skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why is CSM dodgy for medical reporting?
> it wasn't about a 'few' buttons, the iPhone was about none.

Excuse me? Last I checked, the iPhone has at least three buttons, maybe four! Home, Volume Down, Volume Up, Power.
I think you might be misleading yourself. Sitting around, reading articles is easy. Everyone does it when they procrastinate. In fact, when I procrastinate, I do the easiest stuff possible. Read an article, think about it, watch videos, write posts, play around in GarageBand/photoshop, look up unrelated programming projects and think about doing them, etc.

Show me a person that writes a chapter for a novel when they procrastinate, or creates nearly finished pieces of art, and then I'll agree that person should reconsider what they are doing.

Everything that happens while you procrastinate is more or less a much easier activity. Don't sell yourself short.
So what's the innovation here? Applying minimalism (an established style from the 60's) to computers and phones?

Is that really worthy of patent protection? Asked another way, should I be granted a patent to apply minimalism to other objects all around me? Suitcases? Refrigerators? Etc?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalism
Paypal didn't sort this out. It's the same as for the App Store. Your account is bound to one given country and when you move to another country you are supposed to close the account and re-open another one. In addition, you can only link bank accounts to Paypal if they're in the same country as the Paypal account. Also, you can set your address in Paypal to a foreign country.
One of the big differences as far as PDAs go is that they required a stylus, and the touch was pressure sensitive. It couldn't be used just with your fingers.

The iPhone's touchscreen implementation was innovative. I remember quite a lot of debate in the period between the iPhone's announcement and release about weather or not a capacitive touchscreen on a phone would provide a terrible experience. There were a lot of very smart people out there who thought it just wouldn't work (greasy fingerprints came up a lot). At the time, for Apple, putting this kind of UX out there was a huge risk, and a major innovation in the industry. They really nailed it, and in hindsight it, like many other great innovations, seems obvious, but at the time it was far from it.

EDIT - here's a quote from a CNET article at the time:
"11. Just how useful is the touch screen? The iPhone user interface looks elegant, innovative, and easy-to-use, but is it the best interface for a device like this?
Whenever you do anything, the iPhone will command your full visual attention. "No buttons" may be sexy, but it also means you can't do anything without looking at the phone.
The iPhone's iPod usability may suffer even worse from the touch screen. Have you ever tried to operate an iPod while it's in your pocket? You can do it, but it's hard. The iPhone will make blind iPod-surfing downright impossible.
That said, it looks like the iPhone will eliminate accidental pocket-dialing once and for all."

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-9677208-1.html
Be careful -- this doesn't fully memoize recursive functions unless you force the computation of intermediate results, since the recursive calls don't use memoization:

(define memo-fib (memoize fib)) ;; example from SICP
(memo-fib 40)
;; long wait

I would love to see a good general-purpose 'memoize but rather doubt it's possible, though I think I remember seeing one in Common Lisp in "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming" that exploited CL's weird namespacing rules for functions to make recursive functions like 'fib run fast.
The 'doctoring' is only slightly above the level of adding a border around the image. If this is doctoring, then all Mars photos's are 'doctored', as they're stitched together from much smaller photos.
Add-on developer abandons Firefox
Rails - Rspec - Testing Your Modules
I have been working on a project recently where modules are used extensively to share behaviour between model classes. I was looking to use an example from the system but they were all overly complex and detracted from the subject - testing modules. So in the following contrived example I will show you how to test the behavior of a module using rspec. The following “Pointless” module adds a class method which will scramble a class name…. doesn’t get more pointless than that!
This has been spoken about over and over (refer to the heated discussion yesterday which wasn't my intention - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4431382). The core of the article again - looks at the concept of obviousness.

Refer here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non-obviousn... - "One of the main requirements of patentability is that the invention being patented is not obvious, meaning that a "person having ordinary skill in the art" would not know how to solve the problem at which the invention is directed by using exactly the same mechanism."

Predominately - "that obviousness should be determined by looking at
the scope and content of the prior art;
the level of ordinary skill in the art;
the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art; and
objective evidence of nonobviousness.
In addition, the court outlined examples of factors that show "objective evidence of nonobviousness". They are:
commercial success;
long-felt but unsolved needs; and
failure of others."

See also - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_35_of_the_United_States_C....

Again - this article is attempting to state "oh because PDA existed, that means that everything related to a device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious". but again, thats untrue.

