skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I'm sorry, but that is absolutely, categorically, and demonstrably false. If people are sick and dying, they have bottomless motivation.

Yes, but they don't have bottomless wallets. I'm sure a great deal of research would still happen in the absence of large potential profits. The problem is very little of it would lead to drugs your doctor could prescribe. The drug targets are the easy part - the hard part is getting a compound through clinical trials, and ones you get approved has to pay for the other 90% that didn't make it because they were too toxic or didn't work as well as existing treatments.

As a real-world case consider antibiotics. There's a huge need for new antibiotics - if you get the right strain of MRSA your doctor is going to be about as useful as the local faith healer. Same goes for a nasty strain of the clap that's making the rounds in Japan. Totally resistant to existing antibiotics - once you get it, it's not going away.

But for various reasons there's no money in antibiotics (or vaccines, either, but let's just stick with antibiotics). You don't get repeat customers, and the bugs will start to develop resistance in a few years. With no profit motive drug companies aren't doing what they need to do to bring new antibiotics to market. So there's nothing in the pipeline.

The concern, of course, is that if you did away with patents entirely every type of drug would be like antibiotics. Drug companies wouldn't exist at all, or they'd exist as contractors to governments (oh, and wouldn't that be efficient).
Ah. In that case I'd suggest extending the map downwards so that the background image is taller. My browser window is roughly 4:3 and the map cutoff detracts from what is a very nice design.
I think Android 4.1 is finally something like the "agents" people have been envisioning for over a decade.

The possibilities on this are endless and currently Google is about the only company that is able to do it (from my point of view). Google knows my calendar, Google knows my contacts, Google knows pretty much everything I buy online (because they handle all my emails), Google knows about my travel plans (email again), Google know what I've been looking, where I've been (Latitude) and so on.

There could be also huge opportunities for money making in all this. One good question is should they keep all this just to themselves or would it be better to try to create an ecosystem for applications.

Let's the take travel plans as an example. It would be fairly easy for Google to mine my calendar and emails to figure out my travel plans. This would open up opportunities in offering me flight upgrades and other travel related services. Google could either try to use this information themselves, they could allow advertisers to use it, or they could expose it to 3rd party apps (of course with my consent). Keeping with the agent idea these things would be much more than just highly targeted ads. They could be direct offers, like "Say Yes Please, to upgrade your flight from Helsinki to Barcelona to business class for 150€".
Thank you. I can never write the code I want first time - I always end up creeping to a solution, being unhappy with the way it works and so trying something else till it all fits right.

Plays hell with source comments
Football Recipe Roundup
Yes, I do think the revised line break looks good.

One other idea: I wonder if removing the periods after "campus," "invite" and "University" might look better. My thinking is two-fold: One, they seem to catch my eye a little. That's not a big deal, really, but I wonder if removing them will make the map points more attractive since they would then be the only period-like character on the page.

Maybe try it and see what you think. It may look off to you when implemented, maybe not. Obviously, this is just a stylistic suggestion, so go with whichever you think is more attractive.
built something kinda similar a year and a half ago but never put any effort into marketing it - http://shoutfast.com/home - anyway landing page is slick - good luck!
Which is why it seems to me that introducing Siri was a dumb move for Apple: UI is one of Apple's core competencies, but machine intelligence is pretty much the one thing Google is best at.
Agreed. I love cleaning out warts, fixing broken APIs and removing unneeded code. I love looking at the output at "git diff --staged" seeing lots and lots of red and very little green.

But that's just me - any maybe other developers in my team. For everybody else - marketing, sales, customers, end users - this is completely irrelevant. Nobody really understands this kind of work, much less actually sees a value in it.

Adding a blinking logo somewhere and you're the hero of the day. Exchanging 500 lines of bad spaghetti with 20 lines of beautiful art and you're wasting everybody's time.

