skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for the feedback, Fuzzwah. Yeah... we're still in a closed beta. Probably should have mentioned that in the post. Err... and on the site.

Umm... clearly it's a very early beta.
Why It Sucks To Be An App Reviewer For Apple
Free qooxdoo eBook:

http://www.heronote.com/files/qooxdoo.htm
Even if Cisco was running open source code they could still put ALL of this language into this agreement. The difference would be you could see the actual mechanism in work if they had open source code. The egregious part is the language, not the implementation.
Yeah, guess I should have scaled the servers before posting. Good lesson for next time.

Thanks for the feedback. I guess I'll be lucky to get a cubicle in the same building as him (though to be fair... I never called myself a server admin).
Seems like Singularity U needs something like Hacker News as a platform for discussions. Email proclamations to successively larger mailing lists are not exactly an efficient approach.

Should they just use Hacker News itself? Build their own? Or can Hacker News sprout channels? I'd be fascinated by the topics they cover.
Fourth: a high level comment scolding everyone else.
Reminds me of: https://github.com/talsafran/domainr

Discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2802374
in jquery: $(window).bind('resize', renderfunc);
Expedia really has 8,900 employees? I guess I have no idea what they really do, so that might be reasonable, but I would've guessed an order of magnitude lower. I had assumed it was a mostly automated business, with all the big infrastructure run by third parties (ITA, Amadeus, etc.).
Road Bike Rims
Thanks for the feedback, Paul.

We kind of figured we'd need to add custom options, so it's good to hear people would like to see that sooner rather than later.

We'll get it implemented as soon as possible!
Why would you want to directly participate? It's a lot of tech and overhead for what?

I think what you really want is a good dsp that will help you leverage your first party data; maybe look at triggit?
I actually did not think about this angle, but I agree it is brilliant. Knowing your competitors are using the software you gave away for free also gives your assurances they are a step behind! ha! I am a little giddy with excitement here :) such a good idea
My point was not that this was an NSL, but it's this bad even in the cases where we're _hearing about it_.

Fact is, this is happening constantly, and in ways we can't even find out about to know how bad it truly is.

There's no hope. Run.
There are actually various SMS Spamfilter and general SMS filtering/alerting apps in the Android Market.
Good point. I'll pass that along.

And what about all those poor folks with 1024 x 768 monitors?
Posner's right. It seems that there needs to be some new notion of what constitutes patentability.

Drugs are an interesting case as they have these factors going for it:

1) Expensive to bring IP to market. Lots of testing and clinical trials for drugs. For SW it is pretty cheap now.

2) Easy and cheap to copy. Generic versions can be reverse-engineered quickly. Probably just as easy to copy software, but I still feel like this is probably a useful pillar.

3) The IP by itself constitutes the majority of the value of the product. In medicine there isn't typically tons of other IP around that come together to form the product. In SW there is rarely a single piece of IP that is more than a small fraction of the value of the product.

4) The IP has longevity as a standalone product. Viagra can be sold for decades. Aspirin still probably does hundreds of millions in revenue. There is little SW IP that, by itself, has longevity. The nature of SW is to continuously improve it.

5) Time to market isn't a huge advantage. Since most medicine is just sold as effectively a commodity, being 6m ahead of your competition usually just means you have 6 extra months of revenue. Whereas in SW it also means that gives you 6 months to build on your current IP. In medicine you don't typically do Viagra 2.0, with a boatload of new IP that makes the original obsolete (and hence any competitors shipping the old version scrambling).
9,480 now, 2180 of which are in China at their subsidiary, eLong.

http://www.expediainc.com/company.cfm
exactly. Your competitor just help your shortcut the whole value prop conversation, so you can skip that pitch and go into why you are better. It saved you a cycle of story telling. that is good marketing!
> Further, there's some debate whether eucalyptus in California is beneficial or an invasive weed and whether attempts to introduce the pests' predators are a good idea or not.

