skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I congratulate the Mailgun team and I wish them all the best, but Rackspace's previous acquisitions bode ill for the future of Mailgun.

Rackspace acquired CloudKick in late 2010 and Anso Labs in February of 2011. Both teams must have been put on other projects, because their products have stagnated. CloudKick no longer lets people sign up. Their blog, https://www.cloudkick.com/blog/, has broken images and few updates. I couldn't find any products by Anso Labs, so I googled the founders. It looks like they no longer work at Rackspace: http://gigaom.com/cloud/openstack-developers-leave-rackspace...

Again I wish the best for Mailgun, but I really hope they know what they're getting into. If I were a customer, I would be wary right now.
Samsung loses $12.3 billion in one day
This is just a feeble attempt at discrediting Apple, pathetic really. "how does that not qualify as obvious?" If it was indeed so obvious for so long why did we have to wait until Apple did it for every one to realise it? Either Apple innovated or everyone else is an idiot for not doing what was obvious.

In either case the me-too idiots didn't realise how to implement control interfaces for touch screens until Apple showed them how to, at which point they tried to copy what the bright kid had done.
Right; we need upward of 500 art pieces; CC is not going to work for us.
(This comes from an S2 user with Pinch-To-Zoom.)

First, Pinch-To-Zoom is the best idea anyone has come up with yet, but it certainly won't be the last.

If anything, this decision forces Google/Samsung etc. to innovate a better solution. If you don’t think one exists, I think you are sorely mistaken. Pinch-To-Zoom needs to be used by 2 hands (one to pinch, one to hold the phone) which inherently is annoying.

If the patents are trivial, obvious, etc. other companies will find workarounds and some of those workarounds will be better than what is currently available.

In 12 months, this lawsuit will be meaningless because technology will keep advancing forward.
Commercial license for what? Support?

Until there is more evidence this is just a developer who misunderstands what the license entitles others to do with his work.
By "alternative services" I assume you are referring to BitTorrent? :-)
What's the "try me" pointing to?

Some kind of feedback tool about the site.
Very strange; a product being sold for a price that depends upon how much money you have. Isn't that called scalping?
I actually tried and find the GPL violations since I'm curious and would like to make up my own mind. So far without luck. All I can see is that the author accuses other people of creating closed forks (fine with the gpl IMHO) and renaming the product (fine with the gpl IMHO) and that one product is being sold on a commercial license. He neither adds any pointer which product that might be or how he thinks that the other actions harm the GPL. I'd love to see a more extensive statement on that so I can follow his reasoning. Until then, I'm a bit divided about this issue - it looks a little as if he feels slighted and ripped off by others and tries to retaliate while harming the community in the process.

Edit: I meant by "fork" the "github fork" as the author of mayan did. So a "closed fork" would be to fork the project to closed github repo.
You'd still be wrong. Soghoian's "contribution" to the article is just his tweet cited by the actual author and nothing more.
Our enterprise customers pay thousands of dollars per month, so it is well over $1M :)
Since you're waiting for someone to ask...

How do you define "global"?
I've actually done this before on my tablet. The speakers built in are pretty poor quality but my home speakers are nice, so I plugged in the headphone jack. I didn't want to bother moving the video from my tablet to my HTPC, but at least I got good sound.
I'm somewhat curious why this spam hasn't been downvoted into oblivion.
When it's fundamentally broken internationally and people start giving it bad reviews when it doesn't work. That's the only case I can think of and even then it's quite weak.
God forbid anyone should make a bit of money by recommending a book that is of interest to you.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4360330

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4402285
A Prototyping/Manufacturing Car Plant in Africa.
Hello everyone,
I was wondering how much it would cost to Setup a car prototyping outfit in Africa,where i could try out inventing my own automobile .I know lots of people would suggest starting out in my garage, but i just want to have an estimate on how much it would cost and what it entails as i quite interested in the africa-auto niche thanks.
I iTunes on Windows reasonably well. (I typed "just fine" at first, and that's not true. It has been a bit crashy and clearly a second-class citizen. But it works.)
The point is that the lawsuit is your leverage for the negotiation. The acquirer doesn't want to see you lose the lawsuit any more than you want to lose it, because it would set a precedent that would make their own products infringing. And since they're bigger than you, they have more to lose, and hence more of an incentive to win.

I've long suspected that Google bought YouTube for the lawsuit. If Viacom had won, it would set a legal precedent that would basically make Google's business model illegal. And Viacom would likely have won, suing a tiny 14-person startup. So Google's only option was to buy the lawsuit (and the company along with it), so they could use their own legal defense team to win in court.
With several backgrounds like that maybe you can build up a Fourier representation of a small image

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/Dctjpeg.p...
Zooming in is with fingers at top left and bottom right, zooming out is with fingers at top right and bottom left.
The real problem is stack ranking is a morale killer.

