skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks, very useful - didn't know that!
Just to avoid getting into legal trouble, for starters.
Ask HN: Can we get some clarity on the whole 'pinch to zoom' patent debate?
I can't help but feel we're all going round in circles. I'd like to ask for some clarification from people that have either got some background knowledge or have carefully investigated these matters.

1. What do the Apple gestures patents actually protect?

2. What would a mobile device with 'pinch to zoom' need to do to infringe it?

3. What is the minimum plausible workaround that preserves the essential features?

2. Why aren't the precursors that appear so obviously to many to be prior art effective in court?

There's obviously some overlap between questions 1,2 and 3 and I'm aware that there are actually several patents that might relate to this but I think I've captured what needs to be explained to stop us all talking past each other on this matter.

And hopefully we can move the discussion forwards.
Is less than faster than less than or equal to
Show HN: Old Spice Muscle Music
I'm struggling to find it, but I'm certain a germany company said they would launch a service to access Linux VMs running on zSeries.

The IBM SmartCloud Enterprise+ Service (what amazing names IBM comes up with) does incorporate zSeries machines.

http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/en/managed-cloud-hosting/
Yup, I had the same on my bike of 25 years ago! Not easily transferred though if you wanted to sell the bike to someone else.

The unique number etched into the frame can be transferred though. The one you get free from the UK Police is the same as the Silver Kit here: https://www.bikeregister.com/
No 'public distribution system' can ever fix any of problems society faces. It just makes government bigger, in the end making things worse. Maybe it's okay in big cities where you give free food to avoid people killing for it, i.e. suppressing crime, but works only in conjunction with strong law enforcement. Nobody is going to become a better/more productive person because (s)he received free food for years.
How about:

grep Hardcover | grep Kindle
It's a civil suit - they're not "breaking the law" since there's no clear right or wrong answer until you get to court.
Because I know corruption is one of the many many issues that resulted in this problem and not the only thing responsible for it. If you were to fix corruption, may be they will be fed this season, but they will hungry in next 6 months.

Corruption is happening inside this free food distribution program.

But why do those people even need free food? Unfortunately this question is never asked. Those people don't have productive jobs to afford it. That is why we always keep hearing of these stories.

Our focus must be to provide them jobs so that they can buy it, instead of making it a free stuff.
Giving away things for free is the scheme/blanket the corrupt use to hide their corruption. Removing the blanket may not fix corruption, but it's a start.
Bring back the hot pink selection background color!
Perhaps, but I should note that India has historically suffered from highly inconsistent monsoons which have lead to famines, as recently as the 1960s. The failure of those monsoons lead to the creation of a PDS system.
"being stolen before they get it" - nonsense!

1) There is an X amount of food and Y number of people in India.
2) Someone is eating that food (let's assume nothing gets thrown out/rots because of corruption: someone who steals food eventually sells it and it gets eaten, not trashed)

Meaning: corruption does not change the supply and demand, so it doesn't impact the prices (total money that is charged for the food in the country). It only changes the hands which get the money. Nobody starves because of the food getting stolen unless, again, the stolen food is either trashed or ends up exported.
This article has some good points - http://aphilosopher.wordpress.com/2008/05/13/the-ethics-of-p...

"One reason often given as to why prostitution is immoral is that it tends to involve coercion. In most cases, people do not freely decide to become prostitutes. In some cases, they are driven to the profession by desperation and a lack of other opportunities for employment. In other cases, they are forced into prostitution by others. In some cases, people are enslaved and forced to be prostitutes."
Unless you want to show before/after context (-A/-B flags), one should grep before sort, not after. Less work to do.
I'd say apathy of the masses is the biggest reason that any of the things you mention haven't happened.

In this article, for instance, only the poorest of the poor are truly starving and the vast majority just doesn't care enough to protest. While the middle classes are too busy with their own lives, the poorest and most disadvantaged people are too busy trying to eke out a basic living to actually protest about it.

Let me try to list some reasons as to why.

India has no real opposition party in the centre or most of the states. Most ruling parties end up having uncontrolled power.

Corruption has become so pervasive in the Indian pillars of governance that we don't really have a Law & Order System anymore. The Police are corrupt and the judicial system is corrupt. Criminals thrive, as long as they have money.

Failure of the Law & Order system encourages corruption in the political class. The times that an opposition party does become a bit powerful, they end up being just as corrupt as the ruling party. Most Indian election candidates use the support of various mafia and unscrupulous businessmen to win elections. Once they win this way, they need to help such people now that they are in power.

Over a period of time, these issues have become so pervasive in the Indian system that today the educated and the middle classes stay away from politics. They live in their own laissez-faire life with private utilities, security and medicine. They pay their taxes but don't expect much from the government in return as long as the government doesn't interfere or hinder them.

