skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One can't help but suspect these players are acting in concert, to manufacture the most ridiculous exercises of technology patent abuse, so as to motivate the public and Congress to advocate for a reconsideration of the whole mess...
Debate isn't always about arguing your side. Sometimes it's about making sure all the sides are argued so that you can know you're going the right direction.
This article is unintentionally an excellent argument against patent protection for Apple's products.

If Apple is a company that uniquely has the talent and taste of a good chef, the patent protection is unnecessary. They will be able to continually outdo other companies that don't have the same talent.

Arguing that a company has so much talent and is so successful that it needs legal protection seems absurd to me.
Some companies will have to pay a slightly higher per device royalty than they had wanted to and/or remove/modify some functionality. It's the Apocalypse! It's Thermonuclear War!
I agree, maybe OP should have just posted this thread instead. After reading this I'm wondering if Miguel de Icaza is not in fact equating Gnome to Linux Desktop. One may be dying, doesn't have to mean that the other will follow suit.
I haven't gotten very far into passive income. So far, I get 10.00/quarter in sparse CafePress sales and ~60.00/quarter from dividend investments. CafePress has been a rough ride. I've put up a good number of designs I think should do well, but have yet to sell. That being said, I'm not really putting time into all of the other aspects of doing well with CafePress. At this point, dividend investments seem to be an easier route to consistent passive income.
Why the quotes around "alive"? What has been happening with the Netbeans project?
Beautiful. Does it work in IE? (i'm too lazy to fire it up)
About $10-100 a month through Amazon Associates on a moderately popular blog (usually the lower amount). And $12,000 a month from a small Bay Area office building.
You don't have to contest the patent for it to be suppressing others' design. I once worked for a company that made a humidifying air pump. We had to have the water tank held in with a removable flap rather than a door because our main competitor had patented 'holding the tank in with a hinged flap/door'. Sure, you could fight it in court, down the track, after hardware design (which is much more expensive than people realise). Or you could move onto the next problem and have a slightly inferior product. Patents on trivial things stifle innovation.
Are you willing to tell more about Experiment 2? What kind of strategy are you using? What development platform (e.g. what language and libraries and what OS)? What trading platform (e.g. what brokerage / API)? Where did you get your test market data from / how much did you pay? What other strategies did you try first that didn't work? What blogs or sites do you read on the subject? What is your background in? Finance/Econ? Or programming? What other details would you like to offer? Some of us are very interested in this field. :)
Speaking of Thinkpad, there's also http://www.thinkwiki.org
This is a really impressive effect, but I'd hesitate to use it as part of a generic cms backed site since the auto-sizing could inadvertently editorialize the meaning of a headline at different page widths.

"Roddick SURVIVES, Staving Off Retirement" vs "Roddick Survives, Staving Off RETIREMENT"
In so far as this is true -- that Android devices' pinch-and-zoom doesn't behave at all the same as iPads', and that this makes them much worse to use -- those Android devices have not copied what Apple did.

(I have no opinion about how much Samsung actually copied from Apple or whether what they did was legal; I haven't looked carefully enough at the case. I'm not passing comment on that. Just saying that you can't reasonably say both (1) that what Apple have rights over is a very refined implementation of pinch-and-zoom that differs from anything you'll see on an Android device, and (2) that a maker of Android devices copied it. At least, not without a further explanation of how they screwed it up so badly.)
I recently read The Pragmatic Programmers book SQL Antipatterns: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Database Programming (http://pragprog.com/book/bksqla/sql-antipatterns) and chapter 6 talks specifically about this kind of DB design (entity-attribute-value) and the benefits/pitfalls. It's a great read and I highly recommend it.
Wouldn't that double the size, in the database, of a very large table?
I was under the impression that the patch removed universal search altogether.
This is what the preset word combinations mentioned in the post are for.
I worked in the non-volatile memory business for seven years.

Then I'd be curious to hear what you know/believe about memristors in general. To me they sound super exciting but there have been dismaying indications of vaporware (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4231367) and this latest postponement is consistent with that.
This is a great success story. Would you mind sharing what your conversion rate is on the 14-day free trial? Have you experimented with asking for a credit card upfront? Also, was there ever a time you thought about giving up?
> I think the pseudo-anarchic development process doomed Linux on the desktop

I'll repeat myself here. Linux is the natural successor of the technical Unix workstation. It's, therefore, a niche product: built by a highly technical crowd for a highly technical crowd. Only recently efforts were made to make Linux more muggle-friendly and those efforts nearly coincide with the decline of the relevance of the desktop PC.
I don't think so, because the dysfunctionality of the patent system is working out extremely well for Apple.

However, I do hold out some degree of hope that the high-profile nature of these products, along with the self-evident insanity of these patents that give one company exclusive dominion over basic concepts (rounded rectangles, pinch-to-zoom) may be enough to make more people aware of how broken the patent system is.