Depends. I've been on teams where the weak links are the morale killer. Busting my ass while watching people do little and continue with a job or worse yet get the team accolades made me leave my last job.

Does Microsoft have well-motivated top talent? It certainly doesn't show in the product lineup.

This is a completely separate issue. I would argue that MSs problems have nothing to do with engineering talent. Their problems stem from the management side with Balmer being problem number one. Doesn't Google also do some form of employee ranking? They seem to also have plenty of talent. Google though has side stepped needing great management by being data focused to a fault. This has made them better than MS in some ways, but worse in others.

So you're left with the middle - people who do their job reasonably well and aren't dumb enough to take risks that might get them downgraded. Projects that are in trouble can't be turned around because the best (remaining) people stay away. And the people who couldn't get away find other jobs. I saw this happen on a project at a financial company I worked for. They needed eight or ten developers and went through at least twenty in the space of a year.

You're right that it's not always the best solution. First, a company needs to be at the top of their field so they are attracting top talent. If Joe Bobs software attempted stack ranking they are going to fail because they are not the big leagues. No one goes to work there expecting it to be that way. People who work at the Googles and MSs of the world expect that environment and are rewarded well when they thrive.

At the end of the day, coming in at the bottom of one of the premier software companies isn't necessarily a bad thing. I regret not trying to get a job at one when I was younger just to see if I could hack it. At the time though my priorities were different.
Alternative Ways To Network
> I'm somewhat curious why this spam hasn't been downvoted into oblivion.

Because I'm a long-time member of this community who has a bootstrapped company dealing with Kindle formatting, and because it was appropriate to this thread? People were complaining about the book's formatting.

Honestly, people on this site aren't the target market in any case, as anyone with a bit of tech skills can likely create the correct HTML and XML files, but you never know.

Actual spammers tend to repeat the same thing over and over, as well. I rarely mention LW in my comments here.
When IT is the BYOD security threat
There’s Nothing Like It | Bizcovering
The claims for the pinch-to-zoom patent are broad enough to cover pinch to zoom on any touchscreen.
Could someone more knowledgeable please explain what the consequences of this patent might be?
Your police aren't given $100 Million from taxpayers to buy toys like this, including land and air drones.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2012/08/hardcore-sec...

I think US has India and virtually all other countries beat.

I expect they are going to start to do random stops for IRIS scans like they do in the middle-east over here soon - you know, for all the terrorists roaming our streets and airports and buses and trains.
until the first self driving car-bomb and then they'll be banned.
I've been using Optimizely, but after hearing from about VWO from COUNTLESS people I think I'm going to make the switch.

Plus, bootstrappers should support other bootstrappers, eh?
Why do I have to switch off my Kindle for takeoff and landing?
Exactly. It's the intuitive understanding of what made Apple different and so successful.
HN doesn't knock the hustle if its relevant and not over the top spammy.
Modify a site you don't own
I understand your perspective, though I personally find it a bit extreme, and possibly even self-limiting in this case.
>Actually the FACT is that a company is required to defend their trademark as a condition of it being granted.

Nope.
The Sad State of the Startup Pitch
Beyond that, we need to consider priority dates when determining when something was 'invented' when it comes to prior art.

Note the application referenced downthread (20060238520) is a continuation of a 2004 filing, itself a continuation of a 2001 filing, itself a divisional of a 1999 filing which claimed priority based on a provisional 1998 filing. [1]

So to challenge that application, you'd need to find art circa at least 1998. And even then you have to consider the USPTO's (now legacy) practice of recognizing date of invention, rather than filing. Which means you may have to find art even older than 1998, to get that bit invalidated.

[1] Patent applications are rarely straightforward affairs. The process of mapping what we colloquially think of as "an invention" (awesome new widget) to patent applications often entails the creation of a family of patent applications. It gets very messy, very quickly.
It's amazing what people will put up with. I built a media center PC running Windows 7 using a guide like this[0]. It was the best decision I made. I just torrent content on my desktop, access it over the network share on my HTPC, and everything's good to go.

You can get a 10' UI using XBMC if you want, and you can access the full versions of YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, (and HBO Go, I presume) etc. - no restrictions. No transcoding, no syncing - if it works on your PC, it works on an HTPC.

0: http://lifehacker.com/5936546/how-i-built-the-media-center-o...
I have a Galaxy S3. I bought an MHL -> HDMI adapter, hooked up to my tv and started up HBO Go for a test run. On Android they don't even bother with an audio only implementation. The app simply crashes.

Until this article I assumed the developer sucked. Now I'm not so sure the crashing is a bug.
Strange argument, that we fix the internet somehow, by boycotting products that don't match our expectations of what an internet business should be.

