skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> So it's a poorly titled patent. All that tells me is that the inventor was too unoriginal to even come up with a better name.

People are lazy, news at 7.

> If he'd titled it "the wheel", would it be accurate to claim that a patent was granted on the wheel?

No, because the scope of the patent is based entirely on the claims. Nothing else has legal significance.
> Also interesting is the enormous gap between the New York Times, whose content tops this list, and the Wall Street Journal, whose content performs among the worst.

I think this might actually be more related to the WSJ paywall. If you dont have a subscription, you can't view many WSJ articles, whereas the reverse is true for the NYT.

On an unrelated note - I wonder how the category of HN related posts do, relative to other (basically same analysis of the "Pinterest" category). Judging by the success of this post, I suspect HN + Data are a good mix. Are posts about "Data" just as successful?
The danger of raising so much money - $41+ M - is that you risk being hold hostage by your investors.
Will Privacy Go to the Dogs?
I think that time staring out the window is more important than the time you're reading HN. That gap time when I'm just letting your mind work on stuff "in the background" is when a lot of my best ideas bubble up. I think I saw a talk about this or something but that's why they say you always get new ideas in the shower.
Report: Steam's URL protocol poses security risk
I'm considering switching to Slim from Haml (not because of this benchmark, but the syntax).

Are there any downsides to Slim that I should be aware of?
Wow what a load.
I'm glad to see them upholding the principles of free speech and expression that we fostered in the first few years.

I always told people, my job is to provide a platform, not be a tastemaker. It is up to the users to be the tastemakers.
To be fair, writing meaningful comments is really hard. So hard that the number of people who do it well is a small fraction of even the otherwise best programmers. To make matters worse, poor comments are worse than no comments at all. I can see why many programmers shy away from them.

* Comments that describe what the code does are a complete waste of time. The code already tells you what it does.

* Comments that describe why the code was written has more merit, but I cannot see how the following is any real improvement over the first point:

// Investments of this type have always added the interest
// to the principle. Who are we to question convention?
$balance = $principle + $interest;

I am one of those poor commenters, so I really have no idea what could be said about that line that isn't already known. If you say not everything needs to be commented, then where does the line get drawn? In most cases, the vast majority of your code should be no less obvious than this.

* Some suggest the method signature and invariants should be documented, but that seems like just another exploitation of comments to deal with limitations of the language and is no better than putting annotations in the comments.

* I've seen code examples for using a given method in the comments, but that is better left to your test suite. Not only then can the reader see the example, but you can verify your method works at the same time without cluttering up the original codebase to boot.

If you are doing something weird, then yes, I am with you that comments are a big deal. However, if you are doing weird things on a regular basis I have to question your reasons for doing so. You shouldn't have to do weird things 99% of the time.

With that, teach us wise one. How can we all become great commenters so that we do not have to brush it off as something we do not have time for?
Result #1 for me in the UK, with the obvious rip-off, Amargeddon, at #2.
That's a good idea, I think I will be going that route. Then I wouldn't have to deal with any server differences, etc ...

But I think if I do the comparison without a full web stack, people will be like "Yeah, in this lab scenario ... But the real world looks different because of this and that in rails"
What language(s) did you learn, how long have you been learning (them) and what level of fluency have you reached?

I have been using the Pimsleur Spanish CDs for almost 6 months. I have made a lot of progress (especially with vocabulary) but am still at a beginner level (high beginner though, almost low intermediate).
The surface team did an ama on reddit and they said that you can connect a cell phone and charge it - http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/11kyja/iam_panos_panay...
Patent examiners actually take pride in their high rejection ratio.
I am stunned. Seriously, seriously stunned.

I've complained about patents once before, and I think this sort of patent is a perfect example of something that wouldn't be worth a single day of patent protection. It's a colossal over-payment. Does it really make sense for our society to "pay" 20 years of protection for an idea that is so trivial to most of the practitioners in the art?

It's like a street magician selling the secret to their cup and ball routine for $100,000. It's not a mystery, and it isn't worth the price. But for some reason, the USPTO reasons, "well, I haven't seen your cup and ball routine before, so here's the check." They have far too low a standard, and we are paying far too high a price for the vast majority of patents. We can't keep doling out decades of protection for such common-place "inventions".

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4153732

...
If you are in Slovenia (EU), how come you can use Stripe?
Honest question, I'm in Germany.
Thanks for the feedback.

1) I'll add a filter for open bounties.

2) It would be nice if payment could occur after a solution is accepted, but in practice that presents some thorny issues. Notably, how would I ensure the bounty creator pays after they receive a working solution?

3) What would you suggest as a more appropriate fee schedule? Considering expenses, of course :)
Are there any other pros/cons in switching to Slim? Other than the syntax of course.
On the material that I've been covering, he is blowing the doors off of what is expected.

But that only applies to what I've been covering. For instance the word "because" has not appeared on his spelling tests since I began, so is not in the flashcard set. It turns out that he consistently misspells it and so there is some unlearning to do there.

