skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> And secrecy is a patent that potentially never expires.

Do you seriously believe, no one else can come up same/similar functionality/product? I would like a system where they keep the patent secret(nothing is published) for 5 years, and if in 5 years no one comes up with same/similar idea, patent is granted for next 10 years (rather than current 20 years from filing), otherwise patent is not granted. My guess is 99% of software patents will go away.
Except the human brain has pattern recognition. It's possible that these waves are elicited if your password is simply close to the actual one, maybe the first couple letters or somesuch. Then the algorithm could use that information to narrow down the range it has to check; essentially a game of warm/cold.

This might be completely off, since the article is pretty vague, but it seems like a possibility to me.
My views on this front have always been the same as this article. If you're really going to commit to building an application for a platform, take the time and learn to do it correctly. Yes you could do it faster in a language that you're more comfortable in, but in terms of the experience of people who don't care if you're more comfortable writing in JS or HTML, it's worse for them (usually not always I know)
If you squint, every database problem is a caching problem. The only reason we store the relations in their up-to-date form is that it's too expensive to continually replay the transaction log from the beginning of time.
Consulting: Will always require more of your time to make money.

Products: Long term, residual income and the ability to build up an email list that you can market to with other offerings.
List of IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) April Fool's Day RFCs
Someone apart from me found it amusing, Phew!
What is the deal with mobile 3d support in MonoGame? Does that only exists in dev branches?
For Samsung, It’s Not The Money, It’s The Opportunity Cost
> Those prior things you speak of were absolutely terrible. I had all those devices and they sucked compared to the iPhone.

One of the reasons they sucked, was because they had to...

They were done 2, 5, 10, 20 years before the iPhone, iPad, etc came out... When we had CPUs, screens, drives, etc, that were inferior and could not handle the same load or work that modern hardware does.
Have you spent time in many Gehry buildings?

For example, the EMP here in Seattle looks pretty weird from the outside. I can see how you'd call it unpleasant/memorable based on pictures or driving by but once you go in it's great. Some beautiful interior spaces, well organized, works well for the purposes I've been there for.
They found that the nexus s infringed the bounce back patent. But this is impossible as it use vanilla android which has never implemented this behaviour.

So it looks like kinda rushed for _some_ decisions.
>large upfront time investment

A per-server setup fee and a fee on any sys changes is reasonable, as is having the onus on the user to work with the sys admin service to test failovers etc. You could provide add-on services, like scaling advice and implementation etc. Since a lot of sys-admin is doing nothing (thanks to so brilliantly setting things up in the first place, right!) that time is billable to clients for services. That covers your second problem.

This is the kind of idea I'll feel sad about for not having a crack at myself, but I'd be happy to see it out in the wild.
Just read the linked presentation/paper page instead. Less fluff, more details.

https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity12/feasibili...

They claim a 15-40% decrease in entropy over a pure brute force attack. The blip about 'already popular' isn't there. That said, there are gaming oriented neural interfaces on the market. An earlish one for example [1]. They're all basically just commoditized EEG machines. Would not say that they're 'popular with gamers', but they're out there.

[1] http://www.ocztechnology.com/nia-game-controller.html
Easily manage all your social network settings
Copying is competition in the same way that, if you want to attract your friend's girlfriend, you should buy copies of your friend's entire wardrobe and dress like your friend, talk like your friend, and walk like your friend.
I think because Facebook does something very smart: they keep it jumpin'. They change things on an almost weekly basis, which everyone complains about, but it keeps them coming back even though the overall experience became sour for them years ago.

They can't keep that up forever though, people will move on. But I disagree with the idea of another site in the same mold (Friendster, MySpace, Facebook) that will move in and conveniently replace it. I think people are starting to realize those things are just a pain in the ass and will move to semi-anonymous networks like Twitter or Reddit for more stress-free entertainment.
Asking an Investor to sign an NDA - Good Idea or a Bad One
I don't see any failure there. They have relatively few installs, but near top revenue, meaning: nearly everyone have already installed their stuff, and stuck with it, and spend a lot there. They just turned into an established business, maybe no longer a 'startup'. Falling growth rate is inevitable if you have already conquired the world.
Was that an actual 'closes circuit when depressed' button or was it a switch? Either way, flipping a power switch unexpectedly is bad. Lots of video game consoles had power switches. You shouldn't flip the power switch on a modern computer either. But giving the power button a press is safe in every single device I own or am aware of.
I wonder if there's any economic theory on circumventing or avoiding a pricewise race to the bottom that would be relevant here.
3-way Extruder and Colour Blending Nozzle on Reprap 3D printer
I develop software, and want to be right below the line of the average user (25% of some segments of my market are still on XP).

Though am planning to update soon...
Hi, I'm a poster on Hacker News and I can read.

