skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I remember back in 2006 when everybody thought the phone manufacturers were doing the best they could as well. The CEO of Palm famously responded to rumors of the iPhone:

> Responding to questions from New York Times correspondent John Markoff at a Churchill Club breakfast gathering Thursday morning, Colligan laughed off the idea that any company — including the wildly popular Apple Computer — could easily win customers in the finicky smart-phone sector.

> *“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

Turns out they really were just sitting on their laurels, and Apple really could walk in and eat their lunch.

Not disputing that running a carrier is a PITA. Just that the carrier market today really is competent and providing roughly the best value it can.
the one caveat being that awful design can only pass when the information presented is well organized and easily found

Nope. Awful design survives when the users incentives for using the site outweigh the pain caused by the bad design.

I was comparison shopping for marbles this afternoon (don't ask) - several sites just got closed because I couldn't trivially see what the P&P was.

I'm traveling to the US this year. Which means I have to get ESTA authentication from the lovely DHS. It doesn't matter how fking awful that site is. I will go through the process until it works since I have no other option.
There seem to be different classes of industries where the benefits and harm of patents are different.

There are industries like pharma where the IP is difficult and expensive to create, but manufacturing (and reverse-engineering) it is relatively easy. Patents appear to be helpful in recouping R&D costs there (at least when and where they're enforced).

There are also industries where both the IP and the implementation are costly and time consuming, notably the microchip industry. Intel is the perfect example - they derive significant value and competitive moat from both their CPU designs and their manufacturing capability.

Do they need patents? I don't know the degree to which patents currently contribute to Intel's dominance, but it appears it would be difficult to catch up even with no patent protection on Intel IP whatsoever.

And then there are industries where the IP is cheap and the implementation can be either cheap or costly, like software. This appears to be where patents on IP do more harm than good. The article expresses the problem very well:

... There's also a ridiculous quote from Rockstar's CEO, John Veschi:

“A lot of people are still surprised to see the quality and the diversity of the IP that was in Nortel,” he says. “And the fundamental question comes back: ‘How the hell did you guys go bankrupt? Why weren’t you Google? Why weren’t you Facebook? Why weren’t you all these things, because you guys actually had the ideas for these business models before they did?’"

The real answer, of course, is because patents are meaningless. Ideas are worth nothing by themselves. Ideas only matter if you execute, and anyone who's ever actually executed on an idea will tell you that the original idea almost is never reflected in the final product. The process of going from idea to actual product is a process by which you learn that what matters is not what you thought mattered. And yet, for reasons that make no sense to anyone who has ever actually built a product, creating monopolies around the ideas only serves to create a massive tollbooth towards actual innovation. And that's what we have here -- and it's funded by Apple and Microsoft.
It's not that they haven't figured it out yet, it's that they just don't care. It's a captive market, right now consumers can choose whichever carrier they want, but the exorbitant prices and poor service will remain the same wherever you go. Furthermore, executives at the two most successful carriers have openly stated that they are looking for ways in which they can trick their customers into sticking around as they jack up the prices for the same service we are already getting.

Tiered data and text messaging are perfect examples of this. Data costs carriers way less than a dollar per GB to provide, yet this amount costs the customer around $10. Text messaging is even worse, because it costs almost nothing for the carrier to provide it, but it costs customers $10-30 each month.
Not looking for any argument here - the shots on the landing page are great examples of what Getty does and can continue doing.

I agree that the serious hobbyists that feed micro stock companies those 2 dollar pictures will not compete with warzone shots, shots requiring $$$ cost in travel, props, lots of models or whatever to set up unless they happen to be professionals "double-dipping" on a paid shoot. The cash just isn't in it.

The Micro-stock guys might surprise you though at how much cash they have invested in gear ( including lights ) Some of them take perfectly good photos of subjects that might previously have only been sourced more expensively through agency or in house.
Even cars still break down, and when they do it's very useful, if not necessary, to have an idea of what's going on. At the least, you become harder to rip off when you take it to a professional.

Computers and cars themselves, generally, are not necessary, just very useful. An understanding of math or good writing is not necessary in any really strong sense. We can strongly recommend, or even mandate, something that isn't necessary, and often do. I don't see why programming is different, or even less useful. I will continue to recommend it to anyone who's open to it.
The only problem I see with this new watermark is that it takes too much space. It's too tall for me, it could be shorter. But it's just a tiny detail, I love the concept and the design.
Smart phone battery life
Exactly, I've noticed this time and time again.

> MIT discovers ...
> MIT students make brilliant startup ...
> MIT professors build ...

Meanwhile, let's say something originated from RPI. It would say,

> Scientists discovered a new vaccine that ...

