skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is always room for a better content aggregator, reddit etc. all have their own set of flaws and problems. If the Betaworks team have the ideas to make a great content aggregator then purchasing the Digg brand is absolutely brilliant. The hard part of launching a new site is traction, if they can launch with "the new Digg" (and the site is impressive) that $500k will be the best $500k they could possibly spend on marketing. Techcrunch, Mashable, Reddit... it would be the front page of everywhere, "Digg crashed and burned and after being bought for $500k it's back and it's amazing!", hell maybe even CNN and the BBC would cover it. Not only that they have the entire userbase of Digg to market their new site to. A social news site biggest problem is getting users; this solves that problem (and them some)

If we assume that instead of the thought process being "We can have Digg for $500k... should we do it?" the thought process was actually: "We have this brilliant idea for content aggregation, how can we most effectively implement and market this?" then it sounds like a much safer and sensible thing to do.
Do you agree that this software should be patentable?

No.

Maybe you'd say that the software isn't patentable, but using the software with the machine is?

No.

If you design a better blender, it is an visible improvement that can be immediately adopted by existing manufacturers before you can capitalize on your invention. There is little to prevent this from happening. It is unlikely that you will create a better blender, but should you manage to do so the people of the United State of America will grant you exclusive production for a limited number of years.

If you create software that better controls mixing equipment, you can license your software to existing manufacturers. You are protected from competitors by copyright and trade secret. You can license the idea to companies by developing software directly for their hardware and only providing them object code. If they create a new product based on reverse engineering your object code (clearly for reasons other than interoperability), you can seek damages.

Patents are for inventions which are expensive, visible, and not otherwise protected. Software, like literary works and the formula for Coke-a-Cola, has other protections. When patents are applied to industries where invention is common, hidden, and independent invention is likely, the system falls apart.
I liked Reddit back when it was less well known. Now, it just appears that the content appeals to the lowest common denominator. Some of the content is still great (i.e. r/dwarffortress), but a lot of the site has degraded into junk. If anyone has some good subreddits that are still decent, I'd love to know what they are.
Rewind: Mexico Surprises Everyone, Signs ACTA
I don't think points is a good fit for that. A point has a defined length, 1/72 of an inch. If you don't want your text to be 12/72 of an inch, don't specify the size in points.
You can go into the Keyboard system preferences and set a keyboard shortcut for "Sleep".
Thank you! First time I have heard of Coursera but this site is pretty awesome.
Digg is a shadow of an online community, but its fall gave us War, a three-part social media epic by ncomment: https://secure.flickr.com/photos/25036088@N06/3424896427/siz...
First of all, whether or not something offends people is rarely the best reason to do something.

Secondly, "choice" is a generous way to describe it. It's more that sizes are happening of basically their own will, whether the user likes it or not. At least if inch measurements were respected, the designer could be deliberate about a decision. This would not invalidate user stylesheets or zooming; I can't fathom a single disadvantage here.
I bounce back and forth on this line thinking that Kyle, while not aware of his social abnormalities, is helping or hurting society. By having someone look at "us" all differently he sheds an interesting light on the individual, but it also is unnerving and crosses boundaries that we would never have thought someone could so easily broach. It is one of the problems with being too close to any subject you're working with (art, a patient, a paper, a project): you get desensitized to anything odd about 'it', but others are just experiencing the phenomena for the first time.
> Have you never heard of licensing? Research teams regularly build libraries that become incorporated into products that they do not sell.

Licensing is based on copyright, a different government-granted monopoly. Why should software libraries be protected when software algorithms aren't? What you're saying is that you should be able to protect your "yet another JS framework" under copyright, but not something like a power control loop in a wireless device under patents.

> They can also license the math (which is not patentable) and have another team actually write the code.

You can license it, but you have no legal protection to keep people from copying it.

> Ideas that are not patentable can still be protected as trade secret, making them commercially valuable.

1) you can't transact in trade secrets;
2) trade secrets are of no use when embedded as software in devices.

Say I come up with a new power control loop for wireless devices. The loop allows radios to cause less interference while maintaining bandwidth. Say I keep it as a trade secret. If I put it in a radio and sell it, someone can reverse-engineer the firmware and copy the design of the power control loop. Trade secrets won't protect me. Moreover, I have to get into the business of building every kind of radio I might want to sell. I can't just sell the power control loop to someone who is good at building radios, because trade secret doesn't cover things you voluntarily disclose. Imagine the situation: I go up to Raytheon and say "I've got a great power control loop, I'll sell it to you for $50m." And they say "well, how does it work? We're not paying $50m without understanding what we're buying." And you say "well pay me first than I'll tell you!"

> Hopefully it is obvious that patents do not help innovation in this situation.

Agreed, but that's a phenomenally bad patent.

