skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting read, but for my part, I'm much more interested to learn _how_ to start the process. That is, tips on how to position your company to make it a candidate for acquisition. (Apart from a great product and name of course - got that). Ways to flag potential suitors? And ways to make it clear that you are looking for buyers? etc. Any pointers or text to look at would be much appreciated.
It's not as though the Eiffel Tower was built in 1889 or anything...
Can't it be Hotmail v2? There looks to be vestiges of Hotmail/Live Mail everywhere. So, a better question is: is this just added features and a reskinning on top of Hotmail?
You are correct.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/30/adobe-acquires-efficient-fr...
> We very recently moved in the US from a first-to-invent to a first-to-file system. In the former, if you can provide evidence of the genesis of the invention before the filing of the opponent's patent, then that may invalidate their patent.

No, you would need to prove that your documented development of the invention predates the other party's documented development of the invention. Filing date does not matter in that case.
I had the same first impression https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4310349
Is there a tldr of what they actually do? I couldn't make heads or tails of it from their website.
You sound personally offended that someone didn't find facebook ads profitable.

Sure, you may have experienced some sort of success, but you made 10k revenue - not profits (without directly correllating facebook visitors to purchases) and running a garage sale is an entirely different case study than selling an app or online product.
AnyPerk(YCW12) partners with T-Mobile
I read something where the goal is to mimic the offline community of students at a real university. By having a large group of people all taking the class at the same time, you maximize the chances that if someone asks a question on the forum, someone else who's at the same point in the class will come across it and be able to answer it.
I guess the golden lining of the story is that it’s not that people have stopped playing, they just switched to electronic keyboards for ease and expense reduction.

Always sad to see old technology go away. (ie anyone read a hard copy of a book lately?)
The best place on the web to learn anything, free
This report really doesn't seem to have got a handle - it was the same person who sent those later tweets.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4317259
Theoretically. In practice, Mario and Zelda are games where a rather blobby avatar is guided through platforms, labyrinths and puzzles, where some of said puzzles consist of autonomous moving blobs that try to touch you, and which you can defuse by touching them with your active end (the front--mid-sword-swing--for Link, the bottom--mid-jump--for Mario.)

Saying that the games are about princesses and mass-murder is a statement on about the same level as saying that chess is a game about military tactics: it might look decorated that way, but it's not what you spend your time thinking about when you're playing, and it's not what draws people to the games.
Cult Figures
How to Pitch Investors Over Email
Nice response, and glad to see a good one. We know how it goes, but I agree with timeout length being an issue for us as well. It would almost be better if we were 'errored out' so our app performance wouldn't lag.

Might I suggest something like Chaos Monkey? Real-time APIs are highly vulnerable to DDOS and other traffic conditions because they'll so readily accept new connections, might be something worth throwing on the crew regular-like. :)
These companies have real business models and charged serious money to provide value to big corporate companies.

How is that a bubble? Who is getting fooled out of their money?
Ditto. I'd like to know if it is a process that really only starts once someone has noticed you, or if it is something an owner can push for. If so, what is the best way to do this?

Right now, my strategy is to pursue integration and use it as an avenue to acquisition. Not sure if it's the most viable method, though.
13 awesome and scary things in near Earth space
Preface: I hadn't considered technical books and all comments are about stories, both fiction and non fiction.

As someone who has grown up on the internet for the last two decades there is something decidedly different between a website, a blog, and a mobile app when compared to a book. It's something ephemeral I can't put my finger on.

There is magic in books. From a child's earliest days books provide a window to other worlds and realities. Some of these worlds show us glimpses of greatness and happiness others show us the darkest depths of human sadness and despair. We are given characters to love and hate along side characters to use as reflections of ourselves. In all of this there is a certain magic to books. They provide judgement free escapes for the outcasts and loners; Later in life they provide the community for those very same outcasts and loners to come together.

I realize I sound naive and possibly unrealistic. Also, I acknowledge that this community in particular tends towards efficiency and has a tenuous relationship with the humanities. However, all that aside, this feels like it cheapens the reading experience.

I hope this doesn't become the norm for authors telling stories. While perhaps a bit more hyperbolic than necessary this all feels akin to A/B testing The Sistine Chapel. Let's not go around letting MBAs and Middle Managers fuck with art.
Chrome supports profiles through the UI now, check out the settings page (under the "Users" category). It makes switching between them (and knowing who you're using) easier by adding a user icon/switcher to the top-left of the window.
> Also, another thing I’m particularly proud of is that getting this thing up was completely free.

... By pirating the one thing you could have bought. I don't know if I'd be bragging about that, bub.

