skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This. At one time I had over a dozen patents where I was one of the inventors and every time I find something new about the patent system. I've got the bonus education in having been retained as an expert witness in two patent cases, which nominally would qualify me as an expert and I find the system quite murky still. I can categorically concur that just having at patent does not make you an expert on the patent system.
Sounds like a case of assumed "difference regret", where people (esp those who don't know much about the products they are choosing from) think they didn't get the best deal.
Here's what's going to happen. These people will buy a Samsung device. And they will hate it. And then they will learn to never buy anything but Apple. Apple has, for a short bump in near term revenue, earned themselves a lot of lifetime customers.
"Just that due to patent exhaustion Apple was exempt from infringement."

Could you explain that?
Even though it was a completely open space, I never really had problems with noise being distracting, even without my headphones on.

If I _did_ ever have problems with it, there were always small meeting rooms with doors that were empty 90% of the time.

In my 4 months there, I never heard a single complaint about the open space being distracting from any engineer, manager or designer.

I'm not disputing that many people may require absolute silence for productivity or that it may be distracting to work in an open space, but I suspect that it's less common than you might think, or at least less common among the variety of people that Facebook attracts as employees.

Also, I think your suspicions that it was motivated by an effort to save money are rather unfounded. Facebook is not a company to skimp on employee benefits, and I can't imagine they would ever sacrifice per-employee productivity for a cheaper workplace on purpose.
> They never went back to the issue later.

Do you have some evidence for this ? Or just making things up in your head because you're not happy with the verdict.
I'm 21 myself and by what I see around me in my friends and people close my age is that we've become too accustomed to seeing instead of doing. We should start thinking along the terms of "I cannot wait to DO that!" if we ever want the chance to follow in the footsteps of a man like Neil and succeed in taking human achievement further than our predecessors. But hey... you're 17 and you read HN. That's a good start!
If you don't consider 150 euro headphones to be high end, I'm scared to think where on the scale my $40 ones fall.
He definitely read those mails. He just doesn't care, in the slightest, if he happens to annoy you. So he sees no reason to respond.
It's good that you have some internal determination of what quality is, but to apply that to others and try to make them sound inferior because they don't share the same values and judgements just paints you as a member of the same sort of "fanatic" group you define. Having no clue what objectivity is doesn't put someone above others, it just produces judgemental rants like the one you posted. That sort of position contributes zero to the discussion and "the little people" attitude is just disgusting really.
This feels tacky. Discussion of the black bar. It's like fight club. You don't talk about it. Look what's happening here: people are actually debating whether or not someone's death deserves the black bar. Can we please stop this?
I'm not sure what device you were using to read it, but it was far too wide for my tastes. Averaging five random lines showed a character count of 113, but that's 1.5x to 2.5x the "ideal width". That's obviously a subjective measure (heyo!), but I usually follow the "two alphabets" (52 characters) mnemonic as a guide and it seems to work well.

From Wikipedia: "The measure of a text influences legibility. Long lines are hard to read, short lines are more easily read. 45–75 characters per line are regarded as the ideal range for the measure. For multiple column setups, 40–50 characters are often preferred. 66 is sometimes considered ideal for one column setups. Generally, if the measure is wide, the leading of a text should be increased—if the measure is short, it is can safely be decreased. Reverse text, i.e. white text on black also requires more leading."( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measure_(typography) )
Spent about an hour toying around with mediocre sounds and a really too simple drum matrix. Then tried to save only to realize my work will be lost, since i don't have a facebook acount (and don't want it). Yikes!
A valid view, (so no downvote) but I disagree. Armstrong faced many life-threatening failures as a test pilot and improvised his way out of them. A stuck thruster on a prototype lander sent it into a spin, and Armstrong offset it with an auxiliary thruster; another prototype rolled onto its side and he had to eject at 200 feet. No matter how much training one has had, the ability to diagnose and improvise under pressure gives him hacker status in my eyes.
The problem with prior art is that, with the Patent Office doing such a crap job -- thanks in part to the Congress that funds it -- you and your attorney have to document and present it yourself, at $300/hour.

Add first-to-file to this mess, and, well, at least there will no longer be any point in spending that $300/hour.
Dr. Anteater and Aunt Hillary [0] probably knew this all along.

[0]: http://themindi.blogspot.co.uk/2007/02/chapter-11-prelude-an...
Choice: easily get user input in Python
I hate how recruiters use a lot of words tell you absolutely nothing about the position and make up lies to make you feel like you're special. Below is a boiler-plate message I got from a lame tech recruiter, followed by my snarky response.

------------------

My associate forward me your contact info. and the hiring VP of Engineering is interested in your technical background for a senior position.

The company I’m working for is very successful, profitable and well funded by several top VCs. Also can you please email me your current resume in word so I can forward it to the hiring VP of Engineering so he can review it, the resume he has is a bit dated...