I still believe - in additional the complex legal arguments - the comment below was one of greatest aspects that changed the lay-persons juror mind. Per the Apple lawyer Harold McElhinny

"In those three months, Samsung was able to copy Apple's 4-year investment in the iPhone, without taking any of the risks—because they were copying the world's most successful product ... No one is trying to stop them from selling smartphones, all we're saying is: make your own. Make your own designs, make your own phones, and compete on your own innovations."
Wait a minute. I see all sorts of problems with this. So what do they do if your card expires this month?
my biggest surprise (i started in the games industry) was just how low the bar for entry really was. i could have started 10 years earlier if i had realised just how truly awful most programmers in the industry are...
http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/08/21/samsung-galaxy-note-...
This is false, because many careful studies have compared populations, otherwise identical, that differed in one particular -- one received vaccinations, the other didn't. The outcome is that there is no difference between them.

Think about this in everyday terms -- consider the financial advantage, the scientific prestige, that would accrue to someone who located such a link. Wealth, fame, the unrequited love of women. But even though this issue has been studied repeatedly, no one has been able to show a scientific correlation between vaccines and autism.

Andrew Wakefield pretended to show a link, but his motives are now obvious -- he received thousands of dollars in consulting fees from a group of lawyers trying cases related to this issue, and he sought a patent on a vaccine of his own design, a vaccine that would have enriched him if there was such a link. These facts call his objectivity into question. And examination of his "scientific" work shows a repeated pattern of fraud and deception.

I suggest that you think like a scientist. Scientists don't say what you have, in essence: "if it hasn't been disproven, that's an argument in its favor." Scientists only count positive evidence as support for a hypothesis, and there is none for this issue. Indeed all the studies come to the same conclusion -- there is no link between vaccines and autism.
heh, that's exactly my mp3 player story. I bought a small samsung device (dude, look, it plays ogg files! it must be the best!). Less than a month later I bought an ipod nano.
Pardon my ignorance, but I am unable to think of a use-case where it's beneficial for an app developer to not allow his app be available globally.
I could see how one might think they're potentially related, but it's quite a jump to suggest that you shouldn't vaccinate for that reason. Besides, the article is talking about in-womb development, which is a much more plausible vector for autism, considering what we know about it.
I think it is interesting idea. However, I think you need a better system than just the number of commits, or lines of code committed. I don't these are very accurate measurements for the degree which someone contributed to the project. You need a more sophisticated system to determine that.
Such device concepts have existed for decades in sci-fi. In the 90s, if you were thinking to the future of wireless PDAs, they always end in all glass touch screen devices.

Apple wins in execution, although one I believe is based on a flawed philosophical understanding. They won the mass market, like McDonalds did for fast food but they didn't invent anything nor does it make it good for you, developers or society. A lot of different things happened, coming together at the right time for Apple to exploit this market.

If any corporation put as much critical thought into product design as Steve Jobs and Apple did, I think they'd have the same result. To me, it's not about some innate genius or technology prophet, it's about thinking, being critical of everything and getting people to work their hardest at one single goal.
It's not a button, but if you count the mute switch, that's 5.
This is the best response to the current "it wasn't really innovative" fad -- going back and quoting the reviews of the time, especially from detractors and skeptics. None were saying the iPhone was just more of the same inside a shiny marketing package.
NoOps is a response to the schlep blindness of developers doing SysOps.
A fair question. It's my understanding that the Christian Science Monitor attempts to be phenomenological and "objective" in all of its reporting, and some readers have long prized that publication for precisely those characteristics. But it's important to note that the Christian Science Monitor is the house publication of the Christian Science religious denomination, and that the denomination has a view of health and disease that is not mainstream and not evidence-based. (I write this as someone who has visited the Mother Church in Boston and has heard about both the denomination and the newspaper at their headquarters offices as an interpreter for officials from China who were studying religious diversity in the United States.) Thus, on this story I was much more inclined to submit a link from the New York Times (different editorial tendencies) than I would be to submit an article by the same author from the Christian Science Monitor. Most journalists benefit from submitting their work to an editor.
Scientists invent particle to let you live without breathing
Yes. There are plenty of things left that could use some simplicity and minimalism. Patent away.
From my understanding, the Planck length is the smallest length there can be, and every other length has to be an exact integral multiple of the Planck length [1]. I believe the same applies to the other Planck units [2]- they are fundamental units. Similarly, every charge has to be an exact integral multiple of the charge of the electron. These fundamental units seem to to indicate that our universe is not continuous, but quantized/discrete. With that said, there are some theories stating that these fundamental units only apply to our universe (and even in our own universe, the fundamental units may change over long periods of time), and that other universes may have different fundamental units. So depending on how you define the universe, the answer to whether the universe is continuous or discrete could change.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_length
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_units
Actually if you cannot find "good reasons to not use it" by yourself, usually it is better to "use it"
I prefer Windows laptops, though I generally prefer Thinkpads which aren't much cheaper. As for Galaxy Note 10.1: http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/08/21/samsung-galaxy-note-...

