skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One thing Ive realized after working in software for a while is that software itself has very little ability to be applied in a way that is directly transformative to the human condition. By and large software is a tool to carry out an existing process or idea in a more efficient way, and in this regard it is a job-destroyer ready to eat the work of anyone who performs non-creative or intellectual tasks. This is what software does and the reason it can be so profitable - you can effectively capture the cost savings of automating very large processes. In fact the majority of startups when you strip them of their branding and buzzwords are just this ... they provide increased efficiency around an existing process whether it be social or business or otherwise. There is nothing inherently wrong with this in that it is the business of software. Additionally it also absolutely does not mean that these companies do not matter or are inconsequential but if you are looking for the true way software is transformational to the human condition, I think many are looking through the wrong lense completely...

The way software is truly transformational to the human condition is by freeing more and more of us from doing mindless tasks that only feel good to some due the distortions our current educational system and perverted social incentives. We should be celebrating the destruction of automatable jobs so more of us can be free to live better in whatever way that may mean. This doesn't happen in reality because our current system gives little to no rewards for doing other things like living, experiencing, helping, or learning - what actually happens to those people is that they go without another job and flounder. There are very few ladders to guide anyone displaced and thats a shame because their energy could be used in an endless number of ways for society.
Blank CDs sell for more than AOL free trial discs.
The words "proven invalid" seem like a nice summary of what's so broken about this situation.
I once worked at a company (a software company, even) where the developer's office were behind a very long dark hallway filled with multiple years of accumulated garbage. There was an open desk with a peekaboo view of Puget Sound, but I wasn't allowed to sit there because someone with seniority might want to sit there, even though the more senior person didn't want to move.

Hell yeah, I'll take a beautiful campus if you'll give me one.
I was shocked to learn this case is basically being decided by people who have no idea what they are really deciding on.

Here is the jury according to techcrunch

1. An electrical engineer
2. A homemaker
3. A construction worker
4. A young unemployed man who likes video games
5. An insurance agent
6. An ex-Navy avionics technician
7. A store operations manager for a cycling retailer
8. A project manager for wireless carrier AT&T
9. A benefits and payroll manager who works with startups

http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/21/apple-samsung/

Only in America?? And how many of those people are biased because they just love Steve Jobs and Apple products. I know for sure, my mom loves her Mac and she wouldn't think twice who is right and who is wrong in this case.
I get the feeling whoever comes up with the best graphic / table of the verdict will get a lot of play. The live streams are really hard to follow on what is what.
It feels good when the judgments reflect what is a common sense to a reasonable person. Glad the common sense prevailed here. It was obvious that the android devices were copied from iPhones.
This isn't right.... This is a terrible day for fair competition.
Open seating can either be a paradise workplace or a horrible nightmare. It depends on the nature of the work and the disposition of the people around you.

One of my very favorite work environments was in a tightly packed open seating area.
Interesting, what is the issue with SaaS?
Representative of the general public in US. Won't you say?
The "real" thinkpads / T-series have the Thinklight still. This X1 Carbon seems to have a backlight keyboard.
absolutely, shocking. The 'general' public are unlikely to grasp how complex this is and the future ramifications from their short and very limited time with the case.
Yeah, in a nation like USA (or actually anywhere, but let's be realistic) no one should die because they can't afford a standard treatment. I am from Italy and the first times I couldn't believe it.
> Zuck will have fun explaining to the shareholders why they are spending money on this and not trying to get back to their IPO stock price.

Zuck has 57% of the voting rights so listening to shareholders is a courtesy on his part.

Facebook's new engineering campus is a judgement call. To argue that he's wrong, you basically have to argue that you're better at making that sort of decision than he is.

Where's the evidence for that claim?
.. pile of poop?

I haven't followed the case closely and leaving aside whether or not Samsung copied from Apple, we just all lost.

Were there not a few prior art arguments and all that? Samsung couldn't invalidate any of those?!

