skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One problem is that, under current law, you tend to only get those rates until you get sick. Insurance companies aren't allowed to actually jack up your rates if you get sick, but they tend to do so in tranches: every N years they'll discontinue one insurance program and institute a new one. Healthy people can apply for the new one with lower rates, but people with preexisting conditions will be denied a transfer to the new program. The old program will then enter a death spiral where only people who have e.g. cancer or diabetes are stuck there, because once you're seriously ill you can't go anywhere else (at least as an individual purchaser). Then the rates start being jacked up each year to account for the now-less-healthy pool. (This pattern is called the "closed block" problem, and some states have been attempting to add new regulations to restrict it.)

And of course if you had a childhood condition (beat childhood cancer, congenital heart defect, etc.) you can never buy in in the first place.
From the patent number link:

"""
Method and apparatus for recording and storing video information

April 1, 2008

A personal video recording/storage apparatus for downloading streaming video and data contents from a number of sources and storing the video files to an internal storage device, such as a disk drive. ...
"""

Would a video cassette recorder (VCR) fit the bill for prior art? The source in this case would be a television signal and the storage device a VHS tape. I believe the VCR predates April 1, 2008.
This is definitely part of it. As generations come of "Facebook age" are they really going to want to join the same social network as their parents?

I'm in my early 20s so I was on social networks well before those of my parent's generation. Just try dodging your parents' friend requests, that never goes well...
I think this wave of Free-to-play games with incessant requests to gamers to buy in-app coins and whatever might lead to a wave of expensive (like $30-$60, similar to the desktop market) up-front games that will have a promise of no in-app purchases. I know I'm at least, and I suspect a lot others, are yearning for the old days of Sim City and Sim Tower where you didn't have to pay extra for specific buildings.
The title of the book is actually "career.fork()" not "Career.fork()"

I wouldn't have been happy with a title that throws an exception :o)
Explorer Ribbon is an improvement?
You're forgetting liquidation preference.
http://www.adequatelygood.com/2010/3/Performance-of-vs-
Cool - thanks. I'm flattered that such an esteemed member of HN took the time to give me some advice.
I had scrolled down that far before asking my question. I have been disappointed by a few books where the contents looks good but the writing style does not convince me or the author just scratches the surface. That's why I am interested in the feedback of people who have read it.
"They infringed on patents that should never have been issued."

My point exactly.
It might be nice to have this explanation visible on the page too (I was also a little disconcerted by it request so many permissions).
According to Betteridge, no.
I think this article is too focused on the bubble of the tech world. The average person doesn't think that deeply about Apple and Samsung. They don't think Samsung being associated with copying Apple in a lawsuit means Samsung makes products like Apple.

If you are a tech-geek, you'll know the difference, you'll have your own opinion on the case and the OS and hardware that you prefer.
This is about as big an in-your-face platform migration as has been tried in recent memory.

That's what a lot of people said when Office introduced the ribbon UI concept. It's just a waste of screen space. Menus were fine. It's reorganising for nothing. It'll be a huge retraining code. I'm moving to OpenOffice RIGHT NOW!!111!eleven!

But it turned out that Microsoft's usability guys did know what they were doing. Power users, who were the only ones really making use of a lot of the more obscure menu options anyway, adapted (and realised that their old keyboard shortcuts did in fact still work). The remaining 99.99753% of the market seem to have found that Office apps got easier to use. I don't know a single person, outside of power users, who actually tried out the ribbon-style Office for more than a few days and didn't come to prefer it. And I don't know a single company who spent the much-prophesied fortune on retraining their staff to achieve that result, either.

