skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd argue there are certain aspects of the iPhone that are truly revolutionary, even if the ideas may have existed in other contexts before. For example, the scrolling mechanism on the iPhone was not done by anyone else prior Apple's product, and now everyone implements scrolling with a flick/inertia. I think had Apple used the old style scrolling methods, we might still be using those today. LG had a 10 year head start on Apple for manufacturing phones when Apple's first phone came out, yet their LG Prada phone still had a painfully small scrollbar that you were forced to use.

I think Apple did create a product that warrants a design patent though. These are defensive mechanisms that prevent copycats from producing identical products in fashion where appearances and "feel" matter more than the practical purpose of the invention. Gucci applies for design patents all the time so that copycats won't produce an identical bag and sell it on the market.

Apple is worried about the same thing here -- they've produced a product that has a certain appearance and style they feel Samsung is making a direct copy of. Design patents can cover product packaging, and if you look at how Samsung packaged their tablets, you can see how identical the boxes are compared to Apple's.

So in summary, I have 2 main points: Apple can and should defend their design patents. The technology that Apple implemented for scrolling was non-obvious otherwise competitors would have implemented these long before Apple.
Strangely, I've never had anyone argue this to me, but I do get asked, several times per year, if I eat seafood.
Ha ha, OK I admit that analogy was too heavy-handed for the context. It didn't feel so as I wrote it, maybe because I had already walked it back from 'Arbeit macht frei', which was the first thing to come to mind.

The point I wanted to make was that it feels kinda creepy when people start believe the propaganda (of a government, corporation, cult, or whatever it may be) that calls it "freedom", when it's actually the other thing.
Ask HN: A Short 7 question survey for a potential open education system
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/RNRN9MH

I am considering launching a Production Server in such a way that any visitor would be able to take a look "behind the scenes" and I'm attempting to gauge the interest level in such an initiative.

If anyone has a couple minutes, and would willing to take a short survey above, I would appreciate it, as well as any additional comments.
Pre-birth genetic testing (e.g. http://www.lineagen.com/) seems like a pretty effective way to end autism. It works effectively with Down's Syndrome.
So you've invented one-factor authentication?
"The long-standing performance gap between the Mac Pro and the MacBook Pro is now effectively moot"

That's what happens when the Mac Pro product line is allowed to stagnate and run 2-3 year old parts. The difference is infact moot, and that's a damn shame. =[
You didn't call someone biased, you made a conclusion about the meaning of the word bias, that reflects something we've seen here on HN very often. I was showing you how people on your side of the patent debate use the word, since you were on the, shall we say, receiving end of it this time.

You were taking offense at the use of the word. I was, in a sense, agreeing with you, and asking you to recognize that bias does not mean lacking in credibility. It simply means having an opinion.

Bias is not the weapon that some on hacker news seem to think it is (and your position was one as if it had wounded you....)

Hope that makes it more clear!
Most seasteaders would prefer to define their own sovereignty. And of course this has its issues with respect to being attacked by various folks, pirates, navies of various countries, etc. A fairly good writeup appeared in Ars Technica [1]. James Grimmalman, a professor of Law at New York Law School, did a legal analysis which was fairly widely cited as well.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/features/2008/06/seasteading-engineer...

[2] http://stevereads.com/papers_to_read/sealand_havenco_and_the...
"Tell us a time you hacked a non-computer system to your advantage."

Sounded like YC application?
Tastefully borrowed from it :). It happens to be a pretty darn good question - it's a good place to talk about an accomplishment, and provides some insight into the intelligence, creativity, and personality of the person who answers it.
Yep, it is tables used as layout that is depreciated.
From an individual perspective that makes sense. That does not change what I said, however.

This is old and beaten ground though, which you are no doubt familiar with. I'll refrain from treading it again.
I am working on a real estate listings management platform. http://www.realtywarp.com
I'm going to need actual statistics before I'll believe that assembly programmers, hardware hackers, et cetera are any rarer than they once were.

My informal observation is that there's more hardware around than ever. Who designed and built these dozens and dozens of Android phones and tablets? Where are all these tiny helicopters and balancing scooters and taco-delivering drones coming from?

Yes, the average programmer today knows a lot less about assembly language than the average programmer in 1980. But there were a lot fewer programmers and a lot fewer computers in 1980, and to do anything beyond BASIC on a microcomputer required assembly. Since then the number of programmers has exploded, and it has not done so evenly. I'm sure that today there's a lot more Visual Basic-only programmers in the world than assembly programmers, but that doesn't mean that the population of assembly programmers has shrunk; it just hasn't grown as quickly.