That is issue #2 in the list at the bottom.
Here are my results running it in production mode (RAILS_ENV=production rails server >/dev/null 2>/dev/null):

ERB: 9.619 seconds

Haml: 10.893 seconds

Slim: 10.195 seconds

Full details at https://gist.github.com/3906297
After reading this I wonder if there are certain industries that fear telecommuting? That is if the amount of telecommuters increases then certain industries stand to lose out: auto manufacturers, oil companies, and construction companies that build and maintain the roads.
We're thinking narrowly about what 3d printing could make available to a terrorist. Firearms come to mind since there's both a lot of hubbub around the subject and it's the most immediately effective way to harm someone.

But surely there is a range of things a terrorist could print that we couldn't even begin to conceive of right now, things that would enable terrorism to be carried out more efficiently, covertly, or what have you. But then again, those same things could probably be constructed out of analogous parts from a hardware store anyways, similar to how anyone with access to a machine shop could fabricate their own firearms - so maybe it's not as dire an issue as it sounds.
Excellent - happy to see Reddit supporting free speech and not giving into this mainstream media bullying campaign.

I wish more platforms would abide to the rule of law and not to a hypocritical rule imposed by professionally "i am outraged, there is something on the internet, that i don't like, this has to stop!!!" commentators.

Kudos to Reddit!
For me the hardest thing of working at home, is that it makes it very hard to spend quality time with the family as you end up "working" at all sorts of times, something that otherwise you would have waited till next day at the office.

IMHO, if you want to have a healthy family life, This is a serious issue.
Ditto. Time to fork and move on.
I'm the founder and I'm in the US (the founder of Carmivore mentioned they were from Slovenia).
To answer number one:

- Increasingly health monitors are on a network so that all the stats of a ward can be displayed at a central nursing station. The alternative is to turn the beeper really loud so that nurses at the station can hear it go off. In the case of (as an example) children, these monitors go off regularly - especially at night. The warning beeps are usually not a big deal but they do wake up both child and parent (whom often sleep at the hospital with the child). Oxygen Sat monitoring in particular has a high false-positive during regular monitoring on children. To ease the burden of parent, child and nurse these monitors are connected to a network and remotely monitored by nursing staff. This allows nurses to weed out false positives without waking everyone up.

- These networks should not be on the internet, I agree. But I can see low budgets (why run so many wires when one will work?!) and less-than-competent IT (also related to budgets) causing these networks to be connected to the internet.
I've often wondered if Google would heat its headquarters with a data center . . .
I think it comes down to "what is distasteful?".
"Distasteful" subreddits that consist of compromising photos of teenagers taken without their knowledge are to be tolerated. That's "free speech", the highest ideal at Reddit.

Meanwhile, "doxxing" of the people who traffic in those photos is forbidden. That's not "free speech", it's something else.

However, journalism that happens to disclose identities of Reddit trolls... that's not necessarily "doxxing". It's a fine line.

There is no intellectual clarity to these lines at all; they're simply gerrymandered around the proclivities of the most active Reddit users. I guess that's fine, but it's hard to pretend that there's any important ideal being defended by their management.
> in this as in so many other ways, [minorities] are at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to college admissions.

We demand equal opportunity for minorities to get scammed!

I had a high school physics & chemistry teacher who didn't teach the advanced courses as AP courses, because physics/chemistry majors should take the courses at their university, and others didn't need it. I can see his point - I didn't NEED it, but the extra cheap credits would have been nice.

I liked my AP (and other advanced) courses, my son likes his now, and he's much more motivated in those courses than he has been in previous years (correlation/causation, etc.)
perk #1: no. pants.
Were you posting in said distasteful subreddits?
Apple, thinking small
But they just did...

Personally I don't feel strongly one way or another about the shutdown of creepshots and jailbait, but come on.

"We're not going to shut down distasteful subreddits, except the ones we already did! But no more! Honest!"

I guess I'll believe it when I see it. Reddit has no shortage of content that is just one viral blog post away from a PR shitstorm. This newfound (and if I may say, a bit late) respect for expression will be challenged sooner rather than later.
Be sure to delete your Gawker bookmark as well while you're at it. Here is why: http://gawker.com/upskirt
Penn State lineman's life is proof that higher math & college football can mix
Excel tips for PPC managers: a round-up of top posts
Will Apple's iPad mini live up to its billing?
I finished German 1 a few years ago. I have 2/3 but haven't had time to work on them. #1 taught me so much so quickly that it was enough to get me through a couple of trips.
Easy to disable in your browser, e.g. by using the Ghostery extension.
I don't think the patent office or judicial system generally refers to Wikipedia for what constitutes an implementation.

This invention is obvious and trivial and there seems to be lots of prior art. I'm not sure why you still seem to think I'm defending it. Regardless, describing how these lists should be constructed would not make this any less trivial or obvious.
I built one of my final university projects on Pyramid (I wanted to use Python but at the time didn't like Django) and ended up regretting it. There weren't a lot of resources out there to work from - be it projects on github, blogs and I found the docs themselves were lacking sometimes.