The powerful media is too busy and is rarely anti-government because government advertising forms a big part of their revenues. So they don't carry such stories for long. The media has their own pressures since they have to keep circulations high by keeping the prices virtually free.

A section of the civil society had been trying to hold anti-corruption protests in recent times. They started with a lot of support but soon the media lost interest in them and nobody really pays any attention to their rallies anymore.

Now for all these reasons, the middle classes are mostly apathetic to the plight of the poor or the fact that the rich are exploiting the nation.
'Lulzsec hacker' latest to be arrested in US
Hint: HackerNews and streets of Bangalore (refer original comment) are two entirely different platforms and mind readers were not aplenty on streets of Bangalore the last time I checked.

Now, please do not say he meant once I start about the clean lanes of USA talking to someone on streets of Bangalore then I instantly stand out.
Who did you think came up with all the graphics for their 'games'?
> Which, to be clear, means that modern SQL databases do not "expose a view to the world of an update in place database".

I disagree with you on this point. MVCC may prevent you from suffering from locking problems, but you can still, from a user perspective, modify rows. A row is a place and you are updating it. It's definitional.

On your second point. The data model that datomic databases expose is very different from SQL databases. That's enough of a difference to say that it's fundamentally new. Furthermore, I don't think anyone would disagree that the architecture of datomic is very different from that of PostgreSQL.

When you compare a distributed database that uses immutable data against PostgreSQL, the thing that is immediately apparent to me is that garbage collection is much more difficult in the distributed setting. You can't just rewrite the network interface for PostgreSQL and get datomic, but you might be able to get single-server datomic.

I think you are seeing a simple design and thinking, "anyone could have thought that up", when actually it's not that easy. The design that you are looking at has obviously gone through extensive refinement.
According to PG's guidelines, the criteria roughly boils down to whether or not something gratifies your intellectual curiosity. Shall we flood HN with stories of corruption in the Congo, Thailand, Haiti, Russia, Egypt, and so on? Maybe HN should have a weekly feature of poverty-stricken AIDS victims in various countries in Africa? Perhaps title this weekly feature "Poverty Perspectives Beyond the Cubicle"?

Stories like these, while tragic, are not new phenomena. Unless one is naive, one should already know that the world is full of corruption and that there isn't anything particularly novel about this brand of corruption. On the other hand, a story about cleverly planted subtle bugs in a high-frequency trading algorithm would make for a great HN story involving corruption since the details would be intellectually gratifying. But plain old selling of supplies meant for the poor? That's been going on forever. How is your intellect gratified by hearing about yet one more case?
There is plenty wrong with prostitution.

It is wrong to take advantage of a woman. Women become prostitutes because they have no other reasonable way of making money; or they need quick money for drugs/rent/baby food/etc.

I may not be a religious person (since I became an adult) but I hold the belief that sex should be sacred. It should be kept between 2 people who want to connect with each other. We have sex with each other for intimacy, not just for a short burst of ecstasy. If that was the only reason we had sex with each other we'd be no better than dogs.
Totally agree! Wasted time. Everybody know these commands.
update: I think the most striking thing about watching that pinch to zoom thing is that he's doing it idly while thinking/talking about something else - it's no big deal for him. I suspect that he's been using gestures like it for quite a while at that point.
I disagree. They may not be obviously related to coding, though they'll probably end up being useful at some point anyway... But they're definitely useful for working with logs, working with datasets, working with config files, and a host of other development-related tasks. Just yesterday I was on a Windows machine and dearly felt the loss of sed and uniq. I have a task lined up for today to either find Windows alternatives or install msys.
That sounds great in theory, but it will take decades to make significant improvements in agricultural productivity (mostly for political reasons) and preventing mass starvation in the mean time is also important.
I find it a shame he's associating various, really clever artistic stlyes, techniques amd works with particular chemicals he's ingested/consumed.

It cheapens his art and is making false equivalences.
Most of banks use linux boxes for downstream systems (reporting and so on) but a mainframe is the centrepiece of it all, executing end of day batch jobs (this can be anything from the feeds to the clearing house, or end of day reconciliation) and processing trades.

You will be surprised, but it is due to the fact that banks were some of the first people to start using computing decades ago, and some of the programs I have seen in use at banks were older than me. Moving everything to a Intel based platform removes that backwards compatability, but z/OS is made with this in mind.
ABC wouldn't be able to do this if they were not a public broadcaster. Advertisers would be furious.
Ask HN: Review my startup - chartburst.com
The headline of this submission makes no sense whatsoever. "Muve Music, for Mobile Users, Thrives in Shadow of Competitors" would be much better.
>>In this article, for instance, only the poorest of the poor are truly starving and the vast majority just doesn't care enough to protest. While the middle classes are too busy with their own lives, the poorest and most disadvantaged people are too busy trying to eke out a basic living to actually protest about it.

