skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> On any specific technology, you absolutely can know that no one else has patents on it. That is the responsibility of the patent office: to grant exclusive rights to an 'invention'.

The problem though is that anything complex like a video or audio codec can constitute many "inventions" from the USPTO's point of view. H.264 has many patents on it, for example. Again, this is one of the big problems with the current patent system.

So in practical terms you can never use a codec with the knowledge that no one else has patents on it.
Are you an actual physicist?
Are you familiar with how expensive it is to live here? You cannot buy a decent house in a fair school district for less than $500k. Probably more like $750k. For two bedrooms.
I also disagree with a proliferation of micro self publishing without having an aggregation systems in place first. For the HN community it is obvious that the aggregation can be done post-publication and in theory there are many different ways to achieve this. However, it somehow never gets done. There is no Techmeme for science, no real effort to create filtering tools for the stream of scientific articles that are produced daily. Maybe it is a small market but there is a market. I would pay for a service that would give me a (useful) personalized stream of articles. Without the filtering/aggregation the idea of self publishing or the current trend for open access mega journals (PLoS ONE, Scientific Reports, etc) make content discovery a challenge.
Totally agree. Over time, everyone develops a particular style of working with their favourite editor/tools and it becomes very difficult to move away after a point.

I worked with Java on Eclipse for 8 years, and I am taking a self-imposed break from it and working with Java on VIM for the past 2 months. There are benefits to both approaches (editor vs. IDE) but the main thing I notice is that I am far less productive with VIM (because I am unfamiliar with it) and I frequently fight back a strong urge to go back to eclipse (for debugging, refactoring and object relation checking/mapping). I guess this is the kind of thing that keeps making everyone go back to their favourite IDE/editor.
"This is the core of the disappointment that many of us feel with the Sparrow acquisition. It’s not about the $15 or less we spent on the apps. It’s not about the team’s well-deserved payout. It’s about the loss of faith in a philosophy that we thought was a sustainable way to ensure a healthy future for independent software development, where most innovation happens."

I seriously laughed out loud.

Don't get me wrong, I don't necessarily think his idea is silly, and I think he may in fact have a point. However, let's not pretend all those people who complained about the acquisition were doing this because they lost faith in this philosophy. That part is silly. Those people were just being slightly dramatic because they liked a product and it would no longer get updated.
IOSDevCamp day 2 - Live Stream is now up
You're kidding, right? All major new Apple products sell out when they're launched, and it takes weeks or months for them to catch up to demand.

Example: retina MacBook Pro was launched on June 11. If you order one at the Apple Store online now, it still takes 1-2 weeks.

http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/macboo...
You make a good point, I agree that even with royalty-free licenses like these the use of the technology is not completely free.
Yes. We had SVG back in '02-'03 (the company I was at built a product on it).
the linux thing is not universally true.

i have installed a few different distros on my w500 over the years, and it runs hot every time. the ati drivers suck, the os can't seem to control the fans properly, and switchable graphics don't work. tried with opensuse years ago, and ubuntu a few times more recently.

i imagine it's better with a nvidia card, and no switchable graphics.
My advice is always use what you know best and I think a lot of people will agree. I've always looked at these questions like this: "What brand of tools should I build my house with?". It doesn't matter. Use what you have.
There's a line to be drawn between, "privacy from people who are actively looking at you to find something about you" and "privacy from computer algorithms that will make decisions about you based on your personal activities"

Whilst it is likely that you will get "lost in a sea of people" for the most part, it's also quite likely that you will "stick out" in one way or another and this might not be in a way you like or even in a way that is necessarily fair.
> I guess they are meaning "free as in freedom"

Not necessarily. Most of the software developers use - from IDEs/editors, through version control, synchronization, web stack, to server software and even the basic but important tools like ls or grep - is free. Free as in "free beer". We are used to get tremendous value for free. We are used to give away value for free. And I'm not surprised that many developers (myself included) like this utopia, even if it is not currently sustainable.
Well, depends on your layout. That might be the case on a US keyboard but for many others (for example German, Spanish, the Nordic countries' layout and many other European and non-European layouts) it would be preferred over for example "//". For "//" you need to use a modifier (just as with '#') but you need to stretch more (or use both hands) and as well tap it two times. That's one of the reasons why I prefer to code using an English layout in my IDE/editor :)
You might be right, but it's hard to tell. With Apple's visionary gone, I don't think we should be expecting any major innovation with future iPad releases. iPad 3 and the iPhone 4S were a big disappointment.
When you break the first egg, the worst case is the difference between the current floor (where the egg broke) and the previous floor (where the egg last survived). So, the worst total number of drops is the number of drops for the first egg (until it breaks), plus the above difference. If you try making the maximum difference less than 14, you run into problems with the first number...

