skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my reading of the Reddit thread I did not take away that patent examiner just gets to decide that something seems obvious. Instead, the reasoning seems to be that if no prior art for an invention exists, it could therefor not have been obvious. This seems sort of sensible as it is very hard to determine if a truly novel invention is obvious. Hindsight bias being a core part of the problem. So they seem to have moved away from a more metaphysical problem of determining obviousness to just trying to determine if an invention of novel, which at least has some grounding in objective reality.
More on Sparrow and talent acquisitions
Posterous was a great service until a couple of years ago. It was such a neat idea: combine blogging with mailing lists. It was simple and easy.

Then they began to have multiple problems. Email notifications would fail to arrive from time to time. Various over-ajaxed functions, including composing a new post and various administrative pages, stopped working on one or another browser. I had to use Chrome whenever I visited my family blog because things would not render properly in Firefox. Then I had to go back to Firefox because files wouldn't upload properly in Chrome. I suspect the problems had to do with the introduction of the "Spaces" thing, which AFAIK never really took off. I didn't even bother to complain because by that time, I'd stopped Posterous for anything important anyway. Then they were acquired by Twitter, and around the same time, most of the problems I'd been experiencing mysteriously went away.

It's sad to see such a great service slowly killing itself. First they ruined a perfectly working product by slapping half-baked social-networking bullshit on it, and then they got acquired by a company that has little to do with email blogging. On the plus side, they seem to have stopped developed "Spaces" since the acquisition, which probably helped prevent the further introduction of bullshit and unstable features.
Legal fatalism is one of the few responsible comments one can make about a case like this. We don'k know much about the case--the facts are sealed, and we have no context--and I'm not willing to second guess a judge based on one sided, incomplete, inflammatory comments leaked by an angry first-party. But by all means, pass judgement and cast the first stone yourselves. It wouldn't be the first time vigilante justice has been performed.
There's obvious sampling bias here. The companies in CrunchBase are not chosen according to objective criteria. They're chosen because someone visited the CrunchBase website and added them.

It's not a big surprise that the only semiconductor companies anyone bothers to add tend to be the successful ones.

And, your company can be a cash cow even if it never gets acquired or has an IPO. I suspect this applies to a lot of consulting companies, but what would I know?
I hope they publish a post-mortem when all is resolved, it'd be an interesting read. I remember hearing that they had a fairly complex mix of MySQL, Riak, and Varnish caching, in what sounded like a reasonably well-thought-out design.

Also, there's probably a fail-whale joke in here somewhere :-)
The secret online gun store that will arm anyone
Wow, a kid who built a reactor at only 14 is the perfect candidate for Thiel's program. I wonder how he managed it.
Source code, or it didn't happen.
So sexual assault is OK as long as they are kids? I have four kids and often think courts are ridiculously stupid for trying them as adults.

However, two of my kids are daughters. As the victim, their rights should trounce the rights of the attackers. That doesn't necessarily mean naming them, but if they aren't going to be named (which is usually the right thing to do for juveniles), they must be appropriately punished.

Unfortunately, we are missing whether they were appropriately punished. From her perspective, I'm sure the answer is No, but objectively, we don't know the answer.

I can't imagine how much it would suck to be a judge.
Interesting. Would you be happy to provide links.
Why is this on Hacker News? Because Twitter is tangentially involved?
One big issue with gathering this kind of data over the phone is the frequency cutoff on voice-only lines—above a certain frequency (I want to say 4kHz? maybe I'm misremembering), the information is lost. It's basically as if you took a Fourier transform, zeroed out everything above the threshold, and then transformed back.[0] For humans (and even computers) trying to interpret the sound as language, that's not a huge problem, although you might lose some of the higher formants. But for an acoustic analysis that's trying to do voiceprinting—in this case to detect Parkinson's—this could be a big problem.

(I'm also irritated by the glib "99 percent success rate" but I just ranted about that on a different HN post so I won't go into it here.)

