skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To add to this, Drew Curtis (founder of Fark.com) gave a talk on how he defeated a patent troll: http://www.ted.com/talks/drew_curtis_how_i_beat_a_patent_tro...

There are some good insights in this short talk, but there was also this comment by a user called Troll Busters:

This is unfortunate because Mr. Curtis was scammed. No, not by the patent troll, but by his lawyers who was more concerned about charging excessive fees when there was a much more cost-effective solution to his problem. The problem is not patent law but legal economics. This patent was easily invalidated by a simple and cost-efftive post-grant proceeding called a reexamination. However, law firms have been steering clients away from cost-effective proceedings in favor of much riskier and higher cost litigation to resolve disputes. Why? Because law firms need the high fees associated with patent litigation and discourage use of cost-effective post-grant proceedings to determine patent invalidity at the Patent Office.

I was familiar with the patent mentioned and proposed to wipe it out for $50K. We had the prior art needed to invalidate the patent. But each defendant's lawyer wanted to charge their clients fees and not give up the high-billing litigation legal work for such a simple solution that could have been shared collectively among the defendants. Instead, it allowed the troll to divide and conquer and force lucrative settlements for "nuisance fees" or the amount that would have to be paid to lawyers.

I don't know if the threat of a reexamination would have been enough to scare the patent troll away, but it would be very interesting if this were a viable method of nullifying the patent. I'm guessing it's not as easy as $50K-and-we're-done, else one of the victims in these cases would have attempted it already. But it seems like a successful invalidation would certainly kill the troll and save everyone the trouble and legal costs.
The perception out there is that Haskell is an academic language, also that it is a "difficult" language.

This is not fair on Haskell but that is what people think and that really is the issue that Haskell has to overcome.
I think that's more of a matter of scheduler still being immature. Erlang only added an SMP scheduler in R11 due to the complexities of managing internal state without sacrificing it's soft-realtime abilities. It was also only really reliable after R12.

I'm sure Go will mature here and the defaults will evolve along with that. Whether that will take years or not is up for debate but at least it's a possibility and doesn't cost the programmer anything other than a recompile if they start with careful use of goroutines today.
Already thrown a bunch of cash at the monitor.
App Engine as well:

https://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/google-a...
There very well may be a legal requirement. There is with email. If I understand right, a company must retain all communication for something crazy like 3 years.
Machine Learning for Astronomical Data Analysis
At least it's not like California, where a safe rolling right turn is the same as ignoring a red light, and has a fine of ~$500
I presume because the list of potential people who you could connect to might change.

I guess they could re-scan it on a schedule but that wouldn't solve your issue and might annoy their user base who are using it because it "just works."

Plus removing a permission isn't something any app supports that I am aware of. It isn't even something you're meant to be able to do on Android.
This is a really interesting topic and I could fill your screens with a wall of text. It's true that the MPS currently does not collect concurrently, however the only thing that makes it not-concurrent is a critical point in the Shield abstraction where the MPS seeks to gain privileged access to memory (usually in order to scan it for GC). The critical point is where ShieldExpose in shield.c has to call ShieldSuspend to preserve the shield invariants. This is the only point in the MPS that prevents concurrency, and the rest of the MPS is designed to support it.

The restriction could be removed if either:

* the MPS could use a different set of protections to the mutator program

* the mutator program uses a software barrier

The first one is tricky, and the second one just hasn't come up in any implementation we've been asked to make yet. Given a VM, it could happen, and the MPS would be concurrent.

So, I believe there's nothing fundamentally non-concurrent about the MPS design. It's kind of waiting to happen.