The problems with optimizing worst case are much simpler than optimizing the average case (you don't have to deal with probabilities, and you don't need to know the distribution of egg hardness). So, the proof, and the complexity of the proof, depends on what "optimality" measure you choose.
Overfocus on tech skills could exclude the best candidates for jobs
I agree. While he is doing his best to answer the hard questions (instead of avoiding them outright), his answers are not very satisfactory. See this thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/ww982/iama_patent_e...

Whenever someone defends software patents, I bring up Amazon's one-click patent. It's so obvious! I use the one-click-checkout feature on Amazon all the time and dearly miss it on every other website out there. Imagine if Pizza Delivery sites or Flower Delivery sites had that feature. People would order things a lot more if they didn't have to go through extra screens to confirm things every single time. The funnel gets smaller as the number of steps rise. And now one company has a patent on short funnels.
Here are some I've bookmarked:

https://www.eff.org/patent-busting

Crowd-sourced prior art patent busting:

http://www.articleonepartners.com/

There's also PeerToPatent, but it appears to be oriented toward preventing a patent being granted than busting them after the fact:

http://peertopatent.org/
No it doesn't involve that at all.
Please read independent claim 1, not the abstract or the description.
This is false. Non-developers pay a recurring fee for software all the time.
Sounds like a startup waiting to happen.
G+ and Facebook are different things even though people do compare them.

I get different stuff in my g+ stream compared to facebook, they're targeting g+ for something more than just a social network, it is an integrator, yet another cool feature of the whole google ux.
"And who besides us Google watchers know that “Google Play” is an app store anyway?"

I have a feeling that if you are buying the Nexus online, you know this.

If you are buying it in a store, the sales person's pitch includes showing you that Google Play is where you get movies, music and apps. (Similar to how you can on an Apple device with the App Store)
Though I'm not familiar with the Lenovo trackpads in particular beyond playing with them on display models, the trackpad on MacBooks is a huge differentiator over any of the ones I've had on PC laptops. It works so well you forget how well it's working until you start using a different computer with a trackpad that now feels completely broken.
If it turns out there is a compelling public interest, I think privacy could be protected by law rather than disappearing. For instance, it could become illegal to operate a facial recognition database except for research purposes. No doubt this wouldn't be perfect, but it could help to restore balance if certain technologies are deemed to be more harm than good.
Neither Nerd nor Bro
Yes, but normally he might have pointed his easel at the subject and just leaned or looked over the side to see the subject, for example. Although some of his pieces are very large. The point, though, is that you can make looking more dramatic without increasing or decreasing the amount of looking.
Addict Pride?
That's it? No more details?

Edit: OK, I see the submitter edited in some content after posting.
While you may be correct that the system was designed for/with/about smart cards, none of the claims relate specifically to smart cards, and are quite broad.
Stay out of the summary, description, and abstract when reading a patent, and just skip to the claims.
Read the independent claims (the ones that don't start with "the .... according to claim X").

If you find that there are reasonable definitions of each term in the claim that you might fall under, you are gonna have a bad time.

(IE Spend a lot of money trying to get it invalidated)
I just downloaded the newest release and installed the DMG inside the zipfile, then went to the folder i downloaded and inside the /lib/ios/bin directory and ran ./create --args

When i press "run" in xcode i get a simulator with the app. Looks pretty smooth.

In terms of building, they offer this online as well, right?
He had style and swagger. All white suit, pocket kerchief, and a cocked hat.
There are other licenses.
Does anyone else here fear the combination of facial recognition + domestic drones?
Magnetic Sponsoring review
I think that "every 10 floors" approach is optimal for average case.

Basically, E(number of drops) = E(number of drops for 1st egg) + E(number of drops for 2nd egg). We know that E(number of drops for 2nd egg) = 1/2 the difference between two drops of the 1st egg, and E(number of drops of 1st egg) = 1/2 the number of intervals, and 100 = the number of intervals × the difference. So, we're minimizing x + y, knowing that x × y = 100. Since the problem is symmetric, x and y must be equal, namely 10, so "every 10 floors" is the correct answer.
This is pretty fucked up. So now anyone in the world can expect to be sued in the US on base of US software patents? How do you release anything in a situation like this. Then there is the burden of going to a court in Texas? How in the fuck they expect that a Swedish company hires lawyers in Texas? Just how much would that cost? Also this is going to beyond any sanity. Practically you have to stick to some common "protected by a big company" technology, else you run the risk of inventing something new (on your own), and running into some broadly worded patent.

