skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The market was waiting for capacitive touchscreens to become viable. You can't use multitouch properly on resistive screens (or non-touchscreen devices). Apple pounced as soon as capacitive screens became viable - albeit extremely expensive at the time. The first iPhone was "ahead of its time" in the sense that the market wasn't really ready for it. The first iPhone was an expensive PoS - it wasn't until the app store came along and the price came down that it turned into a good phone.

No-one really thought to patent the obvious design decisions that would come with the viability of a large capacitive touchscreen - rectangular, large screen, few physical buttons, multitouch gestures such as pinch to zoom (that already existed elsewhere).

Apple are absolute masters at combining existing technology into an attractive package. They also have excellent timing at bringing products to market (just before the market is ready for them - see original iPod, iPhone, iPad, Macbook Air).

But to say that these "innovations" wouldn't have happened anyway is disingenuous - no competent observer seriously believes that the market would not have moved on to large capacitive touchscreen devices over the last 5 years.

Apple deserve plenty of credit for their OS animations, smoothness of UI and (either praise or damnation depending on your point of view) the curated app store. They don't deserve credit for "inventing the capacitive touchscreen phone".
>> Why does Apple deserve protection from being copied when it could easily be argued that they copied or took a lot of inspiration from what came before them?

I don't know if they deserve protection, but the IP laws entitle them to it.

Don't get me wrong, I don't like the lawsuit or the outcome, but bashing Apple for using existing law in a place like HN is misplaced energy.

If we're really outraged about the outcome, we should be hitting the social media channels in large numbers and trying to influence the politicians SOPA-style to get them to change the laws.
Maybe they read this:

"Things You Should Never Do, Part I"

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
You're off by 3 orders of magnitude. 5269 barrels a day did sound too little to me. In the link you cited the quantity is given in thousands of barrels. The daily use is 5269000 barrels a day.
so if ideal geography and location increases price of land thus increasing cost of living in an area...then is it possible to disrupt this scarcity of space problem?
Joel, this is getting annoying as hell. Again, an authoritve advice on a subject you clearly have very little experience with. I don't appreciate your self-promtion tactics and I find them disingenuous at best and damaging at worst.
If you say that, people will hate you. (and all that goes with it)

But, I think it's a range of epigenetic factors that trigger an auto-immune response to have autism expressed according to some genetic program. Vaccines with their adjuvants are but one trigger - and it should be patently obvious that this might well be the case from the article.
I don't know... It has no tests, no generators, no ports. Not that realiable to me. :)
"illegitimate patents": perhaps, but like others have pointed out, it sounds like your beef shouldn't be with Apple, but with patent system. If Apple has illegitimate patents, I suspect some of the 24,000 patents Google acquired from Motorola Mobility are as well.
That was a really weak line to open with. I actually groaned and closed the tab as soon as I read it.
ANYWAY, Lol at that... made me chuckle.
That's probably a good idea, to just report them. The ones that have more than one tweet still seem very much like bots, but the ones that just have my tweets are just bizarre. They don't even follow people, so what's their purpose? I would have thought the purpose of bots on twitter was either to boost follower counts or retweet counts, but these seem to do neither. Unless they're just spamming people with private messages or something
To be completely honest, I'm not really sure the courts finding Apple's patents non-obvious makes them any less illegitimate in some cases...

Some of them, sure, are legitimate; but not all of them. :-/
Thank you for being the only one to understand my point (which you pointed out in your second paragraph) and not just knee-jerk down voting. My account was automatically censored by the HN algorithm for exploring a controversial viewpoint.

As for the bio-marker there are a number of things that could be looked at: flue/bascterial infection during pregnancy, age of father, anti bodies in mother, rheumatoid arthritis genetic markers in mother, asthma markers.

I have to disagree that it is a narrow possibility. So much of the future of a child is determined during the formative years. Intentionally aggravating an at-risk child's immune system over and over again is something that needs to be very closely researched. To not do so at this point given all that we know seems very unethical.
PDAs were not cellular devices. Cell phones were not PDAs. The iPhone was the first to converge them.
The funny thing about that switch is that in 2007, I thought it was the best invention in the world.

It was a pain muting my Windows phones because you had to fiddle around with the UI to change the profile to silence the ringer.
Why four, or three. Why not one or five... what a silly question/statement. It's completely subjective and as far as "a matter of readability" it's far far from the worst offense.
Just to drive the point home: a device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious - at least to the millions and millions of happy PDA users.

Yet somehow they look so different you could never confuse them for an iPhone while Samsung also agrees it's obvious but many of their devices look very much like an iPhone. I think the author is unintentionally proving Apple's point.
I agree with the eropple. Linkedin is part of the problem. Everyday I get bullshit job emails from Linkedin that have nothing to do with my focus and endless communication from recruiters. It's funny, i quit my job and started a company and yet I still get those communications.