I'm reserving judgement on Windows 8. I think some of the incremental UI changes in Windows 7, notably the new-style task bar and jump lists, were significant improvements. There were also a few very careless retrograde steps, like completely nerfing the folder view in explorer in about fifteen irritating little ways that were working just fine before. On balance, I do prefer working on my current Windows 7 machine to my previous Windows XP one. If they can build on the improvements with Windows 8, and perhaps correct a few of the long-standing and/or relatively recent irritations as well, I suspect Win8 as a desktop OS will do just fine. If they move too much around without a good reason, break lots more little things without the new top-level UI really being much of an improvement in practice, and make it feel like a dumbed-down UI that is to tablets as dumbed-down Windows gaming now is to consoles, then I suspect Win8 as a desktop OS will be a failure and Microsoft will pay an extremely heavy price for it.

But such is the nature of progress. If everyone plays it safe, nothing ever changes, and sometimes changes really do make things better.
Redirect after POST so users can use their Back button. Nothing more annoying than a "resubmit?" button, especially if resubmitting is dangerous.
It's essentially the same idea, except that you elicit a particular brainwave signal only when recognizing something you've already seen. I believe India experimented with using it in murder trials a few years ago-- if the accused elicits a P300 upon seeing the actual murder weapon amongst a line-up of dozens of other weapons, they must know a priori how the murder took place and hence be guilty. Interesting times and there really are applications that could benefit from this kind of analysis.
You need to look at the Claims to figure out what the patent covers. The title and abstract have no legal force.

And since the claims include such things as the compression algorithm being user-selectable, it's trivially obvious that a VCR is not covered.
Brief Initial Thoughts on Apple v. Samsung
"Copycat, copycat" What the Apple ruling means for startups
Can anone here argue that allowing patents on simple UI actions and the SHAPE of icons should be protectable under the patent system? This will stifle innovation for decades....
I'm still hoping for a good stylus solution for tablets. Fingers are a great primary input device but when I'm taking notes, or some other writing/drawing activity, something that works like a pen is much preferred.

I bought a stylus marketed specifically for the ipad and it sucked. The tip was this big soft spongy foam thing. It was nowhere close to the immediate, reliable experience of putting pen to paper. I was left assuming that the current capacitive technology in these devices is just not up to the task of making pen input work well.

Maybe it can be done easily, but it just wasn't high enough on the priority queue. Maybe Microsoft will do this well with Surface, since it would differentiate them and after all, they were doing tablets with pen input over a decade ago.

Whatever the holdup, I'm still looking forward to tablets that are as easy to write on as pen and paper.
How to Beat Group B Strep for Good
Would you care to explain which part of this patent is not trivial?

http://www.google.com/patents?id=O2YXAAAAEBAJ

Until then I'll have to assume we live in different realities.
It makes sense that the free apps are making more when you think about it. They're getting the most money out of each customer. Every customer is not worth 99 cents. Some are worth a LOT more. Just like when you go overseas and the locals have on cheap price for locals and a much higher price for the rich foreigners.

There have to be other ways of achieving the same end goal however without the constant nagging. Has anyone tried a game where people pay by the hour for instance? First hour free?
The energy of a blue photon is higher than a red one, and so an intense blue light might be an hazard [1]. That said, I don't think these glasses will help much, because according to their transmission curve they still transmit ~75% in the 470nm region (which corresponds to the blue emitted by "white" LEDs). If they had managed to make some kind of "optical notch filter" removing the ~470nm blue light from LEDs at a reasonable price it would have been pretty much an instabuy for me.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-energy_visible_light
Verdict reached in Apple/Samsung case - massive infringement
Say what you will about patent abuses, a firm that is utilizing their patents is qualitatively different than some shitballs in a two person office in Houston suing for damages of a patent vultured at some tech company's bankruptcy proceedings.
Should have done a SMC and PRAM reset before performing the tests.
My question about books like this is always 'If you are doing so well at what you're writing a book about, why are you wasting the time writing a book about it?'

Surely you don't expect that your time spent writing a book is going to pay out at $300 an hour, or whatever your consulting rates are.
This is something that I was thinking about a long time ago. It turns out that the gain isn't worth it because of how good the bytecode caches are.

