skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reddit is a former link aggregator that people have repurposed into really, really crappy forums software. It's nearly impossible to have a long, coherent discussion with multiple participants because of how much effort is involved in keeping up with new comments (unless they're direct replies to you).

Reddit really sucks for discussion and it's one of the (many) reasons I don't go there anymore.
I really feel like there is an educational opportunity for the HN community about patents. We frequently have these articles where the title of the patent is copy pasted into a submission to generate the largest amount of hysteria possible. Then the HN community completely ignores the fact that a) the titles are misleading and b) the titles are meaningless in terms of patent protection.

Based on the claims, they are patenting a system for updating client side web server applications. The system attaches source code information to JavaScript object in order to be able to determine the version of source code that generated the objects. The system attempts to provide a way for web applications to update client side code in a browser using the source code the objects were derived from as a way to continue operation without restart.

Now, I'm not saying that is novel. What I'm saying is that there are a lot of presumptions that happen before people even get to the claims. Typically, I encourage people to read the claims first, then work their way back through the rest of the application. Without knowing the claims, there is no way to know what they think is protectable.

This isn't a justification of the system. I think (software) patents and the patent system are incredibly broken. Thats not a reason to be unfamiliar with the systems. Know your enemy.
reply
Did you see the video I linked to? This was actually real and that video is dated 1 year before the iPhone was even announced, let alone released.

Besides, as far as I've read (and I haven't read the details of the patents themselves) they are patenting the concept of the pinch-to-zoom, not the actual implementation, otherwise Samsung would just have a slightly different technical implementation of it right...
Yes, but as someone else said, this article is behind a paywall. Which is too bad, I think, as I think the article that was posted was only scratching the surface.
There are several things I was wondering after reading this article:

- what are the structural differences between Libya and Norway that would make Libya succumb more easily to the temptation of oil? I suppose Libya is in a direr situation than Norway, but is that all?

- exactly, what are the cons of investing some money from the oil in infrastructure of education?
Using Travel and Stoicism to Overcome Anger and Other Negative Emotions
It's kind of cheating to use perl for some of it, don't you think? I know this was just an experiment, and the actual networking part is pure bash, but the title is still misleading.
Still, this is certainly interesting and not something I'd considered.
Well, I think it's a config switch, so it takes very little effort to add it or remove it.
Show HN: iGNANT - iOS App for art enthusiasts
In fact, even computers can often do better these days. Classical logic as implemented by theorem-provers is not anywhere near the state of the art in AI argumentation systems.
If i have to make a plugin out of the vCard RFC (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc6350.txt), i kill myself before ;)
I really think the "unprocessed food" thing is a heuristic that has lost its power. The problem is that it is completely possible to make unprocessed food that is terribly unhealthy. And unfortunately, as with processed food, the cheapest ways to make unprocessed food tastier also make it less healthy. Keep in mind that honey, which many people would consider "unprocessed", is very nearly identical to HFCS-55 (and no, there is not good evidence that the slight differences between them significantly impact their health effects).

So early on, "avoid processed food" was a good way to guess at which foods were likelier to be healthy without having to actually examine them closely. But the heuristic is highly exploitable (i.e. you can trick people into thinking unhealthy food is healthy by making it from "unprocessed" ingredients), and in a relatively free market, it was inevitable that it would be exploited.

Now, if you advise people to either eat raw, unmodified ingredients, or make their own food out of raw unmodified ingredients, then that will still help them. But I think most people hear "avoid processed food" and think "Oh, I should buy these cookies that are made of whole grains and honey", and that is not helpful advice anymore.
Why O_SYNC does Not guarantee that data is written to the hard-disk
I've run into many problems and conflicts doing this. Upgrading becomes a mess and I'm often forgetting why I needed a PPA in the first place. I don't think this is a very good long term solution for people that don't want to re-install their OS every 6 months.
If he is going to use GPL, a licence with almost nil chance enforcement when violated, how naive is he when he so surprise that scummy people try and commercialise his software.

