skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google Glass can be divided into (at least) two distinct parts. The camera and the display. The camera is what Google is pitching very heavily right now. I'd guess they're doing that because it's something people can relate to... taking pictures from your perspective, taking them without putting some device between you and your subject. The tiny camera that takes pictures from your eye level is a big enough draw to get early users interested. (The killer app is "real-life" DVR... why should you have to stick your camera phone in front of your face to take a picture or record a video... how many times have you thought "damn... if I just would have had my phone ready I could have grabbed an awesome shot").

The display is harder to understand. What information do you need in front of your eyes right now that actually helps you? Today you might check Yelp for a restaurant review or Google Maps for directions, but you rarely ever keep your phone in front of your face while you walk through New York... it's a reference, not a constant aide. It's a cool idea but most people (even some of the geeky ones who visit Hacker News) don't see the value.

I think the big vision here is that you'll have a camera that consumes the world around you and a system that can process what the camera is seeing, and give you real useful information about the world around you immediately. You walk into the office and the system tells you that you're looking at "Sarah" and you have a meeting with her at 3pm, or that the menu item you're looking at has 615 calories and most people who order it love it, or that the product you're about to buy is $50 cheaper at an online store and can be shipped to you in 2 days. Glass doesn't offer any of this right now... but it will some day. I want one and if I'd attended Google I/O I'd have spent the $1500 for the early prototype.
To run those, if everything works, simple.

If you are even slightly embedded in dependency hell, then nearly impossible, spending a reasonable amount of time.
Once you ask the user what matters, the problem is eminently solvable: http://daring.is (my startup)
I like the structure (schedule) it gives to Khan Academy classes. The reminders reminded me of an SAT prep site I used before (number2) that would remind me every other day for a month to come back after I started slacking off. Highly annoying but effective :)

Feature recommendation: use the Khan Academy API to allow users to mark videos they watched before as viewed on the website. I've watched a bunch of scattered videos already, so I guess I'll have to mark off as I go.
As an avid bowler, this video/story sends chills down my spine. Being so close to the Big Win and not quite getting there, it's very sad indeed...

But, he got a couple 300 games, and that's nothing to be ashamed of.
I love this idea (with some reservations re: gibybo's comment), and it brings to mind an important quote from Thomas H. Huxley that has been with me for a while:

"Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and, however early a man's training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly."

The issue of motivating people to learn is often neglected in online and/or self-directed education. This is an interesting take on the issue—and, at least, an acknowledgement that this disconnect exists between the "no degrees necessary" zeitgeist and socioeconomopolitical structure (or whatever) of university degrees: on some level, your degree is also "free" (or profitable, rather) if you finish your courses, and costly if you don't.
Slightly unrelated question: where does this "make you whole" language come from? It seems to be cropping up more and more recently, but I hadn't heard it before about 2 years ago. Perhaps it's a term of art that I just didn't know about?

It's a bizarre and clumsy piece of corporate-speak. Money can't make one whole. It could set things right, though.
Here Are The Best Mobile Security Applications
So glad I JB. Because I'm using this.
The law is intended, in the Constitution, to 'promote the progress of [technology]'.

Using the patent system to browbeat your competitors out of business by wielding bullshit imaginary software patents does not promote the progress of anything but Apple's business.

Therefore, it is clearly an abuse of the law.
IANAL either but I'd say you've basically got it right that the USPTO is happy to give out patents that a court will invalidate when someone with the money to shoot them down is involved. But I wouldn't go as far as to say "you can file any bogus patent, the USPTO won't verify". They're simply more forgiving with what constitutes novelty and non-obviousness.

I'd also think that the injunction could be removed if Samsung can show that they aren't causing irreparable harm, even if they are indeed infringing a legitimate patent.
Please do read other comments on this thread (hint: search for security). It's been mentioned at least three times already.
Just drag and drop the icon into the trash.
>The windows tiles may or may not be an advance, but they are clearly not a row of buttons just like the 1st gen iPhone and 2 out of every 3 smart phones that followed.

Well I owned three phones back in 2002-2006 which had rows to buttons and were not iPhone. I get that iPhone is a great phone but please give credit where its due. Even BB had rows of button.
If Adobe allows Google to adopt flash and continue support to develop and support it then I don't see any problem. Android is Google's baby so they need to adopt the flash development. Adobe is fecked up if they don't allow it.

As far Flash being terrible. I have never had any negative experiences. This blanket negative view of flash is just hype. It is used all over the place. In the hands of a bad programmer, any application can be terrible.

Performance tests between flash and html5 don't show much advantage to using html5.

The PRIMARY and ONLY reason for moving to html5 is that it is not proprietary.

As far as security hole, it was put there intentionally. Windows OS is one big security hole so it is like pointing to a tree in a forest. Other reasons are frivolous.

