skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
By making great phones. Lets not pretend here that Samsung copying the sunflower icon for the photo app and having a connector that looks like the apple one had a major impact on anyone's sales.

Edit: downvotes... you guys honestly think that the reason why Samsung has been successful is because of touchwiz? Most people don't even like Samsung's modifications to stock Android. It was stupid of them to make the changes they did, and they deserve a fine, but it certainly didn't help them much in terms of sales.
Well the Palm Pilot isn't multitouch so ofcourse you can't do a pinch there.
But double click just works out of the box on almost all devices when an existing OS is used.

I think you should give this a read: http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html and notice these words: "What I am pointing out, however, is that "new" technologies - like multi-touch - do not grow out of a vacuum."
Yes it's very impressive, it's almost as smooth on my 2.53 Ghz dual core than it is on my 600 Mhz phone.
HTML5 FTW.
My guess is that the canvas rendering mode won't be affected by number of objects like SVG does.
One trouble with judging PHP like that is that the namespace features are so very new and almost universally loathed* that classes are/were the only widely-used form of namespace encapsulation.

In a language like Python, it's not uncommon to be far more discriminating about what is a class and what is just implemented using functions. That design is lost on PHP really.

*I disagree with the loathing. The backslash is a bit ugly but life goes on.
Where is it? :)
Samsung and Apple fandom aside, patenting a smartphone UI is patently absurd.
I used Moor for several projects and works like charms and it's very easy to use ( https://github.com/jeffturcotte/moor )
I'm pretty sure this was a patent infringement lawsuit, so the statement that the "iPhone was a revolution" is irrelevant. Apple won a claim against Samsung for mimicking "bounce back" behavior among other patents.

Hopefully pull-to-refresh isn't patented. I'm not about to look either lest I be found willfully infringing.
Just asking... How it would compare to PyPy's RPython?
AuthorsGoogle: Randall Munroe of xkcd
What Happens When Pollsters Are No Better Than Psychics?
Interesting twist. Excellent execution. Great MVP.
"The people who had come to Twitter in the early days also felt duped, as if they had been told their bite-size snacks were being used to feed everyone on the planet, not to make money...The early Twitter customers and chefs should have realized that eventually Twitter would have to make money. That possibility included advertising."

That's not true. Early adopters (us) knew they needed to make money, but we hoped it wouldn't be at the expense of the people who invested in their success (us).

"The food trucks that had set up shop on the corner, were in some sense, too idealistic, believing they could always get the food coming out of Twitter free."

Not true. It's still free, but no one else can access it. The problem isn't with the cost, but the availability.

"But most of all Twitter, which changed its decisions and strategy midstream, confused almost everyone, often hurting those who helped make Twitter successful and popular."

The only true statement in the entire article.
Where this analogy goes totally off the rails (no pun intended) is the suggestion the developer community was called in to help Twitter scale.

> So Twitter came up with a plan: it told people that they could take the food being made in Twitter’s kitchen and give it away by creating new places for people to eat.

Strained analogies aside, that is just completely and utterly backwards. The API was a critical part of Twitter early from day one, and the 3rd-party client ecosystem and extremely high utility of Twitter as microblogging plumbing was arguably what gave Twitter the momentum to cross the chasm.
Wasn't the whole point of having a lay jury that Samsung's copying was so blatant (they did take the piss on a few of their designs...) that an average person could confuse one of their devices for an iPhone?

That said, I am not defending in any way this patent law fucktardery that's gotten us to where they are today.
1) Compared to a normal desktop, where most of your functional navigation is crammed into a small bar (which has pop-up cascading menus filled potentially with stacks of small application shortcuts, and lots of folders) a full screen of evenly-sized tiles with prominent identifying symbols seems okay to me. Maybe even an improvement, once you factor in live-tile info display. And certainly it seems far simpler to use - it only has one level of depth - click on anything and you're in an application.