I also suspect that, should it become sufficiently important to double the number of trained assembly hackers, we have the means to do so: Raise the bid high enough and, sure, I'll absolutely retrain in an assembly language newer than 6502 and Motorola 68000. ;) (Though, alas, I'm told that however clever I become at optimizing my assembly, the compiler is probably cleverer still, so I guess I should dream of embedded C instead of assembly.)
In many languages, "meat" roughly equates to "red meat". Fish and fowl are considered different categories. I believe this came about because of a Catholic church ruling that fish did not count against the promise to give up meat during Lent. It also lead to silliness like classing the chigüire / capybara, basically a large swamp-dwelling gerbil, as a fish.
"I really don't see how Apple's approach is any better than good defaults with hidden configuration. "

Because nothing is really hidden? Because a decent percentage of users would download pirated apps and sideload trojans?
Thanks for the feedback! I will definitely be adding SSL very soon. The tough thing for me to figure out is if a $7 SSL Cert. has any differences in quality when compared to a $200 SSL Cert.
So why don't they build in an escape hatch?

It would be simple enough to have a very annoying warning when the user turned off the lockdown.
Three things have changed my career (as a programmer/CS student): MIT/Harvard/Stanford OpenCourseWare[1], HackerNews (the past 15 months) and my MacBook Pro.

That MacBook Pro is the best things I've ever purchased. I owe a lot to that machine (and HN).

[1]: I don't mean the new www.coursera.org thing. I mean http://ocw.mit.edu, cs50.tv/cs75.tv and http://see.stanford.edu/see/courses.aspx which were all available years before Coursera and I watched "all" of them and learnt "a lot".
I suspect FB engineers are going to live longer than average for US population, too, since they have higher income, education, etc.
Agree. Been a merchant in a few businesses dating back pre-net.

You need documented signed proof, in general and without that the charge is not only backed out but you get hit with a $25 or so charge back fee. And yes to many chargebacks say goodbye to the account.

We spot fraudulent charges and proactively issue a void before the consumer finds out, lest we get hit with the charge back fee as well.
Another favorite example for me BTW is the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco that IMO is much worse, involving MS using unethical tactics to attack OS/2 later on. And Joel happens to be a former MS employee.
Mac OS X 10.8.1 Improves, but Doesn't Solve, Battery Life Woes
In Europe, it will be 2200 euros. And still a good buy. Not a cheap one, but a good one.
Not sure about their distinction between Hackers and Hustlers.
So actively enforcing a way for the carrier to exploit for further income doesn't bring preferenciality when being picked up by said carrier as a middle stage profit model enabler ?

Should we all show this good will towards all brands and just call all lock downs the greatest neutral thing ever because they are clearly just the bios chips makers fault ? Who wins with stuff like that. It's not like those sorts of actions and their ramifications bring advantage to anyone else down the line...
Ah, thank you very much. With this context, the verdict does make more sense now. I have one last question for you though: I've seen mention of design patents for a bezel around a screen or rectangle with round corners, however should a design patent not cover the entire device? It seems if the idea is to prevent consumer confusion, devices should be viewed holistically, not piecemeal.
My usual answer: "Only Broccoli Fish."

When they ask what a Broccoli Fish is, I explain patiently that there's no such thing.
What is hulu+ for? I checked it last week and the content does not seem more uptodate than netflix.
You don't think Apple protects carriers' money to also protect their own? You honestly think that the iPhone would have been a huge success without carrier support?
what a great idea! I've been working on a place where potential landlords and renters could connect, as using craigslist is just a hellish experience: http://github.com/griffindy/Rently. is this just for landlords?
I wish they launch unlocked version simulatenosly this time. Last year it was just a month, but still, I am sure they can do better.
Another rubbish scribd link and there's no way to liberate the PDF without paying.

Here's an useful link to a PDF preview: http://www.wholeearth.com/uploads/2/File/documents/sample-eb...
For the record, I agree with you.

BUT, as a biologist, I often find it amusing that people discount plants completely. It's easy to forget that they are alive too. Fundamentally, they aren't so different from you or a turtle or a fruit fly. Different cellular structure, sure. Not easily recognizable "consciousness", absolutely. Non-motile, check.

However, plants are very much alive. They react to stimuli, survive in hostile environments, procreate. They are more alien to our sensibilities, but they are arguably not very much different in the grand scale of things.
A good friend of mine that really wanted a modern OS X workstation went the Hackintosh route. He built a machine that's not only much more powerful than the current line of Mac Pros but also considerably cheaper.

I can understand why Apple is neglecting this segment for financial reasons but I do think they're slowly losing their exclusive cachet with the creative set.

