skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First, A country is legally obliged to follow the laws of all countries in which they do business. For legal purposes, "doing business" means actual physical operations in a country or knowingly and deliberately selling into a country. This is basic international law.

Second. That is not how import/export law works. I do not have time to explain how it applies, so Google it.

Third. Your second statement is correct.

Fourth. Your third statement is not correct. Apple can sue HTC in the U.S. b/c HTC does business in the U.S. Apple chose to pursue this case in the ITC b/c it is asignificantly faster way to achieve its business goals (namely, interfering with a competitor's sales of a product). Patent litigation through the court system is a very slow, years-long process, and could take long enough that Apple would be on the down-cycle again.
I don't often call the grammar police, but this could use some work.
The early days of the App Store were a gold rush. People were able to make a good chunk of money off a $5 app. That brought in investment dollars (angel or internal corporate development) that allowed prices to be lowered because there was less direct need to have revenue and costs line up. Over time, that pushed the prices down lower.

Customers became accustomed to getting an amazing app for $0.99 (or even free), so they complain at best and refuse to buy at worst if the price is much higher.

Apple never provided any guidelines on pricing. The market went where it wanted to.
He doesn't write down the math in the general case for the number of floors F(e,d) that you can check with e eggs and d drops:

F(1,d) = d

F(e,d) = sum k>0. F(e-1, d-k)

The sum can given a closed form solution for e > 2, just like for e=1 and e=2.

Another thing is that he directly solves the quadratic, but in fact n^2/2 < n(n+1)/2 < (n+1)^2/2. So taking the square root of twice the number of floors will get you either give you the number of drops you need with 2 eggs, or will under count by 1. It's easy to check which that is.
I signed up for Facebook a few years ago so I could see a (worthless) video someone posted. Haven't used it since. Google+ I signed up for to see what it was like. The only reason I don't use it extensively is because most of the people I know use Facebook. I absolutely love the 'circles' and integration with everything else I do with GMail, Calendar, etc.

But after explaining all this to those who use FB, for some reason, they don't seem to get the advantage which just seems strange.

All that said, one group I told one group I do web dev for that the best way to work with me would be through Google+. After one or two weeks, management decided they wanted to look into using Google+ themselves and everyone I worked with has their own account and use it daily.
What's more, you can't fairly assess the full effect unless you account for the usable content that exists out there and would not exist but for copyright laws.

I know it's popular on sites like this one to act like copyright laws are strictly bad, that no work's creation ever depends on IP laws, etc., but an honest assessment would be that some works require IP to exist, while some do not.

So, after creation, copyright hurts Wikipedia's ability to incorporate a work, while some works would not exist but for copyright. Which effect is more significant, and is that a net positive or negative for Wikipedia?

Well, that would take real research.

You know, the kind this economist didn't do.
Microsoft explains Windows 8 Store: Free 7-Day Trial, lower pay-cuts and more
Veilig en goedkoop: Quick Parking Brussels Airport
"Ads or subtracts" is a delightful description of the profit proposition for Google products :-)
Talking about run rates in the first 6 months is iffy. The run rate difference between #5 and #26 (where they are now on the Mac App Store) grossing are huge. Order of magnitude huge. How much of that $500k was when they were featured and making their initial splash? What's their daily run rate now at #26? What's the trend? I'd wager it's been down steadily if it's anything like the iOS app store.

I don't know about the Mac App store, but on the iPhone, their daily revenue was in a state of decline. There is SO much gravity in the app store. Stuff falls-- it's the natural state for almost all apps unless you have an ARPU or some marketing hack to counteract it.

I'm not saying they were in a crappy position-- though I'm not sure that a $2.99 / $9.99 email client is a good business bet for 5 engineers. Email is complex/weird and users will want support-- with a LTV of $2/$6, it's really hard to afford to support them well. You can't afford marketing. You're competing with $200k comp packages for your team.
Limited liability refers to the liability of the shareholders/investors for the obligations and judgements against the company. Their liability is "limited" to the amount of their investment.

Contrast with a partnership, in which the owners/investors are subject to potentially unlimited liability.

For example:
LLC A settles a lawsuit for $10 million. Investors B and C's liability is limited to the size of their investment (we'll say $100).

Partnership X settles a lawsuit for $10 million. Partners Y and Z are each liable for the $10 million (the opposing party only gets to collect $10 million once, he simply can choose to go after either or both partners for payment). The opposing party can go after Partners Y'z and Z's personal assets, unless they declare bankruptcy.
A spinoff of the Noisy Typer App, Sure to annoy all
The author writes

>This past week I was faced with a difficult problem. A really difficult problem... I kept going and in another hour or two, I was getting epiphany. I had the solution to my really difficult problem.