[0] Why do this? So the phone company can compress and send a lot more data over the same amount of internal bandwidth. Come to think of it, it's kind of related to how wavelet-based compression works.
Show HN: eLearning for teachers, not CIOs
Soichiro Honda

Gary Vaynerchuck
If you like this sort of thing, Fog Creek released their 2005 Aardvark'd documentary for free on YouTube last year: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NRL7YsXjSg .. not balls off the wall exciting but an interesting look at a team of interns developing a product.
It's a good bet that whatever company takes money from your US customers on your behalf has enough ties somewhere in the chain to the US to be forced to drop you as a customer.
Even if the 8GB version is sold exactly at cost, that still gives the 16GB version (the one that's actually sold out) a decent margin.

How are the other hardware players supposed to compete now?

For starters, provide capabilities that the N7 lacks like an SD slot and rear camera. Of course, they'd also have to stop screwing up the OS with their skins and commit to a reasonable upgrade policy.
It's not a movie but I'd definitely recommend the book about the Boo.com fiasco: http://www.amazon.com/Boo-Hoo-Dot-Com-Story/dp/0099418371 .. I believe it was Europe's biggest dot com era implosion and you can almost see why from page one. An enjoyable read.
Don't do the investment model. You're asking for trouble, especially with family and friends involved.

1. Get part-time or full-time job

2. Moonlight

3. Become profitable (albeit low income)

4. Work up to go full-time

5. Done

Be honest with yourself if you can't make a few thousand dollars online to self fund then your certainly not going be able to make real money with a business online.

Your also asking all the wrong questions, the only question you should be asking is: How can I make a dollar?
Being able to buy much the same weapons legally in the US kind of negates the whole drama, doesn't it?
I have very strong feelings both ways about this.

On the one hand, I believe in severe punishment for violent crimes and generally dislike juvenile protection for teenagers. Additionally, it isn't clear to me how broad the gag order was, but she should certainly be allowed to talk about what happened to her (though, if you agree with juvenile protection, I could see a gag order on anything which identifies them).

On the other hand, justice isn't only meant to serve the interest of the victim - which is something easily forgotten (which is why victims don't dictate the punishment!). What sentence best serves their rehabilitation? What best protects the public? What is an appropriate deterrent (gag order seems to kill that side of it).

It's complex, yet easy to get caught up by emotion and suggest that they themselves should first be sexually assaulted, then executed. I guess I'm trying to say that we don't know nearly enough about the case to have a valid objective opinion and even if we knew enough, most of us (myself included), don't know nearly enough about law, psychology and sociology to have an objective opinion.
you could argue that apl (1964) had a similar idea, although a different syntax?
But as you pointed out, it's desktop and cloud. It's not strictly desktop software. The special sauce is in the cloud, that's what makes Dropbox unique.
You don’t think of it as writer’s block
Or could it be that dealing with atoms, vs. bits requires more OpEx and CapEx?
Why is it dead. The Sparrow team won't work on it any more... but they weren't going to work on the Windows version anyway. If you were writing it, why not keep doing so?

Obviously you might have to change the artwork, since that belongs to google now. Otherwise, it sounds like this is just an email client that YOU wrote.
> Imagine a creativity cap.

For the first time I feel I need to say this minor rant...

I had to stop right here and double take on this choice of words. I had to read twice because I was worried that there was a suggestion of artificially limiting creativity with a device.

It's so sad because I can imagine such a limitation being brought upon a populace in my life. At the same time I always imagined that such things as Gibson's or Bank's neural interfaces might provide more than just a collar.

