skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Especially considering 95% of the content they resell is making them pure profit. By now, even the shittiest movie produced in the 90s has had so many tv runs, so many VHS and DVD units sold, that all production losses and fixed fees have been recouped.

There is absolutely no excuse for not having a cheap platform streaming every pre-2000 movie, except pure greed from the copyright mafia.
Sounds interesting. I'll give it a try asap you release it.
The jury completely ignored prior art anyway, because it was "bogging them down."
The purpose of patents is not to protect your clever ideas because you're special and you deserve it. That's what copyright is for (copyright carries certain restrictions however).

Patents are in fact an exchange; something for something. Society gives you a temporary monopoly, that means society incurs a certain loss. However in exchange you reveal all your secrets about how you did it. On the balance of things both you and society are better off. This was one of the things that made guilds obsolete (which existed to protect trade secrets) and so gave us a much more open, fast paced, modern world.

Now here's the problem. There is nothing secret about pinch-to-zoom! It makes sense to patent novel innovations in how a specific implementation of pinch-to-zoom works. But patenting a gesture that is so obvious you don't even need a scrap of expertise in the field to see? Ridiculous.

This is why a lot of people are beginning to question just what society is getting in exchange for the types of patents being issued today.
Ah! didn't know about it. Was there a mailing list/fb group?

EDIT: what did you do for place?
A few months ago, I saw Andrew Betts of the Financial Times Labs speak at the O'Reilly Fluent JavaScript conference. I was intrigued by their focus of using HTML5/JS to provide offline caching of content so that a reader could keep clicking on story links even if they were away from Wi-Fi connections.

Betts discussed some of the hurdles they encountered. Including their creation of a custom compression algorithm applied against the UTF-16 JS data so that much more could be stored on the client device.
This whole "Europe could become the new center of the world" sounds like wishful thinking to me. Asia seems a far better bet.
200-Year-Old 'Monster Larva' Mystery Solved
>> someone should get credit for coming up with that idea

If the execute well on that idea, they do get credit, in the form of business. If you come up with Korean tacos first, and they're good, you get lots of business. We don't have to start shutting down your competition and guaranteeing you're the only Korean taco stand in town in order for you to benefit from your work.

>> UX designers need to protect their work and creativity.

I don't know if you're in the U.S., but this is precisely the opposite of the rationale for intellectual property according to the US Constitution. It grants Congress power "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries".

The goal is to promote progress; exclusive rights are a sacrifice, for a limited time only, made in order to benefit the public.

If the public begins to lose out because of these monopolies, the Constitution would not support their existence.
Ain't broke don't fix!

Both bootstrapping and VC/funding model work fine they just each embrace different business models. Bootstrappers mostly focus on revenue from day 1 while the others are more focused on rapid growth and exit potential.

There is nothing wrong with any of them and the world is a better place by having different models as each offers unique innovation opportunities.
Log-in delays hit Guild Wars 2 launch
A lot of treats in this release! Amongst the new big features (cascaded replication, index only scans) I'm really happy to see a row->json function (great for message queues), DROP INDEX CONCURRENTLY (more flexibility to play with indexes even on production servers), NOT VALID CHECK constraints allowing us to slowly roll out more integrity, and a few other things. Great work as always!
Ask HN: How to resubmit or appeal a dead submission on Hacker News
What browser/system? On Linux with Firefox 14.0.1 I had no problem zooming in.
Because 10 million times $15 is $150 million, or tiny chump change in the grand scheme of their industry.

If you could ensure that only Usenet converts could use it, or pirate converts, that might be one thing.

But chances are, their average revenue per traditional customer is >$20/mo, and thus this kind of service would cannibalize their traditional business.

Reminds me of Windows discs. I never felt that Microsoft took fighting non-business-based piracy seriously, just did their due diligence because the problem was small enough to be nearly irrelevant and the solution would disrupt their normal business.
"That’s how it should work. That’s staying true to our principles and the best evidence that he hasn’t changed society."