Like pines, eucalypts drop toxic leaves, so all the other plants die. AFAIK, only Koalas can eat their leaves. The toxin is eucalyptus oil.

Another strategy eucalypts have for eliminating the competition is exacerbating bushfires. Eucalyptus oil is highly flammable; and unlike pines, eucalypts are fire resistant.
Can you provide further reading on that? I'd love to find out more about how exactly dark energy "absorbed" Einstein's ideas, and I'm sure I'm not alone here.
While it's an interesting idea, you would need one or even two of the big three players (MS, Apple, Google) to push this onto the market, otherwise you'd have a complete driver desert.

I'd go one level above: make a HIL bridge between standard x86 drivers and your lisp machine code.
How Facebook's "Growth team" helped grow the site to 500m users
+1

I used to run a site that averaged ~29% after credit card fees on hotel rooms, but we never managed to swing a deal that wouldn't have seen the credit card companies making more money than we did on flights.

(Maybe their "13%" figure is averaged over high-margin hotel rooms and low-to-zero margin flights?)
This prisoner's dilemma has one round with different rewards.

Also, don't correct people with 'you do realize' because it makes you seem like an asshole.
How software-defined radio could revolutionize wireless - Per Vices (YC W12)
Of course I evaluate each of his points on its merit, and may continue to do so. But part of how much mental "weighting" to put on his points is based on how much I respect how his thinking process goes, and how it lines up to mine. That weighting just got significantly reduced.
I think there's significant potential for the creation of profitable niches (and product innovation in those niches) in the travel industry: families, last-minute, experiences, luxury.

There is very little money in flights, so if that's your business you need to have a long VC-backed runway (pun sort-of intended).

On the hotels side there is huge opportunity.

(Disclosure: I'm the CTO at http://impulseflyer.com so I have a vested interest in the industry)
It does but there are other ways to create objects (even using prototypal inheritance) in JavaScript that are pretty popular in the wild (Object.create and object literals with {} for example). The code behind this and the constructors, etc, would need to be rather different though (that is, you're right, you can't just drop new and expect it to work as-is.)
> they rework it

I see what you did there.
I don't feel that certifications in general help much. They can be useful to an employer that's looking for them, but in general if you know what you're doing and you can communicate that to the people who are hiring, you will have a bigger advantage than someone who has certificate x. Granted there are some places that require certifications x, y, and z, but generally those places have issues hiring great people.
Man and robot linked by brain scanner
IPhone apps hit by App Store corruption
> Symbolics...was simply an example of a Lisp system done well

Gratuitous reference: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=80662 (checkout pg's first comment on that post )

Symbolics was the future. CS has in many ways regressed since then, mostly because of the stupendous success of worse-is-better unix/c mindset coupled with lack of DARPA funding ,the AI winter & the rise of cheap wintel cpu's. At Goldman Sachs, I was incredibly fortunate to work alongside one of the original Symbolics guys ( listed here: http://www.asl.dsl.pipex.com/symbolics/legacy.html ). He complained long and hard about how the c/c++/java family of PLs were "absolute shit" and OOP was doomed from the get go and why functional will be back someday. This was back in the 1999-2000 timeframe when Sun was in the driver's seat and everywhere you looked, it was OOP or bust. Now, ten years hence, functional is all the rage, and you've got clojure, functional java, scala, several functional JS libs...all that's old is new once again! Who knows, with all this VC $$$ searching for a home, we might actually see the resurgence of a LISP Machine. Symbolics 2.0 FTW!!!
I'm not discounting the potential for abuse here, but this is significantly different than Carrier IQ in that Delight.io will be limited to recording what a sandboxed app is doing unlike Carrier IQ's software which was running at the BIOS level and capable of collecting far more private data.
Drugs are typically presented as the crown jewel for patents, but an examination of the modern drug industry destroys that notion for me. Some decent arguments can be found here: http://www.dklevine.com/papers/imbookfinal09.pdf
Not without building your own bidding technology, or leasing bidding technology from a company like AppNexus.
Actually, the new Basecamp doesn't have a free tier now. Cheapest is $20/month.