The optimist in me has a hard time looking forward with this.
My point is that she knew what it was beforehand. She did a cost benefit analysis, and decided she was willing to pay it.
Technology Dream Team
Do you have any idea of the trauma and agony the poor child must be going through? Admittedly I do not know anything more about the case other than the link, but to call her irresponsible and immature is insensitive to say the least.
HARGA BLACKBERRY TERBARU
HARGA BLACKBERRY TERBARU JULI 2012 - Daftar HARGA BLACKBERRY TERBARU Baru Bekas, Semua Tipe Hanya Ada Di Sini ^_^, Berikut ini adalah HARGA BLACKBERRY TERBARU bulan Juli 2012
Yanis Varoufakis on the Anarcho-Syndicalist Organization of Valve Software
http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Software-Development-Cooperative...

http://alistair.cockburn.us/
Textmate is a terrific example.
The solution doesn't violate or bend the guidelines given (using four straight lines). Assuming that some strict rules exist seems to be a cultural behavior - probably ingrained from school, where doing things creatively can get you in trouble. </sociologist>

On the other hand, if you have seen these kind of problem before, you already have a hint that the solution involves something unusual.
No, they just ask, express their interest and I usually try to explain that it isn't a very good idea to jailbreak - especially if you don't know what you're doing.
She's a juvenile. Maybe her sentence will be as lenient as the rapists... I doubt it.
As a non sparrow user, this is exactly how I read this whole story. Google buys up 3rd party gmail mac developers group.

This seems like an obvious case of products/teams that should work well together. Something about synergies and all that.
Posterous seemed - like twitter - perfect because of it's simplicity. Email meets blogging.

I think spaces made it sort of awkward and was disappointed that it essentially stopped development since being acquired by twitter. I'm starting to wish these acqui-hires were more focused on improving the product rather than just getting the programming team to work on completely different products.
A dick move is thinking the developers should be indebted to you for life for giving them them a one time payment of money which is less than a couple of rounds of beers.
> Although, oddly, steroids for athletes don't get the same cultural free pass there.

Sports isn't a results-oriented field. It's a deliberately artificial environment. How you play the game is at least as important as how many times you get the ball in the goal. If you get the ball in the goal the wrong way, that's often worse than if you hadn't done it at all.
How is this "hotter than Apple's iPad?". Every spec listed is described as worse than an iPad (except for price).
Solution already exists: google music. Or store your music on the cloud, or backup your computer, or use Pandora.

Good luck with your web based, social, radio but open source thingy-ma-bob.
Microsoft Vancouver (no longer in Richmond for whatever reason) seems to be a "parking" space for people that are waiting to get H1-B.

Amazon Vancouver, on the other hand, seems to be here "for real".
In Germany there is no such thing as fair use. Either the images are free or they are not in the German Wikipedia.
> The solution doesn't violate or bend the guidelines given (using four straight lines).

Yeah; which is partially my frustration. The other part is that I actually went pretty in depth compared to how much time I would expect most people to go at it. (About an hour with a pencil and paper journal. Figuring out what couldn't be the solution with "You're starting from one of the dots" as an implicit axiom.) I was actually about to write a script to brute force the solution after I ran out of ideas, until I decided to save myself the time and peek at the solution.

I think you can imagine how that turned out.
This is explained well in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4272973
Or cutting off one's access to credit card processing, though I note that Wikileaks managed to deal with that in the end.
Lenovo is awesome, except they seem to pride themselves in having the worst displays on the market. It's downright bizarre.
This is a really fascinating article about an interesting topic, but he spends around a dozen paragraphs explaining the background, and only talks about his answer in the last three. Would have liked to read more about his opinion.
Nothing new of value in this post. It seems a rehash of his last post.
"Sort of thing" for classes of things like computers, coders and offices. Otherwise Code Rush and Aardvark'd are not comparable. I suggest Aardvark'd is not worth the time. Code Rush is of interest both historically & for it's insight into the values and attitudes of some damn effective programmers (these people practically made the web accessible for all in a few short years).
That makes me wonder two things:

1. Is it bad (or unfair) for the IRS to use technology to fight tax fraud? I mean, every dollar not collected from a tax evader is an extra dollar that must be collected from a law-abiding citizen. It sucks for the person with the pool, but if it means lower taxes for everyone else, I think that would be a good thing.