Oh, common please stop this.

If the poor worried about themselves, they will no longer be poor. Expecting other protest for you, earn for you, farm for you is a thing of the communist past.

Nobody is going to come and do it for them.
Show HN: My new startup Connectedtrips - trips that are GOOD for you
The trend at the moment is having java based web applications that interface with a mainframe. So we have a web front end that interfaces with a mainframe that processes/stores the data.

Most companies are trying to stop using the mainframe so much, it is laughable though because they are moving from mainframe based solutions, to mainframe based solutions.
Is this still true on modern browsers with optimising js engines? And if so, why?
Cloud Apps Integration Tool is looking for Beta Testers
I agree with you on this.

But the point is this hunger stories reappear after the aid exhausts out. Which means people are not put to work to afford it.
Glad to see this stripped right back down again to a useful state, it started to get very verbose & noisey
something similar already there :-
http://www.grooveshark.com/artists
I was looking for lightweight web frameworks/toolkits in Go the other day, and as a newcomer I didn't really know where to start. From cursory Googling, Gorilla seemed like a nice web toolkit and gorp a good 'O'RM.

Does anyone have experience with Gorilla or gorp? Any other recommendations?
Ask HN: How did you learn Scala? And are you finding it useful?
I am taking a break from reading "Programming in Scala" http://www.artima.com/shop/programming_in_scala_2ed Man, that's a huge book, and scala is one kitchen-sink of a language. I would wager it's bigger than C++(quite a feat), but smaller than Racket(not racket core but the myriad of language modes which Racket has).

So, far I didn't have a a-ha moment. May be that's because I already knew C++(haven't programmed in C++ for some time but used to), Java(used to do heavy Java), F#(have a beginner level grasp), and Scala seems to mix and mash ideas from these 3.

So my questions is:

1. How did you learn Scala? Book? Which book? Please don't point out that I need to do a project(many projects actually) to grasp any language. I am asking about the groundwork needed for tackling a project.

2. Did you have an "a-ha" moment while learning Scala? If yes, what was it? If no, did it not meet your expectations, or you were expecting no "a-ha" moments all along?

3. Are you using it? For what? Compared to your earlier choices, how is it faring?

4. How about tooling? I am using vim for now. I tried searching for an omnicomplete plugin, found a couple of links which required some housekeeping to get it running. Dropped them for now.
Go has a pretty mature http library. Since it is also aimed at the appengine I say the web is its natural domain.

A good templating system is the go mustache port: mustache.go
"... Aldrin’s pulse-rate at blast-off was only 110 ..."

Excellent read. John Young had pulse-rate measurement of 70 (probably 16 as told by Al Bean) which meant everything was going OK during launch. cf "In the Shadow of the Moon" ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Shadow_of_the_Moon#Apol...
>. 2) Someone is eating that food (let's assume nothing gets thrown out/rots because of corruption: someone who steals food eventually sells it and it gets eaten, not trashed)

That is a simplification. It is both being stolen and it is rotting.

Even the article states that there is tons of food that is rotting/wasting away. If it doesn't mention it, I can give examples of food stock being wasted from as long back as, I think 1970-1980.

Also - Corruption DOES shift the supply curve so "corruption does not change supply and demand" is only true in the land of platonic ideals.
How the heck do you measure who is "more innovative". Are there varying degrees of innovation? Who decides which one is more innovative? It's a completely subjective characteristic...
I came across something in fortune some time ago which you can find at:

http://motd.ambians.com/quotes.php/name/linux_songs_poems/to...

I have found it to be surprisingly useful. Nobody uses all the commands but remembering that something like zcat exists can be extremely useful. Also remembering to pipe through sort before sending through uniq is helpful as well.
My Consulting Wisdom and Platitudes - for Freelancers and Consultants
There are always two way to solve the problem. In this case politician can solve this problem by implementation and execution of plan for increasing the productivity and increasing the jobs. Second plan is to feed them with free food. Second one is easy and give them quick votes, though its dangerous for poor people as well as country.
That's absurd -- many politicians are attorneys, and are ethically obligated to protect the identities of their clients.

I have worked for a government entity in a policy making role, and one of my obligations was to annually file a detail of my investments, business dealings and other things in a manner that balances the public's need to be assured of my integrity with my need for privacy in my affairs.

Disclosure of medical data is an even more egregious ethical and privacy violation. Why should I as a political figure need to publicly disclose my use of narcotics to manage pain from a chronic medical condition? Why should I need disclose the use of drugs that imply a potentially embarrassing medical condition?