I thought the free market determined what survived? Adding this pressure - has to conform to a blog writers vision - just adds another hurdle to success. Was something about the free market broken? Will a half-dozen annoyed blog-readers make any difference? What's the goal here.
Fallacious arguments (of which circular arguments are a subset) aren't literally meaningless. "My point is true because my point is true" is perfectly comprehensible, it just fails to establish the fact that "my point is true". You can disagree with it reasonably by pointing out the fallacy, so it has linguistic substance, and it is not meaningless.

It is very different from, say, "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" which is literally meaningless.
Retailers Turn to "Soft Surveillance" to Fight Customer Anonymity
The point isn't that Apple didn't innovate.

The point is whether Apple's ideas are worth granting a monopoly over.

I recall playing with a Microsoft Surface the year before the iPhone got released, and lots of the mechanics were very similar. Pinch-and-zoom is the 'one-click-shopping', or the 'press tab to move to next selectable UI element' (also patented) of the touch interface; if you're being paid to develop it, you'd think about that concept in about five minutes.

Furthermore, do you really want to live in a world where Apple gets a monopoly on touch gestures? Describe a different zoom-in mechanic using only two fingers.
A bit more like, Apple buying the rights from a group who was patenting what was being done in the field at around the same time as other people were also building similar systems.
Considering the listed plans alone are $49, $129, $249, $729, $900, $1,700 I'm willing to bet annual revenue is many, many, MANY multiples higher than $1 million.

And that's not taking into account all the custom enterprise plans on the very high end.

Really inspirational and motivational stuff for us entrepreneurs just starting with out SaaS apps to see this - and it's all done without giving away a chunk of ownership.

Thanks and good luck, Paras.
Either that or he got a divide by zero error...
Apple identifies which Samsung products it will try to ban in US
Huh? This article says that in India, the police have required store owners to collect ID before allowing people to use the Internet, have required hotel owners to deny rooms to people from Delhi, require police verification before you can rent an apartment, and require witness statements to open a bank account.

And so you have one article suggesting that the police somewhere wasted money on an APC, and now "we have them beat"?

What kind of argument is that?
So You Think You Can Firefight?
oh please; "This is the reason why companies should stop using GPL software in their applications." ?

You're just trolling now.

There are plenty of reasons not to use GPL, but obscure reasons to do with the 'spirit of the license' isn't one of them.
I think that a Facebook group is better for all discussions:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/278515712253665/

If anyone are in, I suggest Sep. 13 which is Thursday and it's great for a toast for Rosh Hashana.
Voted back up to positive territory. What was with the downvotes? This is informative, and he's right -- Apple might be patent assholes, but they're not patent trolls.
I suppose I’d tend to describe a business operating on several continents as “global”, while I’d probably describe a business operating in a few countries within Europe as “European”.

I haven’t really thought about where any firm dividing line would fall, and I’m not sure there’s any benefit to having one. I just took exception to the implication that those of us running businesses in Europe were somehow invalid on a global stage without the blessing of the US.
> "a signal that I should worry about about building off other APIs and not the Twitter API."

Call me crazy, but hasn't this always been the case? Relying on an API out of your control is fine if you're running a website, but if you have a business and you rely on the Twitter's and the Facebook's of the world to keep you going then it's only a matter of time.
This is almost exactly what I'm currently coding in a side project in order to dynamically load different parts of a game when necessary instead of front-loading it all at once.

This is just another example of an obvious method to solve a problem that any developer will come up with as soon as they need to solve that problem.
Uhh, because fictional representations of devices without sufficient information on how to actually construct them isn't prior art?

I guarantee you, if you invent a matter/energy transporter you will be able to patent it despite Star Trek having put it on screen almost 50 years ago.
I work at Rackspace and the CloudKick team (now augmented with a lot of other Rackers) has been heads down working on improving their product. The intial results can be seen here http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/public/monitoring/.

EDIT: Removed some text about fixing the broken site. I just checked and it looks like it has been updated to point to the Cloud Monitoring solution. If there are broken links or images, feel free to post them or send them to me and I'll see what I can do.
On first glance it looks like it could cause trouble for frameworks like Meteor - http://meteor.com/
If this goes against the "spirit of the license", there should be provisions against it.

It doesn't. RMS encourages people to sell GPL licensed software, written by them or not, and to charge as much as they can or want.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
Stripe without the Stripe
I think the best thing about Usenet is that no one talks about Usenet.
"Hey Nostrademons. Great little startup you got going here.

Say what, I'm going to give you a choice. You can either be bankrupted out of existence by this patent troll or I can buy you out for fifty cents on the dollar. You won't lose face, your investors will be bailed out but in effect you've worked your ass off for 2-5 years for what amounts to an above average salary or a generous signing bonus.

Oh and you now have to work for us to develop the idea for another two years, without equity, before your vesting or whatever it is called clause hits."