But because I love this kind of work so much, I don't care. I'm in a position where I can do such things for fun an pleasure, so I'm doing them.
Man, now I feel dumb. I was writing Lehmer generators for a semester last year and didn't even notice they are impossible to reverse. Thanks :P
How is this SOPA/PIPA-like? From the description it seems to have little in common with either of those.
Yeah NaOH. We removed the ones after "invite" and "University" and this looks better. Thanks!
Because good programmers are hard to find, and hardware companies sell more if they can convince EE design managers that their software is so easy, even the outsourced interns can be productive with it.
Everything becomes crappy, because most people don't want to wait longer and pay more for quality.
It is end of the bubble of common folks excitement with cheap internet and cheap gadgets.

Facebook has near exponential growth rates due to many factors, but mostly - a) cheap digital cameras (and then mobile handsets). b) cheap ADSL technology around the world (then mobile broadband). c) peer effect - adult population engaged in behavior of teenagers and college students.

Now all the excitement gone, and all those gadgets, sites and self-exposing or on-line shopping is nothing but a common boring activities.

The next big thing, by the way, is distance-everything. Distance learning is already here, along with remote work. Distance medical diagnostics is on the way.

As long as more people will realize that distance education is possible, they will naturally think that almost everything else also.

That means very interesting possibilities for an economy, including bursting of commercial real-estate, pay-walled education and even SUV-cars bubbles..
Yes, this is not a new idea by any means. For example, GMAC:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ally_Financial#History
I don't even see what you're referring to. The corners on Firefox have a slightly less subtle curve, I guess...

I don't know if you're being hyperbolic, but that feels like a really minor thing to me.
Give me a giant codebase I've never seen before that started bad and turned into a spaghettified mess, and you'll have a very happy developer on your hands :)
Hey vinaykuruvilla. Thanks for the awesome feedback. We'll start A/B testing soon. Your landing page looks great btw.

We checked the landing page on a mobile browser (Safari & Chrome - iPhone) and maps loads fine. I think the server is getting overwhelmed with the response from HN.
The same is true of most drugs. Marginal cost is near zero compared to development cost.

In neither case do you necessarily have fantastic profits although if you can sell at scale at a good price it becomes very likely but if you have a drug for a niche market or software in a crowded market it is quite possible to make a loss.

This is neither an argument for or against the patent abolition proposition which I am torn on. I can definitely imagine with alternative arrangements for Pharma we could be better off than currently but I believe that there must be something possible that is better than both what we have now and better than nothing.
You did some great work dodging most types of injection, something any (what I assume to be) college student should be proud of!
Gmail's mobile version has links at the bottom: 'View Gmail in: Mobile | Older version | desktop'
Um, have you actually tried using the Web interface?

Here's a screenshot from my vacation a few days ago.

http://greggman.com/downloads/examples/latitude-maps.png
Not all patents are by trolls or big corporates. Patents are crucial to medium size and small size firms. A healthy economy requires to create an environment for these firms to thrive. If you think big corporates are the ones to focus on, check out Germany: http://www.economist.com/node/18061718
This description (and justification!) is missing on the splash page, and could be helpful.

Eg something like this:

"Shoutt lets you hear and share what's happening around you, no matter who you are or who you know. It's a social network that moves as you move, connecting you to the people around you."

Also, can I ask why Shoutt instead of Shout? The double T doesn't really appeal to me.
Crowdsourcing works for Wikipedia and open source software because there are compatible elements of unambiguous truth and scratch-your-own-itch. The areas of lawmaking where this is true are few, so this won't work.