2) Metro does look a little odd with such a tall screen. It makes more sense on a widescreen laptop or tablet display. Also he chose a pretty garish background.

3) Also remember most of these icons are legacy. Will look better when more of your apps are Metro-ised.

4) And of course Metro looks best - really only makes sense - when seen and used in motion. Metro is an extremely fluid, motion-heavy OS - traditional WIMP in comparison is as heavy and immobile as a pile of rocks.

5) Purple icon is maps. Blue clouds are skydrive (cloud service.) Sun is weather (once you've used the app once, local weather conditions are displayed on the tile.)
5 tools to set up a LaTeX work environment, for a thesis dissertation in OSX
I recently completed my MSc thesis, and I wanted to share the tools and process flow I used in order to develop and typeset in LaTeX the entire document. The working environment is OSX, but most of it could easily be transfered to Linux as well.
Let me know if you have any other suggestions from your personal experience, in the comments below.
It's time to put an end to the lie that Apple has patented ideas or the "right" to use features. This is simply not true, and not how patents work, and the anti-patent crowd really should be embarrassed at perpetuating this ideologically motivated, but obviously factually false claim.

Jeff Han demonstrated a touch interface using cameras a few months before the iPhone was demonstrated. Both sets of work can be patented because the idea of using a "touch interface" cannot be patented, by anybody.

Similarly, "pinch to zoom" or "one click purchase" or "pull to refresh" cannot -- and HAVE NOT-- been patented.

You can only patent inventions. Inventions can be particular implementations of features. And this is what Apple has patented. Jeff Han's touch implementation uses cameras and Apple's uses capacitive touch screen and a lot of VERY sophisticated software. They are both distinct and non-obvious and both of them could be patented.

I know this is an ideological position for those who are spreading (or repeating) the misinformation. It is much easier to pretend like these patents are trivial monopolies on ideas, than to admit that Apple put half a decade of work into them.

But you should question your ideology when it requires you to lie in order to make points.
They don't buy apps though. I know maybe a dozen people with Android phones and (barring 1 person and 1 app) they have NEVER purchased an app. They don't pay for subscription services, they don't do in-game upgrades, they don't put any money into the phone. Its crazy. And the 1 person that did buy an app? It was an app to aid in pirating things.
Startups, this is how to do great sales demos
Apple's victory could mean fewer phone options
So basically you're saying that PyPy knows what code it can optimize and Numba requires the programmer to specify it. That probably has more to do with Numba's being version 0.2 than anything else. And it's hardly reason to moan that it's not a "real" compiler.
Show HN: New Facebook Newsfeed Storefront
I totally agree with you that execution does matter. But the Samwer's don't execute - they outright copy. From reverse engineering, to out right cloning the CSS style sheets and design UI's which is totally wrong. That's not innovation in any sense and I wholeheartedly disagree if you are defending the cloning of a product completely.

I'm not "whining" about the Samwers - I am bringing them into the larger context of this debate. That is - with patent protection - their outright clones would not exist. You draw a completely different imputation by comparing it to business strategy of expanding faster and cloning a product. I am not against, in any sense, taking an idea (groupon) and making it work in a different part of the world - as long as it adds something to it - a different UI and so on.

The Samwers don't add that and that's what is detestable. If your startup worked hard, built a product with a great UI that is commented upon and then a competitor clones it outright in a different market - are you suggesting you wouldn't be pissed ? Because that's exactly what the Samwers do. And sometimes it's not so easy to just "expand as soon as possible" - payments is a whole massive legal headache (in the case of stripe). Verification systems, financial approval and so on and so on per country and many others. Plus, expanding quickly involves local offices, larger teams, greater strategic planning, more investment capital which then dilutes existing people more and so on and so on. So it's not a simple matter of "expand as quickly as possible" but sometimes that's just not feasible.
"The new boss, Dick Costolo, realized that if the company wanted to make money, it would need to stop allowing all the food trucks and delivery services from taking everything made at Twitter."

