skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> if you were the one doing the design of a motion sensing system, I can bet it wouldn't be "easy"

WELL… I never took any visual recognition courses in university. But there is a large amount of literature on the subject. I think there may have been more innovation producing cheap infrared 3d sensors that work reliably than converting that vector field into a bit of math you can pattern match - but what do I know?

We're disagreeing on the "obviousness" of these patents.

>The aspect of a patentable invention most difficult to judge is obviousness. An invention is patentable only if it is not obvious to a person who is typically educated or trained in the field of the invention.

http://www.uspatlaw.com/contant.php?id=3

I'm trained in the art and I think pinch to zoom is obvious. It would be the first thing you try right after scrolling.

At the end of the day, I think the USPTO has been far too lax in what they consider obvious or not obvious. And yeah, frankly, I think a stunningly large percentage of all software patents are 'too obvious'.

None of the examples of patent trolling we've seen are really 'misuses' of the system.
It would be nice to see some benchmarks showing "C like" performance using this tricks.
My program is a web app, and it is written in JS. The code in the application looks remarkably similar to my own.

The major difference is they're looking for a new version of software that exists on the client while mine looks to see if a certain module/game is loaded in the client and then loads it in if it's not already present.
Does your file system create revisions of the entire tree, or only revisions of individual files within the tree as VMS and RCS do?† Because there are some problems with the latter approach. One problem described by Geoff Collyer (the C News guy) is that "version numbers of related files are not kept in synch, so you can't just cp *';6' /tmp/compile".††

† I tried answering that question myself, but your program kept crashing.

†† http://9fans.net/archive/2001/11/759
I wouldn't trust Iron. I read that it wasn't made with an eye towards privacy, but towards self-promotion:
http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2009/12/iron.ht...
I can't find the feature-by-feature takedown I read, but it looked really counter-productive.
This is just a case of the pendulum swinging too far in the opposite direction.

I remember when early stage startups were expected to have elaborate 20-page business plans, detailed financial projections going out 5 years, and countless powerpoints of market positioning and fit. It was all bullshit but you were expected to do it.

Over time, that exercise in fiction loosened up. Investors became more interested in if you really understood your product, your market, and what it was going to take to bring your product to that market. Demonstrations of sufficient competency, adaptivity, and intelligence were required but investors only demanded documentation of things you could actually say something meaningful about.

Somewhere along the way, more VCs became obsessed with shiny clicky demos (nominally, "product") above all else, often to the exclusion of any substantial discussion of the actual business and market strategy. This demo obsession is a form of mitigating execution risk but it is far from the only kind of risk in a startup and often the other risks are being ignored when this happens. The startup world is a market, supply and demand. Wannabe startups are providing what many VCs are demanding; Bryce may or may not be one of the VCs encouraging it but he swims in a market where many VCs are. Many people who should not be doing a startup think they can because plenty of VCs will actually consider their half-assed ideas.

It falls on both the VCs and startup founders. VCs need to stop acting as though a shiny demo trumps all other funding considerations and startup founders need to stop acting as though you can put serious effort into the business parts later as long as you have a vague idea and a shiny demo.
When you click on "Get protected" it routes all your traffic via secured VPN. That way no one on your network can see your traffic.
Ext Gantt is actually only 287kb, and <100 gzipped. It does depend on Ext JS but only a few UI classes (TreePanel, Form, TextField etc), so using a custom built Ext JS should bring this down to a very reasonable size (nowhere near 2MB for sure). :)

/Mats (Bryntum founder)
Maybe their should be a type of license regarding the use of the API that we should all look for? I feel the same way and am reticent to build anything for twitter or facebook...
Functions Are A Revelation (Python in 30 Days - Day 13)
Give Vimperator a shot. I found it to be 100% compatible with my usage of Pentadactyl (bmark bookmarklets, etc.) and it's working just fine with FF15.
I've also thought quite a bit about this the past year. I moved to downtown Detroit after graduating from school, and I absolutely love it down here. Granted it isn't as bustling as the valley or SF, but we are slowly building a community of super talented individuals. Hopefully Techonomy can get a few more people out of the woodwork and interested in the community. I'm personally very interested in who is bootstrapping their business from the ground up. I have been doing so for about a year and it has been working out great.
Why Twitter Will Live and Facebook Will Die
1st rule.
"Viacom was founded by PHD students at MIT..."