So while I doubt Apple has any intention other than to keep exploiting the flaws in the patent system to attack its competitors, if there is an upside to any of this nonsense, that would be it.

Edit: Even though most of us on this forum probably reserve the most contempt for patent trolls like Myrhvold, with his zombie horde of non-practicing entities, I actually think that these cases resonate wayyyyy more with the non-programmer mainstream audience.

Indie programmers having to pay royalties behind the scenes to some shell company? For most people, that's not too interesting. The Galaxy Nexus getting pulled off the market because it can search for things? This is at least something that people have heard of, can understand, and can see doesn't make sense.
Awesome! also: w/steel cut oats cook 1 min+chill =>AM bingo
I understand the comment. Of course the thought has crossed my mind. But I'm not so sure there's any evidence to support it.

I actually test some of my ideas with people like your mother, and surprisingly (why should I be surprised?) they have little trouble catching on.

What's really amusing is that these things that I have them doing are things that many nerds cannot themsleves do. I've got them using systems and techniques that many nerds won't touch because they think it's too "hard core". It's hilarious.

There are lots and lots of unfounded assumptions about what users can and cannot do.

There are facts, supported by evidence. And then there are assumptions. One requires a bit of work. The other is effortless: you just hit "Submit".
We come from different socio-economic groups. I simply can't fathom the idea of making a $1k purchase so casually that I couldn't even be bothered to do a bit of cursory research. Even 10-20 minutes of light googling is too much for you? How much can you actually build in that time?
Does anyone see groklaw as a credible source any more? They used to have good reporting, but all I've seen since the Apple v Samsung verdict is spittle-flecked ranting.
I'll be entering in the "worksheets" space, both free ones made by us and worksheets generators. I have a kind of a niche in a non-English website and I think it's a nice move.

Do you happen to work on anything related to that? Thanks!
I said the market share came from college kids. I honestly never understand how developers use it, but I can understand smart people find value in it I don't. But don't ignore the fact that the Mac rose to prosperty not through its developer tools but through appealing to a younger generation with access to money a desire to look cool, because they hit that ball out of the park from my experiences, not my opinion.
That's the thing: It doesn't really matter. Take any given software patent and throw a research team at it, chances are you'll find invalidating prior art. Take any given software patent and give it to a CS major, chances are you'll have a work-around inside of a few days.

But that's not the problem. The problem is that you never know which patents will be asserted against you, and by that point the horse is out of the barn. You've now got to spend millions of dollars on lawyers for years to invalidate their improvidently granted patents. And the work-around doesn't do much good when they're asking for damages for past infringement on the millions of devices you've already shipped or suddenly having your trucks stopped at the border (and interrupting your business and straining your relationships with retailers) during the period before you can retool your supply chain to incorporate the work-around. Especially when the second you release a new product with a new set of work-arounds, they come at you with a new set of patents.

Software patents have got to go.
Groklaw links to a BBC interview with the jury foreman.

> we as jurors were sworn to abide by the rules and the stipulations in law as they exist today, at the time we made the decision.

Can't jurors just ignore laws that they feel are unjust?
You are an exception to the rule is my point. For every developer that buys a Mac based on taste, there are at least a dozen kids buying them not for tangible reasons but for the Apple brand, at least where I live and through what I have experienced. Different areas might produce different results, but there was only one other guy in my CS track that used a mac for development, but tons of my out of major peers had them as hip facebook machines.
Requiring royalties for open source, independently developed software is Wrong. An attack on Android is an affront to all independent software developers. Also, Apple has said they are not interested in licensing.
Don't sell it to developers. Sell it to their bosses.
for background, here's a stackoverflow answer explaining how knockout and backbone serve different purposes:

http://stackoverflow.com/a/6340870/231589
Seems I commented on this last year, so what the heck:

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month

Sales are up by about 40% year-to-date over last year, owing to a combination of increased AdWords spend, organic growth in the business, and a successful redesign (and related conversion optimization) right before summer.

Appointment Reminder is doing fairly decently -- monthly recurring revenues (on the publicly available plans) are up about 4x versus the last thread. I've recently gotten some time to actually work on it (my wedding kept me busy for much of the earlier part of this year). My run rate is currently up about 50% since, oh, two months ago? (Why? Interesting question -- re-did pricing, tweaked my marketing knob to "slightly more than zero work", and started getting a wee bit serious about e.g. my use of email to people in their trial period.)

The enterprise pipeline, which is not tracked in those figures, is... well, like all enterprise sales operations ever, I cry a lot and dry my tears on stacks of money. Not terribly relevant to folks who like recurring revenue because it feels like avoiding work, since Enterprise Sales is pretty much exactly what work always felt like, but it is work you get to bank in the past and then get a fairly motivational check from monthly for the present and extending into the future.