These are the words I was happy to hear.
BLS says the average yearly salary for "Bus Drivers, Transit and Intercity" in "Chicago-Joliet-Naperville, IL-IN-WI" is $41,040. For "Chicago-Joliet-Naperville, IL Metropolitan Division" it's $41,320. (See http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_16974.htm for the latter.)

Two years ago I see that "At $28.64 an hour, the top wage rate for Chicago Transit Authority bus drivers ranks third-highest among U.S. transit agencies, according to an analysis conducted for the Tribune." BLS reports the median and mean are $21.06 and $19.87, respectively.

This means the highest paid bus driver in Chicago makes $56,200 per year. Plus benefits, of course. It's definitely the outlier wage.
Many thanks for this link. Exactly what I need at the moment.
Vendors + distributions are all committing suicide by pandering to the app store model, tablet interfaces and walled gardens. Noone is killing anyone.

Linux pissed the power users off (the entire market segment no less) during the gnome2 to gnome3/unity transition.

Apple are pissing power users off with their walled garden growing higher and some shoddy unreliable features.

Microsoft are pissing off power users with the same mind bending crapfest changes i.e. Metro.

It's all gone to shit actually. I really wish I did something else for a living.

I'm sitting here on a T61 with Debian on it, awesome window manager and xterms. It's the last bastion of common sense for the power user.
I don't specifically think Apple has killed Linux on the desktop. Linux on the desktop, without being horrible, was a pipe dream.

I use Linux everyday for development, I'm a big supporter of the project and would recommend everyone give it a go. However I'd fully expect half the people trying it to get confused and give up, some of the interface metaphors aren't quite there, installing software can be a chore of working out how to get there and what to do, and there's still too much emphasis on command line operations.

These things are all fine (and enjoyable in their own right), but for the majority of people they just need something they can switch on, and get on with. Ubuntu has gotten closer, but it's still just not quite there, so it's not that OS X has trumped it on the desktop for people seeking an alternative but that they've hit what they can currently get. There's lots of room for winning people over, some of Apple's poorer decisions recently might actually push a lot more people into the arms of Linux, we'll have to wait and see.
It's interesting, as I live in London and, even after getting a bit angry about how strong the copyright police were being, would have to admit that the Olympics were a resounding success. Everybody I met who was previously cynical grew to love the event, the city was absolutely rocking, the park was tremendous and the worst thing about it was the subsequent downer the city is now on.

Ruined is a bit strong, I guess is what I mean.
Asia is, without a doubt, going to be a crucial market, but, for whatever reason, Asian countries don't seem to be very good at software development yet compared to the U.S. and Europe.
Video: Learn How Google Finds Your Site.
> What I was speaking to is the desire to write:

setHeavyweightProperty = triggers('cache:dirty')(
lambda self, property, value: 'code')

is the same thing as

@triggers('cache:dirty')
def setHeavyweightProperty(self, property, value):
# code

but with the limitations of lambdas (no statements allowed)

> First, the multi-line anonymous lambda being used as the target of the decorator.

Python has no issue with that, it's just hard to do it because Python's lambdas can only contain expressions which can be rather limited in a statements-heavy language.

> Second, a function being called with another function as its argument as an expression within an instance method definition.

That's because your "instance method definition" is not syntactically correct, the capability itself exists. A "method definition" is nothing more than a function defined within a class scope. In fact you can do things like that:

>>> def method_outside(self):
... return self.wedding
...
>>> class SomeType:
... whose = method_outside
...
>>> s = SomeType()
>>> s.wedding = "Amanda"
>>> s.whose()
'Amanda'
>>> method_outside(s)
'Amanda'
>>> from collections import namedtuple
>>> o = namedtuple('N', 'wedding')(wedding="Jim")
>>> method_outside(o)
'Jim'
>>>
Why industry analysts restrict innovation and growth
The analogy with cars is misleading. Patents (unlike copyright) offer protection for a fairly limited duration. The steering wheel and other standard controls would long since have been unprotected.

