skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We get anywhere from $50-250 per month from an iOS app called Basketball Shot Tracker HD (www.slyceapps.com/shottracker).

It tends to depend on how close it is to the basketball season. We found the in app purchase model to work really well for us.
It's been posted countless times but Ira Glass (radio personality and host of "This American Life") has very similar advice: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI23U7U2aUY
It's cool, but it's a pity that this thing is on Google Groups.
No. One can discover mathematics, but mathematics cannot be patented. One can discover an ancient civilization ... and so forth. There are many more examples, and they're not patentable.
I agree. They shafted us once already.
not a game, an app we made for ourselves. Our first one and we only work on this one now due to lack of time (takes a lot of time to maintain a 500k monthly users app :p)
"ok but nothing special"? You clearly didn't own a 1st gen iPhone...
It's oh so easy to say that now with the current market.
What are the 'original' libraries/components then?
I knew I was summoning up my taste-vs-talent terminology from something I'd read/heard but couldn't remember what. That's exactly what it was - thanks! :-)
> Windows isn't a closed hardware platform like OS X

I use Linux.
That’s a simple question for me. I think all patents should be abolished.
Come on. Shut up. I use Windows on a Dell laptop and I can tell you that's not true. (Pun intented)
what about the magic mouse? If you think making mice optical was innovative it'll be hard to say that wasn't....
I was making about $30/month from Amazon affiliate and Adsense on two different blogs. Once Panda hit, my Amazon affiliate blog died but the Adsense one (sports) does more like $150/month now
Yes. At least, a lot of people claim there is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_craftsmanship

I'm not particularly a fan of the "software craftsman" moniker/movement but I think there can be craft to it. Technologies come and go but programming language paradigms, core algorithms, and fundamental ways of working with code tend to remain similar across the decades.
~10 bucks a month. http://hipsterorhomeless.com :|
Why does this topic come up ever other day, and every time people go on tyraids about individual projects and developers being wrong or right, when the answer isn't complicated at all.

Windows is the default. Microsoft got in bed with hardware producers and computer retailors and got Windows on every product on every shelf. For 2 decades you went to buy a PC and you were buying a PC with Windows pre-installed. The extreme majority of PC users and buyers have no comprehension of how to build your own PC, what an OS is, or that they can even use alternative operating systems. At this point, Windows is the computer to a tremendous majority of desktop OS consumers.

OSX is prosperous because it is the Mac default in the same way Windows was prosperous because it was the everything default. The average consumer does not conceptualize or think about how the software is independent of the hardware, what they see and get is what they stick with 99% of the time. The other 1% is Linux / BSD / everything else.

The day of the Linux Desktop is the day a laptop running any flavor of a linux distro sits in Best Buy next to a Windows laptop and costs $50 less because it doesn't have the Windows license fees attached. Everything else is just window dressing of that issue, which is in plainest terms that Apple and Microsoft have a profit motive in getting their OS on your machine, and go out of their ways to see hardware with the OS preinstalled so Joe Shmoe uses it, whereas Linux distributions have no financial incentive or warchest of influence to push Linux as the default. And the default is what matters.
> Samsung expects you to do things at these events and you get your trip and stay for free in return, sometimes a little cash on top. Noone wants to use the word work, for all the red tape this would create...

Legal? - possibly. Ethical? - not to me. How is this not evasion of labor laws? That this is par-for-the-course is pretty dismaying.
"The unnamed-lover theory has been floated so often that defense lawyers have a derisive term for it: 'the unindicted co-­ejaculator.'"
sorry, i meant app in general. i just wasn't sure if you meant you made that developing for others or off something you made. that's awesome.
Or (shameless plug) use tokudb. We have many online schema change features that work within mysql. You can add and remove columns while the database is running, without resorting to complicated tricks with triggers. You just add the column, it completes immediately, and you start using it right away. The work of changing existing rows happens in the background, in a transactionally consistent manner, so you never see the old schema again. It's pretty sweet.
Not as well as apple does.
The beauty of golf is people spend a lot of money on it. I'd charge people a premium to use it. Couple recommendations: Lose the pop-up for Facebook sign-in. Optimize it for mobile (you're probably going to use this while you're in the cart). For marketing, try going directly to some clubs and getting in front of some of their members. Some exclusive clubs probably won't let you, but start small. Can't hurt.
$0, but hey I just launched. Asked again in a year.