That is exactly what I'm talking about. People will buy it, because on paper it has even more checkboxes than the iPad, but then it just isn't going to work.
This entire trial was a farce. The jury foreman admitted that they "skipped" prior art because "It was bogging us down."[0]

> "Once you determine that Samsung violated the patents," Ilagan said, "it's easy to just go down those different [Samsung] products because it was all the same. Like the trade dress, once you determine Samsung violated the trade dress, the flatscreen with the Bezel...then you go down the products to see if it had a bezel.

Seriously?

> "We wanted to make sure the message we sent was not just a slap on the wrist," Hogan said. "We wanted to make sure it was sufficiently high to be painful, but not unreasonable."

Except the purpose of damages is to compensate the patent holder, not to punish the infringer.

And let's not forget that they responded to 700 questions in 2 days. If they worked for 16 hours/day, that's 32×60/700 = 2.7 minutes/question. I find it difficult to believe that a group of highly educated patent lawyers, let alone a group of laymen, most of whom didn't even know what a patent was a month ago, could have come to an equitable decision on all the questions so quickly.

The way I see it, Samsung clearly copied many aspects of their phones from the iPhone. That was obviously unethical, but whether it was illegal is much more difficult to determine, particularly when Apple itself copied many aspects of the iPhone from past innovations.

I don't like to think of Apple as a pure innovator - I think of them more as an assembler. When they see a market in which all the hardware pieces are available and waiting to be put together, they do that in such a way that the final product appeals to the end-user, particularly through the design of appropriate software. For example, they entered the PMP market when hard drives and batteries were cheap/portable enough to make the iPod a reality. They entered the phone market when capacitive touchscreens were cheap/large enough - their real innovation was on the software side. I don't agree with software patents, but unfortunately that's the current state of things in the US.

At the same time, there's little doubt that there was bias towards the "home team" as well, especially when the jurors live so close to Silicon Valley.

I was honestly shocked that Samsung didn't overwhelmingly beat Apple in South Korea[1], although the WSJ suggests there was definitely a bias[2]. Samsung's chairman, Lee Kun-hee, has been found guilty in the past of tax evasion, bribing politicians, prosecutors, and judges, and then pardoned for it by the South Korean government. Not surprising when you consider that Samsung generates 20% of South Korea's GDP.

0: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2012082510525390...

1: http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/23/3264434/apple-samsung-kore...

2: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044423050457761...
With an account created within an hour of this submission I have to ask if you are trolling this forum?

Everyone is entitled to opinion, but when discussing articles like this it's fact and science that matter.

Comments like your cost lives.

We're already seeing increase in measles rates in the UK from the fallout of the MMR scare mongering around 10 years ago.

Please understand that parents who perceive any risk to their children will always err on the side of caution. When that perceived risk is based on lies and assumptions you stand the chance of exposing that child to other known and proven risks.

Please think before you post.
Feedback For Recruiters
In my experience (~1.5yrs on small servers and partially a laptop) it is very stable, especially if you stick to the release branches, but even running master everywhere I've rarely run into any problems on that end.

Using pkgsrc for software is actually a good thing as it is portability-oriented to begin with and you get access to almost all of the packages in there out of the box. DragonFly support in pkgsrc has very much improved over the last year or so since one of the DF devs became a NetBSD/pkgsrc committer.

As for hardware support… YMMV. In my experience drivers tend to lag behind a bit and may or may not work for you. Give it a try.
Apple's execution skills enabled them to succeed using an 'obvious strategy'that others couldn't pull off. That does not mean they "invented" the idea/strategy or that it was overly "original" (e.g. the buttons).

The true innovation of the iPhone was the global re-thinking of the software of iOs, and its relation to a phone. Recall, it was only 2.5G when it came out, one of the reason for "apps", was bandwidth efficiency, in addition to custon form factor. The misery of surfing flash-enabled desktop websites on 2.5G was not appealing. From there, there was the obvious need to maximize screen real-estate. hence, the elimination of the (physical) buttons. Soft keys, Icons, touch etc. were not per-se innovative in 2007.

The adoption of gesture based touch is obvious to anyone who saw Jeff Han in 2006 TED (well before the launch of iPhone). That's not to say apple was not innovative independently. The form factors and underlying tech vary widely.

Just some context worth considering.
I find myself unable to offer an opinion, let's find out.

NOTICE: maxs points out I missed a x1000 on the barrel count, the following is off by three orders of magnitude:

In 2008 the world consumed 5269 barrels of jet fuel per day. 42 gallons in a barrel, 6.8 pounds per gallon, 0.45kg/pound, kerosene has 43MJ/kg… that is 29 terajoules (or I made a mistake). [1] [2]

Spread 29TJ out over the day and that is 29TJ /24/60/60 and you get 337 megawatts (or I made a mistake, this feels low, but I'll go with the calculation). [3]

Google's data centers drew 260 megawatts in 2011. [4]

So, there you go. Google's data centers alone use three quarters as much energy as all jet airplanes combined.