[I've put this in a comment in the code. Thanks for making me write it down :)]
You don't need acid to say things like that, just Star Trek.
I understood the intent fairly quickly. Some people are easily offended I guess.
I'd be interested in a more in-depth look at why this might be the case, because in JS written such that V8 will optimize properly, it's generally faster.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Econometrics

Econometrics is the science of modeling the economy. But like you said it's pretty much impossible to get calculations correct.
San Francisco Bay Area or Remote - Full/Half Time

Outbound Marketing Manager for Koombea

Koombea (koombea.com) is a 70 person design and development consultancy that focuses on building Web and Mobile products for startups. We're looking for a talented marketer to lead our outbound efforts to increase our brand presence and acquire more top tier clients. This will include everything from online advertising to community management to social media marketing. Right now we're always at full capacity, but we're opening new international offices and hiring technical talent like crazy to take on new clients. We've got offices in San Francisco and Miami with our technical HQ in Barranquilla, Colombia (Basically Hawaii in South America).

I joined the company after a 3+ year stint at FB. I worked on a number of small projects and considered taking an investing job, but ultimately was convinced by our CEO that he could offer the best of all worlds. 2 Years later I'm involved in numerous startups, making my own schedule and hearing pitches from talented execs every day.

Why it's great to work for us:

-Set your own Schedule and Location

-Interact with early stage startups every day

-Expand your network rapidly

-Competitive Salary

-Work with World Class Engineers and Designers

What we want from applicants

-2 or 3 years experience with online marketing/social media marketing/community management

-Self Starter - we're very serious about this. You may be given minimal direction, but you'll always receive full support

-Excellent communication skills. 1:1 and 1:many are necessary. (Spanish Language fluency is a huge plus)

-Big Plus if you've worked at a frantic, fast moving startup.

If you're interested please email us at Ben dot Meyer at Koombea dot com. Send us your resume, linked profile or anything else that might impress us. Thank you.
Classic case of it's not the content, it's the delivery. And the delivery belies a combination of ignorance (of what/how/why vc's do) and arrogance (about the value of any one discipline - in this case UX), likely covering a feeling of inadequacy or unrecognized privilege (that's a bit harsh - but usually true - myself included).

And then again... this is the state of most of what's written... just easier to spot when delivered in this way.
Yup. I don't think the DropBox auto update actually works.

I'm on 1.4.12 on this machine while the last version that you can download directly from DropBox is 1.4.17.

Something is not working right.
It would help a bit if the article included at least roughly equivalent Go code next to the Python code. The Go code is wordier, but maybe it takes less time to write because it doesn't require as many decisions (libraries etc.) as with Python.

package main;

import (
"fmt"
"net"
)

func main() {
hosts := []string { "www.google.com", "www.example.com", "www.python.org" }
c := make(chan string)
for _, h := range(hosts) {
go get_ip(h, c)
}
for i := 0; i < 3; i++ {
fmt.Println(<-c)
}
}

func get_ip(host string, c chan string) {
addrs, err := net.LookupHost(host)
if err != nil {
fmt.Println("Host not found:", host)
c <- host + ": <error>"
return
}
c <- host + ": " + addrs[0]
}
Show HN: Android app for encrypting files
I've build this Android application for my own needs and then realized that maybe it would be helpful for somebody else. Basically it's an application which can encrypt files with AES algorithm. Since I've put it on market I haven't received any comments as to what else I could make better or improve (or any kind of critique). So I'd be grateful for any kind of suggestion/criticism you can give me. Thank you.
You do know that's not valid JSON...
If only humans had demonstrated some ability to construct defenses against hostile environments.

You know, like they've done since the invention of fire and the construction of lean-tos.
> "On iOS devices the password is generated from the devices WLAN MAC address"

On what planet is using this data a valid form of security? Anyone can get hold of a MAC address.
Actually, I loved that section. I'm one of those "grey-bearded wizards of Lisp/Haskell/whatever" but I like the idea of becoming one of the "insane Erlang programmers who are content writing sumerian cuneiform all day long." Guess I'll have to learn me some Erlang.
According to his profile, he works with/for Standard Charter Bank.