2. Google Maps is public, but what obligations does Facebook have to reveal photos that are posted privately (i.e. to friends), to law enforcement?
The women in this article have a very different experience to women in Government jobs in my country.
Here they have 9 months fully-paid maternity leave most of which is usually taken after the baby is born.
Also when they return to work they will have accumulated a lot of annual leave.
For the first 12 years of the child's life they have the flexibility to take a lot of parental leave (which is unpaid but doesn't involve any loss of pension entitlements).
All of which is great except that nobody is usually taken on to cover for the missing employee. So the remaining staff (especially the conscientious ones) get dumped on and the taxpayer gets an inferior service.
Your camera as a phone (not the other way around)
I liked Posterous for its e-mail posting, connection to YC, and easy-ish theme editor. Unfortunately, my experience has degraded significantly since I first started blogging regularly on Posterous, with most of the degradation occurring after the acquisition. For example, my embedded YouTube videos demonstrating my Kinect-powered home automation system are no longer embedded in my older blog posts! Modifying old posts isn't cool.

In addition to that, I get a 404 error when trying to manage the posts on my "space," and elements of the web-based post editor are no longer working. Once a post has been edited, it can take hours for it to show up on the blog's main feed. Finally, Posterous pages load very slowly these days. I stopped reporting bugs when I found that my reports were reaching an outsourced customer interaction company rather than an actual Posterous team member.

I wish the Posterous founders well on their future work at Twitter, but needless to say, I'm in the market for a new blog host.
People being sued for patent infringement often go on the offensive, filing reexamination requests with the USPTO in order to invalidate the patent.

One problem is that the courts, especially those in East Texas, do not care to wait for the reexamination procedures to finish, so you can infringe on a patent later found invalid.

It would be very interesting if Notch got their lawyers to supervise a crowd-sourced search for prior art, though. I hope he does so!
How is it that only the girl's name is released and published in the article? Seems like if the two guys pleaded guilty, we should know all of the parties involved.
The guys who run MELPA and me (I run marmalade) are talking and we hope that there can be just one repo in the end. It may take us a while to combine the best parts of the 2 systems in the right way.
That doesn't work. Putting it in the EULA is not enough. You would actuallly have to reject customers with Texas addresses.
The Ribbit Rollercoaster: A Founder’s Story From Concept To $105M Exit
I think Matt Gemmell put it really well:
http://mattgemmell.com/2012/07/21/entitlement-and-acquisitio...

"Sparrow’s acquisition is a success story. Indie devs make a great product, build a customer-base, and are rewarded with a buy-out from a big company and they get new jobs with that company. It might not be what your particular goal or end-game is, but it is a success. I’m really happy for them."

I personally think that you need to give it a shot and try to monetize your product but if after some time you find out that this is a harder and thougher nut to crack than you thought - you better rally some bigger force behind you, pivot, sell or just give up.

The guy at sparrow decided to sell and this is a very legitimate exit strategy.
Again, that's why we want to add signatures to packages. This is probably always going to be a two tier system though (some people are likely to not add a signature). There are other possible security systems as well, like MELPA could use github and say "yes, this package is authorative from there".
Vancouver is known as Hollywood North :). This happens probably due to tax-benefit/break and government support for the film industry (correct me if I'm wrong) that makes movie production cheaper in Vancouver.

And yes, there aren't many big hi-tech companies in Canada. Most of them are at most a few hundreds employees, which I supposed is big enough considering the ratio of population compare to US (roughly 1:10).

I can't imagine there's a hi-tech company with 1k employees in Vancouver. Very very hard. I don't think there's even a 1K (Canadian) company in Vancouver regardless of the sector.
That day is coming: http://t.co/E1oURlQ9
I think putting the burden onto the applicant makes a lot of sense. The applicant is the one with the more information concerning the patent, why shouldn't he explain the obviousness first?

The applicant should talk more about the decisions made during the invention process, and tell us about why, in addition to the how. If there are more obvious alternatives which are all deadends, the working solution may be considered not so obvious.
Fay -- A proper subset of Haskell that compiles to Javascript
paulsuttder, sure email me.

