skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've proposed this a couple of times on HN. I think the solution to these issues is for someone of note to start an organization dedicated to fighting patent troll cases. To be considered for protection you have to become a member and pay annual dues. Such an organization could potentially raise hundreds of millions of dollars and have top-notch legal horsepower available.

It's mission would be to defend members and, in all cases, seek the invalidation of the patents in question.

If something like that existed, trolls would know that the potential consequence of trying to enforce bullshit patents would be huge financial losses and the potential invalidation of their bullshit patents. How many trolls would go up against an organization with 10, 20, 50 or 100 million dollars available to take-on a case?

I am saddened to say that it is an arms race. Given that, true entrepreneurs and startups need bigger guns. It would behoove VC's and virtually all entrepreneurs and startups to help fund and support such an entity. It would be like patent reform approached in a very different way. Knowing that the "nuclear option" is on the table could very well bring reason to a landscape that is simply full of land-mines.

There would have to be a mechanism through which companies of a certain size (Google, Apple, etc.) are excluded from receiving free services from this organization. They would, however, be expected to support it with generous donations. If the large players in the tech would each donated ten million dollars a year (a rounding error in their revenue stream) to such an entity, the organization could easily raise hundreds of millions in no time at all.
The "green" movement seems to be making some progress.
Is Kanban the New Scrum?
> All court cases are held in public, so if you are interested in the full evidence, etc, you can attend the hearing in person.

Space is limited in a court room. That's why I was talking more about televised sessions.

> Once you get a decision, you can fix it. You appeal it.

Good luck with that. That's all I can say.

> They probably practised as lawyers before becoming a judge so made quite a bit and therefore they have nothing to gain and everything to loose if they accept being corrupted.

That's the problem. Lawyers aren't very good and the laws aren't very clear in a majority of the cases. I have yet to see a judge lose their reputation from having one of their cases appealed. Also, private deals are made with lawyers all the time that are protected by client confidentiality. Do you honestly believe that they would have nothing to gain by exploiting such deals?
The article focused on resolution, but with all of Apple's flagship mobile offerings bearing retina displays, I consider it a requirement that any new device is retina.

I didn't make it clear, but I understand the author's talking about logical resolution. I'm wondering if the iPad (1024x768) resolution scaled to 7" would effectively be Retina based on Apple's definitions.
He scaled it by a factor of the iPhone's logical PPI (not the Retina pixel density). If the resolution was scaled by the required PPI to create a retina display (at ~7"), would a 1024x768 display still work out to a physical size of approximately 7"?
Emacs key bindings in Visual Studio
Works. Simple and effective with an easy bar for entry. Good job.
Do you have an offshore bank account?
Reminds me of this gem from a few days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4156438

I guess that's just one more reason to keep their marketing the new way.
I'm never going to sign into something that doesn't tell me what it is first. Never.
I have a bridge I'm looking to sell.
Doing it right for most cases mean not doing it all. You shouldn't be thinking about hash functions and salts. Instead you should use a cryptosystem designed and implemented by experts.

DO NOT DO CRYPTO YOURSELF
Who said I did? Of course I ignore such stories, or skim past the first 15 paragraphs to get to the meat.

If I want a page turner, I'll get a novel. For news stories, I just want the information. Time spent learning about the color of the subjects coat is time I could spend reading another story, learning something useful, or entertaining myself through a medium actually optimized for that.
If they came out with an 8" I'd want the 10" to bump up to 12" I think it would still be manageable, you'd have 4 inch differentiation among each product.
I love this trend that people share their numbers, discuss pricing etc. I will definitely do the same in the coming months if all goes well.
I think the meaning was that combining SHA1 and MD5 is not an appropriate method to circumvent brute-forcing.
Facebook becomes a telco: invests in Asia subsea cable
Sometimes when you're wildly successful as Google is with Android and Search, you start doing things that don't make a lot of sense.

Microsoft has done this many, many times as has Apple. With Microsoft you can see the ill fated Kin/Kin 2, Windows Media Center, Windows Tablet, Windows UMPC's, etc. that for various reasons just weren't good ideas, weren't priced right, etc. Apple had the G4 cube, iPod Hi-Fi, and the Motorolla ROKR (with iTunes).

When you have billions of dollars in profit, you tend to throw money around at ideas that might not be ready yet, or just might not be very good ideas yet. Google has a history of doing this in software, but now that they're moving into hardware the problems seem more glaring.
We have several ideas we can't fund at the moment. If you are interested you can contact us at contact@nextwave.ro
Your comment made me Google 'Stockhold Syndrome' and I spent the next 30 minutes reading about the [1] Kidnapping of Jaycee Lee Dugard. The human mind is absolutely fascinating and scary at the same time.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_Jaycee_Lee_Dugard
You mean officially ?
Does it work on Mobile? No? Trash.
So any online video game is prior art?
So the trick is that Apple tells App devs that the minimal tappable UI element at 44x44 points.

