skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
seriously, i can't believe this thing got upvoted. how do they expect to compete with imagemagick, batch mode gimp, and the like? or even client-side JS libraries like pixastic?
I think that the kickstarter model is below the legally viable laissez faire line, and the once the lawsuits start flying the party will be over. People will look back and say "What were they thinking would happen?"

But that is just my opinion of where its going, it may turn out to be as revolutionary as eBay was in the casual sale market.
NBNZ, but given that I haven't set a PIN for at least 10 years they may have changed the process. Same for online banking.

When I last did it the PIN was a secure keypad, and online banking required them to send a letter and then authenticate in branch.

Photo ID was required for both steps.
I would not rush to call fusion "clean". But it would be an amazing power source.
Here's the problem with the "25x-programmer" concept. There is such a thing, but it's not just about the programmer. It's about the engineer, the company, project/person fit, the team, the technology stack, and the project itself. I've had months that were worth over $500,000 to my employer easily, but I've also had months close to zero.

Productivity compounds multiplicatively. Individual ability is certainly a factor, but not the only one. To be able to sustain 10x levels of contribution, you need to be using excellent tools that you know well, on a project that fits your skills and interests, in a position where you can have an impact (and those positions are coveted and usually allocated politically, not on merit) in addition to being a good programmer. I wish these conditions could be reliably obtained, but for most people, they can't.

That's why the 10-100x programmers aren't banking $1 million and up per year. Companies can't possibly know in advance whether a person is going to have all those other performance-altering variances in place, and they also know from experience that creating conditions in which 10x programmers can thrive is a political mess.
(When Penn & Teller have famously exposed a trick, they've almost always invented a ridiculously poetic method and built the trick around it; by making their art seem more intricate than it is, they force the audience to assume that the rest of their tricks are equally complex. Penn & Teller's exposures are really part of an elaborate con.)

— The article.
I'm wondering if you can analyse the problem of Patents from a game theoretic point of view.

The problem is this, those that don't Patent or were unable or disincentivized to Patent (different country, or different time period) cannot compete on a level playing field.

They do not gain sufficient arsenal to defend against Patents.

Patent law is fundamentally incompatible with the past. In a different era or different arena some ideas were not considered suitable for patenting (lack of utility, novelty, and nonobviousness).

An example is software patents or business process. As money pours in to create changes to the rules those not playing the same game are at a disadvantage.

That is their past IP unprotected by Patent law is now differentially disadvantaged in the marketplace.

The only way to rectify this is to reduce the power of Patents over time until they are eliminated.
I don't like this argument because you can replace "drugs" with anything a government decides to make illegal. If a product or service is made illegal and there's still a demand, it will be sold on the black market and everyone knows what that funds.

The people who created laws that pushed these "drugs" into the black market knew this too and they also had a choice; collect the money themselves through taxes and use it as they see fit (probably to, I don't know, reduce drug use) or keep funding these kinds of activities.

Obviously if all/some drugs were legalized they'd find something else to sell, but why make it easy for them by giving them total monopoly over some of the most sought after substances on earth, with an endless supply of customers, some who are legitimately in need.

Also, when it comes to legalization vs "getting everyone in America to stop buying drugs", I think legalization is a lot more realistic.

P.S. I know one sure fire way to make sure it's home-sourced, unfortunately I can't do that because it carries some risk, jail.
what leaps out at me from that list is that you have systematically ruled out every good way to read ebooks. as a heavy fiction reader, my smartphone and later my kindle have added value to my life that far outweighs any design flaws they might have had.
Hey me too! If you cant work out a deal between Ryan, feel free to message me - email is in my profile. I've been brokering websites for many years now on the higher end (six figures+) so I can also provide an accurate valuation. I personally buy between $xxx to $xx,xxx - I would love to see what you guys are looking to sell.
They pretty reliably give the previous bundle for free if you pay more than the average for the current bundle, but don't bet on it.
That can lead down a difficult road.
" I wonder whether it actually is a lack of intuition, or that I am so locked into the iOS way that it ends up feeling foreign right from the start"

Both, but mostly the latter. If you use both OSes regularly each becomes pretty natural to use.