So we should move towards html5 but keep flash player working on all platforms until full migration of internet occurs to html5. There is simply too much flash content so it will take a long time to migrate.
Are you suggesting Apple was the first company to create a rectangular tablet with rounded edges?
Maybe there's a trend here, but maybe its just me being short-sighted. I'll type out what I'm thinking.

I think that the uncomfortable future for a lot of the e-properties that people enjoy happens to hinge on the fact that the way they are the most useful clashes with the ways they can make money. Big time.

Facebook will sponsor stories, alienating users a little for eyeball time.

Twitter will make sure promoted things get their eyeball time by crushing 3rd party (alienating users).

Digg will- well. You know.

All of these moves hurt the utility of those companies. All of the companies know that.

But something happened with Digg, didn't it? The models of the above have to very carefully balance utility/pleasure of use with a certain amount of intrusiveness to make money because they have found few other good ways, though some get credit for experimenting.

And every time a major e-property does this they make a chink in their dam, inviting their sweet sweet reservoir of users to look beyond into a river of startups. Maybe there are more useful options out there for little fish. Cleaner spaces, open air. Let's be honest I'm bad at metaphors. Moving on.

Myspace became ridiculous and thousands (millions) fled to Facebook.

Digg became ridiculous and many fled to Reddit.

Twitter and Facebook are trying to monetize more and will become more ridiculous and less useful in the process. They might survive, but they are inviting others to take their place in the meantime.

And someday those new companies will build dams around users and either try to get them to gawk at more ads and maybe fall in the same way. This model seems to work for a little while, but they still need to solve the large clash of interest brought about by advertising. Search engines still do it best: ads displayed that try to match queries with relevant content aren't necessarily offensive to taste.

Almost everything else is still trading user abuse for irrelevant product. All users wanna do is talk about the kind of sandwich they ate. Nobody wants to "Learn how YOU can help Hyundai make August National Fuel-Efficiency month!" (real ad).
Absolutely. It would probably make for a much catchier PR story as well.

Don't finish your course? We'll donate to the KKK and Westboro Baptist Church, and send you a copy of Pinheads and Patriots!

Obviously, that last one would change depending on your political affiliation and/or intelligence, but a light hearted jab at half the country never hurt anyone.
Subjecting yourself to social pressure rather than financial pressure is another good approach to disciplined self-directed learning.
First, I'd like to note that the article provides a very poor summary of the patents. That said, I'd like to throw this devil's argument out there as to why these patent wars help consumers:

These patent wars might help consumers by allowing Apple to leverage the money they spend on R&D, giving them the traction necessary to invest further R&D, and pushing Apple's competitors to come up with new and different ideas.

Apple has undeniably pushed the entire cell phone industry forward, and in the process had a tremendous impact on the software, entertainment, and game industries.

If everyone is free to copy their work and compete with them on price, and Apple could lose the market position they (in theory) earned through innovation, and may not be able to get it back. At the same time, if nobody else is innovating to do things differently from Apple, all we get are clones.
I am absolutely going to persuade my mother to switch to an Android in a few months' time. And then recommend it to every friend of mine who's upgrading their phone, mentioning in passing that Apple has actually gotten Galaxy Nexuses and Tabs blocked in the US. I'm glad Android is actually good enough at this stage for me to do this.

The '604 search patent is a big hot mess of ideas thrown together to cover all sorts of "maybe-this-maybe-that" use cases and potential improvements. It basically means having a unified search system that relies upon "search heuristics" for multiple domains. Like the other allegedly infringing patents in the case, it's another broken patent that IMO shouldn't have been granted. Does anyone know of prior art (prior to Dec '04) for a search mechanism that obtains search results from multiple domains using sub-plugins and combines them into a list? That seems to be the core of the idea, and further ideas are thrown on top of it in the patent application thereafter.

Read it yourself at
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...
In addition to the other response, most of these are terrible resources for people trying to learn.

Forums: "omfg search u fucken noob!!"

Documentation: Haha, what documentation?

Q&A sites: Find 1000 threads with no replies all asking your same question. Find 1 thread with your question, and then a reply - which says "Never mind, I figured it out."

IRC: "omfg rtfm!" - as a best case scenario. More likely, -- leeter sets mode +b noob@noobisp.net / -- noob has been kicked by leeter (learn to rtfm)

Google: See Q&A site

Mailing lists might work as a resource. Reading the code might work. And sure, you might have some success with these methods, but pretending like you can just send someone trying to learn a piece of software into any of those places and expect them to get answers easily is laughably naive.
Radiolab ran a story about an older woman who was co
Poetry addicted to smoking, and eventually she caved out of shame and flippantly told her friend she'd donate $5000 to the KKK if she caught her smoking again. It worked, apparently, and she claims she entirely intended to donate it if she started again, and that her hate and disgust of the thought overtook her will to smoke.