- The original iPhone had a PPI of 163PPI

- The original iPad had a PPI of 132PPI

The 44x44 point recommendation was the same for the iPhone and iPad. So the minimal tappable element on the iPad happened to be physically bigger even though it was the same # of points.

A 7.85" iPad happens to have a PPI of 163PPI. (same as original iPhone)

So that means any UI element designed with a minimum of 44x44 points will still be as tappable on a 7.85" iPad as it was on the iPhone. If you see the PDF/actual-size file I linked in another comment, you'll see the UI elements on a 7.85" iPad are no smaller than elements on an iPhone.

actual math here: http://www.appadvice.com/appnn/2012/03/apple-has-163-reasons...
The issue with patent trolls isn't how they use patents - it's the patents that they use. There's nothing wrong with a researcher suing a factory over a patent the researcher holds that the factory is using without license. There's also nothing wrong with the researcher selling the patent to a lawyer, so as to avoid dealing with the legal system, and that lawyer then suing the factory.

This works if the patent was issued for a meaningful advance. In fact, the researcher may not have been interested in doing the research (or at least in revealing his methodology) without patent protection. If the methodology were not revealed, other people would need to spend the time to develop their own process, when it would be easier for them to pay the researcher and then use his work.

The issue with software patents is that the methodologies covered are trivial, and the time needed to develop your own method is trivial as well. Because the patents are granted for obvious solutions, many people end up violating the patent without ever having seen it; this is why patents are not supposed to be granted for obvious developments.
Glad you find it useful.
I think the Q is pretty sweet looking myself. I just wish it had Google TV functionality as well.
Volunteers, or hackers who want to work on something automated.

We have a whoolllle lot of audio, to transcribe it all on MTurk with the resources we have (ie, none) - would be very cost prohibitive.

What we need is a system which can convert 3gp to something more usable, automatically remove noise, automatically remove silent parts, automatically adjust the levels for speech, and then automatically transcribe them. It's a challenge.
What do you think people will think when they read this?

"He didn't do that because he doesn't like Java "

Your words imply that somehow the preferences of the top engineers or CTO should not matter. But why should those preferences not matter? If we are talking about people who are talented, then we can start with the assumption that those preferences are probably the distilled wisdom of many years of experience with particular styles of development. We don't need to re-enact the millions of debates that have happened regarding whether Java is good or bad (One side shouting "It is verbose!" the other side shouting: "Type enforcement is good", etc, etc, until the last syllable of recorded time). It is enough to know that good engineers have preferences and those preferences probably have some benefits.

You also wrote:

"My question is focused more toward the existing team..."

What if the current team is terrible? Again, referring to Colin Steele, he fired/allowedd-to-leave the entire team that existed when he first arrived.

What if we turn your question around and ask it from the other side: is change ever justified? I'm guessing you would say "Yes".
Sweet! I can now non-metaphorically dare someone to build a better Mousetrap.
Well to their credit at least it featured a few chinese characters.
I think online, low-cost education will supplant courses taught with low or no instructor-to-student interaction in a very short window of time.

Less obviously, I think that mentors (teachers and professors at all levels) who provide value to individual learners will stay in high demand, along with the institutions that employ them. I also think that the personal networks of these mentors will become the gateway to top-level employment in many fields.
I would imagine having an Open Source kernel is an advantage for very niche applications like this because you can add/change features that would be useless or detrimental to 99.9999% of users but would be useful in this instance.

I have no idea whether that was part of the reasoning for this or not though.
Open 24x7x365: The IBM open PaaS and private cloud platform
What about a distinction between people who license a patent to only one company (e.g., a university researcher creates a fast-and-accurate HIV test, the university licenses it to a company to produce & market it) versus companies who hold a patent and try to collect licensing fees from every company under the sun, most of whom have no connection to another?
I'll explain what the difference is here. I suggest all software developers learn to use something like http://www.vischeck.com/ on their UIs:

The colors "Green" and "Red" aren't visible at all to R/G colorblind people. There are actually two different types of cone deficiencies (for R/G colorblindness, the most common one), missing red cones, and missing green cones (Deuteranope and Protanope). Turns out, it doesn't really matter that much which one you're missing, as the world looks much the same to you: All yellow and blue. There are some differences, which do mean the specific yellows you see are different from the other type of R/G colorblind, but for software developers, both types of common colorblindness can be lumped together: Only use Yellow and Blue as indicator colors, or colors that clearly go to yellow or blue, or use secondary markers.

For severe cases, the colors you see are pretty much only yellow and blue. For less severe cases, the person actually is only missing SOME of the red or SOME of the green cones, and can tell some colors, but not very well.