I'm happy you're excited. It's great, really, but as someone who makes money off of web development, I extend some hearty profanities for being the kind of person that figures it's better to leave someone like me without food on his table this week so he can start a pet project all the while bragging about it.
How to Have Younger Looking Skin Without Having To Spend Vast Amounts of Money
I don't think the flying car or jetpack is really that crazy of technology. We can easily make quad-copters for personal transport. With enough investment, it could become a commodity good.

But, think about how bad the average driver is. Now realize that they're driving in two dimensions. What happens when you add a third? Terrible, terrible things. That's why we haven't invested in any infrastructure in flying cars, and without that infrastructure, it ain't gonna happen.
The folder approach is handy for getting things out of the main inbox, though. Labels/tags/categories are useful for searching, but for wholesale organizing you can't beat the folder.

Of course, I say that, but my current method uses the One Big Pile system and I delete year-before-last every January.
I feel offended by your 4am statement... I really like getting up early and I don't know why so many people try to get up late - but I would never say they are not normal.
I tried to send an email from Outlook.com but failed the Captcha four times. I tried the audio and thought maybe I was having a stroke because I couldn't make out a damn word.

Clean design though. I'm sure it actually sends email too. I'll try again later.
Are you so naive as to think that the only reason people do startups is to make money ?
You can do all that in the iOS version, the Android version is a pretty direct port of the iOS version. The changes you list are basically necessity when converting to a touch based interface.

There are no L/R buttons, so you need to be able to swipe between characters. It's a mobile game and the screen is smaller so zooming into secrets is needed, and you need to be able to tap on enemies to select or else you'll just automatically attack the first person in the field.

I don't exactly agree with GP but I do understand where he's coming from. I enjoyed FFIII for iOS and got quite far into it, but it's hardly a touch based game. 99% of the time you're manipulating a virtual joystick.
I think you could make an argument for a 'war on paedos' (for example) being as useful as the war on drugs, crime, terror, or whatever.

The difference with this one is that you can conduct your 'business' entirely online, with almost complete anonymity. And what liberal solution is there that doesn't involve children or agitating the mob?

Technology is definitely the wrong thing to look at, I agree. I think, historically, it would be like blaming speakeasies for allowing people to drink illegal booze.
Ray Wenderlich's website is a very valuable source of information for incipient iOS devs. A search:

http://www.google.co.za/search?sourceid=chrome&client=ub...

yields his website as the first few links.

Kudos to this guy for giving a head start to plenty of indie and starting game devs. I can attest to this as I used Cocos2D to produce my iOS game (since pulled because I have been too occupied this year to hack on iOS: last year of high school = major pressure to do well; very competitive environment). But this is beside the point: Wenderlich's tutorials are awesome, well-written and comprehensive. They won't get you production ready games in a flash, but they sure do help.

From an Indie point of view, iOS game development is considerably more accessible than Android game development by virtue of the following facts:

* Cocos2D is a robust, free and easy-to-use environment; a fully-functional, stable, Android analogue does not exist.

* iOS code is 99% universal (just works on all devices) whereas Android code really isn't. For instance: OpenGL sample code from the Android development guides (http://developer.android.com/training/graphics/opengl/index....) does not work on 2 of 4 android devices I've tried it on because it targets deprecated API's and methods which are unusable using the newest SDK versions (it was version 14 or 15 at the time; largely unimportant). Imagine how disheartening, demotivating and demoralising it is to see that "official Google endorsed code" just doesn't work.

* I have personally tried AndEngine and Cocos2D for Android. Neither is up to scratch with iOS Cocos2D.

tl;dr Ray Wenderlich is indirectly responsible for a ton of Indie games on the App Store, should be thanked, and no, an equal (easy-to-use portable, robust, _decent_ framework) doesn't exist for android (though there may be analogues).

edit: formatting
Oh nice, I clicked on the authors name from "A Mathematician's Lament" and didn't see anything. I guess they don't show them if they aren't published yet:

http://www.amazon.com/Paul-Lockhart/e/B0024JEH2W/ref=ntt_ath...
This looks fantastic. Excited to see where it leads. I would have loved something like this when I first set out to learn Cocos2D and Box2D. I went through weeks of trial and error before really figuring things out, and this would have been a great primer.

Really nice job.
In other words, Twitter can and may end your account on a whim, and unless you can drum up sufficient attention, you'll get PayPal'd.

How can Twitter still not have explained themselves? It makes them look extremely shitty, and they've had ample opportunity to come out of this looking like well-behaved guys. Maybe they didn't find it a PR priority.

Recall that this is not the first time something like this has happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2647130.

- - -

EDIT 50 minutes later: They explained themselves: http://blog.twitter.com/2012/07/our-approach-to-trust-safety....
I failed the captcha twice and got locked out with the message that I could “try again later” (but still gave me another captcha to try). Awesome.