Should a shoplifter have his hand chopped off, be caned, be jailed, get community service or not be punished at all? People are going to disagree with each other on this and most other issues and ultimately nobody is going to get the solution they feel is the best for everything. Democracy is not designed to creating optimal societies, it's designed to make sure we can still live together peacefully despite disagreeing.
Marc Benioff: Future Software Will Look Like Facebook
If I were you, I would keep "Exclusively at Stanford University". The more niche you can make your target market, the easier it is to market and gain traction. If I was a Stanford student, I would be way more likely to submit my email. This is how Facebook first got traction.
It's been pretty stable for me, the latest feature of momentarily unhiding icons if they change is great. Allows me to see when Dropbox is syncing or Time Machine backing up. Only issue I have is with apps that have transparent modals that won't trigger via keyboard shortcuts (Translate Tab). Definitely recommend it though if you like things tidy.
They have similarities regarding the freedom of speech. Also, in the newly enacted bill, they can just restrict access to any websites that is said to violate the law. File sharing websites might be banned for access in the Philippines.
We're changing our page once we launch this week to a more descriptive one. It will cover everything I mentioned (and more).

We initially stumbled into "tt" because we couldn't find a domain name for Shout. But once we did, we felt that it added an edge.
Wow, that's some bit of linkbaiting in that article, pointing to other techcrunch articles and a lot of pointing towards skift.com, nytimes and some other sites.

The entire article talks about three different websites, and it contains 0 links to any of them. http://wikitravel.org is the old one, http://wikivoyage.org is the newer one, and the last one is not decided upon yet, but the definitive source about that is: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Travel_Guide
To be clear, this is a (welcome) debunking of the claim made by other newspapers, and not a direct claim by the BBC (which the title implies)

edit I see the title has now been updated to better reflect the source
1) Assuming this data is close to actual numbers, seems like saying "Investments are near the levels from 2010 (which by the way was 1.4 billion), BUBBLE!" is a bit premature.

2) Maybe it's just me but the grammar seems off. The, "end of the technology bubble" to me can also mean that the bubble that we're supposedly in has ended and it's A-OK.
CrunchBase is a useful tool, but it is not a complete data set that could validate the sort of conclusions the author draws.
Using mod_spdy With Apache2 On OpenSUSE 12.2 (x86_64)
Italians Take Up The Torch To Ignite Their Own Tech Startup Scene
Isn't our representative democracy already open source?
I wonder at what kind of resolution we will no longer need anti-aliasing. Did they provide any Retina screenshots with AA off? You'd think that with small enough of a pixel it would no longer be necessary.
OK, Amazon counts. Perhaps RIM isn't dead quite yet either. But the point remains.
Surprise surprise: journalism done bad!
Module Oriented Programming
Fixing old code can be a very satisfying experience. However this is usually tempered by management apathy for code maintenance. It's an invisible problem; nobody can see when you fix a piece of bad code unless it's causing a bug. This becomes aggravated when "25% of the people doing maintenance are students and up to 61% are new hires".

To management it's, at best, an "if it ain't broke don't fix it" attitude. At worst they consider programmers prima donnas. It's immensely frustrating trying to convince them of the utility of code maintenance, even when doing so pays dividends in future feature development flexibility and bug fixing.

I would love to see some strategies for convincing management of the virtues of maintenance.
Cook Some Great Cuisines With Cookin With Google.
i just moved to cph; i'm always up for grabbing coffee
Haha. Thanks! We know the tendencies of college students.
30 Examples of Search Results Page Design
Some Search Results Page Design helps the user to narrow down the search results in a specific category. It not only sells out the products but also differentiates the results with tabbed navigation.
Combined with lax immigration, it certainly is. I'm from Belgium, and I would never give up healthcare, education or basic benefits. But The pendulum has swung too far.

