skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
...with a patent application granted after a year-long review by the patent office that apparently didn’t include watching this scene from 2002’s Minority Report, where Tom Cruise does all of those things and more with a spiffy 3D interface.

This is silly, as is the Gates analogy. I assure you, if anyone manages to develop a practical holodeck, they will be able to patent the hell out of it. Star Trek is not prior art.

Practical is the key word. Lots of ideas sound great but are difficult or impossible to implement. Patents protect the implementation, not the idea.
Interesting. I feel like secure parallel computing / Garbled Circuits would provide an possible solution for maintaining anonymity while allowing you to send back important notices to the source.
Water Illumination - Graphics on the sea
In wake of Apple ruling, Samsung's internal 'firewall' protects key partnership
The C Programming Language - Part 6 - Pointers Again
Machine Learning Throwdown, Part 4 - Predictions
> Nintendo lost almost a billion dollars last year.

Its first loss since inception in 1889. Not bad for a company that didn't have any successful consoles.

> Kinect Adventures was a pack-in game, so that doesn't really count.

It does count. For 2 reasons: 1) you got Kinect Adventures because you bought Kinect - which is more money than any single game, and 2) if you decided to buy the Xbox with Kinect, you paid more – and seemed to be okay with it. Not exactly a complete failure.

> In fact, only 2 Kinect titles have even managed to break an 80 on Metacritic, both music games.

You're getting outside of the original point – Kinect is a great, inexpensive technology that is being used in all kinds of applications (i.e. interactive displays, teaching, robotics, etc.).
I realize the point, I think it's the wrong way to lose weight (and I say this as someone who lost considerable weight and has kept it off for more than ten years).

Counting calories temporarily tells someone how much he is overeating, but the problem is the amount he eats is an ingrained habit. Habits die hard, eating less for a couple months doesn't change anything for most people. There is a lot of evidence that most people who diet put the weight back on because they took temporary measures to lose weight instead of making deep lifestyle changes. [Anecdotal evidence alert]: making deep lifestyle changes was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do, and I believe counting calories would have distracted me from that goal.
I'll be at least 2nd place!
Statsd and carbon security - when DRY gets it wrong | Gingerlime
I can't wait until the term "growth hacker" goes out of style.

HN is so averse to anything related to marketing, conversion optimization, or anything else similar to such practices that a whole new title has emerged simply so no one has to grimace when saying they need to hire a "marketer".

Call a spade a spade: growth hacker == marketer. Yes, they use data to lead their decision making process and are more empirical than traditional mad men style marketers, but that by no means warrants a whole new job title.

Growth hackers are just good marketers using the data and tools available to them.
I agree. On the surface of things i'm completely put off, but i haven't completely lost faith in these guys. I think they should make the alternative way of signing up ("The e-mail way," as they have it on the front page) an equally sized link as the Facebook option.

On the surface of things, the Diaspora team is crossing a line by sending e-mails about Makr.io to the people who were interested in Diaspora. I look at it as the two not being related at all, regardless of the reason they gave in the e-mail announcing makr to the people who expressed an interest in Diaspora -

"Existing social networks do not encourage their users to feel like they have the power to MAKE things on the internet. Rather they are just “capturing” the ephemeral social actions that define social networks today. With Makr, we are making creativity accessible to everyone, in the hopes it enables people to realize that what you post and create online is worth owning."

For me time will tell if this is genuine, or just the Diaspora team using their already existing mailing list to "capitalize" on an already established audience.
Delta Customer Service Made My Mother Miss Her Brother's Funeral
"There aren't very many people buying any of these cars" - I can't tell if you mean teslas, or electric cars in general.

If you mean Teslas - an article in june said there are 10k reserved, which means the waiting list is a year long.