Edit: misspelling.
For your friends who can't code in NYC
ディアブロ3 RMT
Still waiting for one of these or Mog or Apple or Rdio to sign artists themselves...
IE8 will probably be more persistent than IE9. I think a lot of corporations are still on XP. Mine is, for example. When companies finally make the jump to Win7, I think they'll move pretty quickly to IE10, so as not to be too far behind. After all, we should expect IE11 next year.
You're right that it's certainly not freedom that Apple is selling.

The correct counterargument to Doctorow et al has to take the freedom issue head on, it looks like this:

When people move from the country to a small town they are forced to give up some freedoms. When the small town turns into a large town even more. A large city, even more.

I can't crank the stereo to 11 and play it at all hours every night on my block of dense apartment buildings. I also can't keep a pet rhino, walk around outside naked or throw my tv out the window onto the sidewalk 14 floors down. I could list these all day and there are some legitimate things I should be free to do but I can't, that's a slightly harmful byproduct we accept for convenience.

Regulation is an easy scapegoat but every 'wild west' town with no rules either got a serious government willing to make those trade offs or it died out. That's universal not just in the US.

One of the well known promises of technology is to shrink the world and connect everyone to everyone. In short we'll all be much closer cyberneighbors then today and there will be large sacrifices to privacy and other freedoms just like people who moved or found themselves in cities had to make.

Another well known byproduct of technology has been the amount of potential damage a small group of people can do (Aum cult, McVeigh, Unabomber, Amerithrax). This again will act as a multiplier on the trade offs we will be forced to make as we move from the ability to 3d print guns to bomb materials to nuclear and biologic molecules.

The deeply interconnected world of tomorrow will need people to wear virtual pants. QED.
Was it actually about density? I always thought it was about transistors per dollar. Sure, density is a very effective way of lowering costs, but the maturation of technology at a specific process size will work just fine too.
This is one of the reasons I'm such a fan of Apple, despite all the misguided gruff they get here.

Apple always ships free (or near free) development tools with their systems. In the Apple II days it was built in to the ROMS. Nowadays on the Mac AppStore you can download Xcode, for free. (though at one point I think it was $5 for some reason.)

You can develop any mac apps you want, and run them to your hearts content, and you can develop iOS Apps and run them in the simulator (to distribute these apps via apple's store, you only need a $99 membership, which is pretty affordable, compared to the past when it cost $500-$5,000 for such suites of software.)

Its never been easier to be a hacker! And that isn't going to change anytime soon, at least on Apple systems.

(All the apple bashing on HN is from the google distortion field, it isn't reality.)

Hell, you can even develop iOS apps without using any apple tools and distribute them on the web to anyone, for free, and without any regulation by apple. You just have to use javascript and web technologies, but the full iOS UI is available, including things like touch tracking, gyroscope, GPS, etc.

People are so adamant that the iPhone is locked down that many people don't even know this, but it has been in iOS since day one-- in fact it was how Apple wanted everyone to develop apps originally (outside apple's control!) but people kept demanding native apps so apple created the appstore, and the curation of that is a consequence of not wanting malware. (Hard to write javascript malware.)
Yes, because design patents expire, there's even greater reason to need to defend them while they exist. Design patents and trade dress protection often go hand in hand. In order to show trade dress infringement, one needs to show consumer confusion between the two products, and IIRC one needs around 4 years of solid registration before protection is enabled. So when you don't have trade dress protection yet, you would have to use your enforce your design patents to ensure that consumers won't be confused for 4 years or so.

Design patents can be implemented before the release of a product, but trade dress protection is decided by the market after being available to consumers for a certain length of time.

A handbag designer like Gucci would enforce their designer handbags with design patents when they release new ones, then enforce them with trade dress later on.
I spent 4k for maxed out ram and a larger SSD. I'll spend more time interfacing with this machine than with anything else in my life over the next 3 years. I advocate spending a lot on your Computer, chair and bed, and spending little on your car.
Light Table will be released open source under the GPL - just like emacs.
I know what you mean, my Lenovo x201t was really the best purchase I ever made. It came when I was mostly done with the CS part of my degree and was focusing on my math major. The difference in my ability to take notes and actually organize and use them was absolutely massive.
Depending on where you look, it's at about 14%.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-daily-20120820...
How to Beef Accurately at an Abortion Clinic???
You can sell it year later while losing 10-15%. (If you take good care of it.)
How's the Retina MBP heat-wise compared to prior generations of the 15" MBP? That's my only complaint with my 2011 MBP - the thing is an oven on my lap - even with a laptop cooler attached, it's warm.
as a classics majors, I love running across these things, and I'm especially glad to see it on HN, though I agree with tborg that both the presentation and translations could be more up to date. something to work on if I'm bored tomorrow. Now I just need to find the Latin
Twitter joins Linux Foundation
TechStars Episode 6
Classy way to shut down money-losing web site
> The only reason Apple went after Samsung and not HTC or other Android handset manufacturers is because Samsung has gone into detail copying every small feature from Apple.