In the US, Denmark is often taken as the perfect example of socialism done right. But people leave out 2 very important factors:

- Denmark has an abundance of national oil reserves, and exploited them very cleverly. (This is a big advantage to less fortunate nations)

- Denmark is much stricter (smarter) when it comes to taking in immigrants than France/Benelux
I hate to be that guy, but how is this even related to HN? Why are a lot of these apple maps related submissions getting upvoted?
I'm really not a fan of these ads. I'm sure it's very schadenfreude watching what's happened with Apple's Maps from the other side, but I would have liked to see Google/Motorola take the high road on this one and not come out with ads like these.
I've been using

* Karm on KDE/Linux (tracking by virtual desktop, one for each project)

* Manic Time Tracker on Windows (very much like this but with a full GUI. Only works on Windows though)

* For emergencies on Windows there is also Timesnapper which in facts documents in screenshots what happened (in case you have to "prove" it .)

this utility seems like a real improvement on the current situation though. Thanks in advance!
I'm in the UK. It's also useless for finding things - it has petrol stations in places they don't exist near my house, and restaurants that closed down years ago. It also sucks for anything but driving - I don't have a car so I walk everywhere and its coverage of pedestrian zones in my city is woeful (unlike google maps). Also, public transport options are nonexistent (unlike google maps). Pretty useless for me really.
I concentrate better sitting down, but there really is nothing better for my back.
It thinks I work at my kids' school :)
The fatal flaw in this article is that the author has NO IDEA how much of the 2012 investment has made it into Crunchbase. He's dividing the total investment by the number of days as if every investment made until today had been accounted for.

That guarantees that the projection will fall short, because many investments are announced much later than when they're made. For example, IndexTank's round was closed in 2010 but announced in 2011. The average lag is anybody's guess, but it could easily be two, four or six months.
I agree with your assertion. How would you go about validating the author's conclusions in a more thorough manner?
I also really like the examples like "how tall is the Eiffel Tower?" Sometimes I want to know a specific piece of information, sometimes I want to read up on something. This allows me to ask specific questions and get poignant answers.
Reminded me a lot of Like a Little[1] (YC S11) [2], before it became known as Circle[3]

[1] http://likealittle.com/

[2] http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/28/likealittle-funding/

[3]
Who will rename 1000s of files and prefix them?
MySQL Cluster gets API for Node.js
MS supplies the compiler, the runtime libs, and the operating system. What you mean by "have their code inside all binaries"?
That's pretty cool. I like it.
I administer a small number of systems and deploy custom packages to all of those.

Running a custom mirror, signing packages, managing keyrings on the mirror, and getting them on all systems is nontrivially harder than using a PPA and associated scripts.

Now, I run a mix of Ubuntu and Debian systems. I don't use PPAs that much, but when I do they're just plain easier.

Yes, it's an incremental gain, but that's a gain. It makes them better. They weren't first, but they're innovating. Sometimes, the "innovations" aren't fantastic especially some of the more harebrained stuff on desktop (PulseAudio, avahi). But no longer is Ubuntu just a Debian rip-off: They're producing new and useful additions.

The relative merits are debatable, and so I'm not going to continue that thread. In the end, it boils down to X + epsilon > X, for any epsilon > 0.
+1 to that. Apple related posts feature too frequently on here..
Do you think Big Pharma has an interest in keeping these costs high to prevent competition?
Just because something became common, and comfortable, doesn't mean it will stop being economically significant. Otherwise, after the first internet bubble burst, the web design business would crash and burn, along with the the online advertising business, and online shopping business. Social networks, online shopping and gadgets are here to stay, in one form or another, and they will be huge revenue streams for companies which produce the best products.

Good luck with your business on distance learning, it sure is promising, hope it works out as you expect.
I have a cubicle and a lab area at work where I do hardware/software development, which means a large portion of my work involves a computer. I decided to try a standing desk about two years ago, however, I didn't want to commit fully and we don't have desks that raise and lower automatically. I decided the best solution would be convert my lab workstation to standing. I built something to hold mouse and keyboard at proper height and raised my monitors/docking station to eye level. I also added a 3/4" textured mat to stand on and keep a set of comfortable shoes at work.

My findings are that I am more alert standing up, however, I focus better on documentation while sitting down, so I alternate between the two throughout the day. Having both standing and sitting desks seemed to be optimal since a proper sitting desk chair can be more comfortable than a tall chair at a standing desk.
The rendering engine, sure, but what about the rest of the browser? Cache, Cookie, Prefs, bookmarks, etc.