Likewise, our children will be free to incorporate pinch to zoom in a few years...if of course patent protection doesn't lead to innovating a prefered alternative.

On the one hand I think IP laws have significant problems, but on the other, Android's interface shows little evidence of a meaningful effort at innovation and even less effort to respect the IP of others in the industry.
Norway Has Advice For Libya
Apple bridges the gap for fairly technical people who want a OS with the raw power of Linux but more polished.
Center of the world, nope. Center for software development... not impossible (IF the USA will continue on its current route with software patents).
The web is open when you have standard data exchange formats and control over your information. What happens most times though is that you connect to a black box that happens to use FOSS underneath - not free and not open.
What Mozilla is doing is not enough, and recently I have come to think of it a complete waste of time. Web apps are not magiclly open because they're written in JS and HTML.

Finally getting back to Linux, I don't think it has lost. I am pleasantly surprised at how good the latest Ubuntu is as a desktop. If Apple continues to lock down Mac OS people will move to Linux - in my case I am investing in my Linux skills and decided not toinvest in iOS.
>> I worry about the future of web development when I see things that used to be shared openly... one-by-one become startups with a price tag

I'm not worried. I develop for the web, and nearly every piece of my tech stack - language, editor, database, server, browser rendering engine - is open source. My skills are in such high demand that my team can't find people to join it. I feel zero pressure to use anything closed-source.

>> Web dev will only stay open so long as web devs fight to keep it that way.

I do agree with this. I think it's unwise to develop for platforms like iOS, however popular they may be. It's a form of sharecropping.

Let's keep working on the web, where every computer and mobile device is on equal footing, and we don't have to rewrite our app to reach new customers.
i've been a pipes user for many years. i mainly use it as a way to merge RSS feeds into a single bucket (e.g. craigslist items within 50 miles across multiple craigslists). my most frequently used pipe marries a bunch of news sources together by company name, a simple way to keep track of my industry and competitors.

i live in constant worry that yahoo will shut it down. glad to see it's getting some attention, and getting some clones, too.
> this crazy programming GUI that resembled Labview

Visual programming is a guarantee of failure, unless your target users are electrical engineers. Fact.
end of the year?
The quest for the perfect Linux distribution: an ongoing journey
By now, even the shittiest movie produced in the 90s has had so many tv runs, so many VHS and DVD units sold, that all production losses and fixed fees have been recouped.

I'm not so sure about that. The movie business is notoriously crappy - most movies never recoup their costs. It's the few wild successes that keep the studios afloat.

On the other it is true that the marginal cost of selling digital downloads of back catalogue movies is close to zero.
> What he means is that, since python lambda's are one-line

Technically, Python's lambdas are one-expression not one-line.

Within that constraint you can create as complex lambdas as you want (you'll probably need to create helpers for things like loops, and you may be hindered by Python's limits on recursion, but FWIW Scheme's or Haskell's functions have the exact same limitation, the primary difference being they're nowhere near as statement-heavy as Python).
Agreed. As a (private) pilot, and I understand why getting the passengers and crew focused for take off and landing is important. Compared to normal flight, those are the riskiest times - though as you said, still extremely safe compared to driving.

I understand the no-phones rule. I actually love that cell phones being used to TALK ON aren't allowed in flight. What I take issue with is that having electronics on is a safety hazard to the aircraft. If that was true, my Kindle would be confiscated along with my > 3.1oz bottle of shampoo at the checkpoint.
Rackspace Acquires Mailgun
Agreed; this was one I hit the Readability bookmarklet for straight away.

(Having said that, I went back afterwards and filled out the feedback form pointing out the annoying bits. It was a good article, and I wanted to repay the favour; I recommend you do the same if you agree.)
> Therefore, the moral status of a human immediately after the time of conception t_0 is akin to that of an animal. It's not okay to torture, abuse, or injure them for fun; it's not okay for people outside their family to interfere with them; it's morally and socially acceptable and even admirable for individuals to form very deep emotional attachments with them and spend enormous resources helping and protecting them; but it is okay to kill them humanely if there simply isn't a place for them.