But there are some baffling things in Android that are just too vaguely defined, like the oft-mentioned-here back button.

I use Android every day, and I'm still not 100% sure what the backbutton is going to do when I press it, even in apps I use pretty often. Unfortunately fixing this now isn't that easy because each app's Activities gets to choose what happens when the back button is pressed. This is bad for the obvious reason that some developers are bound to do the wrong thing, but made worse by the fact that Google themselves have attempted to "redefine" the back button various times and each attempt has made things more confusing (IMO).
Wormholes most certainly do allow you to violate causality!

How about I just point you at the FTL FAQ?

http://www.physicsguy.com/ftl/html/FTL_part4.html
Show HN: Easily add peer-to-peer chat to your iPhone/Android app (from Hipmob)
Every filesystem in the world probably uses this method. The identity function (i.e. storing an item under its own name) seems to be a special case.
I've been dreaming of something like this for a while. There's an OS project called "Stylo" (https://github.com/maccman/stylo) that has the basic framework for an interface builder, but it's not as far along as what I can gather from the Divshot demo. I'd be much happier building web apps in my free time, instead of an app to build web apps. Looking forward to checking it out.
Exceptions make it harder to reason about your code's execution path. If you raise an exception, it is often not obvious who in the call stack is ultimately going to catch and handle it. The logic for that can live pretty much anywhere. This is not to mention the try/catch/finally pyramids you get from trying to cope with nested failure cases.

Go uses a well-understood mechanism: return. Control reverts to the caller. It's simple, which was an explicit design goal of Go.

IMHO, if you have a choice between exceptions or not, they just aren't worth the value they deliver. As Josh Bloch says, use them for exceptional circumstances only, to indicate truly exceptional circumstances, such as catastrophic errors.

Re: refactoring: http://golang.org/cmd/gofmt/. Check out the -r option.

In practice, is this really a huge deal? Modulo go fmt, what editor doesn't support multi-file S&R with regex? Isn't this what a compiler is for? All in all, this sounds like bikeshedding about syntax. We're all entitled to our opinions but it's awfully hard to say anything interesting about syntax which has not already been said a bajillion times.
File an appeal with the App Review Appeal Board (or whatever it's called). It's pretty simple to do from iTunes Connect. Someone smarter than a robot will look into it and get back to you (my IAP appeal took ~14 days, but they did take precedent set by other apps into consideration and understood some nuanced arguments, so they might know what Stripe/Square etc are and how it matters)
If someone is interested in creating animations in this way, I created a simple script which converts videos in PNG/JSON/canvas:

http://blog.webmatters.it/2012/09/canvas-rocks-video-sucks/
Am i missing some of the article, or does it just not give any hint at the outcome of the MRI?

I remember, years ago, seeing brain scans showing something like serotonin receptors before MDMA usage, and months after, and if i remember right, things hadn't gotten back to normal long after. Anyone know anything about the long term effects?
Wait wait ... what are the unicode characters for that cloud and lightning bolt? That looks awesome.
The bundle is fascinating as the page gives many different pricing signals. Other factors being equal I think people don't like to miss out on things. Mentally as this one game has a unlock restriction it 'must be a better game', I think the risk of missing out in the best game by going under $5.50 will encourage people to pay over the average and still be able to mentally reconcile their pricing reasoning as to why 'they' got a good bargain.

People paying a lot less are also already factored into the average and I see no specfic factor driving low payers to be greater in quantity than usual. Hence why I love this approach.
Study: Want More Female Leadership? Use Consensus, Not Majority Rule
That so many magicians are so possessive of their precious "secrets" and that so many of them are against sharing (even with other magicians), came as rather a big shock and disappointment for me when I got interested in magic.

I spent most of my life in the opensource and academic communities, where free sharing of techniques and knowledge was not only commonplace but encouraged.