But, for teams I manage, we've found Basecamp was actually cheaper than the competition because every tier has unlimited users. That alone makes it cheaper than competing apps that charge per user.
Google to put Mussolini online: 30,000 newsreels and documentaries from 1900s
You can put the iPad to sleep and it will continue to play the video on the AppleTV, but my guess is that if you turn it completely off or move it outside of wifi range you'll lose the control connection so the video will stop playing.
Yep - it's really hard to compete with the airline's own website prices for "simple" ticket purchases, and it's really complicated to automate "complex" ticket purchases; and the travel industry has "corporate travel agents" who've got enough experience to be really good at getting a "close enough to optimum" solution to complex ticketing requirements, and they've got much of the high-margin flight bookings market tied up.

(At least, that was the state of play back when I was last involved back in '08…)
I don't think it's mystifying at all. Banana plugs are probably the most convenient way to hook speakers to an amplifier. And despite all of its other flaws, one of the most exciting things to me is being able to power speakers directly from the Q. Right now, I either have to buy an insanely over-priced Sonos system, or buy a bunch of airport express stations AND an amplifier if I want sound all over my house. It's very convenient to have an amplifier built in if you want to do something like add speakers in your bedroom or kitchen.

All that being said, $300 is a crazy, crazy price for this, but I really think banana plugs and an amplifier are one of the only good decisions made with the Q.

Besides, I don't see how comparing myriad interfaces that _can't connect an amplifier to speakers to make sound_ with banana plugs is helpful to the conversation.
http://help.37signals.com/basecamp/questions/156-do-you-have... http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2580-why-non-profit-pricing

Nope.

(We're not helping hurricane victims or the like, more a club that only just breaks even running an event once a year.)
I understand that in a lot of cases, the rate is higher than the 13% that I cited. That is definitely an average that I've pulled from a few different sources. Would be interesting to hear other averages...
I really do think we'll be better off on average scrapping patents in ALL industries. Sure there's some positives in patents but the negatives far outweigh them in my opinion.
"on error resume next" redux?
One site that I did not mention is Gilt's Jetsetter.com. They have great curation and a number of awesome deals.
A visual blog to share your thoughts, stories and opinions.
MOOC = Massive Open Online Course

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course
>Seriously, who reads patents to learn who new inventions work?

I do sometimes, actually. But you're right that it's not a very understanding-conducive format. They're more concerned with making sure the claims are watertight than making sure the public can figure out what's going on in them.
This is not new. Fabrication was one of the factors leading to famine during the great leap forward. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Great_Leap...
Which brings up a funny party trick - go to the bathroom and start playing porn on the big screen in the other room. See how long it takes for your friends to figure out who is sending it to the AppleTV...
Replace is the wrong way to look at it. Supplement is better.

Sure, mostly people that care about audio are going to have a primary system with a nice receiver and big speakers. But the same kind of person that cares about music enough to want that _also_ wants to be able to listen to the same music in any room in their house, with independent volume controls and freedom to select speakers suitable for the listening environment and context.
Why Showing Your Face at Work Matters
This is an apples-to-oranges comparison. The author admits this, and I'm not finding fault with the analysis. I do worry that those not familiar with various ser/deser schemes for Java will draw the wrong conclusions. My take-away is that you should not blindly use Java serialization in cases where performance matters and you don't need the broad spectrum of use cases it covers.

The main reason that Java serialization is so slow is that it is designed to persist self-describing, arbitrary object graphs.

Self-describing = Full package+class names and versions. Any object graph containing Serializable classes available via the classloaders of both the sender and receiver.