That's a false dichotomy if there ever was one.
Looking for feedback!
Just installed Win 8 in Parallels on an rMBP and I have to be honest, I don't hate it as much as when I tried the preview release in a window on an iMac.

Some of the tips in this article are great and the more you dig, the more you find they actually HAVE improved a lot of things in the 'old' OS as well (this seems to get ignored/glossed over in alot of reviews, especially the negative ones).

So far, Metro/Win8 is just a toy without touch. I honestly can't see myself getting much work done here but it seems to keep out of the way enough.

Ultimately (for me), would I use Windows at all unless I had to for work? And would I replace OS X 10.8 with Win8 as my primary OS? Quite simply: hell no. You'll have to pry this rMBP out of my cold dead hands (not just because Retina is such a game changer visually - I still MUCH prefer the speed, power, efficiency, apps and overall experience of OS X. It's no competition IMO).

Whether Win8 is a winner on touch devices like Surface, time will tell. Metro/Win8 is nice enough but there are next to zero apps for it. I'm also still not convinced having the 'old desktop' on a tablet really is what people are going to want. Obviously it's a stopgap until Win8 takes off but is it really much of a selling point? Anyone who has done RDP or Citrix from an iPad can get an idea of what it's like (I've used it enough times to know): It's OK in a pinch, but shoot me if I had to use it to actually get serious work done.

Microsoft have definitely thrown a Hail Mary here, not long to find out if it will work...
"Ryan has repeatedly suggested that many of his economic ideas were inspired by the work of Friedrich von Hayek, an awkwardly shy (and largely ignored) economist and philosopher who died in 1992"

Most certainly not 'largely ignored' in the UK.

http://www.cps.org.uk/blog/q/date/2012/05/08/happy-birthday-...

http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/commentary/david-camerons-t...

Interesting that the US right wing candidates are beginning to read Hayek. See Ill fares the land by Tony Judt for a polemical response to Hayek's influence in the UK

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/apr/11/ill-fares-land-t...
The plan was always to remove the old start menu. Early builds still had some functionality, but as soon as MS heard that some people were taking advantage of the vestigial code, they made sure to remove all of it on the next released build to remove temptation and avoid getting people's hopes up.
US music file-sharer must pay $675K damages
I don't think it's a hipster comment at all; it's spot on. Gehry doesn't get these projects because he's such a great architect. He gets them because he's a brand with a certain reputation, and the OP basically summed up what that reputation is and what it really means when someone hires Gehry based on that reputation.

It's clear Facebook is trying to emulate Apple, but somewhere in the process they missed the entire damned point and took the easy way out.
But that too already exists... I wanted to built exactly this ~6 months ago, but I didn't because there were already so many competitors back then.
Coursera Adds Honor Code Prompt in Response to Reports of Plagiarism
So true. I have a WP7 and love the hell out of it. I can't stand using my girlfriend's iPhone - it feels clunky and designed for an elementary school child. I have several friends and family that also love their WP7 dearly.

WP7 is a great OS. Unfortunately, it has been stigmatized and beat down because A) Microsoft B) Not Apple, and C) poor marketing/strategy
I'm not sure if you've tried OS X but it seems to me this feature is similar to the Dashboard which is a screen where widgets like weather, stock info etc are displayed. Activation is just a two finger swipe on the trackpad.
What we should all be learning from Branchout's mess
The main way to use it right now is by decorating the functions you want it to compile. See the examples directory [0] in the Github repository.

0. https://github.com/numba/numba/tree/master/examples
That restricted subset, RPython, is what PyPy itself is implemented in; but PyPy can run arbitrary Python code.
Hi, am I wrong, or your hash implementation is O(N)?
It actually all becomes really clear as soon as you realize that what Apple wanted to patent all along, was innovation itself.

Apparently that claim did not get accepted[1] so now they're trying to stop competition from using iNnovation by means of patent-lawsuits for everything else.