Can't say I condone the method, but interesting anyway.
> https://github.com/bugsnag/bugsnag-notifier-api/blob/master/...
> Official notifiers are available for several languages and frameworks.

'Official notifiers' link redirects to github.com
This is neat!

Can you implement a SuperMemo type quiz? I think that's a good killer feature for good performance from students for both udacity and coursera.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperMemo
Github own Gollum [1] maybe?

[1]:https://github.com/github/gollum/
Samsung Barred From U.S. Nexus Phone Sales in Apple Suit
Sure, they tend to, but in principle they don't have to. I would want to assume that the GP assumes that one language runs over half the web.

Of course, once actual evidence is involved, this is just an adventure in nitpicking.
I use (unfortunately) Bank of America online banking and if I don't see the SiteKey or really if there is any error at all during the signon process then I leave and immediately start Googling for Bank of America security breeches in the news. If I don't find anything, then I try to login again the next day.
... and their site looks just like Github.
I have a lowendbox for personal PHP projects. I'd love something with a little more static typing, but there's really no alternative (maybe Perl in strict mode?) that isn't going to blow out my 128M ram (no chance of Tomcat). Perhaps C++, but i'd need to first sort out a good templating system, and FastCGI wrapper / spawner.
beeminder.com is a pretty nice site for that.
If you look at the JavaScript, you can see that it actually expects a keystroke for the Enter key.

I'm not familiar with sending keystrokes in JavaScript (from some brief searching I think it is possible; I just don't know the best practice), but for something like this, you could just do it at the operating system level. A long time ago I automated an annoying user interface for a program we had to use at work by writing some vbscript that changes windows and does a combination of sendkeys and sleep.

Unfortunately, just sending keystrokes isn't very robust since it isn't reading what is going on in the UI and if something random happens (the site behaves other than expected, you touch a key / move the mouse, a scheduled program runs, etc) the script could get out of sync. Fortunately, the consequences of an error are so low here that such a solution would be good enough.
I can still see tweets in the iPad LinkedIn app, though possibly from before when the article was published. It would be a dream come true if people stopped being able to import Twitter into their LinkedIn. It's polluting.
Similarly, I was apart of a fraternity that was local to my school. But then a female sorority with a few more people came on Facebook, took/stole/transferred the likes, and now I have a pink flower where a black and white crest once was, and no way to reclaim all the old posts or pictures. It's very weird.
Actually no, they are file descriptors. They provide a unique identifier, which used in conjunction with an API call, with operate on the data in, or the meta data of a data set.

And while its true that UNIX (and taken to its logical extreme Plan 9) used a common API to handle all of the transfers between non-memory resident data sets and memory, there are many examples of operating systems that use other schemes. One of my favorites which I got to help build when I was in the kernel group at Sun was a thing called 'mmap' which assigned addresses in your memory space to locations on disk. The 'magic' happened in the VM HAT layer. That scheme is having something of a comeback in 64 bit address processors since few machines actually have 22PB of RAM it is possible to do something like:

struct Stuff *my_stuff;
mmap((void *)my_stuff, file_len, 0, 0, file, 0);

And then be able to make a statement

if ((my_stuff+100)->is_ready) { ... }

And have the operating system translate between my notion of a memory address and the data sets offset to instance 100 of the structures contained therein.

I expect to see more of that in experimental OS code. Something like char data_file = ChuckOSOpen("some.dat");
which lets me then address data_file like an array of char so

while (char *t = data_file, IsValid(t), t++) { ... };

would then iterate over the contents of data_file as 8 bit values until there wasn't any more data and thus no more validly mapped pages. Read and write are simply assignment, seek is simply math, and close is simply unmap.

All without the notion of 'files' but with a notion of 'named data sets' which clearly can be implemented in a number of ways.
LinkedIn Says Twitter Posts No Longer Displayed on Site
Actually, that is one of the things I rather like about HN. The "loss" is built in: after a couple of days, nobody is going to read or respond to any of my comments. Everything I write here will effectively disappear several days from now. And that, somehow, is very refreshing: I don't have to worry about posterity or the future.

HN is my way of indulging in the present. No plans, no worries, no future. Very relaxing.

It's also a way of tricking myself to write. In high school, I never liked writing much and, consequently, was never much of a writer. Now I like it more; hopefully my writing improves correspondingly. HN is obviously no way to become a writer, but that is not my goal: I just want to be able to write clearly, nothing more, nothing less.

If I was doing something more lasting, I would not want to trust a single entity. This is why all my code on GitHub is also backed up at home with the most important projects also backed up on my school account: losing that would actually be painful. Losing my comment history here? Trivial.
The automatic touch screen-based linkification of phone numbers, addresses, and calendar dates was fairly novel <edit>for smartphones</edit> when Apple introduced it. I don't believe anyone else was doing it <edit>on smartphones</edit> -- and if they were, there's prior art, and the patent should be invalidated.