EDIT: I tried visiting outlook.com again a few minutes later and, hey, it looks like I have an account! Hope I didn’t miss any important welcome steps (like, I never got to pick an outlook.com email address)

EDIT: ah, but I get the captcha again when I try to do certain things. Still haven't solved it — can’t tell if I’ve been rate limited. I’m definitely human :)
> Sarov has been the site of a big Russian Orthodox monastery for centuries.

Sounds like Anathem.
Apple in China: iPhones make Chinese eyes light up
Facebook shares plunge to new low
"If you're using our JavaScript libraries, your website should not be greatly affected by our downtime other than the data that will be lost."

I wish that was true. But since the library doesn't handle service downtime at all gracefully, we're stuck with the callbacks not firing -- something we depended on.
Heyzap (YC09) hiring iOS developers to build out our popular app
This sounded more like some movie maker pitching a scene for a sci-fi movie. Except they are actually serious.
I like these commercials. I can see why others might dislike them but I would much prefer to see these during the commercial break than Apple's more famous spots.

The "I'm a Mac" spots were arrogant. They flared rivalry and caused Mac vs PC flame wars to increase in intensity. And now-days with IBM contributing consider open source man power the 1984 spot is ironic. These new commercials are mellow, fun, and maybe a bit bland. They no longer position Macs as a social signal but rather as a quality computer. Which is the correct tactic for Apple to take when targeting the larger computer market.
It's not just SkyDrive. They also actively filter evil links out of your email. You know, like http://piratebay.se/.
> I can even predict that in ten years Steinway will bankrupt like what Kodak did.

I'll take the other side of that bet.
You offend easily.
He titled the post "how I made 10k" - making it very clear that the "point" of the article is that FB ads made him money.

The people who are asking about his profit are just asking him to clarify and validate his title and entire premise for his argument. I would say that's not missing the point at all.
Firstly, it isn't about prior art so not sure why you are bringing up an LG device. Secondly, nobody is going to mistake an iPhone for an LG Prada. Nobody. But a lot of people are going to mistake an iPhone and a Samsung Galaxy S.
Different strokes for different folks.

I realize this is Hacker News, but Outlook isn't the worst [email or otherwise] product someone can use.

Edit: The comment was originally:

"I've been using Outlook by choice" Sorry, but I just can't wrap my head around this. You say you have tried other clients and yet you keep coming back to Outlook? Did you only try a few web app clients a few years ago and not sense? Have you tried many other fat desktop and/or command line clients? I personally only interact with Outlook when my employer pays me to spend the extra time required to use Outlook. I am utterly baffled by your statement. Like when someone says they get up at 4am every day, but they are not in the military. Sure there might be some okay reasons to do that (a baby, international trading, long commute), but most normal people would still inquire for more information as getting up at 4am by choice is not normal.
I really should have chased this further when I was looking into it 8 years ago. Is really easy tech, in principle. The sensors are cheap and easy to DIY and the signal analysis isn't too hard as long as you have the sensors aligned well, which is the major issue for making a generic device, really.
I'm confused. In the features list: "Prism forces you to use the correct element for marking up code: <code>."

But the site's index.html is using only a pre tag:

<p>The Prism source, highlighted with Prism (don’t you just love how meta this is?):</p>
<pre data-src="prism.js"></pre>

It looks like the script is automatically expanding this, inserting <code> tags along with the named file, but I don't see any documentation for doing it this way.

Also, if anyone is as confused as I was about why there's a "data-src" attribute, apparently it's an HTML5 data attribute: http://ejohn.org/blog/html-5-data-attributes/
Full circle.

Remember that the original 'computers' were people who performed computations.

If you recall Feynman's self indulgent book 'Surely you are joking' he has a chapter where he describes how they would write algorithms which were then run by humans operating adding machines while working on atomic bomb related problems.
I went on vacation to Cuba last winter with my family plus my mother-in-law (approx 60 years old) and several of her friends (all around her age). Of the six or seven women on the trip, three had iPads, including my mother-in-law, and they were on them constantly. They love their iPads.

That said, I asked them what apps they really used the most (angling for a development opportunity just like this article hints you ought to) and the answers were pretty uniform: web browsing, photos, email, and e-books. In most cases they were just using the Apple-provided apps for these purposes.
It's also all kind of broken for me in a 1024x768 window. Scrolling the article scrolls it over top of the title but under the bar below the title. meh.

Good for wildfire!
So how do you handle SSL for custom domain names?
In Outlook.com, click the settings icon and you'll see a feedback menu.
Yep exactly. I want to keep the videos per se as env-agnostic as possible to not get in the way of the Haskell.
Behold the power of monopoly.

edit (lol, microsofties down voting this comment)
Unlike turkers, grad students produce much cleaner data and also see the data first hand. Which is important. I consider mturk/offshore as a necessary evil, rather than a panacea that will "make research easier and speed it up".

