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I think presenting issues in this way is manipulative. Before I explain, I want to be clear that I truly do feel for this mother and her situation. I also think the patent system is irredeemably fucked to out it nicely. But if you're going to talk about real issues then you can't use stories like this to illustrate them because it's manipulative. Tugging on people's heart strings to push forward your philosophy/beliefs/ideas is a cheap ploy as old as time and it works because a story like this totally derails your ability to think rationally.

I wasn't clear on if the author of this piece was simply telling her tale of how the patent system had a profoundly negative impact on her and her family's lives or if it was meant to push ideas about patent reform or both. As far as the author goes, it doesn't matter because it's irrelevant. I feel for her no matter what her motivations were. We all do I'm sure. What is relevant is why it was posted on HN and it's not hard to guess it was to start a discussion on patent reform.

Now, I'm not stating a position for or against anything here (though I agree with the majority opinion here if you really want to know). What I am saying is that if you want to have a serious discussion about any issue you have to leave these emotional stories out of it because it's not fair and it's a cheap trick. People on both sides of any issue, yes, any issue, can come up with a heart wrenching story to get support.

If you want to discuss and debate an issue then debate it on facts and merit. If you want to empathize with people on either side of an issue then you're also free to do that too. One thing you cannot do, however, is both at the same time. Again, I have to reiterate that I'm totally on this mother's side. I have to keep repeating that because that's what these stories do! They suspend logic, get people all emotional, and the next thing you know people are reacting to things out of pure emotion without thinking no matter how logical the person they react to is being. Using emotion to put forth ideas is a manipulation that aims to hinder or completely stop any real, substantive discussion.
Why is this news?

Surely Apple release updated versions of their hardware and software pretty consistently. A hardware refresh happening in more than 6 months sounds like marketing hype to me.

I'd guess that Intel and nVidia also have new products coming out in 2013. I don't think we need anyone to confirm that.
I didn't see it this morning, but seeing this now and just signed up for the beta. I'm still not entirely sure what it does, even after reading the linked thread, but I try to do whatever I can to support all the 'Show HN' threads, so even if it sucks, you've got my registration (and I'm not presuming that it will suck.)

Nginx is almost certainly not going to be your failing piont, and can certainly scale to beyond 400+ active users, assuming that it's configured correctly and on decent hardware. Your database could crash, or one questionable join could tear the whole thing down, but Nginx is probably the least likely component in your stack to fail.

As for the lesson learned, that's spot on, and one that I waffle on every now and again, even though I've done it and know it to be canon.

Best of luck. It's a space I've got a lot of experience in, and 'interestingness' vs. 'importance' isn't really gotten right anywhere yet. Hopefully you've nailed it.
OK, I'll bite.

Instead of "dyno", they could possibly use a word like "VM". Except that they're not really virtual machines, nor are they EC2 instances. Read Only Chroot Jails plus Precompiled Application, Libraries, and Environment (ROCJPALEs?) They also have a pretty complex set of support structures that provide connectivity to databases and other resources. Perhaps someone can suggest an existing name for that, but I know of none.

Instead of "manifold", perhaps they could use the word "cluster". Except it's not really a cluster, it's a set of distributed clusters. And nodes in a cluster are typically machines. The nodes in the dyno manifold aren't machines, virtual machines, they're ROCJPALEs. You could use the word "array", but again, it's not really an array. It's a multi-layered, geographically distributed structure of co-hosted application jails. "Manifold" seems as good a term as any.

"Streaming" seems like a good word. It's specifically relevant to this incident... they describe how the API is not atomic; that each message is built on top of the previous entries, and the data structures are implicit in the stream. That sounds like the definition of "streaming" to me.

"API" seems like a widely accepted term. They could've described it as a "protocol", perhaps. But neither seems more jargony than the other.

"Data"... well I suppose "streaming API" without the data would work. But it serves to differentiate it from a streaming video protocol.

"Mesh" has a very specific meaning. It means that you have a set of nodes that are connected peer-to-peer and that messages travel through the network by hopping from node to node. I'm assuming that their routing layer is organized in this way.

"Routing" is also pretty well defined. Requests come in and need to be sent to the machine that can serve responses to it. What would you call that instead of routing?

I feel like people who object to this kind of language are the same folks who object to the word "cloud". People don't take the time to understand different strategies to provisioning and application hosting APIs, and then think these words don't mean anything. Yeah, salespeople use the word to hustle the Same Old Shit, but it also actually means something to people like us who are actually building stuff.
> The psychologist Keith R. Stanovich is quite controversial among other psychologists precisely because he writes about what high-IQ people miss in their thinking

Sounds interesting; care to summarize what those things are?
The problem with Heroku is that you need to be a certain level of tech savvy to make use of their services.