The frameworks are slow in places because of some of the techniques used to make development faster and easier - such as autoload. autoload is notoriously difficult to bytecode cache

It isn't a coincidence that the pitch here is against frameworks in PHP and not plain PHP itself. I'd like to see a benchmark against plain PHP, I bet there isn't much of a difference.

If you really need to optimize this stuff just go into your PHP framework and rip out autoload and any fancy reflection stuff (extract, eval). Put in straight include() or require(). Use PHP for templating or a templating system that compiles to straight PHP which is include()'d. setup APC..

Saves you switching development environment, retraining developers, increasing dev time and I bet the difference in benchmarks would be pretty negligible.
I think developing in F# is actually quite a different development experience to C# that lends itself better to be able to develop in a text editor with.

Whilst developing in F# I'm mostly using the F# interpreter (fsi) to test and run snippets of code, once I'm happy with the code, I then just paste it into the main code-base.

I've got some good links to help you get started with F# in the "Getting Started with F#" section, at the end of this earlier blog post: http://www.servicestack.net/mythz_blog/?p=765
Slot machines are where the money is, look at the floor area they give them.

Whales are just the bonus on top and the tables give the sense of glamour/sophistication.
As commercial space race intensifies SpaceX, Virgin find they have company
Not "based," but have you ever heard the saying, "consider the source?"
The unrealistic binary friend statuses are what Friendica Red is supposed to be aimed at resolving, such that it becomes something more like a set of permissions mapped to degrees of familiarity.

http://friendica.com/node/51
No, but this does allow the author to get more publicity and thus allow him to survive even easier as a freelancer.
although their ISK<->subscription time market seems like a nice compromise- if you can grind, you can play for free. If you want to skip some grind, you can pay to get ahead. And no one feels like they're being fucked with by amoral Wharton grads.
Maybe he's done well enough that he doesn't need to be making $300/hr and has a desire to create a book? There's also the publicity angle too.
the result of multiple log out attempts will be "attemptor will be logged out."
I believe in psychology this is called the "Fundamental Attribution Error."
The way I understand Gatekeeper, it must checksum an app on disk whenever it starts up (correct me if I am wrong)

If that is true, this test may not be representative of typical use; it contains way too many application launches.

I would like to see the effect of Gatekeeper settings on battery life.
> On this site I've seen many claims that Apple's patents are covered by "prior art" but the "art" cited is generally nonsensical (eg: 2001: a space odessy having square tablets)

I'm curious, why is the Space Odyssey tablet "obviously nonsensical"?

See for instance the Waterbed patent denied because of Henlein's writings: http://www.techrepublic.com/article/geek-trivia-strange-wate...
Investors to Zuckerberg: Please step down
Once in a while I will throw out a useless and nonconstructive comment:

Isn't it super cute to see these windows "power-users" at work? Pretending that their new OS is for anything other than their grandma checking their email? And look at all you "hackers" congratulating Microsoft for an improvement on the dumbest series of operating systems (per dollar spent on it) of the last two decades. Awww, the intellectual poverty is really adorable.
I think they might segregate the to expose others better but they aren't about to ditch their biggest earners (or piss off their customers who love these so much they keep spending money on them).
I suspect something of huge impact happened in the graphics code. Maybe ML is offloading way more tasks to the GPU (it probably has to in order to optimize for Retina), maybe there are some hideous problems in the code - who knows. It's all based on anecdotal observations of course.

My Mac Pro's fan noise, while unnoticeable under Lion, has gotten so loud it's now uncomfortable to watch a movie with. It's only due to elevated temperatures in the "expansion" area where the graphics cards are (the fans on the cards are strangely quiet though). The underside of my 2011 MBP is about, say, 5-10°C hotter on ML.
I'm in SC accelerator + wife and kids in PA = tough
It's expensive, but consider the Jot Touch stylus:

http://adonit.net/product/jot-touch/
All Your Metadata Shall Be In Water Writ
I used a Livescribe pen as a student, and I found it really helpful. Being able to record audio and tie that to the words I was writing was incredibly useful. I also appreciated that they didn't go with the price-gouging printer/razorblade-refill model, because they allow you to print your own paper for free (as long as you have a high-quality printer).