If he cared about his software (which obviously he did) he should have just sold it himself. Honestly, I think he's just upset because of a lost business opportunity. On the flip side, your software is getting forked, used commercially with ??? amount of users, that'll look pretty nice on your resume.
To present another side: I remember from reading Chuck Yeager's autobiography that Neil Armstrong was also a bit cocky and "know-it-all". However, I cannot find a quote of the passage online.

I did find this interesting anecdote in which Neil Armstrong doesn't appear quite so clever: http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/yea0int-7
Of course, it's also entirely possible that both the number of atheists and the number of evolution-denying people are rising at the expense of a third group, religious people who believe in evolution.
Rackspace customers can use SendGrid to send up to 40K emails a month for free. I wonder how this might impact that deal.
How one man is bringing VoIP, Net access where telecoms fear to tread
End-to-end Web Application Security Testing
Java 0-day exploit discovered, everyone should disable Java today
Very inspiring blog!
Beacuse Minority Report is a movie, and Prior Art tends to require an actual implementation using the same methods claimed in the patent? But if you wanted to pretend that you could claim a movie as real, the implementation is different, in that they used their fingers to frame (the "L" shape), and pinch-to-zoom uses only two fingers in no particular location, other than that they move away from each other.
OMG ITS OFFICIAL, AMERICA IS A POLICE STATE. IM SO ASHAMED OF THE U.S. WHO WOULD OF THOUGHT THIS ATROCITY COULD HAPPED.

CHECK THIS OUT

http://boingboing.net/2012/08/28/how-police-can-obtain-your-...

http://www.bgr.com/2012/08/27/u-s-government-domestic-survei...
Contact the client multiple times via different routes. Email, Phone, In person. I would give it 60 days at most. The amount of time that you let it slide should really be determined by your contracts, your business, and cashflow.
ASK PG : Reason for not using gzipping on Hacker News content?
just noticed that Hacker News content is not gzipped on my chrome browser, while it accepts gzip'd content. I want to know the reason that would help me in general.
No, the license says that if you distribute executables or libraries that link to, or contain GPL licensed code, all the source code of those executables and/or libraries must be released under the GPL or a GPL compatible license.

What you're saying works with the LGPL license though (you can have closed source code that links to LGPL licensed code, as long as it's possible to re-compile the LGPL code and use the new version - which is easiest done by just having the LGPL code in a dynamic/shared library).
I work at Rack. Our legacy compute provider is based on the Slicehost code. Our new Open Cloud offering is based on OpenStack nova.
Nope, we're an India based company. We use 2checkout for payments.
The term "stable" is ambiguous.
For example, Debian is probably most prominent for stability.
However, stable here means "version not changing".
It does not mean "not crashing".

As a user, I want "not crashing" stability. For example, updating the Linux kernel is ok, because it usually fixes more bugs than it opens. Maybe some things now work (hibernation) or work better (energy consumption).