Browsers are not just rendering engines.
If that is what the future is going to look like, I am getting rid of my computers now and taking up gardening and bird watching.
Getting started with CSS custom filters
It is an amazingly intractable catch-22 - if the government increase housing supply then a whole generation who are just about to retire lose almost all of their wealth; If they don't increase supply, a whole generation are unable to afford a home in which to raise a family. Whatever happens, it is almost inevitable that hundreds of billions of pounds will be funneled towards the baby boomers from the young or the yet-unborn.

You know things are seriously broken when a senior Tory minister writes a book entitled "The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children's Future – And Why They Should Give It Back.".
Did you consider a height adjustable desk?

I work alone, so it's not too embarrassing having an electronic desk. I have noticed that my legs ache less. I stand for about 1/3 of the day usually.
I would say just as in most ads these are half-truths.

I think this article[0] hits the nail on the head in that Motorola/Google are promoting the fact that something that is pretty much gibberish such as "315 e 15th ny" can be translated into a pretty accurate address of what the user wants. Again like one of the top comment in the thread about the Ontario map comparison. It's not about the visualization of the maps, it's not about the data, it's about search. Apple just does not have search down very well in general.

I think that a big thing Google Maps had over most other services was to estimate pretty well what the user is looking for even if he only has a slight idea of what he's actually looking for. And to be fair sometimes Google corrects my search results WAY too much. I can't think of examples right now but there are times where the synonym they use for a search term isn't actually a synonym in context to what I'm looking for.

Anyways all this Map discussion on HN has me pretty exhausted about talking about maps for a really long time.

PS. Reading that forum thread, I can understand the accusations that Google is lying, but the ones where people are replying to people who try to interject that Apple's Maps aren't up to snuff getting replies like, "Do people even use Maps that much?", or "Do you get lost that much" is pretty sad.

[0] http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/did-googles-motorola-...
Search could be better. The POI information is pretty inaccurate in places and just sparse in others but the address information is pretty good.

By the way couldn't you just have searched for SFO? That works even when looking at another part of the world. And it is much less typing.
I'm not saying it's a thing that's going to happen, just that you shouldn't have some blind faith that it won't ("I trust they won't do such a thing"). I'm pretty sure RMS would agree with the sentiment.
I decided that the potential health benefits were not worth the discomfort

Rule of thumb, if a posture is causing you discomfort you are probably not reaping any health benefits.

This is with the notable exception of muscular discomfiture because your muscles have been allowed to grow weak, e.g. sitting up straight.
I've used Lonely Planet guides extensively in paperback and somewhat in Kindle form. The Kindle versions are worse in terms of usability. This is partly because the maps are usable in paper form, where it is easy to flip between the map and the legend, or indeed where they are sometimes on facing pages visible at once. The way they make the electronic versions, the maps often have a low-res overview and legible sections on separate pages. Want to move north on the map? Go forward two pages! That's just silly, a UI worse than MapQuest ten years ago.

What's good about LP on Kindle? If you happen to be travelling very light to several first-world destinations which are not covered in any single book, you can definitely save space and weight. Also if you buy the book more for the prose than the maps, it could be all right (with an iPad and a local SIM card this could work well enough, again assuming you don't travel where people are very poor).
The people I've known personally who've tried (and sometimes succeeded, one of them was a member of the European Parliament, my old Irish teacher Sean O'Neachtain) to get into public office have all been pompous assholes. You don't really get much of a choice.
That completely sucks in comparison to the app posted here, unfortunately.
Can a headline which ends in a question mark always be answered by the word 'no'?
Why would you say the user wants the manhattan address and not the Brooklyn address? If somebody actually had 315 written down on a piece of paper because that's where their friend lives, Brooklyn is the address they want. When would a user want to go to manhattan and have that address?