If you mean electric cars in general - I would urge you not to compare the leaf or volt to a tesla model S. The former was sold to cost conscious people who ultimately and correctly saw false economy, limitations and questionable design. The tesla can be sold to anyone who would buy a new BMW/Audi/Mercedes and wants to look earth conscious, tech savy, or hip.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. The challenge is that people who often invest (either as Angels or VCs or even large charity donations) learn through experience that the team that is going to execute the plan is the 'high order bit' or most important part of the equation. People who don't invest a lot, or are new at it, get caught up in the idea part of the pitch and imagine a world where that idea exists.

Inexperienced investors invest in the idea.

Experienced investors invest in the team.

The Kickstarter model opens up a source of funding for lots of new people, and it enables people who could not (or had not) previously invested in those people. That creates an environment which is exceptionally prone to failure. The education process will be a harsh. Because people rarely blame themselves for not thinking about the problem correctly they will start blaming Kickstarter, or the teams, and some of those people will do great harm to the system that is helping people do stuff they couldn't do before. That is why I think it is a weakness of the model, it doesn't surface the root causes of failure easily.
UI Automation Gotchas
Taubes isn't taken seriously by most dieticians and nutrition researchers we talk to (I work at a nutrition startup).

I'd say that if there is any value to Taubes, it is this:

Different foods, given the same calories, will fill you up or nourish you at varying degrees.

300 calories of oreo cookies isn't the same as eating a banana and some chicken.

The main practical benefit people get from low carb, paleo, etc is that they're eating less sugar and junk, and thus eating healthy food with better overall satiety. As a result, they lose weight because they're eating fewer calories.

You can lose weight eating twinkies, it's just hard to do because it's bad for your health, not nutritious, and leaves you feeling hungry because it's all carbs.

A more scientific and less paleo-obsessed way to think about carbohydrates is this:

Carbs are fuel, if you're an athlete, you have a use for them. If you live a sedentary lifestyle, excess fuel isn't going to do you any favors.

Adjust accordingly.

In the end: calories in, calories out. Humanity hasn't defeated the laws of thermodynamics. It's just a question of how easy and healthy it is to maintain a sub-maintenance caloric intake.

Edit:

Okay people, I just got done saying low carb made sense if you weren't an athlete, what exactly are you arguing against? I agree with you guys, I just think the reasoning and rationale should be taken in the context of current nutrition research and not some demagogue's book that is obsessed with a dietary aesthetic rather than data.
Looks pretty cool but shimming into gmail that way makes me super nervous.
It's crazy to me that 'counting calories' is something people routinely take for granted. It is a uniquely human trait. No other animal in this world has a need to do this. Humans up until a hundred years ago (or so) had no need to do it. What the hell has happened?

My opinion - food processing and the agricultural revolution. A metabolic derangement caused by overly processed agricultural products.
About.com was nuked out of google serps, because it has terrible usability statistics:

- high bounce rate
- 90%+ search engine traffic vs direct visits
(even though they buy traffic from other (cheap) sources)
- very low time spent on site
- very low returning visitors ratio

Their website design is quite pretty, yet the awful usability stats.

Website called as "content farm" and poor usability stats, coincidence or..?
haha, Thank you for doing it so. These days I have been going through the jobs section at HN, its kind of frustrating to see all the time some job openings with 'Growth Hacker' title listed for days.
But isn't it true every problem has in it the seeds of its own solution.
Hacker School agrees--we have two copies in our library :)
Black Eyed Peas' will.i.am to Debut New Song...From Mars
http://nutrivise.com
When QA will found bug in your program in testing or staging environment, they will send you your logs, which will be empty. They will not allow you to use testing or staging (or production :-) ) for development.
I don't get it. The OP pretends to like the app and is glad someone achieved to build one for iOS. But then, why suggest the author, chj did something potentially illegal or at least against the rules of the app store?
In Germany we say: "Don't wake up sleeping dogs."
>>Whether or not the raw numbers correspond 1:1 to actual calories doesn't really matter. What matters is that you adjust your caloric intake based on whether you are gaining or losing weight, and which direction you need to be moving in. Even though the relative amounts aren't necessarily exactly correct, it gives you a basis for adjustment.