The compensation is excellent with great stock options, bonus, 401k and comprehensive package. I can call you with all the details on the position and company, please let me know the best # to call you at.

------------------

Let me see if I get this. You're telling me that an unnamed associate told you that an nameless VP of Engineering at an unspecified company thinks I'm great and has a job that pays an uncertain salary.

Please call me at my undisclosed phone number so we can discuss my unmentionable thoughts on this matter.
are you really suggesting that the iPhone in all aspects had no precedent, at all?

That is completely absurd, sorry.
Its a question of scope. There are a lot of patents in this case that a majority of engineers or designers would not consider worthy of patent protection, the most infamous being the 'rounded corners' one. That these patents were upheld then has a huge chilling effect on everyone's design. Can I be sued because my device is rectangular? How about square? Are all quadrilaterals covered? Those are ridiculous questions on their face, but you've just seen someone who got hit with a billion dollar judgement and you can't tell that they did anything wrong, and it paralyzes you.

That is why its a blow for innovation. All the rabbits will freeze hoping the hunter can't see them.
Having been both a developer and a hiring manager, I've come to the uneasy acceptance that recruiting is necessary a lot of the time. However, recruiters that I've dealt with I've personally vetted as being decent folks who don't resort to this type of spam.

I become truly depressed when I commiserate with other hiring types. When I bemoan the general horribleness of the recruiting industry as exampled by these bottom-feeders, the other party simple sighs and goes "yeah, but that's just how it is" Why is this acceptable? Why hasn't this industry been disrupted yet? It's a huge, HUGE market, yet I haven't seen any significant innovation in it except for yet another job site that pops up occasionally.
3 months? I think your math is a bit off.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(original) - June, 2007
vs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_i7500 - June, 2009
Similarly, I know a patent examiner who holds dual PhDs in disciplines directly bearing on his work. The patent office actually asks its examiners not to rub their qualifications in people's faces because there is no upside.
That's actually what kind of happened to me with MP3-Players. "Mhm, I could buy an iPod Nano for ~150 or this whatever-brand with more space for ~100. Two months later I got the iPod Classic, best decision ever."
You make a good point. There's a lot of things that are unanswerable about what-ifs in the early days of Facebook. The biggest what-if I'm wondering about is this: what if Facebook focused on becoming the first large social media company to offer its API as its core money-maker?

Zynga, presently, is worth ~2.5B. How many Zynga-like companies would there be if Facebook was focused on creating the best possible experience for their developers? The moving-target, locked-down API they peddle instead is a poor alternative motivated entirely by their focus on the advertising business model.

It's a big what-if, and the premise of my article is really that they should have found out before they settled on advertising. It was a mistake to hire Sandberg when they did, because once they made her the COO the company had no other monetization options then advertising.
Clearly you haven't been to audiophile forums. 150 is pretty much entry level for those kind of people.
Same problem with Google Apps here. Chrome for iOS to my rescue! :)
Dalton Caldwell's airbnb tech talk about app.net
You could (and can) get high-quality games for a low price

It seems to me that if people were willing to spend more money on quality titles this trend wouldn't exist.

High quality AND low price? Seems unsustainable to me.
Not everything true is worth saying. I don't think the original comment particularly adds anything to the conversation.
> you'd rather your portfolio companies swing for the fences and miss, rather than bunt.

That implies a correlation between what you're working on, and whether you'll get acquihired. From what I've seen, the aquihiring companies will offer on anyone who can get to 'hello world' of startups.

> the trend to acqui-hires is particularly insidious for investors

Obviously, if you already have investors and you take the acquihire, there should be a long conversation w/ the investors first. At this point in the company, the acquihire is a signal that the startup won't work, or new investors won't join.

Also, "I need my investors to make 2-3x" is a perfectly valid negotiation strategy. For angels, that's a decent return. (Of course, matters are different for VC). But the bar for taking an acquihire after a series A is much much higher.
Why? This token gesture will achieve what exactly? If someone obscure, but non-the-less important in sci/tech had died, this might be an interesting way to draw attention to a life you might want to brush up on. However, Armstrong, despite his desire for privacy, has never been obscure. Come breakfast tomorrow morning everyone on planet Earth will know he has died.
How do you read the longer HN posts then?
A codec is only mentioned in claim 2, having more than one codec in claim 3 and letting the user choose in claim 4.

I'm no patent expert, but doesn't that mean he's claiming things without codecs (e.g. the VCR) too? The first claim is generally the broadest and people seem to just laugh it off that these are often so ridiculously broad. But as far as I'm aware these are legally binding until someone overturns them with a presumption of legitimacy due to the USPTO seal of approval.
UK comment: members of the jury giving interviews that include descriptions of their deliberations. I find this system amazing.

http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/CrimeJusticeAndTheLaw/Juryservic...
I don't know, just the way it sounded creepy to me.