Stability should also mean "no interface changes". Updating Gnome 3.2 to 3.4 is ok. Updating Gnome 2 to Gnome 3 is not ok, because it radically changes the interface.
If we're talking about the formal fallacies, I agree, but my experience with people name-dropping compiler errors for informal fallacies is that they're often not very useful or accurate diagnoses. Ad hominem is one that is often useful, mostly as a sort of meta-rule about debate etiquette. But things like "slippery slope" are used to characterize a wide range of arguments of which only a subset are strictly fallacious. And some informal fallacies are only fallacies in the specific context of purported logical proofs, but not necessarily in other kinds of arguments. For example, it's true that an "appeal to authority" in an argument means it's not a valid logical argument that proves its conclusions from its premises. But people sometimes raise that objection in contexts where the authority is being invoked as an epistemic authority that raises the likelihood of its conclusion being true (because we have reason to believe that the authority's judgments have non-zero epistemic value), not as part of a logical proof. For example, while it's true that "the consensus of physicists is that X" doesn't prove anything about X, if I'm not a physicist and have a background belief that the consensus of physicists is generally a good guide on what is likely to be true about physics, it's a good inference that I should at least provisionally believe X.
CloudSigma Shortlisted for 2012 Cloud Computing World Series Awards
Our SSD storage product has been recognized and shortlisted for for the 2012 Cloud Computing World Series Awards!
Cigarette Makers Violate Non-Smoking Ordinance
Cigarette Makers Violate Non-Smoking Ordinance
As long as the fork is only used in-house I'm the customer. I do have access to my own source code. GPL is satisfied. I might as well create a closed fork and hand over the code to the people that buy my product. I can't place any restrictions on what they do with the modified source, but as long as I give them access to the source as required by the GPL that's fine as well. If they choose not to redistribute - fine as well. I might even create a closed fork for tinkering and not do anything with it. It's not the act of creating a closed fork that violates the GPL. It's redistribution without source - and that's independent of wether it's a fork or the original version.
1. You're misusing the term ad hominem:

>The mere presence of a personal attack does not indicate ad hominem: the attack must be used for the purpose of undermining the argument

(http://plover.net/~bonds/adhominem.html)

2. I'm not going to respond to (or even read) any of your points about nutrition because you seem to be arguing with someone else, not me! I have no horse in this race, because I've never looked into it. I think you and gxs rather misunderstood Homonculiheaded's words -- which were about the general way folk were arguing, and not really about specific points at all.
This doesn't sound like a good thing.

This sounds like something one would expect when you combine ridiculous bureaucracy with lots of poverty.

When you can't remove friction from getting things done, you just outsource anything frustrating to someone poorer.
Startups like this that address the talent crunch in startup hubs like SV, NYC, Boston, etc are an interesting concept. However, I can't help but wonder if there would be more value in building them in a place that was talent rich but startup poor. There are lots of schools with great engineering/computer science programs that are far away from these hubs (Michigan, UIUC, Purdue, etc). If you could attract top talent from thees places to a program like the one mentioned here I feel like startups should be willing to make the trip out to recruit if the crunch is as bad as everyone says it is right now.
Their support for incoming messages is pretty slick, especially in that they provide a message body that strips out signatures and replies. At Posterous, we managed that mechanism ourselves, and it was really hellish – it's great to be able to offload that responsibility for Kinsights.

That feature alone made us switch from SendGrid, and the more reasonable price point for our stage just sweetened the pot.
IF India is a Police state then America is Big brother

check this link out

http://www.bgr.com/2012/08/27/u-s-government-domestic-survei...
I think you're out on a limb a bit with this one. For most people and companies a lawsuit would most likely be considered a liability. Granted that there are exceptions like the YouTube example you propose, but you can't assume the same for every little startup that gets sued.
OwnFone: A minimalist reimagining of the cellphone
This looks pretty good. I had a look at doing something similar (but wayyyyy smaller scale than full FS), and gave up as there was many dragons. Nice to see someone pull it off.
Tell me about it, usenet becomes more of an addiction and less of a service. I spent more time cataloging and organizing me collection than watching any of it...
Tell me about it, usenet becomes more of an addiction and less of a service. I spent more time cataloging and organizing me collection than watching any of it...

LOL, I know exactly what you mean. Except in my case, it's bittorrent and not Usenet. And it's not even entertainment, it's more like business related books / audio / video, and/or self-help / pickup / NLP / etc. stuff. I probably already have more stuff downloaded than I'll ever have time to read/watch/listen to. And now I spent more time than I should, on moving stuff from one portable drive to another, backing stuff up, reorganizing, etc.
That bothered me too, so I implemented alarm(2) in bash. Beware of bugs, though:

function alarm() {
timeout=$1; shift;
bash -c "$@" &
pid=$!
{
sleep $timeout
kill $pid 2> /dev/null
} &
wait $pid 2> /dev/null
return $?
}

alarm 1 "echo >/dev/tcp/google.com/230" && echo "Y" || echo "N"

//this prints 'N' in ~1s

alarm 60 "echo >/dev/tcp/google.com/80" && echo "Y" || echo "N"

//this still returns almost immediately and prints "Y"
Takeaways from three years of angel investing
It is not CC that is not working for your; you have (understandable) problems dealing with 500 authors that do not share an agency.