I guess consulting doesn't count as recurring revenue, at least not on my model, so I'll skip it. I'm productizing one of my consulting offerings and should be releasing it later this month -- we'll see if that works out.
The character
Interesting is also traffic peaks. The IAMA from President Obama a few days ago really stress tested Reddit:

http://blog.reddit.com/2012/08/potus-iama-stats.html

> At the peak of the IAMA reddit was receiving over 100,000 pageviews per minute.

> In preparation for the IAMA, we initially added 30 dedicated servers (20%~ increase) just for the comment thread. This turned out not to be enough, so we added another 30 dedicated servers to the mix. At peak, we were transferring 48 MB per second of reddit to the internet. This much traffic overwhelmed our load balancers which caused a lot of the slowness you probably experienced on reddit.
The issue I take with that (important) observation is that just because the threshold is set at 5%, the results can be far more convincing. In an analysis, you may see several components with p<10⁻⁶, a few with p=0.23, several more with p>0.3, and one with p=0.06. They won't all have p=0.05 - in fact, none of them will.

That said, it's worth being reminded occasionally that statistical significance is in many ways just the first step on the road to knowledge, not the last. But when it comes to false findings, stuff like false negatives and exploratory analysis are far more impactful.
I have found their coverage (of Apple v Samsung) useful. The only other outlet that covered some of the more unusual aspects of the verdict and the post-trial jury interviews (that I saw) was BBC.
How we generated 100K engagements on our facebook page
We experimented a test with our facebook page and generated about 100K+ user actions on fb page with in 24 hours. We will be posting more results on our different experiments. You may read more on this and apply to your facebook strategy. Do share your tips on generating user engagement on facebook pages.

http://valleybizdaily.com/2012/09/02/facebook-viral-tactic-for-startup-part-1-like-or-comment-posts/47/
And that wheel isn't the "click wheel" which is the touchpad-surface for scrolling and the physical buttons for clicking. The first gen iPod had a mehanical scroll wheel and separate mechanical buttons.
I don't think you're aware of the sheer magnitude of revenue that pharmaceutical companies make. They often mark-up their drugs by 1000%.
Pinch to zoom wasn't actually something Apple was pursuing Samsung over, apparently.
No. Can you imagine a world where a juror could possibly consider punishment for rape or murder unjust?
Open-Source Platform Adds Transparency to Municipal Credit Rating
I'm not sure if you are aware but "thermonuclear war" was the term Steve Jobs used. It's certainly not just Groklaw's observation.
Sure, but the intent of the author seems to be to say that the language can be molded in ways that make it easy to apply in specific domains. Whether that's with macros or with a DSL-ish approach you're pretty much achieving the same end result. Ruby's blocks make it fairly easy to create DSLs that look like you've actually changed the underlying language in some way - Rails makes heavy use of these features, for example.
> In what universe do the events described in the article sound like the actions of a rational company?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Kies

Having been forced to use this monstrosity to get files onto a Galaxy Tab, I don't see _where_ you get the idea that you're talking about a rational company.
Yes, work can be a lot of fun if you know what you're signing up for. But let's call a spade a spade.
Why would you need bounce back at all? It's one of those things that gives iOS it's personallity, you could definately make a touch based user interface without bounce back.
> 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

Well... It's not Best Buy, but, still, it's something:

http://imgur.com/tzv74
Apple isn't gunning for royalties, they are trying to use the courts to remove their competitors from the market entirely.
And what if we're using SASS?
And, reddit uses PostgreSQL.
I saw the same factual coverage of post-trial jury interviews on, e.g., The Verge, without GrokLaw's implausible legal analysis that this would cause the verdict to be thrown out.
It can happen, it's called jury nullification. There's some interesting reading in the background section of the wikipedia article on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification#Background
Domainkiller, you have apparently been hellbanned since your one-word comment 38 days ago.
Yes, and it's called jury nullification. The jury did not do so therefore they did not feel the law was unjust.
I don't think jury nullification applies except for in criminal trials and only where the jury finds in favor of the defendant. You can't have juries running around convicting innocent people just because they don't like the law (or the defendant).
I had the exact same reaction. I couldn't imagine that it's flying off the (digital) shelves, so I had to click through and read. Next up, Scott Baio?
I've tried both Knockout and Backbone with Circle (https://circleci.com), I can totally see the use case here. Knockout is great for syncing between the client and server, and does history and routing well. However, it's not great at model form synchronization.

However, Knockout really excels at that, and allows you to do great live updates.