Arbitrary object graphs = The identity of objects is preserved. Let's say that 17 SalesOrder objects point to the same Customer object. salesOrderA.getCustomer() == salesOrderB.getCustomer() (identity in Java for those who haven't had the pleasure) is maintained.

Oh, and JDK dynamic proxies are handled as a special case. And some other stuff, too. I had the pleasure a few months ago of copying the JDK's serialization code into my own package structure and adding logging so we could debug deser issues in an OSGi environment. From what I can tell, the impedence mismatch between OSGi classloading hierarchies and Java Serialization makes this combination a non-starter.

The very-performant sample case provided in the blog posting works only for a list of flat objects. As soon as you try to preserve identity, you must implement a two-pass system where you deser placeholders and then resolve them later. I'm not suggesting that it isn't useful, but it probably constrains your serializable objects to such a degree that you'll be unhappy in other areas of your system.

Kyro (as another commenter noted) seems like the best combination of small size/speed/general-ness that I've encountered thus far. There seem to be a reasonable number of pre-built Kyro serializers for common libraries such as Joda time.

For a project I worked on recently where size was more important than speed, I took advantage of the similarity of the objects I was serializing and wrote a custom serializer which created dictionary look-ups on the fly. Repeated strings were turned into small integers, etc. I wish I didn't have to write it.

In a nutshell, if you constrain the scope of the problem you are attempting to solve, the maximum possible performance of the system across covered use-cases goes up. Java Serialization's performance is relatively poor compared to less generalized schemes -- as expected.
Somewhat related - about 2 years ago, my employer had a bunch of us go through the SANS/GIAC GSSP training & certification. Some of the material was pretty boring and of questionable utility, but we had a good instructor and some of the hands-on parts where we were finding vulnerabilities was actually really fun.

I'm under no illusions about the certification's marketplace value and I doubt I would have ever paid for the course/cert on my own, but it felt like one of the better formal trainings I've been through in my professional career (which, granted, isn't saying a whole lot by itself).

Also, the certificate comes mounted on a comically oversized plaque, which provides some entertainment value.
The other way around; the cosmological constant "absorbs" dark energy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy#Cosmological_consta...
Thats pretty cool for us, but I don't see it as an important feature for consumers.
When am I EVER at work and "not busy"??? If that EVER happens it means I have literally run out of things to do at work, and I should go home and do something non-work that I want to do (and then I'm "busy" again). Maybe I'm sick in the head, but for me there is no such thing as "I'm available to be interrupted" time. Interrupt me, fine, and then I have to do a little mental triage, which is more important, what I'm doing now, or what you are interrupting me with? Life is too short and too precious to sit around waiting for people to chat with you. I guess what I'm saying is that there should be "online" and "offline" but I don't get it wrt the yellow neutral symbol.

PPS yes, people find me prickly
You're going to disparage the scientific credibility of the entire medical profession because some practitioners are focused on isolating and synthesizing the effective components of medication?

I guess Randi could have said "only the people who believe this crazy stuff believe this crazy stuff", but he did make it clear that his history wasn't complete and comprehensive.

The damning evidence remains the same: I can go into an otherwise reputable store and pay for "medicine" that is just water with pseudoscientific incantations performed over it. And you have the chutzpah to call Randi dishonest?
I like your philosophy. It turns out giving people something to care about is a pretty good strategy :) Keep up the good work!
Amen to this man!
Gambaran Serial iPhone 5 dan Specifikasinya
>he's been under house arrest for over 500 days without charges

I feel this is somewhat disingenuous. He's been under house arrest pending extradition hearings because the UK received an arrest warrant for him from Sweden.