There is REAL WORK being done in Haskell! Now I just gotta find out how to get my foot in the door :)
The first link, Effective Go doesn't talk about the philosophy behind idiomatic Go, like _Code like a Pythonista_ does. There is however snippets of Go code on that page, and it's fairly reminiscent of C/C++. I don't really see that as a drawback, for I believe C code is fairly readable for what it offers (speed.) Go likeness to C doesn't offend me one bit, considering the power and speed it offers versus C.
For me it put anything in my download folder. It opens in the browser in a reasonable, non-resource-abusive fashion. I'm on Safari 6/Mountain Lion, so I'm not sure what version this happened.
Can't be a bank, too conservative

I know two large international banks that have significant Haskell codebases. I don't know where you get the idea that banks are too conservative.
Wikipedia and OpenStreeMap would actually be possible since they are not commercial...
A good question if he really is just using the Android API is why isn't Google intervening as Apple did in the LodSys case? He should file a motion to dismiss for lack of standing. He's not doing the infringing in that case any more than you're infringing Apples rubber banding snapback by using a Samsung phone.
Location also makes a huge difference; in San Francisco (where he lives), median household income is over $65k and the median rental price for a 1 bedroom apartment is over $2k. If Mok makes $3.5K / month, that probably qualifies as underemployment.
Nice. Feature request: please make the scale logarithmic (at least as an option).
Energy is close to free. Peta-Watt-hours per day come into the earth from the sun.

The problem, in the US, is that the median income in real dollars has actually declined in the last decade/s. This means the mass market has lower purchasing power. For a while, debt was masking that effect, but that band-aid was ripped off.
The fix is to increase median real income. This is mechanically simple, and politically next to impossible.
Let's assume it is using the cell network.....isn't jamming the cell network a much bigger felony than just destroying the camera?
Google Talk, Facebook messenger, ... then it is not even dependent on the mobile phone number. And I like being able to type the messages if I have a keyboard and not just my mobile phone. I cannot understand why everybody uses WhatsApp.
I love what Musk is doing, but both of his current engineering successes---Space X and Tesla---involve building well-understood vehicles, just faster and at less cost than competitors. Doing entirely novel projects like a manned mission to Mars or some new kind of mass transportation system are orders of magnitude more difficult and uncertain, and I think he's grossly underestimating the time and cost for either of his more ambitious new goals. I'd like to see him make plain vanilla space transportation and electric cars into business successes comparable to PayPal before he moves on to Mars and Hyperloop.
That's most likely going to be a >200dpi screen, where you can simply use 2x upscaling for better performance (with no visual degradation compared to current monitors).
I just want to do something in the background without making the user wait

What's more, the strategy of just spawning a thread to do with async processing doesn't scale. Once you hit the limit of requests that a machine can process, you'll need a distributed work queue anyway. Or do Go coroutines run through some sort of managed execution queue?
Westin and 'W' hotels are the #2 and #1 "tier" hotels in the same company, Starwood. And it seems that the 'W' bed costs about $500 more than the "Westin" version. Fitting.
Hacking, not cracking: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/security/hacker-vs-cracker/...
I'd prefer to not die, but dying on Mars would be ok if dying is necessary.
I do believe that's what I said. The comparisons the OP gave aren't useful because the trivial example does not require parallelism, so it amounts to little more than complaining about the lack of features in Node. I'd like to see some nontrivial case studies as well.
The article is not clear as to whether the mentioned spending is only Nokia's handset department. Assuming that's not the case then I don't think it's a fair comparison because Nokia's product portfolio is way bigger than handsets. It's just like comparing Intel's and Apple's R&D spending.
IIRC, you can't tell v8 to keep memory in the same place (it can and does move things around as part of its gc).. this complicates sending strings to the socket, so you have to make a copy from the v8 world to some other world before initiating the async write.. i believe (suspect?) that lua does not have this limitation, so the extra work involved is not necessary.. this is based on old, vague notions so I may be off my rocker, but it is the best of my understanding. I would love a detailed look.
dtrace's pid provider should do this as well.
Love the idea and implementation, thanks a lot for this!