I am happy that he solved his problem, but was it really that difficult if it could be solved in just a few hours? How long would it take him to solve the most difficult problem in his domain?

In my experience it might take as much as a week even to identify the relative difficulty level of hard problems, which tend to be refined, restated in a simplified context, expanded out to boundary cases etc. To me it seems like "just looking at it" is the very first step in a longer process.
As the hardware buttons are generally lit, you could de-emphasise it by removing the light. I had a Motorola java phone which did just this.

The failure of the Apple hierarchical model is it's app-centric, unlike Android which is activity-centric. In a perfect world we could have software back buttons which worked like Android, but I wouldn't trust developers to implement that consistently.
There is no such thing as a real-life brogrammer. NONE of the hundreds of developers I've seen are wild, drunken frat boy caricatures. What we are seeing is a generation of programmers who are much younger and varied than ever before. We're seeing some changes because of that (e.g the startup hub in the Bay Area has moved from MV/PA to SF)

The previous generation of developers had to go out of their way to be interested in computers. You had to order some computer kit by mail and put it together. This kind of selected for a certain personality that came to be known as "nerdy".

My generation (currently in their 20s) has grown up with off-the-shelf PCs and the Internet. We built our first websites in middle school thanks to Geocities. We learned CSS and Javascript from MySpace themes. Programming became accessible to a LOT of people.

Because of this democratization, there is a wider range of personalities among programmers of my age. There are athletic guys, girls who love to go clubbing and yes, guys who would fit in at a fraternity. I think the "brogrammer" label is a mischaracterization of this younger demographic of programmers who all of a sudden don't fit the stereotype that's existed for decades.
Did they go so far as to pay someone to jailbreak for them? Or buy a jailbreak utility?
What extra features? Github is hosting and a nice UI.
You are referring to a "choice of forum" clause (which is distinct from a "choice of jurisdiction clause").

Choice of forum determines where any disputes are held.
Choice of jurisdiction determines what state's laws apply (if the dispute involves a matter of state law).
The author fails to apply his argument to itself.

Many programmers have many different interests, and don't conform to any particular stereotype, and that's fine.

But, some programmers do fit particular stereotypes. Some of them do have the "brogrammer" set of interests. Some of them want to share it, not to counter nerd sterotyping and get even with them fratboys, but because they enjoy watching sports, getting wasted, and the company of those with similar interests. And that's also fine.

Assuming that anyone who likes these things must be "Shallow, emotionally repressed, sexist and valuing testosterone poisoning induced displays of bravado over trying to do things that are actually cool," that anyone who goes out with the purpose of getting laid must be stupid, is just as "idiotic and potentially damaging" as assuming anyone who programs must be "Not A Real Man".
So... he just randomly writes to people demanding refunds for stuff he didn't buy? And somehow imagines that 'refunds' will be processed on purchases that never happened?

Are people really that a) stupid and/or b) evil?
Taking photo and video on a retina iPad is an awesome experience. It is literly the best evf in the world. Being able to see a 1:1 live view of the resolution is amazing for video, and is equally impressive with photos.
Spot on I'm my opinion. I have both, and the nexus is great but I prefer the iPad in so many ways. The price point for the nexus is the thing that initially made me buy, and if it wasn't for the price I would never have gotten an android device at all.
BioWare Senior Effects Artist builds Obi-Wan’s Lightsaber
It's because Mojang sells stuff in the US via their website.

I also assume Mojang could just completely ignore it if they have no assets in America, although I guess they'd be a risk of having minecraft.net seized as .net's US administered isn't it?
I guess I could be called an addict.. to video games. Even made some $$$ with it, traveling around Europe for free.

But damn straight will I not drink more than 1 bottle of wine a week. I just don't need it. I enjoy a nice bottle on the weekend, but I just don't give a damn for more; I have too much fun activities in my life to choose from that don't benefit from being tipsy/drunk.

What do you live for?
The method of choosing the best of two algorithms is itself, a heuristic, so I can't see how that would get around it.
Generally under international law, a consumer cannot be the "importer" of record because there are all sorts of fun obligations that come with being an "importer".

Carrying stuff you bought on an overseas trip through customs is not "importation" for legal purposes.

Also, export restrictions are different from import laws.
Export laws are applied by the seller's country. The buyer does not have to comply with export laws.
Import laws are applied by the buyer's country. Both the buyer and seller must comply with import laws unless the buyer is an "importer of record" in which case only the buyer must comply with import laws.
BTW, how good is FR technology these days, especially in edge cases (blurred face, angles, etc)?

Also, any pointers to algos/open source tools?
Like J-Live, kicking it again, only with a slight twist.