[1] Prior art, they said. Even though it's absolutely indisputable that Apple came up with the iWheel first, and everybody else copied its rounded corners.
Also, people struggle with weight loss because they approach it only from the side of burning excess calories with exercise, but as long as their caloric requirements stay the same, the moment they stop exercising, calories start piling up again. If you want to burn more fuel, there is longer lasting approach: grow a bigger engine. That means: gain some muscle. The more muscle you have, the more calories you will be burning, even while eating an ice-cream on a couch. Muscles will also make you look less flabby, because toned abs will keep your belly in check.
No.

In any case, doing that wouldn't be difficult, you just wrap a Python interpreter and the Python code in a single executable and you're done. What would make it worthwhile is when it would be an optmizing compiler, which is of course difficult for such a dynamic language.
Easy, don't accept friend requests and ignore them. If they want to stalk you, take precautions.
I'm already signed up to be notified when it becomes available to use in Europe. Until it does, FastSpring certainly seems good enough (and defers the effort of setting up a non-static website to handle purchases, which is worth a fair bit to me as well).
Sequoia Capital’s Latest $975 Million Raise Is All About International
I love the simplicity of it. Don't be compelled to succumb to feature creep. There is already plenty to make people pay five bucks or more a week for this. The worth to movie, music, and videogame producers alone.

I guess you could add some mobile notification mechanism, but I already love the product as it is right now.

As far as I am concerned, you might as well charge twenty bucks a month for it. It's a great product.
You misunderstand the nature of patents. Patents cover inventions, which are non-obvious methods to solve problems. This is not giving apple the exclusive right to "pinch to zoom" or "slide to unlock" but the methods for implementing those features.

Apple also has a great deal of very fundamental patents with regard to the unique way for reading touch screens that they invented. This does not mean only Apple can have touch interfaces, but the method they invented for implementing them, however, they do have patents on.

The reason this trial was about these lesser patents and trade dress was the same as the reason it was over products that are no longer on the shelves-- the legal system moves very slow. The "big gun" patents hadn't yet been granted at the time Apple started getting sued.
And I totally do agree with you that some patents are totally absurd - but I reject your notion I don't understand what innovation is. The problem is - innovation as a concept and innovative step under law are two completely segregated idea's. The language and their use are unfortunately bipolar.

My point is - the unfortunate way that patent law currently works is - you are a doomed if you have something innovative that is patentable - not to patent it because you are most likely going to invest a huge level of resources developing it only to have someone copy it later without anything to fall back on. You might not agree with the patent system, you might hate the way it currently works (and I agree with this notion) but you are stuck with it and you aren't protecting your business from an intellectual property stand point - or providing adequate shareholder return if you don't seek to protect it.

You will do hundreds or thousands of hours developing, fixing and perfecting what could be an amazing idea - you will (maybe) get lots of fresh VC investment and take money from your parents, friends and family all who believe in you - only to push it to market and have someone copy it in a flash and reproduce it without question. What to do then ?
I don't have any opinion about Gehry designing it, but I do have an opinion about Facebook's quote:

>It will be a large, one room building that somewhat resembles a warehouse. Just like we do now, everyone will sit out in the open with desks...

How can people possibly design and implement software under those conditions?
I don't think Apple will appeal, but Samsung will, which is a good move because if they concede and pay up hoping that this goes away then Apple will use that as a springboard for a thousand more lawsuits.

I guess it depends on what you consider to be an iPhone "lookalike". I don't believe that much about the iPhone look and feel that people usually point to is actually patentable- trademarkable, maybe, but not patentable. The things that Apple is attacking Samsung and Android over are fairly specific functions. For the practical purposes of the mobile market, I truly don't think this outcome is going to effect Samsung (or any other manufacturer) a great deal.