We're expecting them to be the A-Grade tech wizards who can give us 0 down time. They are after expecting thousands of people to trust their services and to outsource the server hosting and administration duties to them.

So they tread the fine line between convenience (and related "cloud" benefits) and "I can do this myself".

If they can't give us the assurances that they can do it better, cheaper and more reliably than we can do it ourselves then what good are they?

If they can't capacity plan a simple System Status page (running on Rackspace) and keep that up and running then what good are they?

And since their service appeals to a certain level of geek competence, they also can't get away with techno babble bull shit responses to outages.
If it's life changing, pay the party that invented the thing, not the ones that copied it in a app.

Now, if it's not remotely equally useful, sue them for something for screwing your life with false claims.
Some interesting back and forth between the OP and the founder of the startup in question:
https://twitter.com/kathrynhough/status/212368001494818816
I thought Ember.Buttons were deprecated now?
I'd believe the Bradbury conspiracy theories since this should otherwise be a 5xx error code for server errors. The client certainly didn't do anything wrong (4xx)
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> Intelligence and resistance against bias are only loosely correlated

Have you read the article (rather than skimming)? It says exactly the opposite.
"no way" - maybe not. But it's certainly getting harder and harder.

This is the age of irrationality.
"At this point, years into the social networking phenomenon, why not leave the social stuff to the social people who are good at it?"

While I acknowledge that Ping was a huge failure the above statement strikes me as odd. If that's so obvious then...

Why not leave Maps to people who are good at it? Why not leave voice recognition to people who are good at it? Why not leave... etc. Apple hasn't been shy about diving into competitor's markets... which I don't always agree with fully. But on the flip side, you don't know if you don't try I guess.
Monthly bike pass is surely cheaper or comparable to whatever he is paying for parking. I solved his problem.
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You think that's not too bad?

2006 revenues: $2440 billion

2012 revenues: $2660 billion

2006 spending: $2660 billion

2012 spending: $3790 billion

2013 spending: $3803 billion (Obama's proposed budget)

[Source: Wikipedia.]

Just think - we could do three or four megaprojects a year with a 2006-esque budget elsewhere plus those kinds of budget deficits.

Of course, as anyone in California is painfully aware, the high-speed rail project is a complete joke :) you'd need to trust that this one would do better.

Also, as an economics aside: In the private sector, a $280 billion project should hope to earn in the neighborhood of $11 billion a year in profit/savings in order to cover the cost of capital. This is, of course, after equipment maintenance, fuel/power, deprecation, labor, etc.
I know this is a joke, but from the sounds of the errors that isn't far from true. This is also basically what happened with the big two-day outage at Amazon a while back. It's always the automated processes that come back to bite you it seems.

I know I have had my share of server issues, but it seems to me that many 'cloud' services out there are simply adding too many layers of abstraction that tend to make things very, very touchy to any small issue occurring. Because of this I try to keep my server stacks/frameworks as basic as possible while still implementing performance oriented services like NoSQL, caching, etc.
Are we witnessing something big here?

I love my iPad because it doesn't have office. It's not a laptop, it's a whole new kind of personal computer. Maybe I'm wrong but it's nothing like a laptop and as long as they're trying to make it a laptop in a different form factor I just can't see it
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This is exactly what I was afraid of. To me maps are one of those critical smart phone features, and if maps in iOS 6 suck as much as you are describing, it's reason enough for me to switch to Android.

Apple is really trying to alienate their long term customers. I liked them better when Google were friends and when they made computers software developers and creative pros would use.
Slave labor was too expensive to use because you risked losing your valuable capital. Instead new immigrants were used such as Irish (East Coast) or Chinese (West Coast).
I think that smart people are also prone to falling for headlines like this. The reality is much more complex.
> Why is it that people who have a greater capacity to overcome bias have a greater vulnerability to bias?

Why do you assume that type 2 people have greater capacity to overcome bias?
Just a small note: MS made $5.1b in profit last quarter, and $23.1b in profit for its fiscal 2011 year.
The process is definitely different at least in the smaller countries. In Denmark, when the Copenhagen metro expansion was agreed on by the government, the plans were passed as a law through the national parliament. Therefore, everything in it became by definition legal, superseding any contrary legislation, unless it violated the constitution.