In general I found when I was starting out, radio ads delivered the best ROI, and internet ads were down there with yellow pages ads.
I have heard from some reliable sources that Microsoft is quite happy to pay for design+development of applications that are built for their new devices (wp7/8). Perhaps you could reach out to them and see if they would acquire your work. It's not the best free market alternative, but it might get your product to live and prosper. Imagine, if Sparrow (Microsoft eMail Light) gets included in every new tablet? Sure, they've got Outlook, but maybe users would dig a lighter (simpler) new alternative?
YouTube Protects Protestors With New Facial Blur Feature
Two people pled guilty to sexual assault, in a public courtroom that we all fund to some degree.

You "hope grace prevails"? Are you trolling?

Grace for the victim, or the attackers? Whom, if they were a couple years older would have their names publicly available.

Again, we all fund this, there's no reason we shouldn't be able to get the information other than "it's not allowed now".
would be cool to see somebody build a twilio app to link on the article and collect voice samples right off the page
Video Highlights Toronto vs Liverpool 22 Juli 2012
Kali ini saya akan memberikan informasi mengenai Video Highlights Toronto vs Liverpool 22 Juli 2012. Laga melawan Toronto FC ini merupakan laga pertama dalam rangkaian tur Liverpool di Amerika Utara, sekaligus debut Brendan Rodgers sebagai pelatih The Reds. Selama di benua Amerika, Liverpool akan menghadapi Toronto, AS Roma, dan Tottenham Hotspur.
I wonder what would have happened if the Sparrow team would come out and say "guys we're going to close we don't have enough money". Would all the guys who are yelling "I feel betrayed" support Sparrow with a $10/month recurring plan?

I doubt it.

I personally think that Sparrow had a chance to sell their business and capitalize on all of the hard work they done so far, let's not forget that this is their business and not a hobby. They need a end game.

I won't try to go into details as this is probably all speculation, but monetizing a client in a saturated market with bigger competitors isn't easy. I can understand that many of you 'invested' $5-$10 in sparrow and think you're entitled to free support and lifetime slavery but let's chill a bit.

So you've lost $10, big deal. I'm sure you guys have invested more money into more lousy software and haven't say a god damn thing.

Sparrow team, good luck, great work, happy to hear that another indie developer made it. Hope to hear more success stories in the future.
Any country needs tech sector because it creates not just jobs but nice jobs.

Jobs that pay well, for interesting work, in non-restricted environment. To get whose you don't have to sacrifice your soul to mindless institutions nor be eager to consume bullshit. Jobs you can just work.

What else gives you that? Therefore, tech jobs should be priority #1.
I quote from the article:

"The Associated Press does not normally report the names of sexual assault victims, but Dietrich and her parents say they do not want to shield her identity and want her case to be public."

The the AP is still bound the court order and probably can not name the perpetrators.
Well, with ads on the blog one better be milking it for every drop there is.

I've stopped taking any HN-linked blog seriously if they have ads on them, because it's hard to decide if they are serious with their opinion/stance or just baiting to get impressions.
someone start a kickstarter for this girl.
Very true. The main points are:

- Some businesses fail to ask for a "fair" price (to be profitable)

- Some markets are doomed and have not enough paying clients (in Sparrows case: the market for e-mail clients)

Businesses either just fail or, if they are lucky, get bought (if the product is good, that is).
Hi xiaoma, I'm the product and tech lead at a place in LA. Email me with more info if you're still looking for a front-end gig.
What is it about bash specifically that isn't satisfying your needs?
How to Survive an Affair Review
Victim's rights? More human policy-making? I wish.

Apparently not, guess the GP must be right and the victim got what was coming to her.

It's insane how detached we've become from the real world. Arguing about patents and iOS vs Android and open source. Two people pled guilty to a rape, within a court that we all pay for, and somehow there's a random smart-ass that wants to sound smart with the legal fatalism angle on this.
Once I moved to NYC, I jumped on the Tumblr bandwagon and haven't looked back. My Posterous is gathering dust these days. Especially with the Tumblr iOS app -- it's beautiful and effective.
Totally awesome. Love this piece!
Open Office killed Open Office.