And the media folks who keep writing about linkedin disrupting recruiting have no idea about recruiting in the first place. However, Linkedin can be a great tool for headhunting C-level executives, which is where I think there main focus is with the expensive Linkedin Recruiting Solutions service.
At the time the iphone was released I had one of the early HTC touch screen + slide out keyboard phones (Tytn or something like that). I recall laughing about the first iphones. Terrible e-mail support, no MMS, my year old phone had twice the capabilities. I couldn't understand why anyone would want such an expensive phone that was so functionally handicapped. What I didn't understand at the time was that the phone was never targeted at me, it was targeted at the general consumers who didn't care that it couldn't handle 5 e-mail accounts, VPN, etc, etc.

The iphone wasn't so much a matter of technological inovation as it was one of market building. Apple lept ahead of the incumbents by realizing that a 'smartphone' could be a device every consumer wanted, rather than something that 'business folks' used. It wasn't so much that the incumbents couldn't have thought up something very similar, it was that they were caught up dealing with their current target markets: business people whom needed a blackberry or Wmobile phone with exchange support, whom didn't want change, they wanted a device that did its job and didn't require them to think about it. Its very difficult for a company to have the foresight to produce a product that they know their current customers will hate.

This is classic incumbents vs newcomers leap frogging, if you haven't read "The Innovator's Dilemma" its worth checking out as it speaks directly to this pattern of development.
The Power of Passion When Starting Your Company
yeah but they could rewrite std::stack... um, without templates.
Are there people so blessed to have unsolicited recruiting emails on behalf of triple A engineer employers like MS? What I would give for that.
Well maybe. We won't and cannot know, because Linus will never be programming websites for a bank or writing games for Windows.

My feeble point is that the kernel (and git) are computer programs for computer people doing computer stuff.

Subsurface I'll give you. Mostly.
I also would like to add that when I was looking for jobs 2 years ago, i too dealt with a lot of recruiters but a majority of them didn't know shit about the positions they were getting in touch with me about.

Recruiting wouldn't have a bad name if the Recruiters actually KNEW what their client company did and what the job was all about, then you wouldn't have people asking you the difference between HTML and HTML5!
Apple did a really good job making Samsung's prior art claims look like straw grasping. Samsung screwed up the time-line on the Diamond Touch device which of course did not use a multi-touch display anyway. They claimed prior art on a bounce-back feature that worked in the exact opposite way as Apple's patent. Something like you open Safari and it starts bouncing because you are not scrolling. I don't think the jury was impressed and apparently this was the best Samsung had to offer.
Please repeat this quote whenever Google utilizes their 17,000 patents (plus 7000 pending) acquired from Motorola Mobility.

Oh wait ...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/9488453/Google-...
The first time I saw an iPhone, I thought to myself "oh, finally an Jornada that actually works". The number of buttons, layout of those buttons and placement of audio and charge jacks on the iPhone and the HP Jornada are nearly identical. The home button is in the same place. The volume buttons are on the top left side. It was a perfect match. That apple had a stack of jornadas stashed in the back that they were "improving" seemed so damn obvious, I thought that was the point of the whole iPhone schtick.
Funny, I never said they invented the capacitive touchscreen, but that's apple haters for you. What they did that no one else did before is to put the right gestures, the right UI, environment to make it work. I had a LG Prada, it had a capacitive touchscreen so I obviously know Apple didn't invent it.. except the LG Prada was also behaving the same as Windows XP on a tablet. You use widgets like scrollbars instead of gesture everywhere. That's no iPhone.

"The first iPhone was an expensive PoS" ? it was the first phone with a good web browser, that's already quite something in itself. I can't imagine browsing the web on a phone without double tap to fit a paragraph, pinch to zoom and a good engine like Webkit. That made it a feature phone, more than a smartphone, at the time, with the lack of things like installable software, but it was a damn good feature phone, and for those who use lot of webapps, it was probably better than most smartphones too.

For the record, I hate the app store. I hate not being able to install software outside of the curated app store. But I give credit where it's due, even if there are a lot of things I hate about Apple, they did make the one touch phone that was actually usable, as opposed to POS like LG Prada or Samsung Croix (pre-android touchscreens) interface.

It is really obvious looking at some of the ac adapters and dock connectors that Samsung intended to copy the whole appearance of the earlier iPhones to ride on Apple's coattails. Samsung tried to copy everything from the UI to the trade dress to patented technology. They behaved like shady Chinese companies making cheap knock offs.
You're off by a factor of 1000, I think. The chart has units in thousands. So it consumes more than 5,269,000 barrels per day -- yielding 29 PJ or 337 GW continuously.

Edit: Whoops. maxs has priority.
Agreed.