If data quality matters and you can avoid mturk - avoid it.
Leading biologist says soft drinks are evil.
I mentioned it in an answer to a different post in this thread. The short answer is I use Redis via Resque.
What an arrogant comment. Can you tell us what it is you dislike so much about outlook and why, instead of inferring that the user base is unenlightened?
I'm probably somewhere close to Dr. Kinsey on such issues: very libertarian and open-minded. I have no problem with pornography. I also don't necessarily judge people for having feelings. I appreciate the logical and honest post.

What I have to ask is whether the people in these photos, even the very "soft-core" ones, know that their pictures are being shared over the Internet and used like this. Did they give consent, and did they understand the full implications of that consent? Did they get paid? Did they sign a contract?

I think I'm opposed to this kind of thing because I'm a libertarian. I see it as exploitation and deceit and privacy violations levied against people who are too young to understand or that cannot defend themselves.

I've debated people on this topic once before, and it seems to me that there are a lot of cyber-libertarians that will go straight to the mat to defend privacy rights except here. Why don't eight year olds have privacy rights? What if your doctor photographed you, told you it was for medical purposes, and then posted the pics to a gay porn site? What if a TSA screener posted millimeter wave video of you (essentially naked) to YouTube? Isn't this a lot more invasive than Facebook selling your friend graph to a marketing company? Yet most people would find that very invasive and deceptive -- a violation of their rights -- if they hadn't given consent.

And no, the dark stuff is not wild conjecture. I understand that the majority of pedophiles wouldn't be into it, but it certainly does exist. Over at Reddit /r/onions I read a while ago about a forum that exists on the Tor darknet called "Violent Desires." There were lots of "I cannot un-see" kinds of comments, and many warnings about "do not go there... you do not want to know." Child trafficking is quite real as well. The world is absolutely filled with unbelievably dark stuff (in other areas too) that normal people sometimes have a hard time believing: torture ("extraordinary rendition"), blatant fraud to the tune of billions of dollars, human trafficking, slavery, off-the-books unethical human experimentation, and so on... My experience in other areas of life suggests to me that the reality is probably worse than I care to imagine.
Brilliant. Two mindsets of possibility or doubt. I'm reminded of the concept of resistance or the lizard brain http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/01/quieting-the...
As a side note, if you've never taken apart a piano, I highly recommend it. You get a specific understanding of its inner workings, even if you think you already know how it functions.

It seems like those "negative value" pianos would be a good source for reclaimed wood for woodworking projects. I can see turning an old upright into a solid end table or something.
For all those interested in emacs haskell mode this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6xIjl06Lr4 is about the best screencast I've seen covering the new stuff the Chris Done wrote. I'm using emacs prelude and it's a great environment right out of the box!
Sorry, but how do I offend you?
I do like a great deal of Gnome Shell, but what they very badly broke is when you have more than one of a certain window. I always have several terminals, and on my dual screen desktop have two browser windows, two emacs windows, two eclipse windows (one on each screen).

Gnome Shell really doesn't help in that scenario, nor does Unity when I tried it. (And Unity's app menu is obnoxious.) A taskbar has been the best UI solution found so far, although hopefully someone can improve on that.

The people most likely to be seriously inconvenienced by the poor multiple window handling are the ones most likely to be able to moan about it.

Gnome 3.4 doesn't let you use Gnome Shell with the "classic" Panel they provide. More annoying for me is if you use a classic session and try to put a panel on the left then it draws the text vertically which is almost unreadable. Modern screens have far more horizontal space available so why won't it go wider and draw horizontally?
Everyone seems to be getting confused about patents vs. design patents here. Can anyone explain whether design patents are at play here(the rounded corner one for the iPad from 2004) and how prior art affects design patents? Also, what if the prior art was in secret prototypes?
Some of them probably think they can single handedly change the culture.
Chaos monkey isn't for testing peak bottlenecks, it's for testing random failures at the per instance level. For bottleneck testing I expect Netflix has another tool with a similarly simian name, but that's not the topic of discussion.
Doesn't the media do a pretty good job of that already?
Maybe not, but the project is still considered 'alpha' after 14+ years, and generally not recommended for use unless you're curious or involved in development, or as they put it: "not recommended for everyday use".

Looking at the major releases was just a quick (albeit crude) way to try to understand how it's progressed.
Well, Git or Mercurial are equally powerful and both are DVCS (Distributed) which SVN is not. If anything, mercurial is said to be easier to learn if you already know SVN, but both are similar. Git use UNIX philosophy of many complementing tools whereas Mercurial uses a monolithic approach, a single unified powerful tool.
Mind-Bending Factories