I guess the guy wrote the article trying to explain how Zuck had this idea about network where eventually revenue will come from API/graph/developers and at the end he throw a sentence that Sandberg should move to Miami. I am not sure if being focused on this one last sentence was his goal and you made it sound like it did.

As of "nerdy male Zuck" vs. "nice female Sandberg", sorry but that did not cross my mind even once.
> A 1500kbps FLAC will definitely sound multitude levels better than an 800kbps FLAC. The same is the case for any other lossless container. The bitrate matters.

This is completely, objectively false. The bitrate of a lossless file depends 100% on the compressibility of the file. By definition, if you take a piece of data and pass it into a lossless encoder (FLAC, ALAC, ZIP, ...) and then pass that to the respective decoder, you get out the original piece of data; that's what lossless means.

The only time quality comes into play is when considering the input quality, not the compression.
> So this leaves me with the following options:

> 1. Completely nuke my machine, create a new US Apple account and repurchase everything (yeah, right)

> 2. Pay $49 to have Apple Support look into the issue

> 3. Give up and use Linux (I hear Windows 8 will have a locked-down App store too)

As a Linux user, the fact that Apple developers are seriously considering moving to Linux makes me very excited. If even 1% of the disgruntled devs decide to go with #3, there will be significant effects in the Linux community. The Linux community is overwhelmingly biased towards the neckbeard crowd, which doesn't care about things like UI/UX. If some of the Apple devs come in and start contributing, things could change quite rapidly.
>> which lags even end-of-lifed e-mail clients like

>> Eudora for composing, reading, filtering, archiving,

>> and searching.

These words hit the mark with me. I've never found a polite way to word it so I just bite my tongue and avoid being the negative nelly but whenever someone shows me some cool new tool or website, odds on bet its missing a ton of basic functionality that I already had in the boring old pre-web 2.0 version of whatever the tool is.

We're very forgiving of this in general as consumers but it does suck a fair bit.
What I don't like is that Windows is forcing users into a specific interface paradigm. In the Linux world, most distributions offer a wide variety of desktop paradigms, so when Ubuntu wanted to switch to Unity, users were just a couple of clicks away from logging into Ubuntu Classic (Gnome2), or if they don't like any of the ones that come pre-installed, they can easily install others. That way, you can have one computer with a "traditional" interface (Gnome2, qvwm...), an innovative interface (Gnome3, Unity...), and different types that just never got mainstream attention (xmonad, Awesome ...)

Besides giving users choice and creating competition, this allows people to experiment and inovate with new systems with much less risk than Windows model of forcing people to use their latest and hoping for the best.
Umm, you are mistaken. Yes, they found there was patent exhaustion. They also found that the patents were not infringed.

Exhaustion is a completely separate issue from infringement.
Sure. They buy a Samsung notebook and try to install Mac OS X on it. That will be fun!
A Pro-Google Android Zealot writes a story on Google Plus about people switching from Apple to Samsung due to a patent lawsuit and you all believe it? I guess there really is a sucker born every minute.

Check Apple's earnings later to see who was right.
There are appealable issues relative to exhaustion. If I were Samsung, I would file on both issues (infringement and exhaustion) to preserve for appeal.
Is the issue limited to Apple? What's about other ecosystems and app stores?
Everything about the story reads like it was fabricated.
Well this is odd.

You do know that other companies beside Samsung make components and thinking that Samsung is keeping Apple afloat is pure and utter delusion.
I agree that most people haven't heard much about the lawsuit, but saying "I'd be surprised if anyone could tell a Samsung from an HTC" surely only applies to your acquaintaces.

Here in Uruguay they definitely will - and it is Samsung phones which sell the most, by far (we're very price sensitive which is a nicer word for poor :P ).
If a jury member volunteers information, I think that's fine. In fact, it's how we can learn about things like a jury failing do to its duty. (NB: I am not saying that happened in this case.)

I do worry that jury members' names are not kept secret. They are being asked to make what is possibly a very unpopular decision and shouldn't have to worry about what strangers think about them.
And worse if they told you the source then you would figure out how to make that source stop giving our your information and might even tell your friends and a that would make his life less fun. Clearly the OP isn't actually interested in the job so not responding is the best strategy.
There are definitely a lot of the same arguments to be made for SaaS, though I think there are others as well in that case.

For one thing, many relatively small payments is often an easier sell than one big payment, even if the small payments add up to more over the long term and even if the customer is fully aware of this. (Although on reflection, a model that seeks to get many IAPs over an extended period isn't so different in this respect.)

For another thing, customers who are unsure can try the service legitimately without paying "full price" or resorting to piracy. At the other end of the spectrum, while you're potentially making more money from long-term subscribers than you would with a large, one-off payment, those are probably the people who get the most value out of your service so they don't necessarily mind. So you get a certain amount of self-selecting market segmentation without even having to do any work for it.