Here is the core claim from the '915 patent:

A machine implemented method for scrolling on a touch-sensitive display of a device
comprising:

1. receiving a user input, the user input is one or more input points applied to
the touch-sensitive display that is integrated with the device;

2. creating an event object in response to the user input;

3. determining whether the event object invokes a scroll or gesture operation by
distinguishing between a single input point applied to the touch-sensitive display
that is interpreted as the scroll operation and two or more input points applied to
the touch-sensitive display that are interpreted as the gesture operation;

4. issuing at least one scroll or gesture call based on invoking the scroll or
gesture operation;

5. responding to at least one scroll call, if issued, by scrolling a window having
a view associated with the event object based on an amount of a scroll with the
scroll stopped at a predetermined position in relation to the user input; and

6. responding to at least one gesture call, if issued, by scaling the view
associated with the event object based on receiving the two or more input points in
the form of the user input.

Here is text from the paper (http://www.sonycsl.co.jp/person/rekimoto/papers/chi02.pdf) that accompanied this 2002 video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waSXkJBKT1s#t=2m20s) of this exact same behavior:

Figure 12 shows a map browsing system. The user scrolls the map by sliding a ﬁnger
along the sensor surface. If the user touches the surface with two or more ﬁngers,
by changing the distance from the ﬁngers to the surface, he/she can control the map
scale. Simultaneous control of scrolling and zooming is intuitive, because the user
feels as if his or her ﬁngers are ﬁxed to the map’s surface.

It is true that I don't understand patents very well. But, those are the same thing.

Since you seem to understand the patent system well enough to drop generalizations about the HN population, would you please explain how this can be and also why it should be.
Why would they, when these apps make buckets of money and Apple gets a nice chunk of that at no cost to them?
If you'd like to see the fall over time, here's a graph:
https://skitch.com/webwright/eq2es/angry-birds-rank-history-...

The blue line is the overall grossing rank over time.
Refund?!
Slot machines are a much better analogy imo. Mindlessly pulling/tapping and getting rewarded at steady intervals. You continue to shove in your money so you can continue to get rewards.

Arcade games on the other hand were still fun and challenging even if you took away the psychology behind stuffing in quarters. (no one has console slot machines)
I think ATX changed from a switch to a button, and ACPI added OS support for intercepting it.
Bought it, I don't know if you are interested in the feedback of your readers, but will probably post one on this topic in a couple of days.
My opinion is that without the £3.5 billion a year that comes from the UK license fee, and the infrastructure and resources that the Beeb has built up over the years due to that income (plus what they also get from general taxation), they would be hard pressed to make these kinds of programs.

As a license is required for pretty much everyone who wants to watch any live TV in the UK, its always worth the trouble for any license fee payer to ask them to justify why BBC content is (apparently) available to non UK based viewers but not to those in the UK . http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/complain-online/
Reddit Thinks I'm a Spammer
Just because Samsung perhaps did something morally or legally questionable it doesn't make the patent insanity any less insane.
Meetup: "The Next Big Consumer and Enterprise Business Models"
Moleskine notebooks make for a great mousepads from my experience.
A similar question was asked on Quora, and there were some pretty good answers. http://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-work-with-Elon-Musk
OK, sensationalistic headlines aside, this is what is actually going on.

Using EEG, you can look for something called a P300 Event Related Potential (ERP). This is a positive deflection from the baseline activity in the brain signals approximately 300 milliseconds after an anticipated event occurs. Note two key facts about this:

1) P300 actually varies by person; it can appear sooner or much later than 300 ms and have different amplitudes. Because of this, a training phase is required to train the classifier.

2) The P300 happens when an event happens the subject is anticipating or recognizes, so they have to be primed in some sense. For instance, the researchers asked subjects to think of an imaginary PIN, then flashed single digits at them one at a time and tried to infer what the first digit of the PIN was by that. Because they were thinking of, say, 1234, when 1 flashed on the screen, a P300 may have been generated.

What the researchers did was interesting, in that they made the case for potential malware in a consumer BCI game. Their accuracy rates weren't that great, however. This is a far far cry from nefarious agents pulling secret info from your brain.
Also the Pritzker pavilion in Chicago. It draws you in and even if you are at the back of field you feel you are still in the amphitheater.
Since Snow Leopard there has been a steady decline in the quality of OS X in terms of usability. Mission Control is an absolute piece of crap.
Because of the short timeframe of the project we did all sorts of horrible things (like develop everything in the Windows platform code rather than split off a new NaCl platform directory). Getting it to the point of integrating cleanly means that someone has done a lot of tedious thankless work.