CC images (BY-SA) could becoming a nice source of revenue thanks to Flickr (discovery) and their recent deal with Getty images (agency and rights bookkeeping). Right now Getty does not accept CC images, but once they will do this will greatly simplify the job of people that want to licence content without dealing directly with the authors.
I'm interested in this other quote that has the phrase about coming back to it later... Do you have a link?
I do not own a Kindle and the Cloud Reader works fine for me. I've never had it ask for a serial # or anything like that.

Perhaps this is a requirement for new accounts?
Stay in the US and have your so called right to privacy

http://www.bgr.com/2012/08/27/u-s-government-domestic-survei...
Apple v Samsung v Patent Law: a tale of conflating arguments
From what I understand, Chrome doesn't prefetch HTTPS URLs

https://developers.google.com/chrome/whitepapers/prerender

but Firefox does

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Link_prefetching_FA...

So, using HTTPS could be a way to avoid prefetching, but it would not always work.

In any case, I've already committed the changes that you suggested, so now noir-auth-app is free from these problems.
A free press is something that India can still be proud of. While the media might be silly at times, they are free ( to be silly as well ).
That many intermediate programmers DID arrive at independently.
Quantum mechanics: frustrating formal mathematicians for over a century.

You'd have to exercise caution when using (quasi-)probabilities less than zero or greater than one, because many of the classical properties of probability theory depend upon those conditions.
Too bad they don't have a source of any kind. So many of these kind of articles are written by someone with a position in the fight, and then they just cite "stuff they know".
Why Twitter's API Changes screws them as much as developers
You can use Amazon Cloud Reader: https://read.amazon.com/

This will let you read it online. It looks like there's some offline support but I haven't tried it myself.
Comcast isn't participating in this, so no HBO on Roku for Comcast subscribers.
Well of course. If CC is to be any good for us, it has to be that agency. And it isn't. So those authors don't get our money.
Use a browser's native API to time page load performance
9 Ways for Entrepreneurs to Counter Negative Vibes
The Usenet clients might not be the peak of usability but they're far, far ahead of all the different kind of forums software we also have to put up with these days.
My point is that today in software - especially consumer software - the USA is the reference market, the one the whole world looks up to to understand the most current trends.

And my point is that I don’t necessarily accept that premise. I think you’re overgeneralizing.

For example, I’m working on a start-up right now that provides an on-line training aid for ballroom dancers. Obviously that’s a niche market, and it turns out that this kind of dancing is insanely popular in some countries and almost unknown in others. Here’s the kicker in this case: there are two major variations of ballroom, which are known as “American style” and “International style”, for much the reasons you’d expect. If you’re looking for trends, you have to take that difference in the prevailing culture into account.

Of course most markets won’t have quite such an obvious and US-centric polarisation as we happen to have in our field. I’m just trying to illustrate that in any kind of specialist market, you have to look at the local culture in different places, not just the language they speak and the size of the population.
Maybe I don't understand what you're saying, but iOS corrects for the audio delay of AirPlay audio streaming.

I don't have an AppleTV, but I do have an AirPortExpress. Streaming video to iOS with audio on my home stereo works great, with the video on the device synced with the AirPlay audio.
Netflix is not available in my country. There are some online video providers (including iTunes), but they insist on offering most movies and videos in German (talking about Germany) rather than the original English.