EDIT:

And while it's technically true that charges haven't been formally filed yet, it's my understanding that this is due to a peculiarity in Swedish law where they have to have a person physically present to bring charges. Hence the arrest warrant.
Richard Dawkins made an excellent documentary, The Enemies of Reason, which covers homeopathy. Parts of the it can be found on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=dawkins%20homeop...
thanks, we've gotten bad about testing on windows lately. the team is growing so we'll be able to do a better job across OS's and on mobile web soon. please excuse the temporary rubbish. :)
This looks to be built on top of AppNexus which handles the creative review (there is a per-review cost).
Hmm I'm not so sure about that. 3.5mm is maybe the standard for computer-type speakers and earbuds... but banana plugs have been the standard for decades now in home theatre hi-fi systems. Pretty much any decent speakers will connect to a receiver using banana plugs. You also forgot XLR and 1/4" connectors which are the norm in production equipment (my cheapo M-Audio speakers are connected to my computer with those right now).

Whether the Nexus Q needs to contain a dedicated amplifier that can get around an A/V receiver (which a lot of people who invested in their home theatre system might already have) is another matter.
I wonder if this is going to cause some companies to throw money at politicians to get rid of Posner.
I disagree strongly about the text, I find e-ink wonderful to read from. When I 1st used my e-ink kindle and noticed the refresh flash I actually thought it was a problem. I asked a friend who had one prior to me if his did the same and initially he said no. Then he went to check and realised that yes, it does. He then yelled at me for pointing it out as it wasn't something he'd even taken notice of in the past but now couldn't avoid focusing on every time he turned a page.

For me, I got used to the refresh flash and it doesn't bother me in the slightest or disrupt my reading. I don't really see the need for a page turn metaphor. The fact the next/previous buttons are right where I'm holding the device is a huge plus in my mind. Devices where you need to swipe the screen to turn a page seem to be missing out on the huge advantage.

The one thing which I absolutely needed to learn how to hack was the margin size. It struck me of a waste of space to have a 20mm margin on the screen. I found a guide to edit a config file on the device and changed to 5mm margin and love it.
I don't disagree with these points, but my personal take is that the primary difference between software patents and other patents is that most things that end up getting patented in software are things that pretty much any programmer may implement in the course of trying to solve some problem. The patented algorithms often aren't novel or unique, but someone just stood up first and said "Look here what I did. I want a right to exclusivity on this." Even though someone trying to get to the same end goal at some point in the future probably would have easily developed the same method.

In drugs, the end result gets patented. Some chemical formula that's just right, which (in most cases) was not simply stumbled upon in the pursuit of something else. And even if it was stumbled upon, it's still novel and was not likely to be created as a product or byproduct by another party very easily. The insight required to develop the drug was most likely unique.

The equivalent to most software patents today in the drug field would be patenting methods of, say, mixing chemicals. Imagine if there was a patent on mixing two solutions by pouring one from a beaker into the other in a flask, twirling around twice and then shaking gently four times. What if someone had a license to that mixing method and everyone else had to pay to do it? It'd be ridiculous. It seems like that's basically what software patents are.

The equivalent to drug patents in the software world would be, I guess, patenting an entire OS, or an app, or some fully integrated, significant piece of software. For example, no one should be able to make a counterfeit copy of iOS as a whole and sell it as their own. That I would support legally. I (think?) this is already covered by copyright law.
Can we try to tune out tech-blogger BS?
I genuinely enjoy reading TechCrunch, AllThingsD, Verge, Gizmodo, Engadget, just about any of them depending on the day, but I've grown pretty weary of the bloggers and personalities becoming THE story.

I know they're going to play the game on their respective sites, but can we stop feeding the pettiness with submissions and up-votes here on HN?

I don't want to tread on what the community wants. If people genuinely think those stories have a place and are generating good discussion, ok. But I feel like a lot of them are only getting submitted or up-voted because we're falling prey to link-bait.

Anyone have any thoughts?
We are working on the first few things you mentioned.
Thanks for the feedback. We definitely need to work on our messaging on the site.
> If A is equal to B in one respect, and far worse in dozens of other respects, pointing out the one way it is equal doesn't make an argument that A is good.

I didn't state it was better then any other language. I simply made a case that it is a good language.