It's very sad that much of the magic world is so anti-sharing and so jealously guard the knowledge they possess from each other (unless you can pony up their asking price).

This aspect of parts of the magic community is a huge turn off for me.
It's easy to nitpick little quirks in a platform's interface. iOS isn't quirk-free. I think a much larger problem is something this article only occasionally hints at (for example in the icon sizes section):

Android's design aesthetic still sucks!

Is it skeu-oriented like iOS? Not often but sometimes yes! Is it completely 2D minimalist like Metro-style? No, but sometimes yes. Is it futuristic/robot/Matrix? Yes, sometimes, but not always.

Jelly Bean (and ICS) certainly improve upon past versions, but the UI still looks like a big mishmash compiled from random submissions from a bunch of volunteer open-source designers. Nothing wrong with that in theory and no offense to volunteer open-source contributors, but we're talking about Google here and their flagship platform. I can forgive spit and polish when I check out Haiku OS or the latest bleeding-edge KDE distro, but Google and the companies commercially shipping Android devices should be held to a much higher standard. Laugh all you want about Apple shredding pixels in Passport in iOS6 but at least they're putting huge resources into crafting memorable experiences that delight users. What's delightful, memorable -- even whimsical -- about Android?
Because the man is not perfect. Since his arrival Android has looked much better.
Using Facebook and LinkedIn Ads to Intelligently "Poach" Employees
Ayo here, from Hipmob. We released this peer-to-peer chat on top of the same SDK that runs our live support chat product which powers thousands of monthly conversations. This makes it drop dead easy to let your users talk to each other, and enables image & audio sharing in chat. Happy to answer any questions directly and more features are coming soon - ping me at ayo (at) hipmob dot com.
SimpleIoc and the Messenger Service in MVVM Light
Isnt this what carsdirect.com does?
If that works, it works without bitcoin. I can send that messaged, signed, with or with out bitcoin. Conversely, no bitcoin script can force me to sign that message since no bitcoin script can contain that private key. Just because a systems uses public key crypto , doesn't mean its works with bitcoin.

In the sense that it works securely. It clearly works for giving someone authorization.
I've heard of some comedians resorting to violence when some of their lines were "stolen" by other comics.
With the integration of the Ubuntu Software Center both Humble and Canonical work really hard to make sure that does not happen anymore. Right now we have two games ready and the others should be live tomorrow, I can't promise zero problems but they are well tested and if you let us know we will get to the bottom of any problems, high profile Ubuntu debuts are great.
Does anybody know what Combosaurus is about?
re: the abolition of slavery and your economic argument - do you believe this to be the case in all instances where slavery was abolished? or just in the US? Spain abolished slavery circa 1550. Great Britain abolished slave trade circa 1810. Did the US just lag these economies (and GB lag Spain) a lot at this point?
The patent system is meant to reward inventors, including inventors who don't have the capital for commercial manufacture of their invention (i.e. by licensing it to someone who does).
One of the entities RS acquired was SGI. Whom I suspect may have had a patent portfolio.

Not sure who got that though. Oh ... crap. Looks like they were retained by Graphics Properties Holdings, who is, you guessed it, a patent troll themselves:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120419/02113518553/sgi-ba...
"Americans drive a staggering number of miles — close to three trillion every year, according to the government. (That is half a light-year, or 120 million trips around the world.)"

It's not often that you see light-years used as a unit associated with driving!
The two are completely different.
Mikko's Malware Odyssey
shrug Your indignance over my experiences won't change anything from where I'm sitting.

From a no-name candybar running 1.6 to a dead latest Galaxy S3 running 4.0, I have had the same miserable first five minutes.

I've watched a Google marketing executive thrash around on 3.0 before having to wade in on his behalf, I've finished whatever e-mail setup the Verizon rep didn't do a dozen times, and I've spent nice long chunks of my time trying to troubleshoot issues, set up MDM, and fix sync drama of whatever type.