> Some will say that this is a case of a bad patent, and the solution is just to ensure that patents are good.

Yup.

> The problem is that only a couple of people in the world could tell the difference between a bad software patent and a good one (none of them are judges or lawyers), and who are they to rule on IBM's lawsuit against you?

There are hundreds of IP lawyers with strong technical backgrounds who could tell the difference between the patent in your example and say the OFDM patent: http://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC=....

The "chat availability status" patents are getting a lot of press on HN, but I spent years working at tech companies that produced patents along the lines of the OFDM example linked-to above. I think a lot of people on HN don't have the exposure to embedded software to be able to really appreciate what the other side of the patent coin looks like.
My biggest critique with this KickStarter is they are promising hardware in eight months where only a single prototype exists currently. Like the article says, these guys are not Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, etc so I don't have very much faith in them actually hitting their target date.

I could easily see this shipping on time but with tons of bugs in the hardware or shipping 10 months late because they didn't realize how complicated it was.

Even the Elevation Dock KickStarter, which was the first KickStarer golden goose, has had serious delays and they are building a simple iPhone dock.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#Digg_v4

I believe there were "sponsored" posts as well.
Just to clarify - they raised 45m

So either they spent 45m in past 4 years,

or they did not draw down all of it

or someone paid 1/2m for 10m in the bank?

Or am I fundamentally missing something obvious
7 million uniques a month disagree.
Digg sells to Betaworks for the fire sale price of… $500K
Natty Date Parser
What annoys me about the arrow keys is that I can't reach them without looking, and they also change position on different keyboards (standard keyboards vs laptop keyboards, for example). Having to look to the keyboard distracts me.
Are you a software engineer at a company with a languishing flagship product where any attempt at innovation is prematurely killed in the name of optimizing quarterly profits?

Stuff like this bothers me and I think paints an unfair picture of a corporate environment. Corporations aren't some Disney dichotomy of either being incredibly encouraging of change or a supervillain who purposefully punishes developers in order to line their own wallet.

The reality, I think, is that the vast majority of companies are in the middle. Change is good; change for the sake of change often goes against business principles. Why is a company shunning your 'innovation'? Is it because its unfeasible, or costly? Does it not integrate well with the product line?
For your reading pleasure, here is (imho totally flawed) argument by one Mozilla guy who thinks otherwise:

http://robert.ocallahan.org/2010/01/css-absolute-length-unit...
The important thing is that public funded research should have public available results. I fail to see how to keep the results public available and remaining a competitive startup.
Or the Jamaican App Store.. why?
"I still believe it's got massive potential"

Acts of faith do not justify overvalued companies. Groupon is not worth more than $1bn.
Spammers spamming spammers.
In my experience, in software, it's often used loosely. However, I was responding primarily to the use of the quote itself.
similar thing for vim.

qrIdef<space><esc>f.Di()<return>end<esc>jq

qr ' record a macro into register r

I ' insert mode at start of line

def<space><esc> ' type def then exit insert mode

f. ' find the dot

D 'delete the rest of the line

i()<return>end<esc> ' type () return end

j ' next line down

q ' exit macro recording

call it with
9999@r

This looks unwieldy but it's all done interactively. (also if you mess up and you want to rework the macro you can paste it out with "rp to paste the r register rework it and then put it back into another register. 0"ry$ (start at column 0 then into r register r yank to end of line)
That's why I use Evil (http://emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil). I get all the programmability benefits of Emacs with the more powerful editing model of Vim. In fact, the whole of Evil is actually greater than the sum of its parts, since it provides a high level interface for extending the Vim editing model itself in Emacs Lisp. Creating new text objects, for example, becomes trivial.
As mentioned above, I did indeed mean accessible in the sense you can actually see the filesystem, create directories etc. If I am comparing to FreeBSD then not really going to argue about it being open to the user (though I think it is probably a very good thing that they hide all the UNIX system files from the average user, most people I know with a computer think the filesystem is called 'Desktop').
Agreed - needing arrow keys in the middle of doing anything else is bad. My point was that, in this particular case, the fact that the arrow keys are needed is basically all of the bad, and that the parent's complaint of increased complexity/typing is certainly not strong and perhaps not valid.
Reddit won the game, slow and steady. Reddit now literally powers the generation of news cycles across the blogerverse. BuzzFeed? HuffPo? Gawker? TheDaily? Reddit, yesterday.

First thing first is rescue the culture. Digg engineering already fled, the peanut gallery in the valley keeps squawking with delight about your failure, and all you have left is some nicely designed pages showing double digit gains on stale links that's a shade away from being as if they were spun up by a Russian spam squad. Save yourself, redo the logo, redo the color scheme, don't let legacy drag you down.

