skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The idea that you need Apple's permission to install software on your mobile computer is false. You can install whatever software you want, via multiple methods. Out of the box you can install apps built using web technologies downloaded directly from the web.

Apple controls what goes into the store because they want to protect users from apps that steal information. iOS does not have the malware problem that android does as a result.

Javascript does not have the ability to do this, and so Apple will let you install wahtever app you want, directly from the safari browser.

It is not apple's fault that this has not proven as popular in the makretplace as the appstore-- but they had this feature in from day one, a year before the appstore even shipped.
"By the way, what have you done that’s so great?
Do you create anything, or just criticize other's work
and belittle their motivations?”

- Steve Jobs
Outdated how? They were working the last time I made a commit a year ago, I'm not sure what could have changed.
Okay this guy wrote paragraph(s) retorting each individual line in a memo. The author is reading way too much into this. They wrote their opinion, this clearly wasn't a fact finding mission.

I'd probably give this a "C-" for poor format, unbalanced opinionated writing, and it's length (too long).

In the future, it's fine to pick a side, but make a case and defend it with research. Don't ask a series of questions in response to a memo. Questions are unconvincing at best.

"Should your kids be home before 10PM?" vs "Your kids should be home before 10PM"

Hopefully this helps the author improve their writing. I don't even have a Nokia phone, I have no phone. Maybe we'd be friends.
The invalidity is the main surprising part. If we accept these patents as valid, it doesn't seem possible to really defend Samsung. (I don't know the full details, but that seems clear.)

But it says something bad about where we're headed when "bouncing" scrolling, black rectangles, and pinching motions are considered legally protectable innovation.
Just a brainstorm here, but would some kind of Disqus like ui that aggregates comments from HN, reddit and blog comment feed would be an interesting product?

(Google search shows two such apps - one has shutdown and one is now a casino site... Maybe it's just not profitable.)
Yeah! There's nothing new in the iPhone, that Bell didn't demonstrate over a century ago!

The reality is, you guys are ideologically driven- you want to get google off the hook for stealing Apples inventions, so you pretend like the patents cover features rather than implementations.

Your dishonesty is shameful.
And the default Android. It's Samsung's UI layer that looks too much like the iPhone.
Personally I get put off a bit by free to play. I expect to have the game pushing ads at me non stop or trying to get me to purchase things in game. Where as I associate a quality paid game to be clean and just giving me the game without all those other distractions.

Granted I am sure there are some decent free to pay titles, just the mental impression I get before trying new games, based on past experience.
I bought a Livescribe Echo smartpen two years ago and only used it one or two times, including going through the tutorials. It is definitely a very neat technology demo, but my interest was as a developer. I wanted to be able to use the pens as an input device for applications on my Android phone. Unfortunately, this was pretty much impossible with the Echo pen because there is no built-in bluetooth so I gradually lost interest. It was a terrible lost opportunity for Livescribe since I can only imagine the applications one could build with Livescribe and an smartphone; they just seem to go well together.
Its been in Windows since Vista.
Sorry, this is really off topic: I usually prefer just simple HTML interfaces to apps when I am just reading content. I have just stopped following TechCrunch links on my iPad because they always redirect to a nag-page to install their iPad app. I tried to follow a link yesterday and something new happened: I was never allowed to see the page because the redirects back to the nag=page were continuous. What assholes. I know that it is their content and they can do with it what they want, but this seems like a crazy business decision.

edit: I don't use Facebook's app either.
Not even using libasteroid...
You should try reading that patent sometime before you claim it isn't reasonable.

It is profoundly dishonest to characterize patents using a trivial phrase like "one-click" and then pretend like that also means that the patent is itself trivial.

I know why you do it- it fits your ideology.

But it doesn't fit reality.
It almost felt like a meta-analogy about the inherent limitations of analogy.
Dupe of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4431154
great!

it's a nice project, it's free, it's modern, it works, it's an interactive-graphic-non-boring thing, it's a game!

lisp needs more of this.

party's open: more functional, macro wiser and skinnier ones are welcome.

vim should be welcome too as I run ASTeroids fine under vim+slimv (just like the terminal) while under emacs+slime it doesn't display some white line segments here and there... (same sbcl for all)

last thing, I scored 3432 (level 11) with the first coin...;)
Just out of curiosity, does anyone try to get things done with a tablet? With the exception of pen-based note taking and drawing, all the activities I do on a tablet are consumption based (reading, web browsing, etc.) and easy to accomplish using Windows 8's metro interface. With that in mind, I think the added keyboard shortcuts really help clean up the interface for tablet users while giving desktop and notebook users a fast way of getting things done.