This is probably still the most relevant write-up: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4270768
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Your comment would be more valuable if you said what about them makes you suspect they are fake.
I don't make that assumption; I have a number of programming friends who enjoy watching sports and getting wasted - but they wouldn't call themselves a brogrammer and neither would I.

"Shallow, emotionally repressed, sexist and valuing testosterone poisoning induced displays of bravado" was mentioned as behaviours that the word bro "seems to turn up around", not as a blanket accusation. Do you have any suggestions on how I could have worded it more clearly?
The author states that the solution is: 14, 27, 39, 50, 60, 69, 77, 84, 90, 95, 99, 100, which takes at most 14 drops.

In fact, that is a solution, not the solution, for this also works, and takes at most 14 drops: 9, 22, 34, 45, 55, 64, 72, 79, 85, 90, 94, 97, 99, 100.
It makes me sad that so many people see the internet as just a tool for advertising.

At least there's ad-block, I guess.
How can you help non-programmers understand the development process?
The U.S. specifically forbids debtor's prison. You cannot be thrown in jail simply for owing money to someone. European countries copied this right from the U.S. when they got around to modernizing their legal systems.
Uglier than an iPhone app on the iPad? That's impressive.
Unlicensed or shared space should lead to the biggest innovations, just from the fact that there will be fewer restrictions from carriers, and we can see more interoperability between them.
Entitlement and Acquisition
The problems, according to them (and I have no reason not to believe them), is that right now the burden of proof of the obviousness of a patent application is on the patent office, not the other way around. And that this obviousness can only be proved by either citing an older patent or a certain type of publication, or a combination of those, not what the examiner "just knows" - or what it looks obvious to him/her or any other technically skilled practitioner, as the basic law says.

According to them this "presumption of patentability" (as I would call it) was a policy change that happened not very long ago, as before the policy was to reject as many patents as possible.

I would also make a wild guess: That this change was lobbied for by the IP law firms, because they are the only ones which really benefit from it.
> When I buy software, I don't only buy into the software I get, but I support it because I think it has a bright and better future.

Eric S Raymond made this point in "The Manufacturing Delusion" (http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/magic-cauldron...). The value of software to a user lies more in the expected future value of updates than in the immediate value of using the software. This is true regardless of whether you pay for the software up front, and regardless of whether you expect to pay for the updates.

I would add this: the cost to a user of software is also much more than its price. To use software means investing time and effort into it, regardless of whether you paid any money for it. Then, as time goes on, you come to rely on the software's presence--you build your habits around the assumption that it is available, and bear the risk of disruption if it suddenly isn't. These hidden, non-monetary costs can be far larger than the monetary price paid, if any.

The problem is that the implicit non-monetary costs on the user side do not represent any benefits for the developer. That the user invested time and took risk doesn't give the developer anything--they only gain the explicit monetary price. But the implicit future benefits expected by the user DO translate directly into future costs for the developer--just as much as the present benefit corresponds to past developer costs!

So there is a big mismatch between what people intuitively feel they are exchanging. On the developer side, Matt Gemmell's comment quoted in the article feels right: "you paid, you got software." But on the user side, the story feels like "I spent time and wrapped my habits around this software, in expectation of its continued improvement, then found out to my surprise that no improvement is coming."

That said, I don't have any new shiny ideas on how to solve this problem. In the end, I agree that the developers of Sparrow owe the users nothing. But I also see why the users are reacting as if somebody took something away from them that they thought they had.
A friend of mine sent email saying that he'd characterise it as "migration of other types of smart people into fields historically dominated by nerds" which I think I agree with, and matches what you're saying.

I just want to make sure that people recognise stereotypes for what they are, and maybe to steer a few people who might otherwise consider one of the stereotypes as something to aspire to towards that finding your own personal path among the varied possibilities.

If anything, I think finding out in the long run that this article was entirely unnecessary would be my favourite possible outcome, but I suspect sadly that "mostly unnecessary eventually" is the best we're going to get.
As a matter of economics, $25 million in one lump sum is always better than the same $25 million spread out over more than one year.

With the lump sum, you can do whatever you wanted to do, now. With the "annuity", you must continue earning the annuity each year, which significantly limits your options.
This is not true for me. I'm happy for the Sparrow team, but I got upset because I feel when I purchased their product, I got into an implicit, unspoken contract with the developers that while the current version of the product was good, there would be continued development and it would become something wonderful next year, and even better the year after.

Now I'm just sad the product will rot over time.

I know the commercial model is broken for this, but I would have been willing to pay more upfront and pay again for periodic major version bumps, assuming pace of development continued.
I find it interesting that this article puts forward the idea that people who are having problems right now (ex : those with autism and addiction problems) might turn out to be ideal candidates for some future technology. Maybe they'll just sync more easily with the brain interfaces.