Second thing is do some soul searching, figuring out what layer Digg wants to play in. Links aggregation? Community building and content creation? Traffic? Attention? Engagement? That elusive ad sharing model for content creators?

After that figure out for who. Reddit's core is dying, and eventually it'll be fully crowded out by the mainstreaming of rage comics, aww pics, and counter-Tumblr-pseudo-nerdy programming. Do you target those people, the walking wounded much like Slashdot?

Or do you go after the youths, the ones addicted to Instagrams, 9gag, imgur, but bored of their Facebook feeds? Then play the waiting game. New is everything old, after all.

The game's so different now from 2005. All the majors have feeds now. All the majors have figured out sharing, commenting, and extracting action on a story item. On top of that you're competing against mobile guys like Flipboard.

This is one of those situations where execution is easier than creating an idea. What is Digg's $1MM idea? Good luck with that because Digg needs to be futuristic but also really lucky twice being at the right place, the right time, with the right idea. Once you're lucky, twice you're good, right?

I bet this kind of flame out, this one thing keeps Mark Zuckerberg from sleeping.
TextMate's learning curve is desperately short and flat. After 2 or 3 months I knew everything there was to know. The only dark corners could be found inside language-specific bundles which made them rather useless.

I've used it non-stop from late 2006 to late 2010 and I can attest that the last three years were extremelly boring. On the other side, 2 or 3 months is the time needed to have a firm grasp on the basics and, after 1 year and half, I still learn new tricks every day.

If you want inherent advantages, don't look further than Vim's modes and its language.
foodforthought truereddit, economics

and if you unsubscribe from pics, funny, adviceanimals, aww, and atheism (regardless of whether you are or not, it's just not high quality content), you'll find that things suddenly get a whoooole lot better
It will take them a good deal of time and money to clean room reverse engineer a non-trivial algorithm. During that time you can profit from your invention, and advance your product. It will probably cost more money from them to clean room reverse-engineer your product than to just license it from you. Phoenix BIOS only happened because the code was small and the reward for interoperability so artificially large due to IBM's control. If the BIOS just did something useful (a) there would probably be academic papers on how it worked, or (b) other people would probably have just licensed it.
Just use mod_perl. Duh!
It "feels" like a reasonable shorthand for company outcomes is: an outcome is either (a) a categorical success for the investor, or (b) might as well be written off entirely.

With that feeling in mind, the fact that the acquisition was for $500k and not $1MM or $10MM or $40MM is irrelevant: any number falling outside bucket (a) is a loss. And you don't get into venture capital without being able to metabolize a loss.

The people that plowed money into Digg had a charter to put ~$45MM at risk. That was their job: find a place for $45MM to live and, probably, die. One major investment in 10 generates a win that pays for the other 9. So: fuck it, right?
That makes me willing to consider subjecting a test environment to abuse to see if it loses data so as to consider it for production use, but only if I had a compelling use case for it.
With ROCKZi, Blekko Dips Its Toes Into Social Waters (And I Don't Get It)
That's like telling me points are a terrible unit of measurement for print because we use different sizes of paper and points should be relative to the paper size.

The whole goal of points is that a point is a point is a point, regardless of whether I'm printing on a business card or a billboard. Why can't we have that uniformity for digital devices, too?
http://m.quickmeme.com/meme/3pv4lu/
Ask HN: What's your favourite API?
What web API do you find the most useful? Which one provides really good information or allows you to make amazing things happen?
Ilya Grigorik is the man. He had all the best ideas, he had implementations and presentations about asynchronous Rails, about how Node was nothing special, nothing that could not be done with Rails. I wish he would still an integral part of the Rails community. Huge loss.
Fix a problem, not a symptom
Agreed, but for many (including myself), the Digg v4 fiasco was the last straw, and there was an organized exodus of users at that point.
Google Nexus 7 Review [video]
Responsive Design Workflow
Requires you to have to ask them less questions when you run into a blocker. Helps you debug issues.

Possibly.

it helps you help them design the interface or design an API.

Ugh, that's a disaster waiting to happen. Dedicated backend engineers are usually terrible when it comes to what the user really needs and how to display it.

Are you just missing the fundamental point of why anyone learns anything? You learn more so you can do more and make more effective/informed decisions.

No reason to be condescending.

My point is that a front end engineer can make plenty of informed decisions without needing to know the schema of the database or the code in the MT. Does the API return what is expected? Yes = bug in UI. No = bug in server. Does the UI need something the API doesn't provide? Talk to the backend dev to get that into the API. It should be that simple.
Yahoo confirms theft of 450K unencrypted passwords
Its a great deal for sure, but I would imagine betaworks is going to have some other expenses associated with Digg and factored that into the negotiations.
Why Cisco passed, and Palo Alto Networks prospered
MailChimp's Tool for Generating Better Smartphone Screenshots
With Spaces+Exposé, I could do two buttons presses to quickly see every window in every space. Mission Control removes this ability and instead stacks windows, making it harder to find what I'm looking for. Snow Leopard would easily let me select an individual window in another space with one click, while Lion either requires me to slide several times, pick the window, and do an app-only Exposé, or select a space, use Mission Control again, then select a subwindow. It kills productivity.