(For those interested, it's a security plugin for Wordpress: http://www.panic-press.com)
Yup, miscommunication and possibly also cultural issues. A nice way of assembling an ad-hoc multi-lingual promotional team, though, if done properly.
neither is "inventing" or "innovating" or "manufacturing"

Your point?
I see a lot of people mentioning passive income; i'm not a native English speaker; is recurring the same as passive? If you make $xxxx every month with a job it's recurring right? But that doesn't count here?

As I see some 'used to' posts as well; I used to make quite a bit from blogging (especially reviews I did, but real ones, not paid ones), however Google Panda tanked that. Even though it was nice content. It made over $10k/month. Dropped to around $100 which is just enough to pay the server.
A lot of people have thought a lot of things had the potential to change computing in fundamental ways.
Trivial doesn't mean valueless. A "1 click buy" patent is trivial, but forcing everyone to "invent something else instead" (e.g. 2 clicks) is stupid. And what if 2-click is patented? Then the next guy to come along has to have a 3-click system, or some obfuscation that convinces a jury.

Pretty soon, consumers are confused, because every website they go to has a radically different user interface brought on by patents on ideas that should be basic commodities.

When we had the guild system, we also didn't have universal public education, and instantaneous near zero cost publication of ideas.

Plus, you analogy makes pinch-zoom patents look even worse. You can keep how it is implemented a complete trade secret, and from looking at it for a few seconds, I can produce an equivalent implementation.

Apple has already obfuscated their techniques anyway. Why not release iOS as open source then, if it's protected by patents? The reality is, these patents are read by no one except lawyers, and in many cases, they under specify the implementation by being very abstract.

I really don't see how anyone who writes software for a living can defend these things and defend the status quo of not even supporting reform. You are asserting that something like an XOR-cursor (another dumb patent) is equivalent to a manufacturing process deserving 20 year protection?
> rational company

If you're a tiny startup, your internal communication lines and org chart are small and simple enough that everybody is usually on the same page.

But if you're a huge company like Samsung, it's very easy to have situations where the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. That may well be what happened here.

Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
Thanks for posting this is amazing.

The cockpit view is very cool. Reminds me: You can climb Mt everest also now on Google Earth.

South Col etc. At 8000m, somewhat crazy but similar views =D
The iPaq was/is a fantastic device. You could attach peripherals. Try doing that with an iPad. I could put an entire OS on a CF Card and assuming I could boot from the card, the expanded functionality is limited only by the hardware specs. They are durable. I've seen consumer electronics businesses still using them to track inventory.

I wish HP would revive the iPaq.

My only imagined use for an iPad is as a portable display. I want the Retina quality, but I have a more powerful hardware to attach and I need a real keyboard. There's nothing the iPad can do that my open, unlocked hardware cannot do.

I believe it was even possible to attach a real keyboard to an iPaq. That's the kind of flexibility I want. I can get data into and out of the device in any number of ways, without hassle.
I speculate, but "mass hysteria" seems to fit. "These are gruesome crimes; I have nothing to hide; I want to help the police; this is something I can do".

There are a few crimes in the UK that get a lot of press coverage, and I can imagine people living locally feel influenced by that.

England (and Wales, I guess?) has a huge DNA database, something like 4.5 million samples. These are taken from a few volunteers; and from people arrested for crime. If those people are not charged, or if they are charged and acquitted, the DNA sample is still retained. A recent trial in EU meant that we had to put some limits in - we keep innocent people's DNA for 6 years now.

There is a weird disconnect between many English people and privacy intrusions from the state. Lots of people were fine with the idea of a national ID card, and only turned against it when details of cost came out.

Peer calls for voluntary DNA database:
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/hi/house_of_lords/newsid...)

Brief mention of volunteers:
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7532856.stm)
Why did they roll their own spinlock implementation in the first place? They could encapsulate the lock primitives provided by, and optimized for, each platform: CRITICAL_SECTIONs on Windows, futexes on Linux, and pthread_spin_locks elsewhere. iOS and OSX have some Mach-specific spinlocks (OSSpinLockLock?), but I don't have any experience using them.
It's a heck of a lot more than "fit and finish". This is just another way of dismissing what Apple does as frippery.

A Mont Blanc pen is prettier than a bic biro, but it doesn't really write any better. A fabulous meal is probably not as good for you as plate of boiled vegetables.
RMS picketed Rob Pike over Bell's patent aggression.
Alternatively, you can use a database such as PostgreSQL, which stores metadata about tables in other tables, allowing you to not only add a column without locking the table but do so as part of a transaction with other changes that can all be rolled back atomically on failure.

PostgreSQL also supports concurrent index creation, so if you realize later you need an index on your amazingly large table you can have it built in the background while you are still using the table. (Managing indexes were another locking issue mentioned in the article.)
That quote is just painful to read, littered with FUD and not a single bit of evidence to back it up.