This is depressing.
Rails internship at Startupbootcamp Berlin Company (remote working ok)
>> Yes, a microwave is significant if you have only ever used a stove. But going from a live fireplace to the other technology he mentions is a major change.

I would argue that the microwave oven is a significant innovation because it's not based on burning fuel -- wood or gas -- as was done in previous stoves.
Jury Reaches Decision in Apple-Samsung Patent Trial
This is both unsurprising and somewhat meaningless as there will be an appeals process that will last for months and possibly years.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see that Samsung made their products to look like Apple products. They changed their icon styles and other UI elements away from Android standards to match the Apple style.

Some of the things Apple invented and patented on like pinch to zoom and so on Samsung used or copied via Android and or their own UI skin on top of Android.

You just have to look at Windows Phone 7 or Windows 8 or Web OS or Blackberry to realize that you don't have to copy Apple to make a good or great smartphone. Samsung is much closer with the Galaxy S3, too bad they are still cranking out iPad clones with the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and the like.
Worth noting that this is an excerpt of a (much) longer essay in Distance: http://distance.cc

Some of the critiques here are totally fair, but folks should read the whole thing before forming a final opinion.
From just the book title, I'd like to point out that we have something known as Quantum Mechanics nowadays.
Despite being an AAPL shareholder, I agree 100%.
It's sickening. This case may significantly raise the bar for invalidating nonsense software patents in the future.
Well, that's what "jury of one's peers" is all about, a broad spectrum of the population.
It made enough to cover his rent in SF for one year.
I don't mean to be a debbie downer, but I find the idea of taking pictures of moleskine pages really, really clunky. I have done that in the past to take photos of book/magazine pages, and in my experience the picture almost always comes out low quality - a combination of blur, contrast, the curvature of the page and flash reflecting off the paper makes it very difficult to read later. I can only imagine what types of problems these factors will cause for Evernote's hand-writing recognition program. After all, software can optimize image quality only so much.
Coming soon to a learning experience near you: metacognitive strategies
damages: 1.051 billion dollars. WOW.

http://live.theverge.com/apple-samsung-verdict-live/
I wouldn't doubt the OP exaggerated a lot of details. Logically there aren't that many steps between "training martial arts in Asia", "advanced martial artist", and "Buddhist Monk zen martial artist sensei <insert additional superlatives>". Though I would think that perhaps since the OP exaggerated his "good times", this would prove that he knows and recognizes them, and has something to look forward to, a light at the end of the tunnel so to speak.

That being said, it would also suggest he is a manic-depressive type. The highs are high, the lows are low. This is a very difficult condition to deal with.
Samsung lost, 1.5 Billion verdict in favor of Apple
This is a good, well written, specific story of a startup. Nice job guys. :)

- Just realized this is from quite while ago.
1 billion, 51 million 855 thousand dollars... Wow
What on earth are you talking about ?

Juries around the world are compromised of ordinary people.
He mentioned the editor second. The fact that it was the only CL project in his github first. In my perspective he mentioned the editor as a weaker circumstantial evidence.
Jury finds for Apple in amount of $1.051 billion
American patent system is weird. Why is it fair for someone to patent "what" you do, what should be fair to patent is "how" you make this thing viable (e.g. the algorithms used, or something like that)?

As long as you don't use the mechanisms of your competition, you should be allowed to mimic the features present on other competitors' devices.

Considering this, it seems clear that Samsung would lose the dispute anyway.
True, but to be fair, radical innovation is usually the low-hanging fruit of some new discovery.
Are you saying that Patents prevent fair competition? Isn't that the point of patents?
Isn't that how a jury is suppose to work though? They're suppose to have as little bias as possible going into the case.
Good points on the blind spot.

I wanted to add the range hood as well, but it turns out that was in the last 60 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_hood
> You just have to look at Windows Phone 7 or Windows 8 or Web OS or Blackberry to realize that you don't have to copy Apple to make a good or great smartphone.