The U.S. instead tends to work on a model where the legislature passes general rules, and then agencies administer the rules in specific cases. So, for example, a specific rail plan is proposed pursuant to a piece of legislation, but the plan is not itself a piece of legislation superseding others. That leaves it open to all sorts of lawsuits alleging that it didn't comply with the legislation that applies to it.
Agree, it is just the beginning of a phenomenon.
Apple's needlessly abusive design is the sole reason you don't have that choice. They reserved for themselves the power to obstruct the author's use of her own tools, which should be a human right second only to food and shelter.
Says tau/2.
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There will be tremendous recoil though when layman VC's realize their investments are so very risky. It won't be so much a bubble, because the real artificial force here is the monopoly marketplace of shares being on wallstreet. It is a positive move, but all economic shifts like this will produce excessive momentum with some recoil effects.

It is good in the long haul though. The easier it is for normal people to own stake in business the sooner we can close the tremendous gaps in socioeconomic status between the elites and common folk.
Does the steam version have DRM or are they both DRM free? Steam doesn't imply DRM, just DRM friendly.
After years I still fail to understand how Microsoft thinks an OS is worth the prices it charges.

Show me an operating system (that comes with support) that is cheaper.

Ubuntu is $104.99/year for the cheapest support offering from Canonical. OS-X is more.

Android is free, but you have to pay to license the Google Apps (exactly how much no one is saying).
Dynamic keyboard and method for dynamically redefining keys on a keyboard [1]

[1] http://www.google.com/patents?id=SRQZAAAAEBAJ&printsec=f...
Wish I had seen this post just an hour ago :-) I turned down a prospective client for that very reason. I said basically the same thing, but you phrased it better than I did.
Thanks for your post. Having big dreams of the future is crucial to making that future happen.

Many posts below are trying to prove how smart they by focusing on near term impracticalities. Sure it's impractical today. That's already proven by the fact that it is not already under construction.

The surest way to be wrong is to say something can never be done. I'm not even advocating this is a good solution. I have no idea if it will ever be possible. But I enjoy seeing that some people are thinking big.
If I'm born into a millionaire family, I have more purchasing power than someone born into a poor family in Ukraine. This is a result of the genetic dice roll. Following your logic, does this mean Armani should start pricing their clothes adjusting for parental affluence and/or by how many rungs of the social ladder a person has climbed in their life?
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Because if the rail line cracks (which probably did appen in Japan), water floods into your tube. Then it becomes a question of "can they rescue you before your air supply ends" (since they would require an air supply for the vacuum)?
I'm not really sure what is being said here.
It's "dyno manifold" that's the issue here. However, a quick Google search took me here:

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dynos

It explains all :-)
There seem to be three parts: 1) Are PRC and Apple morally wrong for enforcing and not fighting patent claims? 2) Should patents work in a way that incentivizes PRC and Apple to behave this way? 3) Irrespective of (1) or (2) what can be done?

(1) The answer to this is somewhat ambiguous for any company with investors. Sure, I want my companies to behave in morally responsible ways. On the other hand, there are hundreds of other ways to save and improve lives. If we wanted the companies we invest in to maximize quality of life improvement we would get much further providing vaccinations or microloans to the third world where owning an iPad is as much a pipe dream as winning the lottery (per unit money, energy, whatever). If we want larger public access to scientific advances, perhaps we should fund more public science? Or, we should change the way patents work (2).

(2) This to me seems like a very reasonable question. Aside from patent wars that might hurt your favorite smartphone os vendor, there are real concerns. Drug companies are incentivized to create substances and methodologies that drastically improve the quality and duration of lives in both first and third world countries. On the other hand, intellectual property protection for drugs (until they become generics) does cost lives. But we shouldn't forget just how powerful those incentives are. All the awesome research done in university laboratories (one of which I work in) is nothing without the ability to take a drug from "lab-rat plausible" to "market-ready". Certainly patents don't exist to facilitate personal wealth. But just because they do generate wealth doesn't mean that their intended goal has been forgotten, short-term losses notwithstanding.

Even if we answered (1) and found PRC or Apple to be morally culpable, it misses the larger issue: if society feels that this girl, or others who benefit from patented technology should be allowed to use it, someone's got to pay. Either it's the companies and their investors (the obvious point: not just rich folks), or it's taxpayers through some form of state-sponsored licensing (edit: or some other state-funded mechanism). It's tremendously easy to blame only Apple and PRC (even if they did deserve it). It's a lot harder to put your money on the line, so that families like this one can solve a heartbreaking problem.
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Who is the target audience? beginners, intermediate or advanced?

Something I have found in common with many of the thicker books (400+ pages) that I liked is they are broken up into a couple of very distinct sections. The first part is usually an intro and explanation of the material. The middle is more elaborate examples of how to use the materials. The back is more of a reference section.