But that's the point: you cannot make accurate adjustments unless you also keep track of the type of food you eat (cooked, processed, raw, etc.). Because you have no way of knowing whether you gained weight due to taking too many calories, or because the food you ate last week was processed and cooked.
Matt Cutts Meme Monday
Closure of Bitcoin Savings & Trust
Why Email is Still the Killer App
Actually, someone was saying that they saw a google bubble when they witnessed the self driving car in traffic. As the google car tried to keep a safe distance people kept cutting in that space and making the google car slow down even further to get the required space.
Sony shouldn't be handing power of attorney to robots just yet.
Ask HN:  Brainstorm buddies
Steve Blank says it's a good idea to find "Brainstorm buddies".

Who's interested in meeting up for a beer and having brainstorm sessions to help each other's businesses?
The patent system is supposed to encourage the commoditization of inventions by using a trade-off: if you invent something novel and useful, you can get a patent that gives you a complete monopoly for a limited amount of time, but in return you have to completely disclose how your invention was made, so that, first, others can see if the intention would be useful for them right now (and thus negotiate a license with you) and, second, once you're patent expires society can easily reach for and utilize your invention.

Unfortunately, that process has been turned on its head, so that patents are routinely granted for designs, devices, and methods that are already effectively commoditized or simply don't work patent protection. The iPhone's design is undeniably visually appealing and user-friendly, but it is by no means an "invention." It is a form of user interface, something that has already been held to not be patentable, and it is a form of branding, something that is protected, but through trademark law, not patent law.

I find this situation disturbing for the same reason I find it disturbing that pharmaceutical companies spend more on advertising than they do on research and the belt. Consumer electronics companies should not be investing the bulk of their resources playing legal games with one another over non-disruptive "inventions" like the idea to use asynchronous processing to make sure video and audio lines up. They should be using their resources making phones that are better and more alluring than one another.
Here's the core problem. At a fundamental level the thermodynamic argument with regard to body weight has to work, of course it does, there's no way to slip past the laws of physics. If you eat little enough and exercise enough you will lose weight, period, full stop.

But by the same token, it's a useless fact, utterly.

Look at the same argument as applied to finances. If you make more money than you spend you will build up savings until eventually you are rich.

The issue is that these are trivial facts. They don't tackle the core difficulties of the problem they are just bland tautologies. Ultimately long-term weight loss is a complex matter of psychology, motivation, habits, and indeed personal temperament and genetic baggage. For some folks it will come naturally and easily, for others it will always be an uphill climb, and for others it will be almost impossible. And the same thing is true with regards to being wealthy. Some folks quickly and intuitively acquire the skills to step into a business, tweak the knobs until its profitable and then start building up their personal finances from those profits until they have a desire to move on to something else where they do the same thing, continuing to get richer and richer over time. Whereas for others it can be much more of a struggle, or maybe even effectively impossible because they don't have the same opportunities.
>I haven't had patience to precisely track calories, but I find it enlightening to look at labels and compare

Yes, absolutely, everyone should do this (I certainly know how many calories are on the label of most things I eat). But you aren't counting calories.
Top Meta HN Posts
I would be surprised if he had time to read, watch movies or listen to music. It would not surprise me at all to learn that he essentially used iTunes only for QA.
Growth Hacker == A person who use's growth hacks to increase the distribution of their product or service.

http://www.quora.com/growth-hacks
Ah, I see some of these apps doc you points for deleting tasks. I'll look into that after all
That post was one of the things that inspired me to start tinkering with gdb. Very cool stuff.
I'd say portion control is a bigger problem than any of the things you just listed.

The amount of effort it takes your digestive system to process raw chicken vs. cooked chicken is obviously different, but the fact that they chose to focus on these issues doesn't make them more impactful than portion control.