In the end, we chose Knockout + Sammy.js (history and routing) + manual templating (pretty easy really).
The HTC case was in the UK:

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18709232
SRE jobs at Google are something like a 15 month (or so, i forgot the exact number) job (after which they can decide to put you in another position, fire you, or put you there again but in a different team).

you need to have problem solving skills, program easily in different languages, solve performance issues in the code, or, anywhere they pop up really, and so on.

The interviews focuses on problem solving and optimization, you can find them by, heh, Googling around ;-)
This is also true for MS SQL. However online index operations do require the expensive licenses, unfortunately. Postgres is amazing.
:X I wrote up a bit commending SASS/Compass alternatives but was in the [text] portion when submitting and not a comment.

But I'm looking towards learning SASS to write a follow up to this.
Groklaw has proven pretty reliable in prior cases. Se's never truly impartial, but almost always quite close to the truth. And I can understand her, this really is an ugly set of cases.

[EDIT: Fixed gender pronoun.]
The reason this is interesting is that finally someone twigged to the contradiction between the word "buying" and not being able to dispose of the property acquired.

This applies to iTunes, Amazon and the other app-stores around. No re-sale, no transmission of any kind beyond first buyer is contemplated. It's in fact a lifetime lease, with the "landlord" retaining some interesting rights, such as popping in and removing items. We discussed that here a couple of years ago when Amazon exercised that right to remove allegedly illegal copies of Nineteen Eighty Four it had sold.

The current situation may be temporarily good for profits, but the value for digital items may well depend on their having a secondary market like physical goods have. The sales of new houses or cars would suffer greatly if they were not resalable.
From the conversations I had, pretty sure, but, they did make it vague enough.

What I understood from it, is that I failed their interview process (which technically, is remotely valid: I did not want to go further with them).

Of course, in my view of things, they failed (or well, they just weren't what I expected)
Thanks... I introduced the popup for facebook sign-in and it didn't change my conversion for new (adwords) visitors but like 10% more signed up with facebook so I kept it.

My site posts a timeline post when a user creates a new round (unless you have turned that off). So it is kind of a free impression so I prefer facebook sign-ups. Maybe that is a project for the winter make it mobile (jquery mobile?) and implement some sort of payment system. $10/year seems fair to me. Just have to figure out an amount that will cover my hosting + adwords spend on a typical month.
"independently developed"

This is a new claim and not one that will find many takers imho.

"Apple has said they are not interested in licensing"

This is far from the truth. They certainly offered licensing to Samsung. $30/device might sound like a lot but that was a starting point in a negotiation.
Fortunately this did not happen in the US :)
...Not really, no.

Look, I was trying to be helpful. If you want to pick a fight, go somewhere else.
Generally speaking, I agree with you. In this case, however, this was just a weekend project and easy distribution was a goal of mine - hence the app store.

If I were trying to make a full-time living off something like this, then there are a bunch of things I'd do differently - such as what you suggest.
whats the total monthly traffic (including bandwidth), if i may ask?
Why is sharing your timetable harder than shearing a sheep?
Correct, and that make them much less powerful than most people think :)
patio11 is a god...can't imagine his consulting offerings will fail.
This is roughly the path I'm taking on my current project. There are some things that have a consistent, "traditional" schema. However, many of the feature-important things are being stored as JSON blobs. This means that I don't have to worry about schema migrations when I add a new feature; instead, I just define its JSON schema. This works particularly well because I don't need to join on these items. The downside is that I do have to do occasional manual processing on them (sum up all values of type FOO) that would be trivial if everything were perfectly normalized.
Patrick, big fan of your writing and projects like most others here.

Any new Kalzumeus Podcasts coming down the line?

I'd love to see some more posts on Appointment Reminder too. I think many of us could benefit from your insights on selling B2B SaaS products.
Food looks good... are you a fat fuck?
I removed this comment. Browser problems.
It's actually a her not a him that covered the Apple v Samsung case on Groklaw. PJ stands for Pamela Jones.
PJ is a she. Groklaw is often a reference to the whole community though.
Any new Kalzumeus Podcasts coming down the line?

Yes, we're recording one in next week or so.

I think many of us could benefit from your insights on selling B2B SaaS products.

If that subject is interesting to you, join my email list, as it seems to get most of what I write on that topic.
They owned the network. And they wanted to control devices that could be used on it. (There may have once been legitimate reasons for this.)

Apple wants to control your devices. How you use them after your purchase. The network you use to obtain content. And even the content you download: you don't own it, they license it to you. There have never been any legtimate reasons for all this and there never will be.
2 Innovative Ways for Mapping Indoor Locations Precisely
Well this is weird. Right click - open in new Tab, its okay. Click on link directly from headline above, black on black. Hmmm...
Ah, OK. It's actually good you've thought it through.

"Sell to the boss" is one of those little revelations I've had lately and, like any Damascene conversion, I'm being a bit of loudmouth about it.