Ok sure, but why did you cite a bunch of bad smartphones to validate your point?
What's shocking is your complete ignorance of how the legal system works.
And yet, that's essentially a rounding error on Apple's bank account balance...
Double tap to zoom, now, that's real innovation!
Looking after someone with dementia is a full time job which is very emotionally draining and people can live many years with dementia. A lot of people could not afford to look after their loved ones, economically or mentally.

I imagine you'll quit your job when the time comes to look after your parents?

If I ever get dementia I'd like to be euthanasied, rather than have my children suffer through it.
>> people who have no idea what they are really deciding on

I thought the lawyers, judge and witnesses provide all the information they need to make the decision.

>> And how many of those people are biased because they just love Steve Jobs

I would think that Samsung's lawyers would have disqualified those types of people during the selection process.
Yes. The argument being that for a highly technical issue it should be decided by a panel of experts, not the general public.
Apple vs. Samsung Verdict Is In
You must be blind.
Honestly that sounds like the perfect group to decide this. The whole point of this lawsuit is to prove that your average Joe would have a hard time distinguishing Samsung's product from Apple's.
"It works like magic...far more accurate than any interface ever shipped... multi-finger gestures, and boy have we patented it!" Steve Jobs in 2007[1]

1. https://twitter.com/tconrad/status/239136435603652609
I'd hardly consider basically a big warehouse/hangar full of mobile desks and some kitchens to be extravagant. It seems like the lowest cost way to warehouse lots of engineers in an open plan environment, which Facebook for some reason really likes.
Correct definition of the term "Yak Shaving"
no macros? I'm no expert and I'm asking to experts: macros are one of the key features of Lisp. Should macros have helped reducing LOC or improving maintainability?
Totally, but not for Samsung. That's almost 10% of their net profit last year.

This is going to scare the shit out of every Android handset maker out there.
>software itself has very little ability to be applied in a way that is directly transformative to the human condition

I have to disagree on at least the area of communications. I travel all the time and if I'd have been doing this in the 90s I'd either have a hefty phone bill or I'd not be able to keep in touch with my family. More than likely, I'd not keep in touch with my friends and keep my friends, and know my place in this world through my friends. I agree, a lot of software is just convenience, such as better flight search that replaced my travel agent, or the ability to pay my bills online so when I get do home the power is still on.

>The way software is truly transformational to the human condition is by freeing more and more of us from doing mindless tasks

I also celebrate the destruction of the mindless job. I can't remember where I read this yesterday, but someone mentioned imagine you are having a conversation with yourself from 100 years ago: the amount of free time we have because of automation is astounding and I can only hope it gets better. I like to be creative on my free time, but the paradox is that I need a lot of free time to be creative. I find myself spending time on programming or thinking about the automating of tasks instead of just doing them once a week. I hope to find a balance over time and I do jump on anything that can save me from mundane activities.
How is twitter immediate when it's down?

Twitter doesn't solve the immediacy problem with any hard guarantees either.

Most of the time email is on par with twitter.
Smartphones != OS

Have you ever used Windows Phone or WebOS? I assure you, they are not 'bad'.
It really depends on what kind of site/app you have and your goals with it. What kind of site/app do you have?
Well WebOS and Blackberry Playbook and Windows Phone 7 might not be of the same calibur in terms of hardware, but they are proof that Samsung didn't need to try and ape Apple so closely to make a good product.
The fact that patents can often be used on common sense or logical shapes, colours or materials in goods is just silly!
No. Apple won. Pretty clearly.
I can "sandbox" code using the shell far easier than I can control what a "modern browser" can do.

Because I know the shell and my OS better than I know a "modern browser".

"People are working on it..."

C'mon, man. This sounds pathetic. You can learn to use the shell safely. How do you think sysadmins do their jobs?