Wasn't it Viaweb? Big difference between Viacom (the media conglomerate) and Viaweb, the online shop software.
So, are you looking for a cofounder or a freelancer?
Inside Look: Front-End Engineering at MuleSoft in SF
for about 80% of protected home networks i’ve accessed the password ends up being someone in the home’s phone number.. not sure if it’s just because it’s often the only 8+ character string of numbers people readily have memorized or if it’s just lazy isp’s that set it that way (and lazy owners who never change it afterwards)..?
In between all that succeeding and failing were a large number of businesses who didn’t really know what they were doing yet or how they would do that thing profitably. So, weren’t really businesses in the traditional sense and we needed a new word with which to call them.

cheap to scale > scale per se > scale potential
It's very easy and yet very hard. It's easy because there's no trick involved, it's very hard because most people don't have what it takes. It take strong motivation and desire to do it.
Republicans look to enact Chinese-style censorship of the Internet
the wiki is there to guide you better than any other distros docu out there, well except maybe gentoos wiki...
Funny that a lot of articles here wouldn't really be categorized as "hacker" news :)
Lately, everything is "hacking". Seems like the word lost its meaning.
I'd like to think that's his point.
This is a bi-directional relationship. It's not as if VCs are benevolent members of society looking to help entrepreneurs out. Both sides of the equation need each other.

I didn't like the tone of entitlement here. As a VC you're not entitled to just sit back and have entrepreneurs know exactly what you expect and deliver the perfect pitch. Part of your job is to see the diamond in the rough. An entrepreneur who's dedicated as hell with all of the skills to build a successful company but lacking in the ability to be a good presenter, for example.
Then use legal services with your HTPC. I listed several of them in my initial post. I just also shared my personal approach, since I find it to be technically superior and thought that some other readers might benefit from the information.
The Birmingham location is ad sales
From my understanding (which may be a big outdated now), Birmingham's primary function was to service ad sales to the Detroit Autos.
Arch makes it trivially easy to poke at the source code for any particular package, which has immensely helped me learn how things work.

I'm just curious: did that matter very much to you? if so, is there some Debian process to do the same thing?
This reference will be lost on most HN readers, so I'll explain for everyone else.

In many situations, you are better off being white and American than a PIO (this is a very commonly used term). You will get better treatment and are less likely to be cheated by a price-gouging merchant or bureaucrat.

Mendicants are much more aggressive with PIOs. Merchants are similarly more aggressive. I've had one tell me that it would cost $20 to tell me how to get to the security line[1]. When I shook my head and walked away, he yelled at me, 'That's nothing to you - you're rich!'. (He was basing that statement entirely on the fact that I was a PIO, nothing else).

On the other hand, Indians pride themselves on being hospitable as a culture, so they would never treat a white person (a clear foreigner) this way.

When I go to India, I'm very careful to adjust my clothing, hairstyle, etc. so that it's less obvious that I'm a foreigner (trust me, they know). It's better to travel with a local (you probably have relatives there) and not to speak at all - even if your accent is flawless, your vernacular and fluidity is probably subtly off just enough to tip them off. Or, speak in a language that is native to another region within India (so that people think you're traveling from another region, and it will be harder for them to notice your accent).

[1] It's not unusual to have private citizens step in and fill the gaps where there aren't enough public employees to do the job at hand, so yes, this was more or less this guy's entire job. Other people charge to 'watch over' your car in public street parking, etc.
Honest question, how would usenet get killed?

Usenet posts are, for all intents and purposes, anonymous. Sure there's some source header information, but that's extremely easy to spoof and there's already dozens of SAAS upload services which hide the user's identity.

Downloaders are as anonymous as their NNTP provider makes them, thanks to SSL encrypted connections.

The only attack vector for copyright holders is to go after the service providers, which _should_ fall under safe-haven rules. The worst they can do is issue DMCA takedowns for individual posts, which can number in the hundred of thousands for just a single video.

If safe haven didn't apply, usenet itself is distributed, take down one host and people will simply move to another.
Are your competitors' apps available in these other countries that you're in?

If not, that might explain the discrepancy.
Thanks, that's very strange. It looks like the correct output during startup, and then it just stops.

It's not too surprising there are bugs here, this is one of the first examples of its kind on the web, and I'd expect issues in browsers and in the game itself. However it does work for me in multiple versions of Firefox and Chrome so I don't have a good guess as to what the problem could be in your case.

For a future version I'll try to put in more debug output, perhaps that will help.
I just blogged about something similar today called the Failure Fallacy (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4444523).

We are making it hard on ourselves to be successful because of the ideas and types of businesses we are drawn to create.

We jump into crazy ideas with no provable business model or customer when we could experiment and apply customer validation to our potential product. Jumping in like a crazy person is glorified in our community because we love watching others do wild things and hope it will help us be more wild.