I think it helps the pull- MIT is a brand name, so people will click the link.
What a horrible article. Technology has admittedly introduced new forms of addictions, but they make the leap to "the demise and ruin of a generation" based on... what, exactly? Starcraft guy in 2005, and Anders Brevik? And apparently the N64, which was a disappointing console but not enough to ruin men for life. Men like stimulation and sex (and stimulating sex). Not news; not the demise of anything.
ICO blog: updated advice and guidance on changes to the EU cookie law
Are there also invisible watermarks on the images?
It wouldn't be too far fetched to imagine that it's simply because Apple knows that some of the patents involved are ones which cover areas they're working in and so by being part of the consortium that owns them they're covering themselves against potential problems in the future.

Once you're part of consortium, you might as well be part of the group looking for potential infringers. It behoves you to protect your investment and it provides potential ways to protect yourself in the future by being able to force cross-licensing deals if it turns out that you're infringing on someone else's patent(s) - these are supposed to be fairly fundamental patents so there's a good chance that who ever is suing you is going to be infringing on one of them, or else licensing it already.

This is a far better article about it - http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/05/rockstar/all/1
I agreed completely, but am not aware of any studies that compare purely aesthetic changes. At the very least Patrick's post shows that design is less important than a tuned Sales channel.
Fussell's Great War and Modern Memory (http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-War-Modern-Memory/dp/0195133...) is one of the great texts explaining WW1, though not perfect. Hugely influential creating the view that WW1 caused a break from Victorian to modern views and values. Fussell also passed away this week.
Mark Suster's blog, Both Sides of the Table
Very interesting. I do think it's vitally important to acknowledge the real nature of war, whose best witnesses are those who actually lived through it, the actual reality of it, not generals or politicians conducting the war from the safety of their offices.

There's a real question as to whether war ought to be shown in all its gory, butcher's window horror in the media. On the one hand, it's important people realise what war is actually like, on the other, it's easy to get desensitised to this stuff.

Personally, I've (regrettably) seen several images which indicate the reality of these things on shock sites, etc., and after a short while was rather desensitised. The images are so horrible that I just couldn't even begin to register the reality of it on any scale the way somebody who has actual experienced it would.

I really don't know whether showing these images would really get people to see the utter, utter insanity of war and the cost to these ordinary human beings, or whether people would just get desensitised.

It's an important question that ought to be explored.
Money isn't for saving long term, it's for spending; if you want to save, buy assets. Inflation is only a problem for those who wrongly mistake money for an asset. The purpose of money is to facilitate trade, not store value.
The GPL doesn't restrict the products of tools.

I think a GPL-like extension of a pencil sharpener would be the following. You develop a new pencil sharpener that copies 90% of the original design but includes a sharper blade that makes nicer pencil tips; when you release that product, you must show everyone how your pencil sharpener is designed and definitely must not prevent anyone from seeing how the original (that you started with) was designed.
Of course the shareholders would put up with it, they have been hoping for dividends for a long time now. It's not like Tim Cook would be giving himself a bonus, the money is already his. Part of his compensation at Apple is his stock, so He should have taken the dividends that were owed to him. Anyone who would be upset by that should either start donating a portion of their salary to whomever they work for, or quit complaining.
I called it an "ugly-race-to-the-bottom" because the micro stock niche debases the art and makes the photographer's work into a commodity judge mainly on its' cost. I don't know about you, but I won't take an afternoon setting up a shoot, utilize thousands of dollars worth of gear, spend more time selecting/post processing and then submit it to a service that will sell the rights for 1 dollar and pay me pennies.

The micro stock model has worked because pricing was high. It's swung the other way. Fair value is not received in many cases.
Listening to the voice in this one gives me the creeps: http://www.screenr.com/JJp8
Facebook missed the mark with Facebook Camera
To keep it short, why can't I take a photo in Facebook Camera and directly post to someone's wall, better yet why can't I do this within the Facebook app itself?

With all the push and focus on great user experience and interaction design, how is it that such a small and crucial component was overlooked by no less than the social network? Hmm
(It also helps to set edgecolor='none' to remove the black line around each point.)
This seems more like an Apple move than a Microsoft move. It's a pretty common opinion nowadays that Apple is the worst in the bunch; beating the pants off any unethical stuff Microsoft might be up to -- or was up to even back in the day. I'd imagine Microsoft just needed to be on board so that they didn't get left out and screwed over by this down the line.

I am completely mystified by how these companies get together and work with each other on things like this.
A density plot would never have revealed the discrete grouping along the x-axis due to rounding. The density plot hides it, but if he started from density plots this might have gotten him into trouble (for example if he would group them in [starttime,stoptime[ partitions it would skew results) .
Posted because of hypercritical.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/
I think this is great - it's either a win or no-worse-than-it-used-to-be, depending on the kind of Getty client you are.