Additionally, Mission Control is simply much more laggy-feeling. I could easily switch between apps and spaces with no hesitation in Snow Leopard. In Lion, for whatever reason, it was that decided it was important to eliminate this in order to do a fancy slide effect. Lion also gives you the ability to set a unique wallpaper for each desktop, which is nice for some people, but it forces my computer to refresh the items on my desktop each time I scroll into another space.
Just curious, but why not inches / cm instead of points?
China preempts Apple on iPhone 5 launch
"redesign" here means something more radical. Sponsored stories from partnered news outlets got auto-pushed to the front page, hand-made tweaks to the secret-sauce algorithm were used to suppress a very noticeable user protest (links to outside discussion of the redesign, and a lot of links to reddit), which turned into a revolt. All comments were lost (a very small subset was restored from somewhere, but there was no proper backup discipline). A week or so after that, someone who visited the front page would only see posts with a few hundred upvotes, and sponsored posts.

Digg was ailing before that (as I recall, the Digg Patriots and the clique dynamics were a factor), but traffic took an abrupt dive at that point.

Artistic rendering of the debacle:
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/25036088@N06/3424896427/siz...
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/25036088@N06/4192738180/siz...
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/25036088@N06/6642064613/siz...
And there are other factors; 3D movies apparently have contributed to profits.
Ah, thanks - I guess I should just get rid of the fixed header...

But to your first point, I don't think it's just learning HTML and CSS syntax. For example, I've never seen a SE break out XScope and measure the exact pixels between two elements, obsess about the opacity of a drop shadow, or spend a few hours to tweak the bezier curve of an animation. It's like saying that SEs will just struggle with design initially.
Yes it was. Remember the digg bar?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#Digg_Bar
That.

And isn't it the job of the programmer to know those things?
I understand the problem perfectly well. I've used Lion for a long while now. Prior to 10.7 there WAS no fullscreen feature (no universal feature, that is. Individual apps had their own implementations), and I hate how Apple implemented it.

Regardless, my point is that a lot of people have been using the full-screen feature as a substitute for full-maximize. I'll gladly sacrifice a quarter inch of screen real-estate to be able to use my external display simultaneously. I actually NEED that menu bar most of the time, anyway.
Sadly not by much.
I'm an intermediate user of vim but the filtering the macros to only run on those lines is a great tip! I did it a bit different but we had a similar idea.
Your last sentence contradicts 2 out of 3 of those you quote.

He says sometimes a cheaper product is better, you say he's telling us not to buy the cheapest [but he said it could be better].

He says remove price as the main criteria, you say use price as the main criteria to rule out the cheapest products.
Why should software libraries be protected when software algorithms aren't?

Independent invention.

> They can also license the math (which is not patentable) and have another team actually write the code.

You can license it, but you have no legal protection to keep people from copying it.

To keep other people from copying it. The people that you license it to will be contractually bound. Perhaps, but it will be expensive and time consuming for them to copy it. Patents are for a limited time, so this is an argument tied up in a comparison of how long it takes someone to unravel a complicated system, how long a patent lasts, and how much the inventor would license it for.

I think a lot of people on HN don't have the exposure to embedded software to be able to really appreciate what the other side of the patent coin looks like

That may be true. If you have made inventions such as these, you should protect them with trade secret because chat availability status patents are far more excessively damaging than strong signal processing patents are valuable.
That's what I've been thinking. As far as I know, HFT is far more complicated than most accounting transactions, yet it seems like no one has moved to replace accounting or auditing. Why?
But in your example, IDE fans are suggesting a demonstrably worse set of options - when I switch from iOS to Android development, I have to learn an entire new editor. Using vim, I have to learn the `adb` command.
A better analogy might be two different positions in basketball: shooting guard and center. To some degree, the two positions specialize: SG doesn't need to block shots (let's say), while the center does.

However, everyone needs to dribble. A simple CS concept like recursion is analogous to dribbling. If you can't dribble, you're not playing basketball. If you don't know what recursion is, you're not a professional. Period.
Skin cancer app tracks changes head to toe
I would love to have multiple monitors, and have multiple desktops per monitor that I change independently.

For instance on one monitor I could flip between email, the specs for what I'm working on, etc in different desktops. The other monitor can have a browser that I'm testing in, my code, etc in different desktops.