There is also a Tritanope which actually has problems distinguishing blue/yellow, but they're VERY rare.

normal color vision:
http://www.vischeck.com/images//hats_norm_big.jpg

Each type of R/G colorblindness:
http://www.vischeck.com/images//hats_deutan_big.jpg
http://www.vischeck.com/images//hats_protan_big.jpg

Vischeck.com (which I'm just a frequent user of) will also Daltonize images for you. What daltonization does it it takes colors in an image and moves them around in the different color spaces to make it so both normally color sighted and color deficient users can see everything.

I am not an expert, but merely a software dev who tries to do right by the color deficient, 8% of North american males.
You may find David Weekly's "Introduction to Stock and Options for tech entrepreneurs/startup employees" interesting.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/55945011/An-Introduction-to-Stock-...
Sendgrid is a great example of an API-only startup. They've sent 45 Billion transactional emails for over 60,000 customers.
The Q is Google's attempt to pull an Apple.
You use unsafe.putLong(), unsafe.putByte(), unsafe.putInt() to directly store a value into a given memory address. You then use unsafe.getLong() etc to directly read those values back from memory. This get you native C-like performance of only 78 ns, roughly 130 times faster than Java's 11,000 ns, very impressive! But when it comes to allocating memory, you use "new byte[1024]", a straight Java call. Using malloc ie. unsafe.allocateMemory(...), to get a larger byteblock and writing into it would probably speed up the routine even more. You also have the free ie. unsafe.freeMemory for the cleanup. (http://www.docjar.com/docs/api/sun/misc/Unsafe.html )
My home page is about:newtab. Odd.
Maxthon’s HTML5Test.com Scores Were Incorrect
Don't worry, in the "long run" the laissez-faire approach to corporate regulation will "end up" minimizing malfeasance and maximizing freedom. Liberty just needs more time. Like, say, another year. Two, max.
You make excellent and carefully argued points. It is important to me that I say that even though I do not agree with your opinion on static type systems, I enjoyed reading all of your argument.

Although, one thing is not clear to me. It reads to me that you are you saying that indirection incurs only some of the cost of dynamic typing, so why do you follow with "and in practice the difference rarely seems significant"? I can't connect the latter part, clearly I have missed something.

I am of the opinion that you can write complex systems in C because, although as an abstraction of a complex system it is itself complex, there is no incidental complexity as is found in C++. Its small size makes it simple for those who have understood the system it abstracts. I still believe that a more expressive type system would reduce some amount of effort and uncertainty when testing and using C.

Do you consider Clean, ATS, Haskell and OCaml type systems to be expressive? These languages are expressive with powerful type systems and tend to be very fast, often without leaving idiomatic code. In my experience I have been saved many times by helpful type systems and follow them like gradients, allowing me to hold more without getting lost in the minute details of correct piping, invocation and application. I find I am much slower with dynamic typing and pressed with a feeling of paranoia.

I can't explain why preferences are often expressed so viscerally, my only guess is that there must be something biological that influences what type of type system you prefer.
How about voluntary child amputees because that's the only way left to compete in the Olympics? Doesn't that little slippery slope make traditional doping scandals seem like pat-a-cake?
First Location Based Software as a Service in Closed Beta - You're Invited
Very nice. I was about to hand roll my own implementation of this, but this just saved me some time :-)

I like how there's a working demo right there on the page - it's nothing groundbreaking but it definitely adds a bit more polish.

Something I'm wondering about - would it pay to have some sort of "variable" key binding whose value would differ depending on the user's OS (if this is even possible)? For example, instead of binding both command+k and ctrl+k, I would bind one combination that would work both on Mac and Windows systems. This isn't a deal breaker or major issue by any means, but I'd be interested to know if it can be done.
The Nexus Q is easily hack-able. That's an important feature. Just a few days after the Q launched you already had people transforming it into a game console with mind control and a projector:

https://plus.google.com/117676109445965905583/posts/BRbJEQk4...

This is probably not a mass consumer device supposed to replace the Roku. It's a premium product for a very specific use case (as google demoed). While at the same time a developer toy to explore what android can do in different devices.
What would Linux be good for if Tim Berners-Lee didn't invent the Web to make CERN more effective?
The main issue seems to be Vivek Wadhwa (not the whole University) for sending out one poorly thought out mass-email that is vaguely in support of homeopathy.

If I remember correctly, Vivek Wadhwa also authored quite a few articles (on Techcrunch and elsewhere) that demonstrated a poor understanding of stats/science.

For example:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2831195

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2495012
So it does have a lot.

At Apportable (YC11) we have been poking around with it and found it has the potential for being an amazing game platform.

You can read about our exploits where I demoed the results our hacks at AnDevCamp this last weekend after Google IO:
https://plus.google.com/117676109445965905583/posts/BRbJEQk4...

We figured out it's also possible to transfer APKs to the device with NFC but it fails at random points.