Medical diagnoses affect people's view of people. I don't want otherwise good people excluded from public service because they are HIV positive.
One guideline to keep in mind:

> If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous
> adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate
> "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys."
> Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."
how do I execute the out put of something like this:

grep -i 'pattern' file | awk '{print $5}' | sed 's/^/cmd/g'

I end up sending to a file, chmod, then run it at the shell.
Terry Crews makes music for Old Spice. (Amazing ad.)
The idea looks pretty good, and it's OK if someone hacks it for themselves, but the implementation is lame, in my opinion. I understand that I can be a bit off-topic or ranting worthlessly on a simple hack that was intended to be just that, a simple hack.

It looks like people forgot how to develop simple protocols for this sort of thing. A simple protocol for remote named pipes, a client and a server, and a wrapper/gateway for dotCloud/HTTP wouldn't take a (very) long time to develop, wouldn't be completely dependent on an external service, and would probably develop into something bigger --- even for anonymous file sharing!

I really would like to know why programmers, in general, seem not to be doing this sort of thing anymore. Sorry if it looks like some sort of misplaced criticism, I'm posing all of it genuinely as a question to the community.
Agreed,

That is why probably most people on this thread are discussing agricultural methods, distribution and issues related economy.

Besides you always have a right to flag this.
Thanks for the reply huntesh! Grooveshark aren't involved with big record labels. We can get unsigned artists music heard by THE biggest labels ;)
You should really try ack (http://betterthangrep.com) as a replacement for grep.
People buying stock
Most articles on HN are about technical subjects so I don't see why you complain about some discussions which are on others topics. If there are news on India corruption on HN, it's because there is a lot of hackers interested in it. If you're not, just ignore these articles.
Cool idea, because it kinda circumvents the usual "solicitation" pain in the ass process before someone's material ever gets to the hands of an A&R.
Exactly Saiana! The big record labels don't accept unsolicited material which leaves unsigned musicians totally stuck! Our process vets the poor quality material but gives the talented people a chance to be heard. Glad you 'get it'!
Liftport Is Kickstarting A Space Elevator - For The Moon
of course, jobs are needed. #1 is food tho- if you are starving then you are unhealthy and not able to take care of yourself . some people are born into poverty and need more of a leg up in the beginning because if they make any mistakes they die. if we make mistakes, we have many legs to stand on, because we are very very privileged. have you ever given to charity or given anything away for free? or have you ever been given something for free?
Experts say latest Java software opens PCs to hackers
Not sure what you're getting at but as I mentioned there are way too few people in the weakest sections that they would be able to garner any political muscle.

Also, your whole idea that only the affected should protest in a society is grossly simplistic and if I might say then naive. A society exists to protect all its members including the weaker sections. This has nothing to do with communism.

Social evils are fought by the society as a whole. Should men not fight for women rights, should straight people not stand up for LGBT rights, what about priveliged races against racism?

I think you need to think your argument through without getting needlessly worked up.

I'm invoking Godwin here but this quote is thoroughly apt.

When the Nazis came for the communists, I said nothing; I was, of course, no communist.
When they locked up the Social Democrats, I said nothing; I was, of course, no Social Democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists, I said nothing; I was, of course, no trade unionist.
When they came for me, there was no one left who could protest.
I think his point is stealing food redirects it those who need it and can afford it.

So the problem shifts from corruption to affordability. The free food program exists because they can't afford it. If we can fix the affordability problem, there won't be a need for a free food program and there by corruption related to it won't exist.

These people need to get jobs. But since they don't have it. You may by all means fix corruption and give them free food, but they will hungry again in the next six months. Where will you get free food from, then and till when?
What does Google Analytics have to do with html5?
Customer Support the Stripe way but without Managing Mailing Lists or Filters
McKinsey has a basic problem solving test as a screen before the structured interviews. I found it very easy, but it screens out a surprisingly high number of people.

I know that several other strategy consulting companies do use intelligence screen based on progressive matrix tests as part of their interview process, but my only experience there is European (but with American companies) and I don't know if they use it in the US as well.
Can you recommend a Rob Pike lecture? :)
Lulzsec Hacker Arrested in the US
Ok first I tend to agree on the general remark : I have been in software development for a long time and a lot of recent solutions look totally overkill / overengineered for me.

But here, it makes the thing really easy, it autodeploys, the underpinning technology (0mq) makes the socket rendez-vous easy. For a first proof of concept I just love the usability !

Now yeah you can do it by installing a proxy on one of your servers ... ha but first you need a public server on the internet, tweak the services, expose it a little bit more to hacks etc etc ...
Kim Dotcom: More assets freed-up
This is why I'm glad of the ABC. Advertisers can go to hell!
Nice rant, but All 4 of your examples are supercomputers, not mainframes. A supercomputer is optimized for absolute performance. A mainframe is optimized for reliability and guaranteed performance. With a supercomputer if you get a soft error on a block, you retry the block. On a mainframe, it's too late.
Why doesn't he just rent the Aston with his own money that he earned as an iOS dev for flipboard? Does he really need the attention?
There's a difference between gossip and a reference check.