I was thinking in terms of cooking at home versus going to eat at a restaurant. Restaurants are far more egregious in terms of being calorific as well as highly variable and prepackaged food usually isn't that good for you.
Sony XPERIA S tablet launching with boatload of accessories
> No other animal in this world has a need to do this.

Have you never seen an obese dog or cat? Feeding to much of the wrong food will make any animal fat.
I didn't mean to imply any hate towards reddit in my original post. While the quality of some parts is questionable, reddit is undoubtedly a hub filled with great content and knowledgeable people. Amazingly interesting and insightful posts await those who are willing to dig for it. My reddit addition is just as strong as anyone's.
While not ideal, they could register a new Twitter app for the released, for sale version of Tweetbot. Everyone would have to reconnect to that app (just as they originally had to do on the beta), but it should get around the issue as the new app would have zero used tokens.
But not nearly as silly as the patents themselves...
" Many people think that it is a good model and make money through it sure, but I believe commercial software makes more money and that money is easier made..."

Making money out of it is irrelevant.

Whether or not you can copy a file is a moral question, and this has a higher priority than how to make a business model out of it.

You can't argue about if something is good by checking if you can easily build a business around it.

I will take an extreme example here (just so we get out of the copyright environment):
What if I want to make money by kidnapping children? I believe I could make a descent living out of it (especially if I have some kind of law on my side). However this 'business' aspect is never considered, because it doesn't pass the morality check, and thus is irrelevant.

I know it's an extreme example, but this shows there's a hierarchy when we need to determine if something is acceptable. Making money ISN'T among the firsts.

I'm not saying you can't make money without copyrights, but it simply can't be an argument.
I think you're oversimplifying the kind of developers out there. Have you honestly never seen an open-source project with a Paypal Donate button, or some form of the old "Buy me a beer" solicitation in a README?
You own the right to watch that film in the privacy of your own home.
>>Taubes isn't taken seriously by most dieticians and nutrition researchers we talk to (I work at a nutrition startup).

That's because most dietitians and nutrition researchers follow conventional wisdom, which was established back in the 50s and 60s. Taubes himself included an amazing commentary on how conventional wisdom is incredibly difficult to dislodge in medicine and related fields. He had no illusions about his book being enough to do it, especially since he's a science writer rather than a scientist.

But his work is very valuable, and his dissection of why we believe what we believe is spot on. He goes a little overboard in blaming carbs, but does an excellent job vindicating fats.
Love Tweetbot, but why can't they just register a separate application token/secret for the alpha and change it when it goes gold?

Just because it wouldn't generate any media attention or am I missing something?
Totally new field for me, very interesting thoughts :)
Show HN: local_bin: your custom binaries scoped by current working directory
Sure, I've seen an obese dog or cat, and I've also seen what these animals are fed.

I guess my point was not clear enough.

Feeding any animal an improper diet can lead to a metabolic problem where satiety and fat deposition do not work as intended.

Animals in the wild eating their natural diet do not have a need to limit their consumption. They self regulate effectively.
What about Occam's Razor?

> "Humans up until a hundred years ago (or so) had a need to do it."

Actually, the aristocracy and nobility have all suffered from obesity since ancient times. Historical texts have many, many records of... robustly sized... monarchs, nobles, and the rich. Indeed, the image of the rich fat-cat is a lot older than merely the last century.

> "My opinion - food processing and the agricultural revolution. A metabolic derangement caused by overly processed agricultural products."

Or perhaps more simply, the majority of the population stopped doing hard physical labor day in day out. We started sitting behind desks for 8 hours a day instead of toiling in a field or factory for 12.

I'm also willing to believe that we are simply eating more than we used to. In industrialized nations the ratio of food cost to income is almost laughably low - compared to agrarian nations where the cost of food can sometimes be up to half of a family's income. If you look at countries with smaller average serving sizes you will see a corresponding drop in obesity rates.