We also got a mouse working with one of the games we ported for Android:
https://plus.google.com/117676109445965905583/posts/iAsNqGrX...

My thoughts are that google wanted to ship it by Google IO but have more plans for it upcoming.
What are your thoughts on the possibility/probability of all police/public interactions being required to be recorded? What legislative hurdles remain on a state/federal level for this becoming common practice?
Lessons Learned at the Red Hat Summit
It's impossible to tell the spirit in which this comment was intended.
I'm not sure that providing subsidies to large banks and refusing to enforce the law when they commit crimes is a laissez-faire approach to corporate regulation.
Spoofing sender in SMS is easy, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS_spoofing
Did Pinterest get compromised?
It's good to check your Pinterest account once in a while, specially if you're only using the "Pin It" plugin to pin interests. Today, I just discovered that my account got hacked. Spam boards & links were created.
Not to mention "snake oil" liniments and other forms of quackery.
I used to buy into the MBA mentality.

Now I really think MBA / todays managerial wisdom is slowly destroying the world. The business climate in most corporations is plain awful and most people don't even realize because they don't know what a healthy business environment looks like.

It seems that these days that as long as your numbers on your spreadsheet match up, it doesn't matter how you got them to match just as long as they match up somehow. Lying is just one of the many unethical techniques that are now common tools to deliver shareholders "value".
Is it likely to be a $100 premium? The iPad 3 is $499 and the iPad 2 is $399, so I'd expect what amounts to a mini iPad 2 to be maybe $299... So based on that I assume you are comparing it to the new google tablet, except that this is being sold at cost -- I don't think we'll be seeing too many android tablets of comparable quality at that price.
The boss needs to be sensitive. The email is from a coworker, who isn't held to the same standard.

That said, I wouldn't have sent the email myself.
The Q's hardware is capable of much more than the software currently allows. Hacking it was explicitly encouraged at I/O. All of the negative points in the article can be fixed with software updates. Seeing as this is a brand new product, the software currently has minimum functionality to show off its two new features: control via tablet, social playlists.

I predict that in the next year the Q will get software support for:

- iOS devices as a controller

- other computers on your network as a controller (web interface or chrome app or something)

- netflix/hulu/other stuff streaming support

- music/video streaming from local network devices

- streaming all audio output from a device (like my desktop computer) to the Q, so it can be used as a stereo device instead of just an output device

However, assuming all of those features were added, I'm still not sure I'd pay $300 for it.
He's gotta be making a reality distortion field joke.

"There are four lights!" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_eSwq1ewsU
Apple granted glasses patent
Yet another Linux vs GNU/Linux Poll Interesting
Apologies. Have edited for tone.
These are good points, and as the creator of SE you've undoubtedly put a lot of thought into this. I just wonder, from the perspective of an occasional answerer and moderator, whether there's some way to maximize the value of the questions living in the categorical interstices. Is a question less likely to get the exposure that will lead to a good answer when it's migrated to a smaller sub-site?

And some of the "subjective" questions produce fascinating discussions and enlightening answers; arguably the community moderation of such questions and answers (closing and deletion notwithstanding) still provides valuable weighting that could influence the overall graph and increase the value of the network. Could there be a shadow network still moderated for quality? Hard problems but fun to consider.
The Secret Service is tasked with currency counterfeiting crimes, not the CIA.
Obviously the author of this article is a socialist... The financial industry is driving innovation by applying the principles of capitalism.

The only reason the bankers are lying is that government meddling is making their capitalistic process illegal. Of you want bankers to be 100% truthful, don't tie their hands behind their backs with quaint concepts like usury, proper underwriting of loans, etc.
"My point was that it's an enviable position,"

It's been described by someone who had that position as "not worth a bucket of warm spit".

"not least of which because it's a great stepping stone to becoming president."

This is actually pretty uncommon, in practice.

Anyway, in Biden's specific case, there's no way he'll be President. He probably won't be running for VP again.
To roughly recall a comment someone made to me on HN a while back, if it's profitable to think of ideas and do nothing with them until you can sue someone else independently coming up with the same idea, there's a problem with the patent system. The whole point of patents is that they're for ideas that it would be unlikely that someone else would come up with on their own.
Isn't that simply giving the attacker all the info they need to start cracking these passwords with a dictionary attack?
What portion of any of the hot online education projects could have been done without the web? For instance, how much of each of them could have been replicated by mailing people DVD/VHS lecture videos and quiz software? If most of it could be done without the web, why wasn't it? Cost? Excessive waiting and friction caused by going through the mail?

I agree with almost everything I've read of what Khan has said, and Thrun is certainly impressive. But when other people go nuts about the possibilities of online education, they seem to imply that the primary hindrance to educational success worldwide has been a lack of access to video lectures. For most students, I do not think that is the case.
A CTO Must Never Do This...
A war story of AWS, databases & life in the trenches...