Or you can pretend the shell is too difficult and something to be feared. The simple fact is _you_ control the shell. You don't expose it to the world (unless you're playing games with CGI or doing like the OP said: feeding it random bytes from the internet). You can read the code for a basic shell (e.g. rc, sh, dash). You can modify and compile it yourself. You can write your own. CS students routinely write their own shells as part of the curriculum. A "shell" is something relatively simple.

You really think you're ridiculously complex "modern browser" is "safe"? Safer than your shell?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8cQ0yU89sk

When your use the shell, you trust the people who provide your OS's kernel, the compiler, libraries and userland and those 3d party applications, if any, you choose to run. That's already a lot of people and a lot of code. When you use a "modern browser" who do you trust? I can't even begin to quantify it.

As a very well respected cryptographer once wrote, security may be less a matter of reducing privilege than of reducing the amount of trusted code. The only reason you even have a concet of "privilege" is because it's a relic of shared computing. Everyone has their own computer now. There's no such thing as "root" in Plan 9.

Compare the LOC in a basic shell with the LOC in your web browser.
The case is being decided by people that Samsung and Apple chose, out of the random pool of potential jurors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_selection
Apple wins over $1B in damages in Apple v. Samsung trial
If you use a US company then they are subject to the Patriot Act no matter where the servers physically are.
Knowing this audience, I'll probably get downvoted, but I'll say it anyway.

That's rather cynical. This is precisely the kind of trial that doesn't require expert thinking because most of what is up for debate is whether Samsung willfully attempted to fool customers into thinking that their products were just like an iPhone by copying the trade dress. And determining such a thing is a matter of common sense.

This reminds me of an anecdote about Brahms's first symphony:

Brahms himself said, when comment was made on the similarity with Beethoven, "any ass can see that." [1]

So it is here. We needn't pretend any longer that Samsung's designs are mere coincidence. Whether it should be punishable is another question, but under the current law this, to me, is the right call.

1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._1_(Brahms)#History
Apple wins tech biggest patent trial against Samsung
The physical world, robots, and the internet
How so?

Issued patents have already undergone an examination by a patent examiner, who found that the patent met the statutory requirements for validity, so it seems reasonable to me that someone wishing to overturn that decision should bear the burden of proof.
I haven't seen such a broken site (for me) in a few years.

That's quite hard on a one-man show which is in the edge of not requiring flash, for requiring flash.

I would reserve such harsh criticism for sites I have to visit and which are not even intended to work: city council, theatre box office, local public library. Heck, even the London Olympics user experience was broken, I read.
I'm aware of how it works, i just don't think there should be a legal dispute for many of the 'patents' here is all.
/usr/games/cowsay -f `ls /usr/share/cowsay/cows | shuf -n1` `/usr/games/fortune`
No, that's not the point of patents, but unfortunately, the point of patents was kidnapped long ago, and now I feel like someone just threw the key into the ocean.
Zuck has to listen to the market. If the market is dumping his stock like after the recent lock-up expired then there's a problem.
From now on we should call rotary dial phones the new Apple free smartphones.
thank goodness patent exhaustion was upheld.
>> Ok sure, but why did you cite a bunch of bad smartphones to validate your point?

The hardware for Windows Phone and Web OS might have sucked, but the OS's are quite nice in my opinion. I would seriously consider either of those two over an iPhone if they (well WP at least) had better hardware.

Regarding the Blackberry, well, I don't have any defence for them.
Except that it's NOT a highly technical issue.

It's mainly a trade dress and UI look & feel issue. So the general public are absolutely the right people.
Ideal verdict: "The Judge presides that both parties should just FUCK OFF and make decent phones."
I think that's unnecessarily dismissive.

The article, and your response, are just examples of two opposite sides of the same old argument: how do you measure value? Should value be measured in how much money is made, or should it be estimated in more subjective terms of human impact?

We need occasional articles like this. It's healthy to re-evaluate what's being done once in a while. Dismissing people advocating for the human impact measure of value as not "getting" Google or the startup industry leaves yourself vulnerable to not "getting" what they're talking about, either.