EOM

[1] http://www.indexmundi.com/energy.aspx?product=jet-fuel&g...

[2] http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/glover2/

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt

[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/technology/google-details-...
That's true, there could be a lot of time in research and offline action going behind a single commit. Any suggestions re: other Github-provided data?
PDA's usually had a few extra buttons because navigation using a stylus was always a bits awkward. If you ever tried scolling a web page using a stylus and scrollbars in Windows Mobile you'd understand why every PDA had a D-pad and a separate home button - it was a neccessity because of the stylus.

Apple was simply the first on the market with a touch-driven display, which let them drop the extra navigation buttons. It's not like nobody ever thought of having less buttons.

In any case, the invention of removing buttons should not be a patentable idea. The sheer absurdity of all, of Apple's patents is an abomination and makes the US law system look like a carnival.
"Supply and demand" is the obvious answer, but it doesn't answer the follow-up questions: what's fueling the demand, or lowering the supply? The answer to those is: easy borrowing, and foreclosure stickiness. Actually, easy borrowing fueled the demand in the past, and the bubble is still deflating, slowly because of foreclosure stickiness. If people had to pay cash for houses I'm confident house prices would be half or less of what they are today, in most areas. If banks got rid of their non-performing mortgage loans in short order, I'm confident that would cut house prices in half in most areas.

House prices are also a hot political issue; namely, each generation wants future generations to pay excessively for their houses when they retire, so they support the gov't borrowing heavily to fuel house prices. (Of course they want future generations to pay for the gov't debt too.)

Improved robotics, materials and whatnot will have limited effect on house prices. A lot of the savings would be absorbed as greater profit for construction and renovation. You see this happening in the pre-fab industry. For the next decade at least, nothing beats buying an existing house, financially. Most houses in the US are selling for less than replacement cost.
Which brings up a question I've always had. If a Quantum computer uses bits that are on, off, and both, can't this be simulated with a Ternary computer?
This article from the Economist is a sort of a round-up of recent work on the medical implications of our gut bacteria, including autism. It has more information that you might use to broaden your search:

http://www.economist.com/node/21560523

A long term antibiotics prescription messed up my gut bacteria, leading to problems with drowsiness and yeast infections. Strong priobiotics (100B+ cells daily) reverse these probems, which return within days when I stop the priobiotics. I can't speak for autism, but I can tell you first hand that gut bacteria do play a role in our health.
> Obesity for example is clearly related to nutrition and there are many published results where many variables which could affect obesity are quite well-isolated -- twin studies to isolate genetics, studies of how obesity rates vary based on physical location in various cities, and so forth.

Care to show me, for example, a single nutrition study where "skin color of participant" was a variable controlled for? It is known that cholesterol metabolism (eventually into) Vitamin D is greatly dependent on skin color -- and yet, it does not appear in a single nutrition study, despite the greatly known significance of both serum cholesterol and serum vitamin D.

I'm taking this ad absurdum in an attempt to show you that if you apply this standard rigorously (as one should), then no result really holds up.

And by the way, "obesity is clearly related to nutrition" is only true in the sense that "everything is related to nutrition". There are no results of things that affect obesity that are "quite well isolated" in humans that I'm aware of.

> Or perhaps the correlation is indeed correct but wrongly attributed -- perhaps Seth has not noticed but he tends to use butter to fry peppers and pork fat to fry meats, and now that he is using butter his diet contains 2% more vegetables ...

If you actually followed him, you'd know that's not the case. He is very diligent about isolating variables as much as possible, and thoroughly documenting his day, including food intake, how much TV he watched, etc -- and the butter hypothesis was actually an attempt to strengthen a hypothesis having to deal with animal derived fats (which among other things, included bacon). It wasn't just observational - it was part of a variable isolation experiment, that (within limits) was comparably rigorous to any other non-blinded test (which are far more common than you'd think; in fact, many if not most supposedly double blinded tests aren't).

> You have absolutely no evidence that it's the butter which is making Seth faster at it.

He has much more evidence for than you'd expect from this short posting, if you care to look at it. This conclusion is indeed supported by data, and is scientifically valid.
I pitched "sysadmin as a service" to a sysadmin friend and he was totally against it. He said we don't need more sysadmins, we need better developers who understand sysadmin fundamentals and know how to build stable systems. How about taking both and synthesize them? Sysadmin-as-a-service + training and education service. Hire the consultant for the bandaid fix of the immediate problem and to train and help educate the internal team on the sysadmin fundamentals they are missing.