If you're a designer at an agency (which would use watermarked photos in their comps, and then purchase proper rights once the client has approved) this is no worse than it used to be. You still have a watermarked image, it's just slicker looking. Having the URL in there is handy, but you would have recorded that anyways as part of your workflow. It's worth noting that the license behind these images still hasn't changed - you're only allowed to use them for 30 days, and not in a finished commercial product.

The other kind of client is the small-time blogger who would never pay for the image rights anyways, and would just use a watermarked comp shot in a post. According to the click-through license agreed to when downloading these images, this client type shouldn't exist - it's explicitly against what's permitted in the license - and yet it does, widely. For these clients, putting the URL in the image is a win for Getty; people who used these images will keep using them, but now those clients' viewers will be able to easily track the image back to its source, making it easy to actually purchase the image legally. This turns someone using a Getty image without permission from a problem (violating a license) to effectively free advertising.

The obvious next step - although I bet this would be difficult based on all the pre-existing contracts with the photographers - would be to accept that the second type of client exists, change the license on the comp shots, and try to bring them into the Getty fold. Change the license to say that you're allowed to use the images anywhere online you'd like for free, as long as the photo and watermark stays intact and your number of average monthly unique users is less than, say, 10,000. Doing this would take a sizable user base and turn them from license-violators into free advertising. Financially, this wouldn't affect 90% of the type-2 clients (they'd stay under the viewership cap), and would only impact the bottom line of mid-sized publications, who really should be paying for the rights anyways.
Thanks, Mitchell. Is your hot standby in a different zone (e.g. one in the West, one in the East) so you can handle one of their big outages?
Everyone wants to be the smartest person in the room.

It's a shame, because it never used to be that way. And if ever it was, it was in a positive "look, I made this!" way.

To me, the fact that a story like this would even get to #1 on HN says more about how HN has morphed. Would we have seen this 4 or 5 years ago? Unlikely IMHO.
I agree with you that ultimately the reason Apple won't buy a carrier is that Apple occupied a much more favorable spot on the value chain than the carriers.

I'm unlike virtually everyone else on HN in not being alarmed by the pricing of text messages. Prices have nothing to do with costs. Text message pricing is a way of segmenting customers by behavior and price sensitivity, nothing more.
How about down voting "advice dog" and other meme comments lest HN be overrun by memes?
Shiloh Jolie-Pitt wants to be a boy and Suri wants the outfit of her mother
Well, you just turned this into a demonstration of a typical sue-happy american and their crappy juridical system (a prejudice that a lot of europeans have against america), you should have been thrown of court for that.
العاب اطفال 
العاب اطفال العاب اطفال العاب اطفال العاب اطفال العاب اطفال العاب اطفال العاب اطفال العاب اطفال العاب اطفال العاب اطفال العاب اطفال
It's a domain-specific language mostly[1] geared towards communicating with other humans. Incredibly expressive if you can master it, but the grammar is insane.

[1]: There have been some misguided attempts to appropriate for other purposes, but these are largely ignored in the linked article. cf. http://cukes.info/
Ugh. I suggest reading "Ina May Gaskin has blood on her hands" (http://skepticalob.blogspot.com/2012/05/ina-may-gaskin-has-b...).

At home births have caused deaths and brain damage that could easily be avoided in a hospital. The article hand waves these away by saying deaths caused by unnecessary surgery aren't scrutinized. To that, I say "then show it to us", because we can readily see the harm in at home births:

http://blog.dreamhost.com/2012/03/09/wren-jones-2/

http://skepticalob.blogspot.com

http://hurtbyhomebirth.blogspot.com
"The economic and psychological costs stemming from Facebook not getting the traditional opening day pop are impossible to measure."

Are shareholders now entitled to a reward for going public?

Opening day is over. FB is trading well below the IPO price, let alone the high. Nobody can blame that on opening day glitches.

That means that the market would have clearly been more wrong to give it an opening-day "pop".
Germany sets new solar-power record
I might be interested in learning R if I knew what it was. Even the webpage doesn't explain what it is until you watch one of the videos.

I see this all the time on software-related websites. They launch into the technical details without even one sentence about what it is. I could give a whole bunch of examples here but I think everyone has experienced this.