Though more granularity, as it has been said, would be nice, this is good enough for me and lots of people as it is right now.

What I REALLY would like to see (and I know this is not really a feature request for this, but just an idea I'm throwing out there) is this made for other Amazon AWS services as well.

Common scenarios, like "I would like to run a wordpress site on an EC2 instance serving a couple thousand hits per month", or "I'd like to store a 1 TB backup of my personal computer on Glacier and retrieve it when my computer crashes (say in 1 year)".

The point is, like you said yourself, if you're spending a lot of money, you shouldn't trust anyone else, but having these "ballpark figures" would be really useful for people that are considering these services.
Ikea also seems to be the only place in the UK that sells decent slatted frames to put under your mattress. I guess British people aren't familiar with the concept.
We plan on adding that later, but it's a larger interface change we weren't ready to take on.
iPhone 5: The Stage is Now Set
Note that Celery isn't just about what you describe here. A distributed task queue is beneficial in Go (or node.js) too. Async is one thing, distribution is another. Also web servers are often volatile environments (e.g. for tasks that must complete).
Incredible stuff. If this would have been when I was in school maybe I would have chosen a diffrent career.
U.S. Race Categories "Reflect a Social Definition of Race," Not Biology
My first thought: how about reproducing on Mars?

Now to find a suitable Mr. & Mrs. Smith, if you grok me.
The California "high speed" rail project is depressing.

In theory, I'm a huge fan of high speed rail. But the California project is going to end up costing over $100 billion, and everyone knows it. It's going to take decades to complete. If, indeed, it's ever completed. It's routed to go places no one wants to go. And, as Mr. Musk says, it' not actually going to be very fast. It's pretty much a classic textbook boondoggle.

I wish they'd cancel it and start over again from scratch in 10 years. It could still be finished faster.
The annoying interface that gets between you and diagnosing internet problems (beyond the 'giant X on the line between you and "internet"' diagnosis) was frustrating. Ok, I get it, I'm not on the internet. Where do I go to get more information so I can start diagnosing it?

For the sake of 'usability', Windows Vista hid a lot of functionality behind 'ease of use' features that served only to provide the user with less information, making tech support more difficult for no real benefit. Users still have no idea what's going on, but receive no error messages that indicate why.

Vista also added helpful features like the whole 'Let Windows find a solution!' concept, which is great in theory but, in my limited, anecdotal experience, has never once actually provided any sort of solution. The closest I've seen was yesterday, when Windows 'found a solution', tried to implement it, and failed.

They spent a lot of time and engineering making a 'usable' OS on the surface, but all it was was a pretty sheen over top of an OS that didn't, at its core, work significantly better in a lot of areas.

Windows XP was an OS I disliked strongly, but tolerated grudgingly. Windows Vista was an OS I actively discouraged people from getting. Windows 7 is the first version of Windows I've ever recommended people upgrade to, but Windows 8 looks like another step in the wrong direction.
You and a lot of people. I'm sure a big chunk of the seasteaders would jump at the chance to live on a moon city.

So here is the entrepreneurial challenge, believe Elon, in that he will make it possible to go to Mars, and before that it will be a lot easier to send stuff to the Moon. What can you start researching today so that 10 years from now when everyone realizes that this is going to come to pass you'll be way ahead of the game and visionary?
Wow! S3 is really expensive.
Have you ever tried putting a slatted frame underneath your mattress? In Germany you usually put the slatted frame in a bed, but I found you can also just put that on the floor (plus mattress) to have a very low bedstead.
Where's the sense of adventure and romance in that?

Lots of explorers of yore could have met with the similar arguments. Some people can stay behind and man/woman? the home front, others can go off to explore and expand our existence. Not that there's no cost to it, but let's hope, that overall, it's a net plus.