What made it that especially interesting was that it alleviated a large part of the need for copy+paste. If you'll recall, the first iPhone OS didn't ship with copy+paste.

I'm having trouble figuring out what "A means of searching multiple databases and sources for data" actually refers to.
I couldn't agree more with your statement. User adaptation will always increase costs, and increased costs will always increase ads, and increased ads will always increase alienation. It's a lose-lose business model. It's very interesting to watch these companies win the hearts of millions of users then change, and lose those millions of users, in the matter of months or sometimes less. Crazy.
Koh was a patent litigator before becoming a judge, Alsup is a mathematician who served as a special counsel in the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice.

Her bias is showing. How embarrassing.
A very good point.

Ads are probably toxic to social media in most cases.

And worse than the ads, are the advertisers, and what they want.
"... When a friend offered him a job as a bike messenger, he took it — in part because couriers had been glamorized in cyberpunk novels like William Gibson’s Virtual Light and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, but also because it would ease his mind ..."

Great read Klint. This is the best quote from the article and I really understand this. I remember having the best of both, working outdoors during University - some money and hard physical work. Undo-able now. Of the bike riders I see on the weekend, a fair portion I imagine are city-boys working in high-stress cerebral occupations like software & finance ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/5646201528/
What if you dont want to build a freaking SEO, ecommerce, fashion or other site but want to do something that really makes a difference?

Most of your rules only allow you to pick the lowest hanging fruit.
"Donations". Programmers are collectively very stupid, as far as economics goes.
You notice ugliness everytime you use it. The beauty in UX/UI/Window Manager lies in it just being there, not distracting but complementing one when he/she is working.

That's my definition of beauty. I can go days without noticing it and if I take a step back and take in the whole experience, I find the beauty.

Ubuntu does it for me. Especially because I can take time to make it beautiful for me and I can have a free hand while doing it.
Why are you bringing up such a hypothetical, when clearly Apple isn't anywhere near starvation at all from the impact of the Nexus? If they aren't near starvation, why should they recover the maximum "lost market advantage", if that would only increase the likelihood of them becoming a monopoly?

If there is real infringement, why not offer Samsung the option of licensing the patent at a court-determined price? And shouldn't economic/market-health considerations be taken into play? Current law might not allow for these two points, but maybe they should be considered.
The patent in question:

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...

I'm bad at legalese, but it seems to pertain to search-as-you-type amongst multiple libraries (songs, texts, emails, etc.)
I'm in a similar situation (took my last math course a decade ago, and now struggling with texts on neural networks).

I'm reading this book to revive my dormant knowledge:
http://www.amazon.com/Guide-Essential-Math-Engineering-Compl...

An even shorter book has also been suggested for those who need a refresher :
http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Mathematical-Skills-Engineer...
This rings true for Humanities Phd's as well. It's difficult to describe the cycle of guilt, drive and passion somehow all wrapped together. This is a great overview.
Right, an ad hominem. Great.

I did use OS X for Java development for a whole year. Moreover, I've had to use it a little bit recently at school and work, so I've played around with the newest versions. If that isn't enough experience to "understand" OS X, I'm not sure what is.

Not much else to say here, because all you've done is act condescending and solely attack my perceived credibility. Because, obviously, if I didn't like OS X, I just didn't understand it!
Judge OKs Apple injunction on Samsung's Nexus phone
Honestly, there are a whole lot more interesting problems to solve outside of Twitters ecosystem. Storm, meet teacup.
Pre-marketing your app
> Why are you bringing up such a hypothetical, when clearly Apple isn't anywhere near starvation at all from the impact of the Nexus?

The analogy was intended to demonstrate that when you purloin (or commandeer) someone else's property, it's sometimes impossible to restore their previous hypothetical future, no matter how much money you throw at them.

Apple may not starve, but they may very well be irreparably harmed.

> If there is real infringement, why not offer Samsung the option of licensing the patent at a court-determined price?

See my grain commandeering analogy for why. Apple doesn't want to license these patents to Samsung, because Apple clearly thinks the temporary government-granted monopoly is worth far more than any reasonable licensing fee.

> And shouldn't economic/market-health considerations be taken into play?

The market seems quite healthy, currently.
I don't downvote often, but I've downvoted your comment here because it's just sanctimonious empathy-free wankery that adds nothing at all to the conversation.
When Apple was a weakling, it wasn't even in competition with Samsung, and Google didn't exist.

It's not fun, imo, watching a gorilla (one might say the biggest one) pulverizing three others.
Inessential.com: Matthew on Twitter Restrictions