Here's a softball example. Pinterest, or Doctors Without Borders: which one is more likely to be having a real, positive impact on the lives of people around the world? In terms of money and exposure, Pinterest is more valuable than Doctors Without Borders. Is that the right conclusion that we should be drawing then, that Pinterest is worth more to the future of humanity than an organization dedicated to sending medical talent into parts of the world where it's otherwise unavailable?

I think the article was reasonable. I don't see anything in the article that suggests that the entire industry is without merit; just that, there is a trend right now in the industry as a whole which we might want to think about a little. (Its author might be suffering from being a bit too immersed in only one aspect of business, perhaps.)

So why does that always make everyone so defensive? Why shouldn't we question whether or not money is the best measure of success, or progress?
goodbye innovation
Stripe’s Capture The Flag 2.0 — A Hands On Contest For App Developers ...
Sorry to see they're all being electromagnetically irradiated by those giant power lines.

On the upside, they'll save tons of money by not having to hardwire any of their fluorescent lamps...
Lots of data, but preciously little information. For example:

- Why is python so much slower on Mac OS X? if I had to guess, I would say it is more due to a version difference than due to a compiler change. It might also be some particularly slow library code on Mac OS X, though.

- What is causing the sometimes huge differences in CPU-only tasks such as the matrix computations? Compiler, system overhead due to inefficient code, system overhead because the system also performs other work (for example, did the OS index files during some of the runs?), or maybe architectural choices that lead to system overhead (for example, a scheduler might switch tasks more often in order to keep UI response low)?

With such info, this would have been a great article. As it stands now, all I conclude from it is that OpenGL is slower under Ubuntu, and that Linux filesystems are faster (but there, it would help to know why. HFS probably is a large part of the explanation, but it also might be that Mac OS ports of various tools do slightly different things, e.g. By flushing to disk more aggressively.
One thing to recognize about San Francisco is that the tech scene is actually spread out across the whole peninsula, not just San Francisco.

While San Francisco has been experiencing a considerable renaissance (my last three companies were HQed in SF), quite a bit of the tech scene is located 30-40 miles South in Santa Clara County.

San Francisco is physically smaller than Manhattan and has about half the population. The rest of the peninsula is pretty suburban. Even in areas of SF that approach Manhattan for density, it is not NYC and it is not trying to be. If you like hyper-competitive people or any hint of pretension, look elsewhere.

That said, yes, SF's startup scene is mecca. Really. The tech density is high enough that you will see tech people literally everywhere, money flows liberally and is well over critical mass for early adopters of technology.

The biggest cons to living here are:

* As a startup, hiring is hard because the best of the best often want to start a company, have started a company or do consulting for startups. I import a lot of people from across the country.

* Microclimates mean going from a t-shirt to a coat with a twenty minute drive.

* Rent is expensive. Maybe not Manhattan expensive, but no less competitive.

* A car are necessary if you live in the peninsula because of how spread out it is.

* You'll be in an environment where there are probably 3+ other startups doing your exact same idea.

Disclosure: I'm from SF.
There is a somewhat justifiable reason for the author to jump to that conclusion – VMware Fusion 4.1 (accidentally?) supports the virtualization of Snow Leopard, which violates Apple's EULA. That feature was very quickly removed in a 4.1.x update.

Given that Fusion 4.1.0 is blacklisted while 4.1.3 works fine on Mountain Lion, it's not entirely unreasonable to think that Apple purposefully disabled 4.1.0 to prevent users from virtualizing Snow Leopard against their will.

Not the conclusion I would have jumped to right off the bat, but I can see the train of thought.
I think that's what's so frustrating to me as an engineer. Samsung's technology patents were clearly violated, but did not win in court. Why? Perhaps because they aren't common sense. They are complex and intricate. THAT is what patents should be about. Not common sense.