As a species we have wanderlust built-in, perhaps.
Suffering from hypothermia?
Many are enterprise users, and this can mean a strike against Google Apps. Many of them stick with XP because it works great for their purpose and many applications only work with IE.

Like it or not, Microsoft wins a lot of points for supporting older versions for a decade plus. They might lose a few bucks on a new Windows license but make it back on reputation and other enterprise tools.
Those are basically the same thoughts that I had. Security is not enough of a concern for most of the market. I wouldn't built it as a commercial product, but basically as art for those of us who value privacy.

That said, I think the number of people concerned with message privacy is on the rise around the world. Over a few years, the market may grow significantly as privacy receives more attention.
That's a good point you make.
Then roll out http://www.google.com/chromeframe.
Sure, back then it included IE8, but the announcement specifically stated "Beginning August 1st, we’ll support the current and prior major release...", and with IE10 coming out, IE8 is no longer included in that category. When IE11 comes out you can expect Google will also drop support for IE9 and so on.
Sure you can do that (using threads/multiprocessing/greenlets). But usually you don't want to because it's hard to guarantee that the background task will complete without interruption.
Agreed.

I think we, as a profession, have a tendency to focus on what's "easy" (syntax and constructs we're already familiar with) to the exclusion of other, potentially more important factors. I am and have been guilty of this myself, so I'm not claiming any sort of sainthood, just making an observation.

Often people pick on the use of single-letter variable names as "unreadable." This is mostly a matter of keeping the code light on the page, as they put it. If you're dealing with a package centered around Foo, especially methods on same, it's customary to just abbreviate it to f. That clashes with a lot of people's instincts even though, once you get used to it, it works well.

"Once you get used to it" is key -- this is true of any language with substantially new or different syntax/semantics from what a programmer is used to. All else being equal, familiarity ought to be orthogonal to merit; the mere presence of a learning curve ought not be a deal-breaker.

Anyway, Go is one of the most readable languages I've ever seen, given that it is not a scripting language. Among other things, type inference and literals make the code very clean, to the point where you can in short order read the standard library code and expect to understand it.
What Leo Apotheker did to HP in his short tenure is borderline criminal. If I owned HP stock or were an employee I would be livid - but it's not totally his fault - it is also the Board's fault for bringing in a dinosaur with a complete lack of vision of the marketplace. I knew from the moment they hired him it was going to be a trainwreck. I'm sure many of the astute industry participants/observers here felt the same thing.
Yep, you're right. Doesn't mean I have to like it much. I do think you could make a campaign out of hating TurboTax though.
A lot of that distinction is just accounting. Apple under Jobs believed that the best "R&D" was done by the folks working on real, shipping products. I bet Ive's salary isn't counted as R&D, but surely that's a big part of his job.
Even magabooster Quentin Kopp is strongly recommending they scrap it.
The Best Bluetooth Headphones for Less Than $500
What's the mechanically simple answer?
I had a bad experience as a TaskRabbit buyer. There was a dispute between me and the task worker as to whether the task was complete. The worker went ahead and marked the task as complete and TaskRabbit deducted my credit card. The dispute resolution process was a convoluted and manual process which I didn't have time for (which is why I was using TaskRabbit in the first place). It wasn't a huge amount of money so I let it slide.

I can see why TaskRabbit might be biased towards paying for the task automatically after the agreement has been entered, the alternative would be to make it easy for the buyer to screw the workers over, but it seems like they probably need an easier dispute process or they'll lose the buyers, I know I'm not using them again. I guess the worker ratings is supposed to help with this but I couldn't quickly figure out how to rate the worker and TaskRabbbit didn't make it easy by sending me an email about it or something like that, so I just gave up.
android to me is really a poorly designed inconsistent mess. Windows phone has a fresh design with intuitive design and the Lumia 920 hardware is frankly better than anything available out there.
+1. Pretty annoying having to bounce around between accounts. But not that bad, can live with it for a little while longer! Great update today