I imagine it's still in their interests to be merged with the main trunk. Maintaining one's own separate branch isn't fun.
Honestly one of the more impenetrable articles I've read lately. Just not very clear or well written. I'm not even entirely sure there is anything news worthy here. Just some dire need on Swisher's part to make a connection between PB and J and the famous peanut butter memo. That's not enough to justify an article.
Samsung's success should not be attributed to the fact that they copied iPhone and iOS design to some extent. Samsung makes great hardware and they simply made the best Android phones. They benefited from the strength of Google/Android ecosystem. It is ridiculous to claim that HTC and others are not doing as good as Samsung because they haven't copied iPhone and iOS enough.
Show & Thank HN: my friday night project turns into a venture
Does anyone have examples of good use cases for this? I personally can't imagine why it would be more useful than my full IDE, though I'm eager to hear how others might use it.
The routers do, though. Through BGP, AS's communicate location information to the routing infrastructure of other AS's. 15 years ago we saw the decline of "everybody knows everything" as the routing tables of core infrastructure simply became too unwieldy.
This case is about the right to sell what is analogous to the movie theatre, the projector, and the camera. Apple found a good way to package them together, and Samsung imitated this, but offered something nevertheless different: a more open and distributed system.

It is Apple and their App store policy that will drive the manufacture of cookie cutter Apps on their homogenous environment.
Could a 'Printable Gun' Change the World?
MobileWorks is looking for a Growth Hacker/Marketing Intern
Last friday night I hacked together FJunkMail.com and the following day posted it up on Hacker News - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4402220.

The response from the Hacker News community was really encouraging. I want to thank you all for that. I especially want to thank ChuckMcM for his idea to turn it into a way to send a postcard to your congressperson (and his helpful feedback over an email thread), and prasincs for his additional re-enforcement of that idea.

From all that I built https://postcongress.io over the course of this past week. And already it is turning into a venture. A colleague of mine recommended I contact advocacy groups. I've started doing so and have some strong leads and a meeting on Monday.

So, thank you HN.

And there is still tweaks to be done so I'd appreciate any feedback.
Once arm starts becoming powerful enough for desktops

Hysterical, considering the very first arm machines were desktops.
You can leverage App Engine's Channel API for some minimal collaboration techniques.
I've generally appreciated her writing, but I agree with you here. There's an emotional undercurrent.
Why Apache Cocoon is not so popular as it should be among web developers?
- Predecessor of server-side JavaScript, long time before node.js was born, you could do server side things in JS with Apache Cocoon(Flowscript is part of Cocoon since 2004 at least).

- Best template engine ever: XSLT/XPath (whatever templating system you are using in your app, it will always abe subpar to XSLT/XPath), thanks to XSLTC(XSLT to byte code compiler) it's also the fastest templating engine you can have

- Pipelines and built-in caching system

- Sitemap

- MVC

Those are features I love about Cocoon, I guess for someone else other features will be more valuable.

Yet I'm unable to find any reason why Apache Cocoon is not so popular as it should be.. ?
Let your existing users use your app/service for free, and only charge new users.
A lot of people do not understand what plagiarism exactly means. Of course, there are those who do and brag about it but there are a set of students who do not understand what it means to plagiarize. Plagiarism is a wrong path to tread and this should be explained - perhaps a course on History of Plagiarism by Coursera?
But... they took turnstiles out!
It could be bad news even for Apple users, since now Apple will increase the fraction of resources allocated to legal bullying (since it works) at the expense of making better phones.
Well, it is partially also that there are many people with different opinions. You seem to assume that most people here hold all the views expressed by the entire community.
> (e.g. a "Angry Birds" Roku box? That makes no sense)

Roku sells a Wii-like game remote [1] (with motion sensors) and pushes Angry Birds as the remote's demo app. It's perfect synergy using a recognizable brand like Angry Birds to sell your own stuff!

1. http://www.roku.com/accessories
But it's a small minority that don't like them. They successful because they're popular. If Apple removes them, people will freak out! And maybe even buy an Android device.
a lot of components could sensibly be upgraded by themselves

And here you people complain about Android platform fragmentation...
Neil Armstrong has died at age 82, NBC News has learned
>because they couldn't afford an iPhone

Why is it that it's really hard for some to understand that people sometimes--maybe even most of the time--choose an Android phone because they prefer an Android phone? With some iPhone models selling at $49.99 and with iPhone being on nearly all of the major carriers, people aren't "settling" for an Android phone.
I posted a very similar reply to a post a couple of days ago linking to the same article (uh..see EDIT below, this is slightly different article), submitted by the same person, who also happens to be the the author of the story (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4425673). It appears that post was either flagged or downvoted into oblivion, because it disappeared shortly thereafter (and after seeing this hit again 2 days later, I'm thinking it was pretty justifiable...)

EDIT: okay, so I missed a small detail, the other was about the MBP, this one is about the MBA. My bad..I guess.

Anyway, my experience has been largely the same as yours...I lost a significant amount of battery life when I upgraded to Lion, and apparently it seems like the problem is only getting worse.