With that kind of logic, though, someone could make a case about how having a low percentage of psychopaths could be a good thing for times that call for that kind of behavior (probably in some war situations). And I'm not talking about their psychopathy being beneficial to them, but them being beneficial to their tribe / village in those situations.

Anyhow, I don't have a particular example in mind and I'll refrain from giving a bad example instead.
Tell that to Ben Johnson.
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The article doesn't really provide anything specific - oAuth is actually hard to implement and the reason for variations is typically down to both dev cycles and differing opinions on security elements.

We see a lot of openAuth implementations (we provide infrastructure for it: http://www.3scale.net) and we try to help people be uniform, but the spec still has room for interpretation.

I think there'll be convergence - things like http://www.ifttt.com/ will encourage people to the straight and narrow - but it'll take time. Agree with some of the other commenters - not sure how much this article really helps: a detailed laundry list might be better.
As you would with any standard. If h.264 were open source you couldn't fork it and have it work with existing h.264 devices. It would be a new standard.
I agree. Today people are more interested in being famous than being private. Thank the tabloids.
Relevant post on MSDN: https://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsstore/archive/2012/07/20/mak...

The $1.49 may not be very far from $0.99 in real terms, but I feel it significantly increases resistance. I'd be much more willing to spend $0.99 for an app I want to check out than $1.49. Wonder what the rationale behind that figure is.
I would guess that most people don't quite grasp what the data could be used for and assume that it more secure than it (probably) is. people also seem to assume that stuff that is marked "private" on facebook is actually private in the sense that nobody will ever be able to access it.

Stalking murders I imagine are pretty rare and will only affect a small number of people, even so I imagine people who know people who have been murdered because of facebook are somewhat more skeptical of it.

Having your credit card stolen isn't actually such a big deal, you can usually just cancel, get a new one and have the fraudulent charges reversed.

Having stuff like your preferences in porn or the conversations between you and the person you are cheating on your spouse shown off to the world, that stuff can hurt.
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How do you do that objectively though?

I mean, consider Apple's bouncing lists patent. When you use it, it's very intuitive, and any moderately skilled software developer could implement it in an afternoon. So it seems obvious, but the question is then - why did nobody do it before? Touchscreen devices existed previously, so that seems to suggest that it is non-obvious. Synthesizing a drug is not hard or novel, but arriving at the conclusion that this is indeed the correct drug that is the reason that pharma patents exist. So the same could be said of bouncy lists.

So how do you determine the obviousness of this, objectively? The most straightforward ways are prior art and to to consider claims from previous patents. It's mostly objective and is hard to argue against, as opposed to one patent examiner's opinion on obviousness.

The problem with software patents is that the benefits of a 20 year monopoly far outweighs the benefit of having it released to the public - which is not true for all patents. If Apple couldn't patent the bouncing list, they'd still have bouncing lists, and it would still be an advantage to their devices, even if everyone else copied them. If you couldn't have a patent on a drug that was going to take $1 billion in costs to bring to market, yet would only cost pennies to synthesize, you wouldn't even bother trying. So the question is instead, how do you objectively determine which industries require patent protection, and which don't. For the rest of the industries, copyright and trademark laws are more than enough protection.
Interesting - I have the exact opposite experience. I was amazed at how easily I could integrate multiple accounts in to one interface and switch between them seamlessly. But it sounds like you had an unusual (I hope!) experience, so that could be causing it.
I'm still not a fan of Android on a phone (I have a Galaxy Nexus lying around here and I don't like it), but the "bigger phone" feel of the Nexus 7 makes it work great. I think Android fits a lot better on a device of this size/form factor than on a phone, and I feel like the reverse is also true: I love my iPhone, but I'm not digging iOS on a tablet at all. It feels clumsy.
We can say that most rich people (as most Americans think of it) were self made or born into it. I think you're right that people should have better perspective on wealth. You should be able to find happiness with more wealth than 99% of the planet. On the other hand, a person earning $50k in New York City is making more money than 99% of the world. But I don't think either of us would call him rich. Context matters. A LOT. Source: http://www.globalrichlist.com/

Re: #2... I bet you're right. I bet many (most?) of them had pretty well-to-do parents, a free college education, easy access to credit, friends-and-family investors at their fingertips, etc. It's not a fair game by any stretch, but I think that's a different discussion.
The claim that every applicant should get to "make their case" to a human may sound nice in theory, but it would be a monumental waste of time.

It's easy to get a stack of 500 resumes, and many of those resumes are from people who legitimately lack the skills to be productive. A company committed to talking with every applicant would never get anything else done.
> Open Source.

I actually think this is the opposite. Open source users tend to be more informed and thus more understanding to software issues. They post bug reports and even talk to devs when required.

Someone who bought a piece of software will complain until it works as expected.