And taking down the addons without so much as leaving open the possibility of someone else continuing the work seems like a crappy move towards his own users.
Agreed. I read a lot of tutorials, docs, and other info about Backbone. Code school was the first to help me "get it." Soon after walking through the first two chapters, I went and read the infamous annotated todo and everything made sense. Highly recommended.
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"The autoimmune hypothesis is yet another autism hypothesis that is advanced primarily by parents, because it offers more hope than a neurological etiology."

I haven't done any research on this, but at the same time virtually every other chronic illness is caused, causes, and/or is exacerbated by chronic inflammation, so if inflammation during pregnancy doesn't have any effect on neurological development it would be extremely surprising.
Why does that warrant patent protection? The idea behind a patent is to protect innovation, however the innovative cost in that sense is negligible.
I understand where your coworkers are coming from. Getting the application up and running to prove the concepts the application intends to solve is critical in a business setting. If you can implement search by hitting every element in the array in a fraction of the time it would take to implement a binary search, you are that much further along to seeing the application in action.

If they actually refuse to go back and implement a better algorithm once the characteristics of the application are known, that is another matter. Do these people actually hold the same beliefs once they start to see the performance of their application rapidly degrade?
You can definitely patent the specific things that makes it better and perhaps even arrange a bunch of things that, by themselves, would not be patentable into the right order to make one bigger thing that is patentable.
Dotmac's problem is that it was an extension of the Apple platform, and not seriously optimized for when you are using a non-Apple machine.

Also, I'm talking about a freemium model. I wasn't aware dotmac had a free tier. I thought it was a premium product that's one of the things built into the large profit margins Apple takes on devices.
Quarks carry fractional charge (e/3) [1]. And Quasiquarks seem to be able to carry any fractional charge with an odd-denominator (e/3, e/5, e/7, ...) [2,3] which would seem to indicate that the universe has quantized space yet has no lower bounds.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark#Electric_charge

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_quantum_Hall_effect

3. http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/1997/oct/24/fractio...
Dynamic programming is an optimization technique using divide and conquer, whereas memoization is an added optimization in the dynamic programming paradigm. An optimization we do while calculating fibonacci sequence is memoization, to prevent from going down the tree to the leaf every time.
Interesting take on "mobile," which is a bit of a fuzzy term. So, I take it you don't consider the wifi-only iPad or the Nexus 7 to be mobile devices? I guess the concept of "mobile Web" has really made things murky.
> At 25 pretty much all your cells have died and been replaced many times, and if over evolutionary times we had lived to be 500 years on average, we'd have mechanisms to keep up healthy that long.

You're missing the point that some cells, essential to our survival, are never replaced, and when they decay, we die. One example is brain cells -- they're never replaced, and when they're done, so are we. This means that, unless we can get around apoptosis (programmed cell death), then we won't ever move beyond a certain age. We aren't close to understanding apoptosis.

> What is "good enough" for our genes isn't always good for us as people.

Ah, someone who thinks he can outwit nature. When we try to outwit nature, we end up outwitting ourselves.

> Most of what can be called "modern progress" is about protecting us from what would happen to us if nature was left to itself.

You mean, like antibiotics? The antibiotics that we have foolishly mismanaged to the extent that they simply don't work any more?

Contrary to your thesis, we need to figure out how to get along with nature, not pretend we can dominate nature. We've tried to run the show, and nature has responded by showing us how naive we are.

And this idea isn't some airy-fairy New Age philosophy, it's the result of careful scientific work. We're just getting started in figuring out how to get along with nature, and everything we've tried to date has backfired:

Medical and nutritional advances -> overpopulation

Antibiotics and other medical breakthroughs -> the gradual evolution of antibiotic-immune microbes.

Longevity extension -> overcrowding, a plague of chronic diseases in the elderly, deep philosophical questions about meaningless long lives.

> Curing the diseases of aging is just the continuation of that

Curing the "diseases of aging" is not your topic. Your topic is the disease of age. That's not the same thing at all.
That's a little more than "cursory" - I know I've never looked closely enough to read the nametag.
His link to contact Mozilla is an email to the AMO editors, who approve addons based on performance, security, etc. I'd guess they wouldn't approve his addons for some reason, and he thought their criticisms were unreasonable.
>As I do not wish to encourage anyone to use Mozilla's products at this time, I will not be hosting or providing these extensions to anyone.

He really does not want to promote Mozilla products. I think that really shows how much he despises Mozilla (currently).
That switch was on every single Treo device from the 270 onwards, and numerous feature phones had a hardware mute switch as well.
The features generator is a nice touch.
Love the logo and the name! At the windowsphone link, I think the first thing people should see is a brief paragraph about what the app does, rather than have bullet points first. (I don't use Twitter so can't speak to that.)
> we can't let that get in the way of the science that really is their child's best hope

If it's genetic, as you assert, then what hope is there?