I want this to change. More people should be running successful businesses, though they might not be instagrams. I want to see your unique touch on so many tired products and ideas.
30 tabs ? really ? man, how do you keep your focus.
it bothers me too.
Ferndale, Royal Oak, Birmingham (anything on woodward north of Detroit) are great places to live/work
Ask PG: Comment Spam
Over the past couple of days I've noticed an increasing trend of users posting "<subject of post> is becoming more and more of a problem, luckily, my startup 'X-Co' solves this problem, here's a link to our website" comments on vaguely related and completely unrelated posts. Is it time HN implemented a flag button for comments or would you class these as acceptable comments?
As of last month or so, Arch threw out their installer. You now have to use the command line. Does this make it harder in your experience?
The title made me think. Is there a place or archives where companies leave their forgotten or dead projects that they tried and moved on? Is there any HN's that dug up a failed project and turned it into a successful company/project?
This isn't normal behavior, did you file a bug?
I did the exact same thing. Migrated my office (6 PC and 3 servers) from Arch to Debian for the reason you give.

I don't miss Arch since I'm very happy with it at home and on my laptop.
I have no (major) problem reading it online, but it just wont let me. If i go to your link, i am sent back to the kindle store. Then if i try to 'buy', i am required to have a kindle serial number, there is no other way to proceed. (I assume if gives you an ID or something if you download the app, but there is no 'read online without a kindle' choice).
The office is tiny -- like a closet with 3 desks against the walls. I've been by it a few times during business hours and I haven't seen anyone in it yet.
A Study of Stereotype Threat in Computer Science [pdf]
Revolution at the Edge
Revisions of individual files only. Yeah, you can't do that kind of sorcery with phoenixfs.

† Fixed. Sorry about that.
> I do not like it when my computer changes itself without asking.

There is a pref you can flip to disable silent automatic updates. This is Firefox after all ;)
Writing An Efficient Segmented-Sieve Prime Generator In Go
And btrfs[1] of course.

There's also git bup[2] and git-annex[3].

[1] http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/btrfs-snapshots.html

[2] https://github.com/apenwarr/bup

[3] http://git-annex.branchable.com/
Municipal taxes pay for police. You can't simultaneously propose to eliminate tax and decrease crime.
There's still dozens of small, basic service providers. Many universities run NNTP servers, as do ISPs.

Cox used to offer a base NNTP service, for example, which was part of my cable subscription. I stopped using it because they had awful data caps and horrible retention.
It's delicate - as you fear you could go too far with the line of thinking. So far I haven't regretted my choices, I move fast and I pick patterns that fail gracefully. I know the debt is compounding, and I feel like I know when it's appropriate to pay it back.

I'm paying it back now, actually, as I finalize our public SDK. I don't regret leaving it until now, I would have had unit tests covering stuff we didn't really need for the business.
Top Grossing Flashlight App of All Time to be  Acquired for $1M
I am confused: Are you actually saying that asserting one's Indian heritage means that one has to accept all the shit that happens due to an incompetent completely broken system?
Which are the top Enterprise services in the cloud?
Huh.

I really liked the Olympics. And almost all the "normals" I know did, too.
Problems with Agile Metrics w/ Comics
Note that (I think) Apple typically uses Broadcomm wireless chips, which are not the best choice for this sort of thing.
Yet again, African dwellers are not allowed to have access to information

http://awesomescreenshot.com/031ee7aa1
More large tech company's started out without a business person than without a technical person. I suspect a large part of this is the importance of a BS detector when delegating things. Or as PG said, The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java developers. http://paulgraham.com/avg.html

It's not that you can't build a good website with C++ or an Oracle back end, it's if your company desides to use them your probably also making a lot of other stupid decisions.

PS: (During the Bubble, Oracle used to run ads saying that Yahoo ran on Oracle software. I found this hard to believe, so I asked around. It turned out the Yahoo accounting department used Oracle.) http://paulgraham.com/vwfaq.html
Grandparent was pointing out that the extra procedures were not due to his being an immigrant or tourist. Most countries have somewhat fewer hoops for their own citizens than foreigners. He wasn't asking for preferential treatment, he was surprised how bad the default treatment was.

And saying he's not really an Indian because he lives in the US is kind of petty.
2x liquidation preference and a board seat for someone only putting in $25k? Seems a bit heavy handed (though he says he is moving away from those terms now).
Sounds a lot like my bank. 5 characters of 0-9 is exactly what they validate their passwords on. Luckily that validation is done only in Javascript, so disabling the check allows you to use any password you want. That doesn't help the average person though.
A Map of the world's hurricanes since 1851
How about $150 per month from only 20 million people? And then $50 per month from another 20 million people and leave the rest out in the cold?
So what do I run now instead of Kismac, since it doesn't support anything > 10.7.2? Aircrack with some GUI frontend?
This works both ways.

[Background: Developer with many years experience, many apps written, many existing customers, deep domain knowledge, and multiple exits.]

I rarely pitch, but when I do, some of the things I hear:

"No one will buy that." (They have and they will again.)