Sounds like a shit sandwich to me.
Congrats guys! Great service and well-deserved, we're big fans (and customers).
Worse than that actually. NNTP is a pull model, SMTP is push, at least.
I would disagree. India is not a police state. India is a bureaucratic state. These regulations are not meant to frighten or intimidate people. As the article points out, they're so ineffectual as to be laughable. Police states tend to be quite a bit more brutal than that.

No, all of these regulations, permits and rules are classic hallmark of bureaucratic empire building. All those Internet cafés now need to be inspected to ensure that they're keeping track of their customers. The department that manages to grab that privilege has access to more lobbying power, more bribes, and more influence. Any politician would lust after side-benefits like that. So, after any catastrophe, the answer is always more regulations and more inspections, regardless of whether those regulations and inspections would do anything to actually solve the problem.
When I got my Kindle I've spent quite some time for the useless jailbreak.

The only cool thing I was able to achieve was to play Star Wars ASCII version over telnet (towel.blinkenlights.nl).
Granted, this excerpt seems ambiguous at first. A different quote had the phrase about coming back to it later. There's more context here though:

"We weren't impatient," Ilagan said. "We wanted to do the right thing, and not skip any evidence. I think we were thorough... we took our time. We didn't rush. We had a debate before we made a decision. Sometimes it was getting heated."

Even without context, what you quoted is not really that ambiguous. He says they debated it, so much debate that it was "bogging them down". That's not skipping it in the sense most people think skipping it means.

So "skipped it" in his words seems to just mean they moved on. Then since the question was answered on the verdict, they did clearly did come back to it to form a group consensus later.
Postfix: SMTP Options with Webmin
Can Technology Redefine Detroit?
CloudKick is perhaps one example, but Slicehost is a counterpoint. It became their Rackspace Cloud offering, which is quite good.
Then we are happy to support you - but, could I point out I had to read this defence before I knew that - maybe when plugging your own work in context its worth pointing that out.

PS

David, I suspect many HNers are like me - interested in reading the book, no Kindle. I tried the "Cloud reader" but am stuck giving amazon a valid serial number of the Kindle I don't own.

so, is Google right in telling me you cannot use cloud reader without at least one Kindle purchase? (Have not dared brave the Amazon tech support line)

edit - about third rewrite - cannot make the thing about "please say you are bootstrapping HNer" sound anything other than snarky - apologies.
Apparently, it works fine if you go trough google: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=the+i...
But otherwise it's a no-no. Strange.

And I know the article is old, but
- It's interesting (it's what matters, right ?)
- It wasn't "news" in 2011 when it was posted either
- The title of the hacker news submission is exactly the title of this article. So I think the OP wanted to point to this.
>Need a new credit card, or a phone connection ? You can have a representative visit you. These kinda of services are primarily possible to India's abundance human resource (and various other factors of course).

Of course, you have to ask why it's often necessary for someone to provide those services. The answer is that oftentimes India's infrastructure is so rickety, it's easier for the corporation to maintain a private courier pool than it is for them to trust the postal service or a private delivery service.
Have you provided them with the project? Next time put a backdoor in your code and remove it after payment. Most people don't check.
This is not novel. This is not innovative. It is a relatively obvious method for dynamic code loading over the web that any intermediate programmer could have arrived at independently.
Ideas of "principle" vs "rules" based decisionmaking have a long history of debate. As you note, writing perfect rules to cover all scenarios ex-ante is nearly impossible.

That leaves us the task to debate virtue of new and existing principles, and find a way to incorporate discretion and expertise. The issue is making sure that discretion doe not get manipulated/gamed as well.

How do we do that?

Society today is very much every man/special interest for himself.
Seems a bit odd.

If someone is violating GPL then get in touch with the FSF (http://www.fsf.org/) and talk enforcement with them.

If someone is forking your code and calling it something else, or selling it.... well, welcome to the GPL. You're allowed to do that. You need to read section 7, specifically:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt

c) Prohibiting misrepresentation of the origin of that
material, or requiring that modified versions of such
material be marked in reasonable ways as different from
the original version; or

That's an additional term you can place on your code, and NOT part of the default license.
So.... where do I send my examples of prior art? patent office?
A note about Arch: most WMs and DEs have support for packages that allow configuration through a GUI, although the installation is all text. Configuration through editing text can sometimes be faster when you really know your system. As the author points out, running arch can really help you to get to know your system.

Also, it's been awhile since I was "new" to linux, but arch installation can be very easy if you follow the beginners guide on the arch wiki. Everything is spelled out plain and simple.

There is a graphical installer for a branch off of arch, known as Archbang. It's basically a live system you can boot into (with openbox) and install from there (still text based really, but a little more friendly). (Some arch users also fear the road of a GUI installer because it would make it easier for people with little understanding of linux to run arch, but that is a flawed philosophy. Arch can be for learning too)
Two New Execs and Lofty Expansion Plans: “Onswipe” On Its Way Up