Thankfully I think the country is starting to come around to the notion that no amount of sodium reduction, fat-reduction, or carb-reduction will work if you continue to shovel it into your mouth by the gobful.

It's become vogue to blame every ill of society on industrialization, when instead the answer seems to be simpler and more obvious.
Irrelevant. The point is that if your destination is less than 250 miles away, then it doesn't matter whether the car charges in 5 minutes or 50.
Thanks - I wasn't sure if it was per week or month. Per year sounds weird unless it's a 3rd world country.
Please keep in mind the difference between the title of a patent, and the claims of a patent. The title is inconsequential (and in fact, there's some incentive to make it as unhelpful as possible). The claims are the important part of a patent.
The commands you want are "stepi" (single-step one instruction), "disass" (disassemble at the current point in the program), and "info registers" (show you what's in all of the registers). These work equally well for hand-written assembly and for any arbitrary compiled program.
Great tip. Thanks.
How Can You Make Money with Pinterest | Daily Morning Coffee
"One way to look at innovation and progress is that all inventions must eventually become a commodity"

Yeah. They do. Patented inventions become a commodity in 14-20 years, depending on the kind of patent.

"Here we see Apple (and to a lesser extent, MS, RIM and other parties) actively fighting this process."

Call me crazy, but I think we're seeing Apple using the process to defend their inventions, which is exactly what the system was set up to do.

Patents aren't intended to ensure that consumers have rock-bottom prices on the latest consumer gadgets; they're intended to provide inventors with incentives to produce non-trivial inventions, by granting them temporary monopolies on their ideas. To argue that Apple (and Microsoft, et al.) are wrong because they're artificially inflating prices on their patented products is to miss the entire point of the debate.
I'm with you--got a BS in EE&CS, and an MS in Software Engineering, but I can't really honestly say I'm an engineer, electrical, software, or otherwise, nor a computer scientist. Maybe a computer scientician... And while I did very well in my studies (many, many years ago) and am pretty highly compensated for my work with computers, I needed the explanation too.
In the end: calories in, calories out. Humanity hasn't defeated the laws of thermodynamics.

I think is a simplistic and problematic view of it. We are complicated machines. We can't process all types of input efficiently and without side effects. Any type of machine works differently depending on the source of energy. I can't put diesel fuel in my car and expect it to run the same way that it does on gas. Diesel fuel has energy just like gas but there is more to it than that.
> Here's the core problem. At a fundamental level the thermodynamic argument with regard to body weight has to work, of course it does, there's no way to slip past the laws of physics. If you eat little enough and exercise enough you will lose weight, period, full stop.

This is just not true. Our bodies follow the laws of thermodynamics, but the laws of thermodynamics do not dictate how or whether we process calories. We can poop out fat. If you drink a bottle of olive oil, you will probably not digest it all. If you eat fiber, you won't process those calories. Our bodies are not bunsen burners.
How hard do you think it is to implement scrolling, the rubber band effect, and pinch-to-zoom on a display screen?

Answer: not hard at all. In fact, it has been trivial for years. The hard part is implementing it in a cost-effective, reliable manner — something that Apple did with industry-leading industrial design/manufacturing efforts, not through patented technologies. But that's not what this case was about.

If this case involved Samsung bribing Apple employees to reveal the secrets at the Foxconn plants in China, then I would completely agree with you that that is wrong and that Samsung has broken the law by stealing a competitive technology. But that's not what's happening here; ironically, Apple is deriving part of its competitive advantage from using Samsung!

What's happening here is that Apple is suing Samsung over silly, trivial, and peripheral issues that played a modest (if any) role in the iPhone's success, silly, trivial, and peripheral matters that, unfortunately, have been granted the strongest property right in American law, which is a monopoly of their direct or indirect use by anybody.
The Epic 4G Touch infringed D677 not the Epic 4G. And that makes a difference