However, the human at t_0 will become a person at t_I and the animal won't; the fact that the human is a potential person seems to be very important to the anti-abortion side of the argument.

Besides saying "well, potential things don't count because I say so", is there a strong argument for rejecting the idea that we should consider the human at having the moral status of the person they'll later be? (Clearly we do this already in law, starting at birth or soon before.)
Just had a look at their patents, and found this line in their gesture patent -

Identification and classification of intuitive hand configurations and motions - http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Se...

How is the use of intuitive gestures not obvious, entirely by definition?
symbiotic of the problems at the rest of Yahoo. good technology, good ideas, good people, poorly marketed, poorly sold, poorly managed.
Apple said that they, in the prelude to the suit, talked with Samsung about licensing their patents. So all in all I don't think apple has a monopoly since they will likely be forced to license their patents.
For none software tasks I keep looking for a way to make, for want of a better word, 'exponential' todo lists. So if something needs to be done in the next twelve months, it remains very high level in the to do list "arrange trip to America for example", and as the deadline gets closer, it becomes more granular.

I've had some success doing this with the sub ToDo lists within Trello cards so as it moves from 12 months to 6 months to 1 month to this week it gets broken down into smaller pieces but it still doesn't feel quite right.
It's a joke. When I fly, I'm on my cellphone and using ForeFlight w/ GPS to navigate. My lil' Piper doesn't care :-)
As a Rails user the best feature for me is the improvement of pg_stat_statements to normalize queries: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/What%27s_new_in_PostgreSQL_...

That means I get a real overview on what Rails is actually doing and what takes the longest.
PG: The Art of Funding a Startup is now free on Amazon
Thanks man. We're very excited about building a great software company and staying bootstrapped as long as we can :)
What is "wrong" (or at least suboptimal) is when good bootstrapped products get killed by money-heavy venture capital backed ones that fizzle out when they finish their money. That is pretty frustrating.
"I would be afraid of being successful, because I know I'll be bullied by others."

Getting sued for patent infringement is one of those first-world problems I'd love to have, because it means you're big & threatening enough to be worth suing.

Your strategy there, if you're still a startup and don't have a huge legal team, is to get bought by a big company with a huge legal team that would be hurt if the aggressor wins in court. See: Google, YouTube, and the Viacom lawsuit.
Stanford’s StartX Acclerator Planning for National Rollout
Or just cancel the cable :)
Curiosity rover's intriguing geological find
Didn't know that... thanks for the info!

By the way, by "patenting webkit" I meant patenting some of its technologies.
Changing the underlying implementation is not changing the API contract. The API makes no guarantees about where your arguments are shipped off to nor where the return value came from. It simply says "you give me X, Y, Z and I'll return you M" and that's it. This is the very reason for specified APIs: the underlying implementation changes (for caching, efficiency, new storage models, etc) and external code goes on its merry way doing what it did before-- running.
+1 for Tel-Aviv
If the company does any business with people in the US, patent trolls can attack it - perhaps the most famous recent example being the Uniloc vs. Mojang case: http://notch.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/mojang.pdf
I really liked the post (and the sentiment about 6wunderkinder as a Bostonian in Germany). However, I also really liked the reasoning of Nate Weiner on why he chose to make Pocket free:

http://blog.ideashower.com/post/21276590202/why-pocket-went-...

As you pointed out, it's up to us customers what kind of vision we want to support, the "low-risk", immediate revenue model or the long-tail, high-risk, winner-takes-it-all model. I totally agree that too few people are aware of the inherent differences and then cry if the latter fails or gets shutdown after an acquihire.

That being said, I prefer Pocket over Instapaper
New Megaupload Will Be Massive Global Network To Change The World
Many older (70+) people wake up at 5 am, they usually go to be around 8-10 pm.
Anyone one know the state of software patents for Canada?
App2Card goes social Promote your Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn with our cards
I wonder how many years since its inception you'd have to add together to get to the bandwidth of one pirated BlueRay.