Please include something like the following on the webpage and--if there's space--in the headline too:

"R (a programming language for statistics)"

I don't mean to single out the guy who did these great tutorials. I mean this for everybody. If your software product/OS/service/language is not Photoshop, Linux, Google, or Java, then write a couple of words right at the top to explain what it is please.
This stupid site completely pegs the CPU in Firefox 12 with NoScript!
That's interesting. The closest thing we had was auto shop, but that's like the learning MS Word equivalent of a programming class. What we did have, interestingly, was some programming lessons, though probably lighter than it should have been.
I think, it's not out of character per se, but Apple will be very threatened by the rise of Android. Android now leads the market (afaik), which was Apples position for years.
Now, they only have two options in the current system:

- change strategy
- sue

Obivously, a huge company like Apple won't just change its strategy. Just building the fancy products they do got them at this point but may not get them much further.
To sue is (sadly) the only other way to hold off competition.

What that change in strategy may be, i don't know. Maybe more openness and try to break out of the walled garden they build..

There is only little space left in the niche that Apple occupies (selling expensive tech products to people that can afford it), especially when there is so much competition in the whole market. Apple had a major advantage for years in the market with the iPod and iPhone and i will be really impressed if they can think of the next big thing(tm).
If Apple can't come up with the next big product and just keeps going, they may only be able to sue to hold off competition.

That's only talking about the mobile market of course.

Edit:

I'm hoping for months now that all major companies just sue each other into checkmate until it becomes obvious to the governments that the patent system has to change.
Please Apple, MS, Google, etc. sue until you are not allowed to sell any products anymore! I very much look forward to it.
And "The 'Good' War" by Studs Terkel, a comprehensive masterpiece of individual perspective.
Don't use Density Plots ..

... without seriously considering the benefits of a scatterplot.

Here is some data I plotted recently:
http://i.imgur.com/lvraM.png

Yes, you need to be careful about overlap (transparency can help), but without a scatterplot, I would not see the sharp edges, or have my attention drawn to the outliers.

Density plots imply a model: By creating bins, square or hex, you are adding a layer of interpretation on top of the 2D data, which can be bad. Also the bins of this article have sharp edges (high frequency content) and add artificial structure. I think smooth density plots, not covered by this article, are superior.

Best of both worlds? --> http://www.survey-design.com.au/graphs/density_plot1.png
Welcome to the professional stock photo industry - that's what shots like that cost to use.

If you'd like something cheaper (which generally won't look as good, won't have the metadata searching capabilities you needs as a professional photo editor, or may not go with the story you're trying to illustrate), the market will provide - in the form of iStockPhoto and others.

Getty's main client base doesn't ever purchase just one photo, will rarely look at the price on the website (they know what they need, and already know roughly what it will cost), and more often than not will have their own separate pricing contract with Getty that looks nothing like that series of drop-down boxes.

If you're searching for an individual photo, looking at the price, and considering if you need it - you're just icing on the cake for Getty, as opposed to the target of their business model.
The latter?

"Moderate" is always relative to standard industry practice. If patent trolling isn't standard industry practice quite yet, it's fast getting there. "Don't be evil" is a lot harder when evil is the norm.
You're talking about losses due to market forces. Those aren't at issue. The losses complained of are due to NASDAQ's already-admitted breakage and subsequent mishandling of the fallout, hence why claims are being submitted to NASDAQ.
The last one is an issue, actually. The space invader one is the extreme case: it's already a shadow. And the border tricks for triangles are also shadow-resistant.
Thats quite an innovative way of handling problems
Go through all this trouble but forget to make the font size bigger and the encoding quality such that it's actually legible? Baffling.
Generic Text Comparison Tool with LCS Approach
Flask has a bigger dev team, but Bottle is a nicer, more elegant micro-framework. From what I can see, the design of Flask can be broken down into 2 phases. The first phase is essentially like bottle. The second phase added class views and the likes. And it became inelegant and verbose.

If bottle has something like Flask's Blueprint, which facilitates the management of larger projects, bottle will clearly win as a micro-framework.

In the end, who is the winner really boils down to how much love a framework is given to by its founder. Web.py started a generation of nice frameworks, but I think the person behind it didn't put a lot of effort in pushing it forward, and eventually, it just stopped progressing.
I don't think that's a very good analogy. It's more like sharing back everything you did to enhance the free pencil sharpener, so the whole project evolves even faster with everyone's enhancements.

I think both GPL and MIT have their place in the open source world. If you want to build something long-term and you want everyone to contribute, then use GPL. If you just care about jumpstarting a solution to a problem, and if you're satisfied if they only use your basic solution at the very least, then use MIT.
It is a pity that the article does not explain why the change. I assume that the MIT license is more permissive than an LGPL license but since LGPL allows use in closed source projects what else does MIT brings to the table?
And he's 66... pretty odd. There are plenty of women in their mid twentys if he likes younger chicks.
> Text message pricing is a way of segmenting customers by behavior and price sensitivity, nothing more.

Go on.. (by that i mean can you explain your view of this. it sounds interesting and I don't understand)