The only thing I didn't like about the pen was that it was ballpoint - I'm oddly particular about this; I like Uniball or fountain pens, and I find ballpoint pens a bit irritating to write with.

But other than that, I didn't have any complaints with the pen - if you're like most people and don't mind using ballpoint pens, you probably won't mind the pen either.
CouchSurfing raises $15 million in additional funding
Yes, there is, last I recall.
Steve Jobs: "Good artists borrow, great artists steal"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU

therefore... oh wait
That said, it's a beautiful website and a beautiful idea. Sincerely.
Video of protein movement within a neuron shows how our brains renew themselves
If it's obvious, why didn't it exist on any of the touchscreen products which went before the iPhone?
http://www.patentbuddy.com/Patent/7352953

The guy is a patent TROLL. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFmpeg

His invention he so graciously enlightened us with, and the US constitution so enthusiastically promoted the art of software with, is explicitly a patent on recording video and encoding. I'm sure all the digital video companies, demo hackers, video game developers, film industry personnel were so grateful for his magnificent contribution to the computer sciences.

Patent are the highest violation of the pursuit of happiness. An earth with patents is a violation of every (unborn) human's right to innovation, self determination and industry.

One cannot innovate if the root of innovation is blocked by a patent.

If you can write it in the C lib it's not an invention okay?
According to NPR yesterday, they also ruled on whether the infringed patents were valid. So yeah, that's the jury's fault.
BackboneJS Rendering Problems
HTML5 Download Attribute
Ask HN: New product launch splash page. Does it work?
We are going to announce a new product launch soon (TargetProcess3) and created a splash page for this purpose.

TargetProcess is a 6 y.o. project management tool, but this new release is a 100% re-designed UX in fact.

I wonder whether this splash really works. Does it have any intrigue? Does it have enough information to explain benefits and wow-features?

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Link: http://targetprocess.com/3
Sorry I should have put "ignore the positive tone of the article".

I have used Windows 8 for the last 6-7 days and regardless of this information, it's still a pain to use. The learning curve doesn't go away that easily.
As others have said, being a hacker is more about mindset and attitude than your technical capability. It is more a journey than destination. Anyway here are some suggestions:

1) Read this - http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

2) Try to get into explore-learn-do habit. Always look out for new things to learn and use that knowledge to solve some problems.

3) Learn Linux - If you aren't doing it already install a linux OS and try to use it as much as you can. I'm not asking you to ditch Windows. Install both if needed. If you aren't able to do something in linux, then do it in windows. Ubuntu Linux is good to start with.

3) Learn Programming. I would suggest you to begin with Python as it is easy to learn and have very good library ecosystem. Learn a relational(mysql) and a no-sql(mongodb) database along with python. Try to understand what different kinds of applications can be made - Web app, Desktop app, Mobile app, libraries, scrapers, servers, clients etc.

4) Learn about WWW, HTTP and Web Development with HTML, CSS, JavaScript and any python web framework - django/flask/etc.

5) Code, code and code. Keep learning and making new things.
http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

"A surprising number of people retain from childhood the idea that there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world. There is, in any normal family, a fixed amount of money at any moment. But that's not the same thing."

That is a great essay, I've read it several times. I particularly appreciated the how he points out what money is and what it isn't. I bought this course on Economics http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.asp... (sometimes you can check it out from the library) and listened to it in my car over the course of a couple of months. Dr Taylor has a very easy to listen to delivery for a lecturer. And it really helped illustrate how the economy both works and how it can be reasoned about effectively.