I've spent tens upon tens of hours doing my due diligence. But every time I pick up the device, it's the same five minutes. Whatever manufacturer, whatever device, whatever form factor, whatever.

Edit: Here's another way of putting it. When I pick up an "Android" device, I don't know what I'm getting. Stock? Cyanogen? Sense? Touchwiz? Motoblur? No-Name? No-name without OHA support? Carrier modifications? Manufacturer pre-loads? 1.x? 2.x? 3.x? 4.x?

This makes answering remarkably simple questions like "how do I set up e-mail" pretty difficult, because there are so many possible answers to that question (K-9? Mail? Maildroid? Gmail? Forward mail to Gmail?) -and- the ones that come before it like "how do I get to the apps" and "how do I unlock the phone" and "what button, if any, wakes the phone up".

These thousand distinctions without a difference make it hard to make predictions, design workflows, or make recommendations to anyone about anything Android. It's just this ever-expanding morass of STUFF.
`language:ruby example` ?
One I just noticed with the NS4G: there is no documentation on how to get to Google Now, they talk about the Galaxy Nexus, but never mention its predecessor. How do you get to it? The search button... swiping up does not work whatsoever.

And I HATE how my contacts are white and everything else is a dark grey to black theme.
Roger McNamee On Apple: ‘Most Amazing Company’ // Becoming A ‘Dumb Monopolist’
On the upside, you can scarcely breath without infringing a patent these days. I doubt a patent troll can operate in a non-infringing manner should a sufficiently large portion of the patent-holding community decide to get pissed off at it.

Problem is that the trolls also have few or no assets, other than their portfolios, that is.
"Traffic fatality rates were highest in exurban areas. combined traffic fatality and homicide-by-stranger rates were higher in some or all outer counties than in central cities or inner suburbs in all of the metropolitan areas studied."
http://www.minority.unc.edu/sph/minconf/2004/materials/lucy....
I am also wondering about this one. It seems fishy..
Twitter's iPad app update provokes a backlash
So I went to carwoo.com.

Gripe#1: Why do you need my cell phone number? I know you say you won't give it to dealerships. I don't know why you need it either.

Gripe#2: Why do I have to choose a color? That is not an especially important factor for me.

Gripe#3: Your distance to dealership computations are as the crow flies. I happen to live near a large body of water with only a single bridge across that is 70 miles away from my house. A dealership on the other side will not be 50 miles from my house.
State tries to ban online teacher torment
Square employs a significant number of ex-Apple guys. That might have something to do with it :-)
As an ios user since 08, the nexus7 needs a lot of comparative polish.

* The keyboard doesnt always pop up when you're in a text field.

* What's the deal with font rendering in Chrome? Some links appear bigger than others (on hackernews and reddit).

* Hitting an actual link is like choosing a first square in Minesweeper, sometimes it works, but most of the time it either misfires or opens the enlarge modal.

* There seems to be inconsistent feedback that a link was actually tapped in Chrome.

* The built-in apps lack any real contrast.

* The default google apps only seem to play content from the play store. I cant get the book reader to open anything so I had to try 10 different ebook readers leaving me in a situation of read some here, read some there. Why wouldnt google want it to open epub like ibooks does?

* The software home button is very frustrating. Miss the spacebar, Im going to the home screen

* Who thought that power + volume down is the best way to take a screenshot? It is very hard to do

There are other little things that escape me at the moment. The device is great though, and if I didnt have such a history with ios, id probably think it was the best that could be offered. Luckily for us the gripes that I have seem to be minor in the grad scheme of things. My main advice (to you googlers reading) would be to choose a default setup that is what you guys consider the best of the best and still let the tweekers tweak.

Oh and I feel that a small ipad would easily eat the nexus7's lunch
> However, I don't understand how skepticism about the role of intellectual property protections has turned into uncritical acceptance that it only causes harm.