Not that I have taken to Usenet, just saying that there is more to it. It is also tiring to look for movies and find they are not available (mostly for political reasons, no doubt).
Version Control for Poetic Time Travelers
I think it works both ways -- neither will Yahoo create great products until they become a great place to work, again.

This is why I think Mayer was a great choice. If you're at Yahoo and disillusioned, or considering an offer and on the fence...you have to latch on to something representing change. Marissa wasn't the only possible choice, but she was at least as good as any other imaginable choices.

Now I'm making her sound like Obama. I'm much more comfortable with that conflation than the Steve Jobs one though.

Oh, and sorry about the motherhood pun. I didn't even notice it til the reread.
PR is a just a method to drive traffic and hype for your startup.

Right, but the world is a lot bigger than TechCrunch. Especially that TC jumped the shark years ago.
Sweet, congrats guys! Been using Mailgun happily for ~2 years now, and it's great to see I won't have to change anything. Looking forward to the Rackspace integration!
And to be honest, all of those things have their place too. If time is money, then code is hard currency. There are no hard rules about how to address code - it depends largely on the context - who's waiting, what timely opportunities are pressuring you, even your intuition about how code Should be strutured can be important, more important the the reason you opened the source file.
It’s telling us that people will do almost anything to get same-day releases – and that they’re willing to both pay wads of cash and break the law at the same time to get them.

That's the entire point, right there. It is stunning to me that media companies are oblivious to this, and it's possibly even more stunning that they're still trying to control their shows as if it's 1985. You may as well try to hug water.

Like shocks says, when the studios build a Steam for media (e.g. Hulu but without the bullshit), they will come.
Raspberry Pi Digital-to-Analog converter and vice-versa
It's a pity, but the demo seems busted. It pops an alert dialog (debugging?), and then any editing seems to fail pretty quick. The screenshots look nice though :)
Announcing Windows Azure Mobile Services
Well, technical debt matters too.. Mr. Goodwrench says "you can pay me now, or you can pay me later"
The Letter Written In Case Neil Armstrong Didn't Return
It's amazing that people are surprised at all when a combination of proprietary media-playback system don't work as desired.

No snark intended, I've just not ever had a good experience dealing with a single proprietary playback mechanism.
This is offtopic, but I'm curious, how did you hear about Hacker News? I'm curious what makes new users want to participate here.
I like the idea of having a standard object system in the language, don't get me wrong. But having a standard object system and baking compositional inheritance as a core primitive of the language are two different things. The latter isn't a terrible thing at all. I just believe that there are more general language features that subsume it.
Yeah - the most recent that I've heard is 400 karma (so it's not always true that 'karma doesn't count for anything')
I don't think they use the standard video player though. It may have changed recently, but I noticed that the controls were jaggy on the Retina iPad. They might be doing some weird encoding of the video to prevent piracy and thus use a custom player designed to look the same.
It is not just the day one availability that is the problem. Where can you legally get high bitrate 1080p video with DTS-HD Master Audio/Dolby TrueHD via the internet?
Congrats on a tremendous technical feat!

Any advantage of using a full-scale FS over something like git-annex (http://git-annex.branchable.com/)?
I too did not consider sending mail from applications a big deal, until I had to do it on a huge scale. Turns out it gets quite difficult to maintain an email module that consistently avoids your outgoing app emails being spam-flagged or otherwise corrupted. It's a neat service.
You can't get utility patents for "concepts". They patented a specific way to do pinch-to-zoom on mobile devices with capacitive touch screens (and interacting with an event loop). Which is a similar, but not identical, problem to doing multitouch pinch-to-zoom on a projector-based system as in the demo.
I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately. I live in Ann Arbor (about an hour west of Detroit) and the area does seem primed for a revolution. I think it will take a handful of well-known people to say "this is the next spot" for everything to explode. Hopefully this conf is the start of that.
Never mind the fact that it costs money (potentially a lot) to defend yourself, which a single developer most likely will not have. I'm fairly sure a lawyer will expect payment, win or lose.