But sure, the automatic copy-protection without the downsides of intrusive DRM is definitely a huge win for SaaS.
The difference with Unity on Ubuntu is that they still made it easy to use Gnome2. For that matter, they made it easy to use Awesome, and I can almost guarantee a tiling window manager will never become the default window manager. The other benefit to this system, besides user choice, is that while the current system is in widespread use, people can still improve the old/different system, and the systems can steal ideas from each other, and everyone ends up with a better product.
I am skeptical that this is actually a true story and not a parable. The alleged regular people consumer statements do not ring true.
Some people do hate Samsung products, and some people just hate Android in general. It may come as a shock to you, but in spite of this fact, there are actually tens of millions of people out there who prefer Android, Windows, and reasonably priced laptops.

I bought a retina iPad because at the time I was in the market, it was the best tablet available. If I were going to get one today, it would be a close call between the iPad and the galaxy note 10.1. As far as phones go, Apple has neglected the trend towards larger screens. For a power user, the Iphone's tiny screen is unacceptable. I recently purchased a Galaxy Nexus, and it's easily the best phone I've ever used, at a better price than an off contract iPhone.
It's ugly, but it gets you there.

Brillo offers you the moon. Free.

That didn't take long.
> It depends on the bitrate. A 1500kbps FLAC will definitely sound multitude levels better than an 800kbps FLAC. The same is the case for any other lossless container. The bitrate matters. Simply by listening to lossless music you won't discover 'sounds you've never heard before' as the author claims.

What?

Do you not know the meaning of the term "lossless" when discussing compression? It means that there is no difference between the decompressed result and the original source material. To do that, FLAC uses the minimum bits required to exactly reproduce the original sound waveform. There is no 1500kbps FLAC that "sounds better" than a 800kbps FLAC, because FLAC will only produce one bitrate for a given waveform.
Well, enough people have heard about it that it's made the front page of a newspaper, so people are bound to talk about it.

And indeed, Apple's products are iconic, but these are normal people we're talking about. I wouldn't put it past them.
why bother spending 5 years and a lot of effort/money designing something awesome if someone else can come along and clone your product in 3 months

Um, because you'll be able to sell that thing over and over for gazillions of dollars and turn your company into the most valuable company in human history?
I think you are probably safe to assume that. Clearly the guy writing this is coming from one particular side of the argument. I really couldn't care one way or the other - I like my iPhone, but if a Galaxy is going to make you happier go buy it.

However, don't discount the other side of the price argument. For some people price will be an important factor - however, as the iPod showed, it's not necessarily the main consideration for all consumers.

I had a discussion about a year ago with someone from Samsung - "look", he said, "the problem is this: our phones cost basically the same to make as Apple's phones, but the average consumer thinks that the iPhone is worth more than a Galaxy". Samsung would probably quite like to charge as much for a Galaxy S3 as Apple do for an iPhone 4S. In some markets and territories this actually happens.
Of course not. I accept and expect an infallible reality, it is the commenter I responded to who is shocked.
Thanks. While I'd like to see Apple gets it teeth kicked in as much as the next guy, the amateur analyses on HN about why the jury is obviously wrong are pretty frustrating to deal with.
The title implies that it was indeed deliberately fashioned by someone.
I love apple, they make great stuff and the eco system is a vision so well crafted it dominates anything else ever developed in that field... I had a MBP as my main machine on the road for some years even, don't make it sound like someone with another POV is simply discarding or "rewriting history". Apple copied a lot from several sources to make the original iphone, don't make it sound like they didn't because you prefer and love the brand. I get it, it's a good phone, it isn't a free pass to obliterate every other contribution to what made it great.

" It was -- literally -- like nothing that had ever come before it. It was -- literally -- like no other Android phone at the time"

No, it wasn't, it was progression on the work of many others and prior art that was discounted by the jury on the apple vs samsung case, is -- literally -- proof of that. Stay well. :)
In addition, I am at Starbucks once a day, at least. Never seen people so damn eager to talk with strangers, which makes this story even more.... "amazing"? :)
This is why I get so amped up about this entire discussion. One of the things that's so great about an API-centered business model is that there are a ton of creative decisions that have to be made in order to monetize it.

Do you sell per request? Per user? Do you charge a monthly fee and throttle the developers feed? Do you make some parts of the API, like user names and network names, freely available, while other parts are more expensive, like the edges of the social graph or individual interests?

These questions are so much fun. Finding the answers to them would be even more fun, and ultimately profitable, even if the answer to the question ends up being, "None of them work, let's go to advertising."

When Facebook jumped headfirst into advertising by hiring Sheryl Sandberg in 2008, they made it impossible to ask these questions.