I believe you're correct, but ...

> because parents prefer it, again because it offers more hope

This sort of thinking is popular because it offers hope and having that hope present offers a higher quality of life for the family.
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Was there something in the article that you feel is no longer relevant today? If not, who cares when it was posted?
Just last week I read that it could be caused by an older father: http://www.latimes.com/health/boostershots/la-heb-older-fath...
Rather, he thinks that it's time to bring a dead-simple routing algorithm to people who are not driving for fedex and ups.
His point is that he is not ashamed of taking an old, simple solution and scaling it up, and he claims that he'd like to see others do it too.
The bigger point is that it's almost all anecdotal - the number of people in this field is too broad and varied to be able to draw any substantial conclusions about anything, imo.
I would like to remind HN that autism being a syndrome, it is likely to be several distinct illnesses with different genetic and environmental factors.
I don't know where you're getting that idea from. There was definitely prior art presented during the trial at least on pinch to zoom, tap to zoom and the bounceback on scrolling.
Note: this is a comment by someone who does not even use a particular free thing about what that free thing's creator owes him, justified purely by that thing having once been available for free.

Have I mentioned "charge more" recently?
Thanks!

I think you're right, I wrote that first because I noticed that people didn't read the full description and they didn't knew what features the app had, but having a little introductory paragraph above that list makes much more sense :)
That's why Apple patented a lot of the small details that make the iPhone better, instead of just patenting quality.
I would have liked a compatibility chart between this and the other frameworks.
>> The iphone wasn't so much a matter of technological inovation as it was one of market building

I disagree. I think the iPhone was the first smartphone that worked. The killer app on the phone was that it was the first phone to have a modern mobile browser.

It was not a browser that "didn't suck", it was a damned good browser. I had an Eee at the time, and I would pick the tiny-by-comparison screen of the iPhone's browser over the Eee any day. Why? Because the smart tap-to-zoom really used the screen real estate effectively. On the Eee, I'd have to use both horizontal and vertical scrolling to read some content.

No mobile browser before the iPhone's version of Safari even came remotely close.
"Are you saying there is nothing to patent about the implementation of gestures on your touchscreen, as opposed to hitting widgets like scrollbar?"

Aren't touchscreen gestures just mouse gestures where a touchscreen replaces the mouse? That seems like an obvious amalgamation of two pieces of prior art.

EDIT: That doesn't mean that particular aspects of the implementation of touch gestures on iOS aren't patentable, but AFAIK that hasn't been what Apple has been suing on the basis of.
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> “One of the things that’s happened in the last 10 to 15 years is that power-scaling has stopped,” he says. Moore’s law — the maxim that processing power will double every 18 months or so — continues, but battery lives just haven’t kept up.

Has everyone just given up now on the original Moore's Law about transistor count, and just decided that the law is about computing power (per the David House quote)?
Translation:

I work for Joyent and think you are threatening us. You should not innovate, but use our stuff because we think its the best and don't think you can take any of our market share, but please don't try!
Fair point, and I agree, but complexity and creativity are orthogonal.

Managers clamp down on individual creativity and cleverness because they fear complexity, and rightly so, because 95% of software complexity serves no value, and only creates frustration and risk. Their risk-limiting optimization tends to suck all the fun and creativity out of the job, although that's not their intent.

Here's the problem: complexity emerges anyway (Greenspun's Tenth Rule). Force people to use Java instead of high-level languages and they'll invent AbstractFactory patterns and hideous, undocumented DSLs in the name of "object-oriented programming". The problem with software is the same problem that exists in legislation: laws are never unmade. The difference is that no one needs to know or care about horse-carriage requirements from 1730 in Philadelphia, but the legacy complexity in software lives on, making everything unreadable and messy.

Moreover, the end-result of all this unexpected complexity is that most software jobs become a legacy slog, which further reduces the room for creative expression.
Which graphical toolkit system and xml parsing library are you referring to?
I'm shocked to realize that I am apparently the only (or one of a select few) developers here that has an agent very similar to the ideal discussed.

He's a matchmaker that works at the C-level, placing interesting developers in qualified situations. In fact, the client isn't encouraged to pay their invoice for his one-off fee unless they are happy with me.

It's all relationship driven networking, no acronyms or resumes involved. And we both are very happy with how this works.

In closing, I assure you that having an agent is possible, you just have to have a personality to match your coding chops.
Yes, yes and YES. I think there's huge possibilities here, but the challenge isn't in designing or construction, but of re-education. Some people think owning a traditional home (and cars etc) will make them happy.

We know that's not the case. Materials possessions and keeping up with the neighbours does not make people happy. That reality needs to be more widely accepted for a true disruption in the housing market.

My .02.
The intro section of the TR35 answers exactly that question:

http://www.technologyreview.com/fromtheeditor/428873/35-inno...