As for MS, yes, they are highly profitable, but my point is that they used to be the feared leader that owned the software market and all distribution to it. Now they have very little respect in the consumer electronics market which is quickly moving up-market and disrupting the enterprise market. I think Microsoft continues to lose market share into the foreseeable future because 1) their leadership is pretty bad in the sense that they are all over the map in terms of product development and lead on very few products and 2) their software is shit and their strategy of getting people into their full stack of web hosting/development/browser framework will never get them any kind of dominance there.

I am a bit biased here because I absolutely hate Microsoft's implementation strategy. For example, at our office we use Microsoft Project Web Access which they only allow you to use in Internet Explorer, offering its users no choice of browser. In the long run that doesn't seem like a wise choice. They're building in an unnecessary limitation that any competitor can exploit. Do they really think I or anybody else won't use Chrome or FF or any other browser just because they make me run their shitty software in IE?
Last week at this time it was popular to pile on Onlive's CEO to say "he fired everyone and stole the company!".

No one asked why he did it. The common thread was "he was greedy!"

That really pisses me off. We come to find out a week later that the company was days away from total insolvency and that structuring an ABC to deal with $40 million of debt was the only way to keep anyone's jobs. It's a brutally painful place to be.

Sometimes people do awful things for simple and awful reasons. But I believe that's rare. I believe some people are forced to do awful things that they would never otherwise do given the option. I think in this case people didn't want to know, or perhaps didn't care to know why it happened. They just wanted to blame someone.

I fear the media's growing lack of interest in the why.
Leaked iPod Touch 5 Cases suggest LED Flash and have 'mystery hole'
It's not really about search. If you had a weather app installed already, Vista and 7 would do the same. But I guess it's nice that there's a built-in weather app now?
He still contributes open source all the time. He's just not an open source fanatic. He'll use an Apple because it's a nice computer, and he'll write open source on it.

I used to be a Gnome contributor as well, I worked on Ubuntu at Canonical. Now I use a Mac. Does that mean I'm not allowed to work on open source now?

It's not a fucking religion.
The AmigaOS, since the beginning, had no problem to deal with power off-s. That's only when I arrived on the PC that I felt very strange to have to do a software shut down instead of pressing a hardware button. Nonsense.
I wish you were kidding. In the 1990s I worked on software that had the same "look and feel" of the "delicious library". We had shelves and we put things on them, books, CDs, etc, in our software. This was for a seattle software company- the same city that Wil Shipley lived in when he created delicious library.

So, can I claim that, because he put books on shelves in his software that he stole the idea from us, when we did it 10 years before him?

His claim that Apple "stole" this from him is completely absurd to the point of nonsensical. He couldn't have sued Apple because his claim is nonsense.

Just as my claim that he stole our idea of putting books on shelves is nonsense as well.

The sad thing is, so many people believe this kind of nonsense.

"Hey I put books on shelves in software!" Look how innovative I am!

To compare this to patents is beyond reaching.
for a hone machine where the tower is out ofthe way, I don't like poking around under the desk to find the button. start the machine with mouse click or slam a key, and sleep with power button on keyboard.
This attitude frankly disgusts me. The legal system is all kinds of screwed up and its verdicts don't necessarily have any relation to reality. It's an intellectual cop-out: I don't have to actually put thought into the issue, because a bunch of expensive lawyers already did, and I can just parrot them!
> The entire basis of patents was essentially trying to protect the little guy

No it wasn't. Why does this misconception exist? The point of patents is to open up trade secrets for the benefit of society and advancement of the sciences. We don't allow patents to encourage inventors or make sure they can profit, that is the price we pay to get their knowledge, it is not the goal, just the means.
...still an issue. being a "clone" is far less offensive than taking someone's name and artwork.

If it was just a clone called "HTML Jump" with original graphics, but the same gameplay, there would be no outrage.

Imagine if app.net called itself "twitter.net" and copied twitter's design exactly? There would (rightfully) be outrage
Ask Facebook how? They've been doing that for a while apparently.
Looks similar to Glib, NSPR or APR in scope. What does it bring over those?