This is actually contrary to "protecting innovation". If you actually innovate, you run the risk inventing something that someone already patented, and then you are fucked. Under such circumstances its much safer to just not try to innovate...
You cannot say "but it's obvious" on a court a law when there's a lawyer in the other side being payed to to point you're wrong. I'm pretty sure the MAFIAA lobbyists will try to make a compelling case why it isn't obvious. So this might become useful when there's an IP reform bill circulating around.
Yup, I remember when I was learning Python, before I ever wrote any real tests, all my modules would be littered with:

if arg[1] == 'test1':
print func1(a)

elif arg[1] == 'test2':
print func1(b)

elif arg[1] == 'test3':
print func2(a)

...

Eventually I found it was way easier to stick this in a _test.py file :)
Then enjoy living in a stack overflow-less world, since that's what we'd have if we followed your rules.
I think he did a decent job answering. However, /r/Android is being needlessly confrontational and cynical.

For instance, this question from your linked thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/ww982/iama_patent_e... was answered satisfactory. There is a difference between

"a plurality of heuristic modules, wherein: each heuristic module corresponds to a respective area of search and employs a different, predetermined heuristic algorithm"

and

"searching different sources of data wherein you search each with a method that makes sense for its contents"

But the replies from random commenters and vote totals would have you believe the opposite.
Open source is a sustainable way of making software a zero money cost though. The contract is basically that they allow you to use the software on the basis that you might give some value back in the form of patches, bug reports or even just asking intelligent questions on their forum or paying for commercial support. Even if you don't they don't really lose anything.

A huge amount of OSS is fairly "developer facing" too, with possible exceptions of stuff like firefox of VLC (few people would imagine paying for a media player or browser today).

I agree though that bad FOSS evangelism may be partly to blame, if you tell everyone to "use Linux because it is free, all software should be free!" without explaining that price not the important part of the equation and you are a software developer yourself then I guess you can't be too surprised if people see that as endorsement to pirate Photoshop.
New light bulbs may be harmful to skin
I believe the user, "majorapps" failed with his or her submission. Judging by the green name, and the two earlier submissions, he or she is new to HN.

I'm a bit surprised that posting content with just a title is allowed, though.

EDIT: There we go. Text has been added. Still seems to have been intended to be an URL at first, though.
You need to stop listening to yourself and start listening to your users.
I think this is the wrong part of the puzzle to worry about. Pick whatever you're familiar with for the basic CRUD stuff. The two more complicated bits are a scalable backend and probably some reasonably "hip" interactive frontend (i.e. JavaScript). Whether that's something to worry about from the start is another matter…
Personally I think this development is actually a good direction. People need to feel the pain before they react.

So far privacy has mostly been attributed to "some internets movements". But if everyone (incl. politicians and their families) are impacted, privacy should hopefully become a more central issue for policy makers.
Another example was VisualHub, a Mac front-end for ffmpeg video conversion. The author, Techspansion, EOL'd it in 2008 and released a "code dump" as open source. Someone tried to pick up the pieces and form an open-source version called FilmRedux, but it was last updated in 2009.

Techspansion, however, was a good citizen and when a Mac OS X Lion broke VisualHub, he released a patched binary, so I'm still able to use VisualHub four years after it was EOL'd! :)

http://www.isquint.org/
Because the decision has flip-flopped a few times, but at the moment Microsoft has settled.

(http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-05/microsoft-settles-f...)

MS has lawyers, and money, and time, and thus for them to lose is concerning. (Not saying anything about the applicability of this patent to Mojang.)
Or you might just "enrich" the data with some behavioral information. Maybe one twin favors vanilla and the other strawberry ice cream.
I'd argue this is already to some extent culturally accepted, but mostly only in an "arts" context, and not generally in any formal discussion like medicine. But in general culture, people often do seem to view, e.g., the alcoholism of the absinthe-cafes era, or the drugs of the Beatniks, or the LSD of the 60s-70s, as a type of personality and lifestyle that may, in some cases, be at least worth respecting if not imitating. Mostly relates to the arts, although there are a handful of other examples, such as Paul Erdős's well-known amphetamines usage.

It seems like it does need a "why this helps me be productive" hook to convince people it has an upside. Either you need to be an artist and go for a "helps my creativity" angle, or else you need to be in some kind of focus-needing occupation and use drugs you argue improve your focus (amphetamines, off-label usage of Ritalin, etc.). Although, oddly, steroids for athletes don't get the same cultural free pass there.

I think people probably will find any concept along these lines more threatening than neurodiversity (possibly for good reason). People "wired differently" often grew up that way, so there's a sense in which you accept that's who the person is, and both they and others have gotten used to them being that person (in some cases). Most such groups are also a smallish percentage of the population, and you can't really "opt into" it on purpose, so it's a fairly fixed set. Parents aren't worried that their non-autistic teenager will one day decide to "experiment with autism", so there's less need to stigmatize it as an option. But nearly anybody can choose to become addicted to heroin, and a significant percentage of people who do, might decide it was a mistake, yet find it hard to get back out of the addiction. So it's a more "dangerous" concept in a sense, because anybody can opt into it, but possibly not opt back out.
Nearly Transparent Polymer Solar Cells
Notch should mobilise some of those millions of players.