The author replied in the other post that he would add Snow Leopard to the test, which should be interesting...I'm expecting that the difference between Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion will be huge.
Linux did "proper shutdown" type stuff, though for a long time it couldn't actually kill the power.

Unicies were probably similar.
> Now, some of those coins, in my gaming experience, were impossible to score

If you had better skills, you could get through the entire game without buying a single additional coin! ;)
This tea leaf reading continues to be ridiculous.

So, based on the trial outcome:

1.) Apple won, because they established the validity of their patents and that Samsung was guilty of willful infringement of many of them.

2.) Samsung won, because the damages aren't so severe to have made their strategy of ape'ing the iPhone a bad decision, and now they get to be mentioned in the same conversations as the iPhone.

3.) "Companies that innovate" won, because the jury has reaffirmed the patent system to protect companies from being ripped off.

4.) "The technology industry" won, because now mobile phone manufacturers will be forced to differentiate their products, hopefully leading to better designs.

5.) Apple lost, because in spite of the ruling, they've pissed off the nerd community by behaving like the 500-pound gorilla that they've become, instead of the scrappy underdog people want to root for.

6.) Samsung lost, because they have to pay out a pretty sizable amount of money, and are now going to be referred to as "that company who copied the iPhone".

7.) Google lost, because this will cause problems for other Android manufacturers, and many consider this case to be a proxy war between Apple and Google.

8.) The industry in general lost, because patents are fundamentally icky, and this case reaffirms the strong-arm strategy that companies (Apple in particular) have been refining to artificially hamstring their competition.

9.) The justice system lost, because mere mortals aren't possibly intelligent enough to understand a patent lawsuit, because if they were, obviously they wouldn't think patents could ever be valid.

10.) Lawyers won, because everyone involved got a massive payday, and there'll be a lengthy appeals process.

Did I miss anyone?

Thanks media, your insightful commentary on this complicated issue has been super valuable!
SAP gives startups millions of dollars worth of software. Here’s why.
You have interesting things to say, I'd like to hear more about the Google+ story for example, but your delivery (because you're so angry) makes it nigh unreadable.
This happened to me the other day. It's like I can't write ten words of argument on HN anymore without someone fainting dead away.

This seems like a good time to thank you for correcting many of the catastrophically inaccurate things I've thought over the years. ;)
Hi. Good question. Why did I write this book?

I think bdunn and robbiea's suggestions are valid.

(And, man, I wish pyre's suggestion that I don't need money was true :o) though I'm lucky enough to consider myself pretty successful at what I do, so I wasn't writing to make up for missing revenue.)

But, in addition to the residual income and, to a lesser extent, publicity angles, the initial spark behind writing it was the fact that I found myself being asked time and again about what life is like as a contractor/freelancer. Which meant that a) there was definitely a knowledge gap/problem to be solved and b) the repeated nature of similar requests meant it made sense to optimise how I shared what I'd learned over the years.

I'm well aware that no one gets rich from writing a book - so I deliberately didn't sacrifice any client time; I was able to (just) fit it into what spare time I had.

Along with all that, there's the fact that I knew I could write this book and wasn't intimidated by the task (I had the knowledge and the skills -- I used to be a national-level journo) and the fact that writing is still fun, so it was a pleasure to make.

Yep, that pretty much covers it.
The OP says that new design will be like their current setup, which (as far as I can tell) seems to attract employees well enough. Any comments from Facebook employees on how the "one room building that somewhat resembles a warehouse" works for them currently?
> I don't believe that it has ever been about minimizing costs.

At Facebook, no, it hasn't been. What parent is saying is that he hopes FB did some research on whether this will actually help or hurt productivity before risking the lifeblood of the company (engineer productivity).
I see you have an odd number of bullets. You seem to have left off the one explaining how the lawyers lost.
It is too preposterous to say people buy Android because they can't afford iPhone or people are not aware of Android ecosystem. On contrary, Android has become omnipresent. Market has been swept by bigger phones. iPhone is getting bigger and iPad is getting a smaller screen size all because of Android.
Do you really believe companies should have the freedom to clone successful products and flood the market with knock-offs?

Imagine if some up-and-coming auto maker started making cars that look exactly like (insert your favorite luxury brand here) - except it doesn't go as fast, the steering sucks, the upholstery has gaps, etc. And then imagine a bunch of consumers not only buying these cars, but naively insisting their car is actually better than that luxury brand they've never owned and ridiculing the owners of the luxury brand for being gullible fanbois for overpaying for "premium" quality that they don't (and probably can't) appreciate.

It's not that I'm a snob (I drive a rusty Subaru if you care), but I am glad we live in a place where good design and good engineering is valued and where companies unwilling to invest in design and R&D cannot simply steal the hard work of others.
I agree to some extent... but I guess it could also be seen as him trying to ensure even fans of Apple hang around till the end of the video.