You should worry about the database because it's probably your canonical storage of data, which for most of us is the most important part of our product/service/whatever. A good schema enforces consist data, invariants, and all sorts of other stuff that you don't want to be dealing with a manual (and buggy) basis.

Schema updates do not need to be slow. They might not always be as elegant as you hope but the big databases are improving on that front, and as tzs mentions - there are tricks that can be employed. With the latest and greatest PG, I believe we're even starting to get event triggers, so it may well be possible to do schema updates with replication. I also have a feeling the binary replication in PG 9 and up can even do it out of the box, with hot standby to still allow responses. I'm not entirely convinced replication is a backup solution, so maybe that was an operations antipattern. That's some baseless assertion from me though :)

If deployments are a pain, work to alleviate pain. They are pretty mechanical, even if involved, which lead very nicely to being automated.

Seriously, we're smart people, let's not throw at least 30 years of research out the window in favour of glorified entity-attribute-value schemas.
Why Isn't Labor Day Celebrated on May 1st in the United States?
Especially when they highlight on mouseover
> It does not take locks, other than for very briefly.

You are right. I think this is a misunderstanding in the original material: if one does not use a default expression (i.e. the default is NULL) then the implementation they are using -- Postgres -- will just twiddle the catalog information. My guess is that they did not know this detailed system artifact -- adding a column of NULL value to table of billions of records is for most purposes as fast as a table of nothing.

No need to do such a fancy switchover of tables, although one will still need to backfill a desired default, as you have indicated in step 3.
> No, the reason why Apple has eaten's everyone's lunch up till now is because they're interested in being profitable, not innovative. The GP is correct in stating that Apple isn't innovative

This is decidedly backwards. From the start, Apple's focus was creating great products (by their definition of great product), and only later did they learn how to maximize their profit from them. There's a pretty good and influential taxonomy of "value disciplines": product leadership, operational excellence, and customer intimacy. Historically, Apple was good at the first and not so great at the other two. Since Jobs' return, they've really ramped up on all three.

A classic way in which companies undermine themselves is by pursuing profit through cost-cutting rather than improving product/service quality. I don't have any hard data on this, but I suspect that's what happens to intiially innovative tech companies that have non-engineer/designer business types that take over.
pinch-and-zoom is a good idea. But it is just that: An idea.

Its invention cost no money and society as a whole is not served by granted exclusive monopoly over it to any entity.

The entire discussion is turning to be absurd. Is pinch-and-zoom (and friends) all that separates Apple from the competition?

In other industry manufacturers learn from each other (seatbelts, suspensions systems, transmissions, etc), but somehow when it comes to software and electronic devices we want to stop progress and grant monopolies to every oh-so-little idea.
I have a free website/webapp in the education space that does about $90k/m right now (2012-2013 school year) while school is in session, and grows about 2.5x each year. Revenue is 100% Adsense. I'm happy to answer any questions that don't give away what the site actually is.
Or PostgreSQL. I've been hearing good things about it lately.
My point is the differential in mental approach.

In a classical sense, science is an act of discovery, of learning and understanding that which already exists, that which is the fundamental nature of the universe. These are things done out of a quest for knowledge and understanding. The entire concept of a patent is foreign to such an approach.

Invention on the other hand is a concept rooted in taking a knowledge base and using it to create something new. Something that isn't just the fundamental nature of things but rather using such fundamental rules to create a novelty. The concept of a patent is founded on this ideal.

Ultimately what I'm saying is that science marching along just fine without patents is a poor comparison to use, it has a completely different basis than what patents were created to protect (theoretically, I think they are just a mess at this point).
The sure can, but that means they would be forced to share their "discovery". Discovery and Invention are two different domains when it comes to patent law.
Are you stating that native apps are always snappy/right? Because if you are, I have a list of App Store apps for you to look at.
Why? I find both perspectives very informative.

Please don't let your personal relationships spoil an informative (if sometimes heated) discussion. That kind of kills the "hacker" spirit.
I would say that closeness in time to commercialization is more important than bottlenecks per se: doing research that will enable great products in 20 years is rarely lucrative, because it's difficult to capture any of that future value (especially if it's further out than the length of patents, and often even if it's within that length).

So it's smarter (if you want to make a profit) to let someone else do that, e.g. someone who's paid as a researcher and isn't trying to turn a profit, and instead look for things that are 1-3 years out. You even see it within academia; applied math pays a lot more than pure math, for example, even though both are quite important to mathematical progress.
This catchy headline is essentially saying that company X is going to watch their growth and expenditure and maximise their profits in a manner which won't benefit consumers.