(http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml)
I wonder how many frames per second the film is running at it always seems old films don't quite get motion quite right.

Look at him walking and the dog too they're walking way too fast very unnatural but really it's not much of a difference I guess.
Mac app had a run rate of over $1m its first six months, per this interview: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-08-26/tech/30036420...

Who knows what was happening internally, but on the surface: strong team of 5, $1-1.5m revenue their first year, tremendous reputation and another product in the pipeline. What more could you ask for to make a long term go of it?
redis: https://github.com/antirez/redis/
In a support email, someone demanded that we refund his money because our app was a piece of crap. The app has always been free. I told him this and he retorted that he had jail broken his phone, and doesn't pay for apps.
How about this solution: It's an egg. It will break from the hight of even 5 feet. The answer is the first floor.
Well frankly, as a aero/mech engineer I'd definitely pull out the UTM and the aero chamber. Your vice grip isn't going to be enough. [For those wondering, first the aero chamber to determine Cd and terminal velocity. Then the UTM be used to determine the compressive strength.] After that I'd scan the other egg in a 3D scanner and generate a super accurately detailed model. Once the model is ready, it's just a matter of plugging these values into Ansys explicit dynamics or Comsol multiphysics and find out the exact height at which the egg will break. Granted, you might require a bunch of the world's fastest super computer clusters and a few days to solve this problem, but hey you have a very high accuracy and precision. [Probably +_ 1cm even].

But yeah, since the author has stated it's a math problem we've just left it as a thought experiment.
Was it photoshopped?
Actually, I don't quite get why users are so upset about this. They said they would keep releasing maintenance and security updates, so hopefully, I will be able to keep using this app for quite a while.

Because the thing is, I think this app is quite wonderful the way it is right now. I don't need any more features. As long as I can keep using it, I will keep being happy with it.
I live where a house with two bedrooms costs more than a million. I'm certain half a million would significantly change my life.

I just don't need such a house.
The funny thing is, they probably should have priced lower. If you look at their rank history on Mac and iOS, they saw big grossing rank bumps the few times they dropped the price.

Maybe that's just a short-term effect (yay, sale!), but based on the week they sold Sparrow for $4.99, there's a good chance they would have made more long term.

App store economics are weird.
Right now the 16GB version is sold out on Google Play, while the 8GB ships in 3-5 days.

https://play.google.com/store/devices/details?id=nexus_7_16g...
optimizing the average case is (in my experience) more common in optimization problems ... the author should say is that the number of floors required to break the egg follows a uniform distribution

Then again, optimizing the worst case performance can be done without worrying about the underlying, and unknown, distribution of the lowest egg breaking drop.

If we start optimizing the average performance, then we need to assume something about the distribution (is it uniform? exponential? is there a bump in the middle?), and different distribution will have different optimal search strategies.

Looking at the worst case keeps the problem algorithmic, the version you propose would be more an exercise in probability calculus.
Shh.. Sparrow for Windows was just a few weeks away. http://tmblr.co/ZWzfbyPpHG3B http://t.co/OBeYi3Zp
The people objecting to this on the basis of hypocrisy are making an obvious error and should know better. The population of people complaining about how they were wronged by a corporation has different characteristics than the population of skeptical comment writers.

Stop pattern matching and start thinking.
I apologize. I should have been more specific. I'm not a developer. Just an 'idea guy' with a budget. Vetting dev shops to build prototype, some specialize in Django and others in RoR. Just would apreciate and advice that may be beneficial. Thanks
1. Brains are similar. How similar? We don't know until we tell someone else about what our own brain is doing, and find out that their brain works the same way. Some things might only work for one person. Some might work for 20% of people. Some might work for 99% of people. Nothing works for everyone, of course. Are you imagining that, instead of articles like this, we only see articles about things that work for everyone? That would be an empty set.

2. Anecdotes are meant to be used as grist for Bayesian updating. What I personally gleaned from this article was a slightly heightened confidence that your brain works at a certain speed whether you are pushing it to work or not, or worrying over its success or not, or whatever else--so it's better to just allow your brain to work, than put yourself in emotional turmoil over its need to find the solution. The technique itself (though see #1) isn't the important part of the article; rather, it's the knowledge found through the use of the technique--even though it was only implicitly stated!--that made the article valuable. The technique was only relevant in the way that a description of the experimental process and apparatus is relevant to a scientific paper: for rigor and replication of the original discovery.
I'm just a regular user, and I have not flagged anything in the first place, I'm afraid.