Or in other words: How many Naggums is one "Twilight-Eclipse-1337-0-day-aXXo-xvid-sucks-720-SWESUB.mkv"?
It's hard to be all things to all browsers
I know people like this to. I think it is kind of a waste of time given you will often watch something once and if you really want to see it again can redownload it and be good to go in about 20 minutes.

I download things, chuck them on a hard drive that is only 1TB, if it starts to get full I just delete a chunk of stuff.
Don't finger print readers violate this patent?

Please correct me if I'm wrong.
>Evolutionary psychology is a valid science, however, and this is an enormous however, untrained individuals attempting to use it to enforce social norms is absolutely 100% sexist.

I personally believe that sexism is not immediately a negative thing, but neutral. Sex based discrimination is useful and can hold a lot of value in determining our next course of action.

Using sexism as a moral axiom is illogical. What's worse, it's censoring free thought through intimidation of social irrelevance.

Logic should be followed through without unnecessary moral burden. Observations should be made without the need to justify oneself purely for making them.

Just despairing with how the word sexism is conflated with so many other things in the internet rhetoric. Maybe this is more of an American thing.
Sounds to me like an engineer with that level of experience, who had navigated the patent process for his own prior patent, would know a thing or two about patents. I'm open to the possibility that there's a conflict of interest, but this bogus article says things like "I don't know if Apple uses this patent...or Samsung." That's fishing for hits by generating false controversy focused on some poor guy trying to serve as a juror.

I think this is a terrible article for demonizing some poor juror who had to put his life on hold for weeks to sit through this case. Don't blame the messenger (juror) for the broken patent system.
The timespan is utterly ridiculous though. With the modern pace of innovation in mobile and software development, a 20-year patent term would be like if the steering wheel patent were valid for 200 years.
Regarding the watermark generation process, although the bash script works, I immediately reach for my old friend (GNU) make(1) for that kind of task. Here's the Makefile:

all: watermark

done:=$(wildcard *-BD.pdf)
src:=$(filter-out $(done),$(wildcard *.pdf))
marked:=$(patsubst %.pdf,%-BD.pdf,$(src))

watermark: $(marked)

%-BD.pdf: %.pdf
./watermark_script.sh $< $@

The done+filter-out mumbo jumbo is there just because without it, -BD.pdf would be matched by .pdf, and therefore would generate -BD-BD.pdf... and so on (this is a loophole that the original bash script has, if parallel runs are timed correctly). Putting the output files in another directory is left ans an exercise for the reader.

The inotify script becomes:

inotifywait -e create /home/user/pdfs && make -C /home/user/pdfs

There is another loophole here, in that the -BD.pdf are created in that directory, so the script gets run again. It doesn't matter for our makefile, which will do nothing on the second run, but there is the 'parallel runs if timed correctly' issue of the original bash script.

Generally, GNU make has a bunch of very interesting facilities, making it much, much more powerful than its ancestors (BTW, people interested may want to take a look at an implementation of non-recursive make[0], which — while being awesome — also shows up some useful make tricks).

Now, regarding the filesystem events and userland tools (which are awesome), I wish there was a unified front-end for this kind of things (inotify on Linux, fsevents on OSX...)

PS: I wish the comment form supported something like markdown, so that I could escape those wildcards, and more.

[0] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/559216/what-is-your-exper...
FRAND only applies as a legal principle of the patent in question is part of an industry standard. So a Samsung patent that got incorporated into the UMTS should become a FRAND patent. The rules do vary from standards body to standards body.

Google has argued that industry-common patents, not just industry-standard patents, should fall under FRAND terms as well. In other words a patent that enables multitouch gestures is so essential to modern smartphones that you can't compete without it.

I'm still ambivalent on the whole patent question, though I'm intrigued by the idea of making all patents licensable under FRAND terms.