I think it would be news to HTC that Apple didn't come after them. They must have just imagined the import ban that limited supplies of the One X and delayed the launch of the Evo 4G LTE: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57435081-37/htc-phone-impo...

Throw in Motorola and you have Apple going after the top 3 Android manufacturers in the US market (and, until ASUS and the Nexus 7, the only three manufacturers of Nexus / Google Experience devices).
Yes you are right, although he wasn't born in the U.S he was Serbian-American
I just found it on slideshare. Didn't see the talk but I still found it quite useful.
Yep, same here. I put the most money into the things I spend the most time with. So far it's worked out pretty well.
What's your point? That's in no way a bad or ridiculous price.
And this is why I prefer this kind of job posts: it sets up a 2 way communication. Like HN job posts used to be back in the day.
Uber's dynamic pricing is an interesting system, and I think some of it's subtler points are overlooked in this article. Uber did a poor job of providing good messaging about what prices would be last New Years Eve. That's changed. They're a startup and they seem to be learning as they go.

The article argues that overall prices should be increased to help offset costs for high demand times. That's missing the point of dynamic pricing (or "surge" pricing). The point is that you can almost always reliably get a ride, regardless of demand, but at times with the highest demand (like New Years Eve) you have to pay more for that. In return, Uber is able to pay their drivers more, and are able to better fill those high demand times (otherwise you'd just sit around waiting for a car, but would never get one because they're all already filled). It's the right move from a platform perspective. It's not putting the interests of drivers above passengers, but instead balancing both sides (passengers have an increased chance of getting a ride if they absolutely need it, but may have to pay more for that).
a friend of mine cofounded a project that sounds similar. www.rentobo.com
The obvious question is, why didn't /couldn't Samsung point to this obvious prior art and get the point across to the jury?

Damn I wish I had been on that jury, I would have loved infuriating everyone by hanging for a full acquittal.
Maurice Stans was there also. Mitchell and Stans both had living quarters in Watergate. I've watched "All the President's Men" at least 50 times and never knew this. Very cool.
Having good competition is a necessary part of progress. You can always stick with emacs or the (entirely) OSS alternatives.
Don't you know how to argue without doing this type of argumentation that you so commonly uses in Apple versus Android threads? I am not a Apple or Android fan to argue how the US patent system sucks, or how Android sucks, or how Apple is evil, or how Apple is the only company that innovates, all opinions that I read here on Hacker News from people who generally know nothing about life, people just like me. I am really not into these type of discussion that you appear to be so eager to enter in HN.

It's easy to come and say that I am a lunatic, so what's your opinion? Why the iPhone succeeded among the early adopters? Were they all geeks that loved Apple? What about other places that are not the United States in which there's not a Apple store in every major city, do your analysis still stands?
If Google+ dominates Facebook, I cannot imagine this being the reason.

First off, it's not hard to make any post exclusive to my University on Facebook. Second, why exactly is that a highly desirable feature?

The absolute last thing I want is two Google accounts with two Google+ accounts.
No. You get what you pay for, and what you get here is a screen significantly better than any other display available. In addition to a very, very fast computer that weighs 4½ pounds.
Microflow: Diagnosing Medical Conditions on Earth and in Space
How TV Networks flubbed coverage of Neil Armstrong's passing
There's an old saying... Luck favours the prepared.

If you are not prepared for an opportunity, then luck will almost certainly pass you by.
Ironic considering Facebook has its roots in Universities
I had a co-worker once who used his debit card at an ATM at a coffee shop nearby our office. Somehow, some genius had installed a mechanism in the ATM to read the stripe and the PIN. So they were able to take that info and create a fake debit card that replicated my co-worker's debit card. The next week, his bank account got cleaned out. He was absolutely broke and went through a few weeks of hell trying to get it all sorted out. Fortunately, the bank was able to help him out. I don't know what happened with the police investigation, but basically none of us used cards at that coffee shop again. The coffee shop was still operational, and I think the police were somehow able to determine that it wasn't the coffee shop at fault (maybe only a single employee or an ATM maintenance guy, not sure).

I think this is why a lot of debit cards have chips nowadays. The chips are harder to counterfeit (I think). But I think we still have to grandfather all the old debit cards without chips. :(
The time you are talking about was when computer science was in its infancy, and was small enough for people to be fluent in all parts of it. This is not unlike early science, when you had the same people make discoveries in pure math, physics, chemistry ...

What we have now that the field of computer science is maturing is more specilization. There are still "systems" students, who learn the low level details (one of my friend's class was writing an operating system). In addition to that, you have application developers, who can spend there resources make a more user-friendly product, and likely taking advantage of dozens of other black box systems other programmers created.