Is not uncritical acceptance, there has been plenty of research and evidence that shows intellectual property harms innovation:

http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.h...
I’m writing a novel, because the Internet told me to
Thanks to gucharmap's excellent Unicode character search:

☁ U+2601 CLOUD

⚡ U+26A1 HIGH VOLTAGE SIGN
They just posted this: http://blogs.technet.com/b/msrc/archive/2012/09/18/additiona...
It is the cloud theme of Oh-my-zsh.

https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/wiki/themes
Then don't do business with a dictator as Apple is. There have been enough cases of "creative interpretations" of Apple's guidelines, against which you have nearly no handle.

So you have to blame yourself.
Ok, so I upgraded Twitter for iPad, and I don't think I'll ever use it again. So that's one annoyance taken care of!
The fundamental problem is that it assumes that all patents are invalid, and that no legitimate grievance can exist over the companies' intellectual property. While this may be a popular opinion on HN, I doubt many actual companies are going to be willing to sign away their right to sue when another member company brazenly steals their work.
Looks very cool! I would also like to point out Cloudinary as a great service that features image hosting & upload in addition to filters. I think Instafilter.io could maybe get a leg up though if they offer and publicize a growing collection of available filters (perhaps a user-generated "filter store" of sorts).
I think Android is great, but this inconsistency is what spoils it.

I still get tripped up when I click the back button in the browser, and it boots me back to the home screen and not the previous item in my browser history. Never mind having the concept of 'windows' with zero visual cue that a page loaded in a new window, and not the existing one.

There wouldn't be much of a problem but the stock apps set expectations that are rarely delivered upon anywhere else. You're trained to long-press an item to perform an action on that specific item. This won't work in every app: in some caes you might have to swipe it, iPhone style; in others, it's just not possible.

I would still use Android over an iPhone, but there is plenty of room for improvement.
That works, but it works without bitcoin. The idea the article was putting forth is that you could use bitcoin scripts to change property ownership

The point is you can't, as the article proposes, create a bitcoin scripted loan where if I default on the loan, authorization message/transaction gets sent (because that message must be signed with a private key that the network does not have) .

What you could do, in a world where bitcoin script is far more powerful, is give your bank a transaction that says this transaction is only valid if I didn't pay loan x(where x is some bitcoin contract loan) and if it is valid, then the bank has access to my car.

When this transaction validates according to network consensus, the car would hand over control. This requires,however, that the car can make the validity judgment. Which means the car has to understand the bitcoin protocol and probably have access to the transaction records/blocks.
I think you're better off picking the technology stack based on the community around it. With only 9 months of Python under your belt, it wouldn't be much of a loss if you switched now. Try to get a feel for the Ruby/Rails and Python/Django communities and in which one you'd feel more comfortable participating.

To make some sweeping generalisations, Pythonistas tend to be more computer-sciencey than the Ruby crowd, and if you're doing a lot of heavy number crunching, it might be worth checking out SciPy/numpy and whether there are equivalent stacks in Ruby (I have done this research but my gut says there aren't.) OTOH, the sheer size and popularity of RoR means that it's much easier to find work in Ruby/Rails than Python/Django. YMMV.
Whoop! :)
I'm not so sure. I would argue that any and all design is UI design because UX applies to everything that is designed, be it a website, a newspaper or a rocket ship.
Heh. Looks uber entertaining. I should've dragged myself out for this. Thanks @dmor for organizing!
You can't change the name of an app without submitting an update (anymore).
Email can't be defined as a Social Network in the context of this patent, because they had to define what it constitutes a Social Network to be able to use the term in their text.

But Windows Live Messenger can be defined as a SN, with that definition. I don't know if Yahoo! Messenger could also be included, because I don't use it and I'm not very familiar with it.

Read my response above. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4541041
I still wear my "cold storage" T-shirt sometimes.
Design Trend: Long-form Pages and Their Place on the Internet
Chrome Canary can now use live microphone input
The study is in progress: it would be highly inappropriate for the researchers to release any kind of result at this point.
And the existence of growth is the main reason for a steady loss of quality.