But to answer your question, I think the real plan is that you don't try to do your work on a Windows 8 tablet without a keyboard. Instead, you get a lightweight, convertible Windows 8 tablet. That way, you can have your cake and eat it too.
>Apple won a claim against Samsung for mimicking "bounce back" behavior

False. Patents don't cover features. Patents cover inventions. Apple won against samsung for copying apple's solution for how to implement a feature. Not for having that feature.

This misrepresentation trivializes the nature of the patents and is ideologically driven. Don't fall for it.

If you disagree, try reading the patent.
The often cited "POsitive-negative-positive" method is terrible and is used by those with zero feedback skills.

The most important component I have found from working in a company with an open, expected and established culture of consistent feedback, is that objectivity comes from specificity. This leads to a much better outcome and people having less of an issue taking the feedback onboard as it removes emotions and concentrates on the issue and not the person.

My particular approach, learnt from a previous organisation I worked for, and which works brilliantly:

Take time to actually adequetely identify the 'specific' action/habit/issue that needs correction and then find a clear impact on a given stakeholder. I know this sounds obvious, but is often overlooked. A great way to find if you're are specific enough is that it should come down to something you can see or hear. You can't see someone "being too negative", only actions that lead to the subject being percieved so.

Now keeping the clearly identified action/s in mind, you can approach the person with an open mind, ask for permission to give the feedback (you want to set an environment conducive to the process), and then let them know the problem as well as how it is affecting customers/the team/you.

The impact not the negative action is possibly the crucial element here depending on the actual problem.

Of course, it is important to not come across condescending but it will pay off to not tell the person how to fix this behaviour, but let them offer it to you. I have found that many times people will not know what they were doing was wrong and come to the right conclusion themselves.

Work together to find a way to overcome the issue if necessary, and offer to help in the process or to point them in the right direction—for instance if persons problem comes down to time management, and one of your peers happens to have that as a strength, then maybe they could spend time together on a project and that peer could share the way they effectively manage their time.

After the exchange it's also important to make sure that they know everything is 'cool' between you two, so later in the day/week it may be advantageous to strike up conversation on a completely unrelated topic, or just ask how their week is going, even invite them for a drink after work etc.

If done correctly this approach will work literally every single time. It did not fail me once in four years.
> Are you running ubuntu with all the graphical niceties ?

Yes.

> And is the laptop heating up more when you are running a vm ?

Not really but I honestly haven't hammered on the VM yet. I gave the VM 1024mb

> Are fans louder when running ubuntu in a VIM ?

Nope. I've heard stories about loud fans on the x220. My fan is dead silent. I actually have to put my ear close to the machine to know it's running.
Just because a service exists does not mean that someone else shouldn't launch something better. I love the simplicity of the service (reminds me of buffer that does one thing really well).
It looks horrible. I've not been inside it, just viewed it from the street, so I've no idea about how serious the leaks are.
I agree. I don't want to buy a bag full of coins to defeat a monster. I want to play the game in full from the outset.
Both the Nexus S and the Galaxy Nexus which use the default android UI were found infringing as well.
I don't know any programmer who could implement one click in a day.

You think that it is just "checking out with a single button press", but that's not what the patent covers.

This is the fundamental problem with the anti-patent position. It is based on a lie.

The lie is the claim that patents give the "right" to use "features", like checking out with one click. They do not.

The One-Click patent, for instance, spends a great deal of time talking about fraud.
Apple vs Samsung, the Misleading Appearances
Donated $50. Get well Ken.
One way around the "don't know who the subscribers are" problem would be to add a link to every post that gives the readers the opportunity to join your community.
I find the ability to go into a quiet room with a closed door priceless.
There is a control group for the impact of patents. It's called software.
The patent doesn't cover the idea of using pinch to zoom. Patents are not on features or on ideas. They are on implementations.

Thus someone else demoing pinch to zoom using a different implementation is completely irrelevant to this discussion.

You guys are trying to redefine patents in order to argue that they should be "reformed"!
Is DARPA’s Phoenix Program Intelligence-Related?
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the out-there research arm of the United States Department of Defense, is well known for it’s futuristic and bleeding-edge technology research projects. Often times, the Agency’s highflying efforts seem to protrude a motto of “failure is an option”. In fact, a 2003 article in The Los Angeles Times states that DARPA’s failure rates are between 85 and 90 percent. But this has not prevented the Agency from trying out new things, which sometimes help shape the future.
"Last year I held a special webinar that was invite only and everyone had to sign an NDA before attending. On this webinar I explained the current state of the mobile game industry and my plans to dominate as an independent developer."

For me, that quote about sums up the rest of the article. Too much arrogance in there for me.
Trey bases his assessment on Apple's published "Top grossing" list. This is potentially problematic as it's not clear over what time period this is based or what other metrics Apple uses to put apps into this list. Apple, like the publishers would like to encourage people to spend more over time than just download free apps so they're incentivized to encourage the implication that in-app is the way to go.

