn't care less about having 4.2m or 500k, at least you have enough fund to back up your dreams and projects).

That was my 2cents. Keep up the good work guys!
The Google Hack That Could Be The Antidote To Search Engine Spam
I guess this goes without saying, but view them in Firefox. At least the OS X one looked thoroughly screwed in Chrome.
I was great this is awesome then I watched their promo video and have to say I feel I just ate way too much cake. I feel ill now. Wow this is bad. I am just not used to this kind of shit anymore after years of watching everything commercial-free on the internet.
If you've been banned from Google AdSense and you're deadset on getting back in, create a new legal entity with its own Google account. This complies with Google's TOC. There are higher costs of course, but presumably you'd do it if the revenues would exceed the costs.
How many google programmers are actually doing that though?

Compared to something inane and dull like the number trying to get the logins for all the different services actually working with each other properly?
Adobe does lots of open source.... most of Flash is.
The tab thumbnails look a lot like Opera's.
What use is a phone that has a million widgets if you have to go through 6 screens to make a phone call? I had this with Windows Mobile and a HTC Universal. The thing that iOS does really really well is provide an experience that doesn't feel like it's getting in the way. Android does that as well for basic functions, but in bolting on all of these functions to turn the phone into a swiss army knife, they're fragmenting the android experience.

As someone pointed out there is a market for simpler phones. I'm sure there's a market for more complex ones too.
The unintended product experiment we had this monday
There are valid concerns about the implementations of .NET and the possible ramifications that could come if Microsoft decided to enforce their patents surrounding them.

Having an open standard can be moot if effective implementations of it are patent-encumbered, forcing you to either use a licenced runtime, a second-class one, or risk getting sued.

More on this:

http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2010/07/ric...

"RMS: You shouldn't write software to use .NET. No exceptions.

The basic point is that Microsoft has patents over features in .NET, and its patent promise regarding free software implementations of those is inadequate. It may someday attack the free implementations of these features.

This is no reason not to write and distribute free implementations such as Mono and DotGNU. But we have to keep in mind that using and distributing these programs might become dangerous in certain countries. Therefore, we should minimize our dependence on them – we should not write programs that use those features.

Mono implements them, so if you develop software on Mono, you are liable to use those features without thinking about the issue. It is probably the same with DotGNU, except that I don't know whether DotGNU has these features yet.

The way to avoid this danger is not to write programs in C#. If you already have a program in C#, by all means use a free platform to run it. But don't increase your exposure to the danger – don't write additional code in C#, and don't encourage people to make more use of C# programs. We need to guide our community away from dependence on an interface we know Microsoft is in a position to attack.

It is like the situation with MP3 format, which is also patented. When people manage to release and distribute free players and free encoders for MP3, more power to them. But don't ever use MP3 format to encode audio!"
It's a sign of... wait, strike that. It's a huge red flag the size of the moon when a company with no revenue (http://www.npr.org/2012/04/10/150372288/instagram-sells-for-...) is sold for so much money.

I would argue that Facebook and Google are bubbles too since they do not provide value. Advertising is a joke of an industry - it produces nothing and is essentially the business of mass psychological manipulation. For proof that such bubbles burst, look towards to entertainment industry which also provides nothing of value yet charges through the nose for it.
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Another way for teenagers to annoy the hell out of me on busses...

(after the invention of the mobile phone speaker)
It could actually kill a lot of them. Patents are just fine as long as they are used defesivly. If they are not they can ruin everything.

Some effects I can imagine:

- Potential competitors aren't bought but sued to death.

- It could be harder to get founding if your situation is not sure, investors could loose their money

Consequence will be that start-ups will become more expensive again...
Testing Intel SSD 520
He said "open markets" you are putting words into his mouth to back up your own. ideology.
The opposite could happen too. If you want to make sure your APIs are copyrighted then you would stay in the US.

For example it would make it harder for someone to offer a drop in replacement for your cloud based service by replicating your APIs exactly.

Personally I doubt APIs could be copyrighted, but some would find an advantage if they could.
Apple Working With Dropbox To Resolve App Rejection Problem
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Ooh, cool -- will add those links to the story.
Considering the local pubs around me (Wetherspoons I'm pointing to you) appears to be full of drunken old perverts staring at porn on their iPhones, I'm not sure this is such a good idea...
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It said "a few girlfriends" for carp sake. A few. Not all. A. FEW. The poem doesn't even begin to imply that it would only be that way around. The only thing obvious here is that some people are hell bent on finding injustice hiding behind every word. I feel sorry for those people. :(
Perhaps consider raising your hiring bar. Even young girls still in School in India didn't have trouble using Scala: http://www.scala-lang.org/node/10714
You're not at the cutting edge and that's fine
The cutting edge of web dev tech isn't for everyone - and that's ok.
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I've been wondering about this for a while: what's with the large back button? Back when it was introduced, it was cool because back button was the most often-use one of all nav buttons (next, reload, stop, home) but now they're reduced to one, large back buttons just doesn't seems to make any sense anymore.

Are they still doing it as a part of Firefox UI identity or is there any (recent) usability research on this?
No wonder since it is full of -moz-* vendor prefixes.
Raise the price of the current solution sufficiently, and the migration then makes a whole lot of sense.

This even if the target product is less capable, less desirable or otherwise inferior, given a sufficiently large price delta (or hassle delta or product support delta, etc) then management and operations and finance will most definitely encourage the migration.
Launched my new Startup Yesterday, Here's how the first 24 hours went
Okay, someone please explain this to me: I thought a few years back we had all this uproar about the EU wanting to introduce patentability of software. They eventually backed down, if I remember correctly. Now a German court rules that Windows 7, a piece of software, infringes upon a patent. What?
Welcome to Spectral Python
From Schmidt's testimony:

Sun wanted $30-50 million for a Java license

http://mobile.theverge.com/2012/4/24/2970872/live-eric-schmi...

I've read the $300 million figure and per-handset fee elsewhere, but I can't find it now.
This does carry the hallmarks of disruption (in the true Christensen sense of the word).

If I were a projector company, I'd invest heavily in designing low power projection chips to sell to handset makers / make phone-sized projects to integrate with handsets. Maybe that already exists (beyond this phone)? I have to say I'm not well read on the state of the art here.
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Berkeley Wins the Simons
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When I grew up my dad wanted me to be a business man. When my kid grows up I want him to be a patent troll.

When I was young the money was in innovation. Now the money is in stifling it.

I agree though. Tedious describes this perfectly.
Particularly interesting: slides 82-85 : The goal is a solution that feels fast to the user, and that goal ought to trump engineering considerations (eg: minimize number of round-trips) by default.
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