The headline is interesting because it's stating the obvious, standard business practice but possibly they have hit on the only way to glam up the incredibly boring story of 'product will be delayed by 12 months'.
> PostgreSQL also supports concurrent index creation

I use this all the time, and am flabbergasted how people can do without it. I feel like migration frameworks should make it the default with Postgres.

It's too bad it can't be mixed with transactional DDL, but because indexes are not logical changes, I don't really care as much, even if it is dissatisfying.

So, all in all, for those who want to take advantage of this feature in Postgres:

Stop doing this:

CREATE INDEX foo ...

Start doing this:

CREATE INDEX foo CONCURRENTLY ...

For the cost of one keyword, your index additions can be a non-event.
My intro to LESS - If you're not using it, you should be.
Hope most of you are using LESS or something similar (SASS). I've found it to be a dramatic boost in productivity.

Let me know what you think. Thanks.
That's a nice sentiment if you're making serious money or are otherwise well funded. Maybe their writers ought to take a vow of celibacy too, just in case.
Two previous submissions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4463519

(no comments)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4466528

(comments that the news story goes beyond the facts)
Judging the article: it lists no sources and has no quotations from anyone regarding the headline claim. Doesn't seem that The Sun has presented any evidence whatsoever to back it up.
Do you think the prosecution will stop arguing that people are guilty if they stop DNA testing?
Yes I would expect this too. OP should file a provisional U.S. patent application listing every clever derivation they can think of, tomorrow.
"passive" means "not active", as in "I didn't do anything." Here people are talking about projects that, after they are set up, continue to generate income with minimal continued work being put into it. This is in contrast to a product that you continue to invest work in maintaining, supporting or selling.
Gridset, 
Gridset, one of the best services from 2012. This is a review from my experience with it.
I'm really curios when it's going to be approved somewhere in Europe. That's going to be a big signal of moving towards a finished product.
> Knowledge of key manufacturing processes was a trade secret.

So, without patent protection, pinch-to-zoom would have been a secret and the rest of us would never have been able to figure it out? Or, without patent protection, no one would have put in the R&D effort to come up with pinch-to-zoom?

Obviously not.

The benefits that patents are supposed to provide to society just aren't benefits at all in this case. So, as a society, we ought to figure out a way to change the law so that it provides benefits where needed without doing more harm than good. It's clearly doing more harm than good in software right now.
Ugh, by this logic the first person to use drop-down menus should be the only person to use it (without licensing) for 20 years. Or a hover-event on a link. Or a hyperlink. Or real-time form validation. Or neverending scrolling instead of pagination. Or facebook style side menus on mobile devices.

Certainly there is UI innovation, and certainly it can move mountains-- I think arguing that fact is a straw man-- no one is saying that you can't be innovative with UI. We're just saying that most/all of it isn't worthy of patent protection.
Larry has always wanted to have Bill's place in the world. He's a far worse monopolist than Bill ever was.
I do not lose money. My Outlay are low and will stay as my host bandwidth is unlimited.
Nopes. I'd just like to work together on JS projects. My experience is that pairing with someone is an excellent way to both keep you on task and make the experience fun.
I completely disagree within the confines of developers. I'm not really sure what the comments about consumers have to do with this topic.

I used linux for 5 years as a desktop OS, skipped in between windows occasionally. Just recently switched to a mac. It has nothing to do with being hip. OS X is an OS which runs all the *nix tools I need, has a reasonable well thought out UI and above all it __just works__. Its what I wish linux on a desktop could have been but never was and I doubt ever will be.
FWIW, I often look at tokudb with envy, but there is no way I will switch to MySQL from PostgreSQL for it: there are so many other things I'd lose that I would rather put up with my other issues. That said, and I totally admit it was now over a year ago that I was looking into various database implementation companies (and thereby might have you confused with a differen company), it seems to me like your technology would be amazing if used as a standalone index (as opposed to also storing the heap), and adding indexes to PostgreSQL is both simple and "part of the point of using it in the first place".

(I also would have expected the PostgreSQL market to be better for this kind of thing, although I'm not in this business, so I'd love to understand where I'm wrong: the general argument being that relying on a third-party commercial index is a much lower commitment--and thereby a simpler sell--than relying on a third-party commercial storage engine, in addition to how most companies using MySQL seem to either know so little about database technology that their criteria was simply "popularity" or, alternatively, so much about database technology that to them MySQL is perfectly fine and they don't really need your solution.)