Perhaps Angry Birds is dropping on the pay charts because people are finally bored of the franchise? How many years and different ways will people pay to shoot slightly different pigs with birds?
> You have no way of knowing whether this is true.

There is a whole field dedicated to answering this kinds of questions, it is called economics, and there is quite a bit of research in this area analyzing historical evidence from different legal systems, times and industries.

And most of the evidence indicates that patents hinder and stop innovation, and that most innovation and progress happens when there are no patents:

http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.h...
So, answer me this:

If you think "pinch-to-zoom on a mobile device with touch screen" is a reasonable thing to patent so that nobody except Apple can use it on a smartphone, then you would have also had have no problem if:

- Someone patented "tabbed browsing" on a desktop computer[1] and nobody could sell a browser with tabs on a desktop platform

- Someone patented the pull-down list-select control on a desktop computer, and now everyone writing a GUI for the desktop platform would have to come up with their own variation of a list-select control that is sufficiently different from the patented one.

I could come up with many more similar examples, but I'm not at all sure how/whether the above two hit the mark as an analogy for the trick Apple just pulled (because I find all three situations absurd).

Hm, now this makes me wonder, Ableton Live has this truly brilliant way of navigating a waveform/timeline effortlessly to anywhere in both large and tiny zoom scales, it's incredibly efficient and quite intuitive, and I've (so far) never seen any audio editing software that has something quite like it. I wonder if they patented it? It is way more innovative and non-obvious than the "pinch-to-zoom" that Apple grabbed. Also there are quite a number of different but quite obvious ways to navigate a waveform on the same input devices (desktop+mouse, usually) unlike "pinch-to-zoom", which is really the most obvious gesture for zooming on a touch-display.

Because I was thinking of maybe one day coding up a very simple waveform editor, and I wouldn't be satisfied until I at least tried to implement that mode of navigation. Of course as long as I don't sell it, I'm safe from patents right?

[1] just adding that because as far as I'm aware these software/design patents only work because they're coupled to a specific piece of hardware (in the US, that is. for now, thankfully it works a bit differently in the EU)
Good question. I'm always baffled when people say (and believe it) that huge open space is the way to go. It's even worse when they think all employees (including HR, marketing, etc) have to sit there.

How numb do you have to be to spend 8 hours in these conditions, even doing nothing creative?
The problem with FTP games is they miss a huge segment of the market. I have spent thousands on games, but less than 20$ on free to play games because I dislike the gameplay compromises needed to support FTP. That said, the app store funnels things towards FTP games but a subscription based game-play is probably a better long term money maker.
I find this contradiction quite curious. I think it is because their position is ideological, not logical.

Samwer is evil. Copying another startups look is evil. Google is good (remember their slogan: "Do no evil." how could they be evil?) Apple is bad- and has been forever. The RIAA and MPAA are evil.

So, sometimes copying is good when google does it, but its bad when the samwers do it, and of course they will trumpet any "Example" of apple doing it no matter how disingenuous or dishonest they have to be.

This is more about their personal feelings towards their brands than any kind of logical consistency.
This is just simply not true. Without a provisioning profile from apple you can't install anything. And putting a web link on your screen counts as an installation only in bizarro world.
A. No they didn't. (Samsung didn't even claim this -- they claimed that a multitouch window resize, which is neither as useful nor as intuitive as "pinch to zoom" nor actually zooms anything was "pinch to zoom" ... go watch the video.)

B. If it were simply about "rounded rectangles" you'd be right. But it isn't and you're wrong.

The letters L and V are not protected, but overlay them and print them on a handbag and you are in deep shit. (And yes, trademarks and design patents are different things but work in much the same way and have been used against each other in lawsuits.)
Free to play might ruin games.

Games are supposed to be fun. In a free-to-play game, the game designer's goal shifts from fun to incremental revenue collection. I think it's an abusive dynamic between the game designer and the player. If free-to-play becomes the norm, we might wonder why games are not as fun anymore, without being able to put a finger on it.
I have a feeling that everything he's saying is true, and it makes me very sad.
How? Vesting doesn't have to be noted in the books immediately, just make a contract which specifies all the details of the vesting without actual transfer of shares, which happens under specific circumstances (e.g. an exit, expiry of the vesting term etc.)
He asked what API, not what field of techniques. NLP is comprised of many different things, all different techniques and observations and not concrete code implementation of them. I for one am also interested if he used some ready API that implements some NLP techniques.
I think they can never quite anticipate the demand.
Samsung & Armstrong
I don't get why developers are so mad at Twitter. Why is making a Twitter client the only project you can do? If you really can make a piece of software that provides a better experience for Twitter, certainly you have the ability to make something else. And if you're anything like me and every dev I know, you have half a dozen or more project ideas rattling around in your head. Make one of those and let Twitter go.
Bootstrapping Zero to 7M from Kolkata: FusionCharts CEO Pallav Nadhani
I found that opening sentence pretty off putting too. The rest of the article seemed fairly handwavey.
Nodejs on rails
I suspect at this point, everyone who currently owns an iOS device and wants Angry Birds has it. Their sales are mostly to new iOS device owners while new games can sell to everyone.
Please quote, from the relevant patent, what implementation (rather than feature) you think Google and/or Samsung stole from Apple.
Because WCF is an "anti-pattern promoting, over architected abstraction"
It's called "substantial similarity." One of the tests is whether a "reasonable observer" would be likely to mistake one for the other.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity

It's nice work but the author should've used different assets and a different name.
So they could sue competitors.
Neutron Drive - A code editor for Google Drive and Chrome
> It was one thing when they were the scrappy underdog but the idea that I need the OK of the richest company in the world to install software on my (mobile) computer just suddenly seems equally laughable and creepy to me.

It astounds me the kind of stuff Apple gets away with this days that Microsoft could have never dreamed of doing in the 90's.

Can anyone imagine if Microsoft had required its approval of applications like Netscape before allowing Windows users to install them?

Can anyone imagine if Microsoft had sued BeOS or RedHat for infringement of patents as trivial as pinch-to-zoom?
Any ideas, comments?

Thanks.
They are making up for it in merchandise.

I have been touring the US this summer and have been amazed by the number of people wearing Angry Birds shirts. Even grown men. Walmart has huge Angry Birds signs right next to established brands like Levi and Nike.
Nitpick: binary blobs like .pyc and .so don't belong in a code repository. Instead you would put a makefile or setup.py to compile the .pyx files.
> But to keep us from running things they don't like.

Really. Perhaps you could point to the app on the openly viewable blacklist?
The number of available jobs are meaningless without salary information. I suspect that the average COBOL developer makes much less than what the typical HN reader would consider competitive.
The only reason to believe he was a bad person, or not the person you thought he was, was a completely made-up and unsubstantiated hit article by Tech Crunch designed as link bait. Before that article, it was just another matter of a poorly performing business plan that needed to be addressed.
It seems like there's an Average Joe approving tech patents as well.
Don't you think there would be a problem if Freedos renamed itself to "MS-DOS"?
Trey Smith is from the "Internet marketing" world and a friend of Frank Kern's. Now, I like these guys (as far as I can learn stuff from them for free - spending $10K for a "mastermind"..? nah ;-)) but they seem to take approaches that.. rub some people up the wrong way (and that's putting it lightly). Nonetheless, I've still found there's a lot to learn from their experiences even if the delivery is a bit.. slick.
I agree. My guess is Zuckerberg hired Gehry because that was the only architect whose name he knew. Gehry is very old and his buildings are just expensive attention whores. I really wish he went with someone younger with actual talent. Jeanne Gang would have been a good choice.
I really don't like free to play games, as they're implemented now. The current strategy is simply "pay to progress" rather than to unlock more functionality. I was playing this game called Tiny Tower, and in it, you could pay to finish building a room. If you paid for the room, you ... had another room. You could then pay for another room. The dynamic of the game didn't change, things just moved along.

Even without this, because so few people pay anything, the dynamic of the in app purchases is skewed so that you have to spend a ton of money to get anything out of your purchases (people willing to pay are willing to pay a lot, apparently). So people like me, willing to spend $5-$10 on a fun phone game but not $50, are sort of left behind.
I agree. While all of these pseudo-gambling games have been common place on PCs and the web for going on a decade (maybe more?), it's sad to see it start leaking into traditional game spaces as well.

iOS is basically brand new, so maybe it was inevitable for these types of games to take over. I'm interested to see what happens in the next console generation - it might be a sad state of affairs beyond big-budget AAA titles.
Patents cover inventions of methods and processes to accomplish something-- implementations, not the idea or the feature.

Thus pinch-to-zoom as Jeff demonstrated it, using cameras to take pictures of your hands is not the same thing as apple doing it using software to turn noisy amorphous blobs into finger points on a capacitive touch screen.

Other people can implement pinch-to-zoom because pinch-to-zoom cannot be patented.

Both Apple and Jeff Han could have patents on their very different implementations of this same feature.

Unfortunately people really seem to believe that patents cover features, and I think this is due to the deliberate spin put on the discussions by anti-patent people.

If you disagree, try reading the pinch-to-zoom patent itself.
I've been near it, but haven't been inside.

It's a very cool looking building, but "doesn't leak" still wins for me. Architecture is a demanding discipline in that your work of art also has to be a usable, practical structure. If it isn't, you've failed, IMO.

If you're going for artistic value alone, you should stick to sculpture.