"They will use <x> instead." (When my customers have already begged me for an alternative to <x>.)

"You have 10 minutes to explain the technology." (After 2 minutes: "Who cares about that? Where's the business proposition?)

"You have 10 minutes to explain the business proposition. (After 2 minutes: "What difference does any of that make if you can't build it?")

When I've pitched with a co-founder: "We don't like your team. You don't have a enough of a track record."

When I've pitched as a single founder: "Where's your co-founder?"

When I've described the distinctive advantage: "OK, I get it. We can combine that with <x>," effectively negating the distinctive advantage.

"We want a home run." (But when you give them a potential home run, they get scared that they'll be in too deep before seeing returns.)

"We want to see early returns." Then: "But where's the big idea."

"We want a product." Then, when you demo a product, "But your customers will want a service."

"We want a product, not a feature." Then, "But where are the features that will grab your audience?"

"Give us financial projections." Then, "This is science fiction. How could you know?"

Or "Where are the financial projections?"

"What happens if you get hit by a bus?" (Too stupid to have any response.)

Face it, OP, for every stupid pitch you see, I see stupid money jumping over the dimes to get to the nickels. For every intelligent investor, there are dozens of heirs, government admins, enterprise idiots, lottery winners (from lucky exits, not lotteries), and angel posers. You're not the only one whose time is being wasted.
Can't edit, but "a function defined within a class scope" should actually be "a function assigned within a class scope", where and how the function object was defined does not actually matter (as the example shows), the only thing which matters is that the object is bound to a name in the class scope.
I still use Chrome despite it not behaving very well with 10 or so tabs open. It either starts getting slow or will keep the previous page's cache and will refuse to load the new (URL) page. The ways around this are annoying. Close unresponsive tab and open new one, restart the browser or empty cache. FF seems not to suffer from this problem but it still feels a bit slower in general.
download.com does not make me trust you. It's a red flag that makes me think you're even more likely to be malware. Especially given this: http://insecure.org/news/download-com-fiasco.html
Benz patented a three wheeled car with a tiller.

The Ford Model T came out more than 20 years later.

You can read about the differences between it's controls and those of contemporary automobiles here: http://www.scvmtfc.org/drivingmodelt.pdf

Maybe this time the rules are different and innovation won't occur over the long term. But I wouldn't bet on it.
HBO (a single content creator) is looking to pocket ~4 billion by itself (http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118042241) why would the entire industry be interested in splitting 3 billion
Resolving The Primary Key Fiasco
And nice, playful hacks get discarded as "Totally unusable." because they do not work on latest iOS. [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4442829
Open data and the start of a golden age of soccer analytics
Ehm... if anything CNET will add malware, not remove it.

Was many years since I've downloaded anything off of download.com and I have a hard time believing that I ever will.

http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-pick/nmap-warns-download-c...
Also our Angel.co https://angel.co/nightpro you can get in touch through hello@nightpro.co
They'd make even more money with five billion people paying $1.
Firefox 15 arrives, supports compressed textures for impressive 3D gaming
I worked with people at a company in Lansing (TechSmith) that worked at Quicken Loans. They were NOT disappointed with their move.
Totally agree. As an OS itself, let's just look at it objectively first. Without Internet, you can keep using your OS for a very long time if your usage of daily software doesn't change a whole lot. What could be the basic functions? Writing, printing, maintaining files. All this can be achieved without worrying too much about upgrades. So just on this account, there is no need to disregard XP.

However, we cannot divorce Internet from the OS, and consequently you need necessary updates to keep up with the changing time.

You make a good argument that XP is not really that old (it isn't as old as Win95/98/Win2K) and honestly speaking, from my experience, if you are a owner of a reasonable processor (Pentium 4 and above) and if max out on your memory slots (4 Gigs is relatively possible) than I really don't see a reason to buy a new PC if I can hold on to what I have as long as I technically can.
they don't want you watching television except through their boxes

This is entirely untrue. Most cable companies have apps which allow you to stream content via iPad or even Xbox apps.

The whole HBO Go thing is part of a cable wide initiative called TV Everywhere which is entirely about letting you watch your TV content on alternative devices as long as you have a cable subscription. Streaming content is actually a win for the cable operators because it offloads a lot of work from their cable infrastructure. They're actually fine with you streaming content via their network's services as long as you're paying your cable bill.
IBM working on Watson app for smartphones
They are available in these countries as well...

Since it's an offline app I thought the 3G / WiFi coverage might be way better in the US than in other countries. Might this be one issue?
looks awesome.. i'll try it when i get home.
Money is still the primary reason.

As others have mentioned, the risk is low and it's a lot more user friendly than people realise.

http://www.stalecoffee.com/2012/08/28/usenet-brignull