I can't fly around Africa in a bush plane and give out medical advice, I can build a successful business here and then fund a doctor who volunteers to do that. If I'm smart and thoughtful I would look at how much solid humanitarian work is funded by folks in the US, and I would note that there is more funding going into humanitarian aid from the US than any other country in the world [1], and while it did take a hit during the Great Recession it is recovering. And if I was smart and thoughtful I would know that like the aphorism "a rising tide lifts all boats" that anything that generates economic growth in the US results in more humanitarian aid for the world. And then I would note all those awesome tech companies in the top 500 list that are driving creating the GDP which is coming out of the #1 source of humanitarian funding in the world and I would say "Go tech! Go tech!"

[1] http://www.globalhumanitarianassistance.org/wp-content/uploa...
Your new TV ruins movies
if this system were abolished then companies like Apple would be obscuring their methods to prevent copying, and their platforms would be more locked down.

Excuse me?

How could Apple possibly lock their platform down even more?
There are surely very dedicated people working in some casinos. That doesn't have anything to do with them doing interesting stuff.

And the fact that they use "what every other user facing tech company uses" is exactly the problem. I like and use A/B testing, but it's purpose as a tool is to take decisions based on what extracts the more money from users. There's no dark corner, but the goal is definitely the same. And it's not exactly something that I want to associate with games.

The fact that your whole post, and a big part of the link you give, is as much applicable to selling games as to selling rocking chairs or any random saas product is exactly the problem. Marketing and sales come first, game development is merely an afterthought.
Are you trolling? A video compression algorithm being selected is not obvious? Has the patent office/this scumbag troll not heard of gnu video libs?
Customizing jQuery UI Draggable
I really didn't like idea of mixing metro with normal desktop style of work. Now, after two weeks of using it on work and at home, I can just say that it works great - metro doesn't interfere with desktop apps, I'm using them like i did on win7, and win8 is better with regular desktop style of work in every way!

Startup/shutdown speed is also totally awesome, even I basically don't power off my computer, never.
So, now, when there's no much metro style apps, win8 as desktop OS works great, and in about one year when Store fills up, it'll be even better.

Other things I really like that are much improved over win7: HyperV inside OS, ISO Mount, multi-monitor support (taskbar, wallpapers), cloud integration, copy/delete/move dialogs with speed graph, task manager.
Seems like a lot of rearranging the deck chairs. Hopefully the real work of significantly restructuring the company is happening behind the scenes where allthingsd can't see.
I've said it before and I'll say this again: Kara Swisher needs to openly admit she has a serious grudge against Yahoo.
If you find this observation interesting you will definitely enjoy Maciej's analysis, "The Social Graph Is Neither":

http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/11/the_social_graph_is_neither/
It's cute that he has to say that he's "not here to bash apple" so many times. Clearly the whole point of your video is bashing them.
How can I monetize my app without losing my users trust?
I have an idea for a web app that will allow people to easily share links with friends / whoever. Basically the app allows people to register, create an address book with friends emails, cell phone numbers, and possible social integration. Once you've done that you can send friends links easily to their email or cell phone all from the same place. I'm most likely going to build a browser extension for sending links. I don't want to make any money from the app I just want it to pay for itself (hosting, twilio, etc.) I've looked into advertisements and I don't think it's the right fit because most people won't be spending a lot of time on the actual site as there's no real content. I thought about a paid subscription or a tiered plan based on usage and average costs. Are there any other ways to monetize a simple app?
But arcade games did dominate game design for about 15 years. It wasnt until the late 90's that console developers realized that they didnt have to design games the way they had been doing since 1980. Just look at Super Mario Brothers, it is designed as an arcade game: lives, timer, padded number of levels.

On a side note: I would take arcade games over social games any day. Arcade games were made to be hard in order to gobble up quarters. Anyone born in the early 80s remembers games as being really, really challenging. Social games are being made to be mindless and addictive.