Something that drives me crazy is when books skip steps. Don't assume that the reader knows what the middle step is just because it's mentioned in chapter 2 doesn't mean I'll remember it when I get to chapter 9. Or 6 months later when I am looking at the book trying to remember how to do something. It's a book not mysql you can have something in more than one place.
Isn't this analagous to a 403?
I give all of those confirmation emails a special label in GMail.
This would all be pertinent if the software patents in question were actually novel inventions worthy of protection.

One of the patents is for a "method for dynamically redefining the keys on a keyboard". I mean, come on.
Would you also put 403 in the 500 range?
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That explains why iOS is not a good platform. The owner of this platform loses his focus (building a good platform, giving developers more power), instead it starts to duplicate developers' effort in the name of user experience. Surely they have a chance of doing it better, but it is just because they can use their private APIs.
> PRC seems to have a valid patent, they sell a device the people in the article could use, Speak For Yourself infringed without a license and they are the good guys why?

The question of whether or not they've infringed is currently being litigated, so it's premature for you to say "Speak For Yourself infringed". And, therefore, it's premature for Apple to have removed the app. Does this mean you can take any app off of the store just by making a claim against it?

It's not just "uncharitable" for Apple; the action they took hurts people. And the "it's their playground" argument is getting old--yes, it's their playground, but it's perfectly reasonable for the rest of us to have (and discuss) our own opinions about how they run it.
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The point I was trying to make was that intelligence itself is a bad goal - it's a means to an end. Being smart makes things easier, sure, but it's not really something to be proud of by itself. 'Metric' was probably a bad word choice.
Waze ("crowdsourced" traffic), at least for iOS users. Seeing how they cope with having all of those users disappear should be interesting.
Just a sec.. where are you seeing that?
But it's conceivable it could be related to you. "I'm sorry, this content is not viewable by non-<insert group of choice>" or "You are on the Anonymous watch list". That makes it a client error.

In the end, many times the response codes are murky. I'm very comfortable with it being a 4xx; you'd put it somewhere else. The working group will hash it out and we'll use what they say. shrug
Lots of WordPress (yes, WordPress) devs charge $250/hour. That's $2,000 (assuming no travel expenses). JavaScript/Ruby/Python, I don't see why $2K/day is actually not feasible.
Finding a patent triples your vulnerability to infringement claims, and since the USPTO is rubber-stamping overbroad garbage rather than sanely enforcing the novelty and non-obviousness requirements, the answer to "is this patented?" is basically always yes.

Edit: I'm not claiming that this particular patent is invalid (I can't safely read it, of course), only that invalid patents are so prevalent and dangerous that merely looking has a huge negative expected value for any practitioner.
> Pay the students $50 for each correct answer, and there's not a doubt in my mind that the results will be the complete opposite of what he's seeing now.

You've never tried tutoring kids who get kickbacks for good scores then. Absolute fucking nightmare. Motivation to study must come from within for it to be successful in any way.
And -- as with WINE! -- games probably use much fewer of the overall APIs than a "desktop" application (like Facebook) would. There's no need for any of the complicated UI widgets, for instance.
They got in touch with AirBnB; AirBnB sent out a message to nearby hosts asking for emergency assistance, and a friendly host in the area was able to pick them up and give them a place to stay for the rest of the week. It looks like they may have to pay some fees and extra for the difference in value of the location, but overall it's better than sleeping on a bench in a park!
New Yorker articles (that get posted here, anyway) always have some sort of take on things that attempts to bring down the good. Same for The Atlantic. I'm not saying they're always false, but there is a certain kind of thing that these publications are interested in, and it's a kind of thing that makes me feel dirty---or as if they're trying to make me feel dirty. Anyone else noticed this?
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You're right that the hipmunk UI may be overkill for your use-case of simple point-to-point flights, but I wonder how much of the market that represents?

That said, reducing the complexity of the UI for that usecase might be a way to increase adoption.

NB I do a lot of complicated travel, and hipmunk found me a fare that saved me $1800! I use ITA matrix, KVSTool, etc, and oddly enough it didn't show up there.
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Vast majority of Ubuntu and Linux users don't pay for support - that's the difference - they have a choice. With Windows there is no choice, just a huge fee going to Microsoft, who are trying desperately to hang onto the lead in the desktop OS market.
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Reminds me of my Mensa membership (hey, at 16 you're young and impressionable). Quit that ghetto a week into reading their mailing lists. Imagine the complete opposite of HN.
That sounds like a modern version of the Chewbacca Defense. "If Instagram is worth $1B, then <insert any crazy logical conclusion you want to make here>"