My own fault given that I'd only built a couple of small apps on it before, but it does show that it's quite difficult to get into without knowing Pylons/zope/repoze or one of it's other forerunners.
Yes, I used the makefile. Certainly it is possible that it has been fixed.
This gotta be one of the most interesting technical conversations that I have seen on HN!! Since you both seems to have a lot of knowledge about propulsion systems, I wanted to ask you about advice on how to get into the field. I am an aerospace undergrad graduating next year. I am thinking of going to grad school (undecided between masters or phd) and propulsion is one of the areas that I would like to work on.
It's supported in places where a vector format is not (namely, older versions of IE that don't support SVG).

Plus, icons are easier to handle as a regular text/font asset, than as SVG, and you can use all the tools available for web typography for them.

That said, why we never had a simple vector _IMAGE_ format for the web is beyond me.

By which, I mean a simple format to display vector images at various sizes, a simple vector decoder, with no animation, javascript, styling and other stuff. A JPEG/PNG equivalent for static vector images.

That would be dead easy to add support for, compared to SVG (just treat as any other image format) and it would handle lots of use cases.
I don't see that as an "instead of." He talked directly about his product, he just picked a very good, relatable example. And then showed specific details about how his product helps you do it. Most of Apple's commercials are like this: they show their product directly, and they show how you might use it for specific things. Compare that to some vague "we think you're a good person, and we're good people too" branding commercial that tries to relate without showing what I'd actually get out of using their products, or a product-featuring but otherwise short on examples commercial with people throwing Surface tablets around like frisbees.

So absolutely tell your prospects how your product will let them do things they want to do—if you don't understand what they want to do well enough to be able to do this, they aren't very good prospects yet—but always focus on your product, because that's what you have to sell, and that's what people are going to be willing to pay for.
Fall 2012 AngelPad company hiring Ruby/Mobile engineers
Hi developer humans,
We're an early stage startup who was recently admitted to the AngelPad incubator program.

We're looking for a bright, hungry Ruby engineer to join our team. This is an early stage startup and as such the role will become what you make of it. If you're a leader, great then you can grow into our VP of Engineering. If you prefer to code or have design aspirations, we'll have plenty of that. An understanding of Continuous Integration and why it's valuable is required. Experience building mobile apps is a big plus. We don't care about "years experience" if you can prove that you kick ass.

What do we have to offer?
-The business side: We've got provable traction, a solid business model and customer validation
-Significant Equity stake in the company
-Membership in the AngelPad incubator program
-The opportunity to help execute a big vision and change the landscape of mobile development
-If you've ever thought about starting your own company (and you know you have...) this is the perfect opportunity to learn how.

If this sounds like the right challenge for you then send a copy of your resume and a link to your Github account to angelpad5hiring@gmail.com

-kevin
-founder
Clever Cloud (french-based PaaS with auto-scaling)
Behind the covers, we convert filtering expressions in the WHERE clause to Mongo's query API, and send that query over.

We found that translating the rest of SQL amounted to writing a database query executor, and instead opted for leaving that to Postgres.

For these translations, what use cases did you have in mind?
Zach has done a great job of seeing a need in the Common Lisp community and writing a packaging system to meet that need.

I don't use Common Lisp as much as I used to but when I do I now use Quicklisp for every project.

A further benefit of Quicklisp is being able to browse available packages and quickly experiment with packages that may be useful. I think that Quicklisp tightens up this exploratory cycle.
the issue is not (only) having distasteful content; the real issue is censoring links to content that embarrasses redditors, like the Gawker outing of the reddit creep, in a shockingly hypocritical display of a double standard.

you cannot "uphold the principles of free speech" by keeping creepy content under the "it's not illegal" moniker, and at the same time censor the outing of one of the moderators of said content - another perfectly legal action.
I start to be annoyed with the "a power efficiency of 2 is the standard in datacenters". My servers are hosted in a datacenter with a global efficiency of 1.15, proved after more than a year in operation. Announcing that Google is doing 1.2 is simply announcing something wrong and I suppose Google is very happy with this number being provided to the press. It means that some competitor will use it as "Google is the best, they do 1.2, we are at 1.3 we are not too bad", where I bet Google is now near 1.1 or less (they operate without cooling in Belgium for example).
I love when I get a chance to say "I don't know" in an interview. It makes an important statement that I'm not proficient in everything, it helps me to know that I'm going to learn something at my next position, and it also gives me a chance to run through my learning process with the interviewer.
Your second example is actually how Doctrine 1.2+ works. You could define your models in a YAML file which was then transformed into PHP classes at runtime.

That of course, leads to the issue of having your configuration separate from your implementation/code.
(is there a better way to do quotes on HN?)

> Which isn't quite the same as being able to get support from the company which built the software

I'm sure they'll build Git for you if you ask :) Do you think the original authors of Perforce etc. are still with the company? Are you under the impression that their current development team understand the Perforce source code far better than people providing professional Git support understand Git's?

> and who can push out a new release to fix the bug that you've just run into.

That's exactly what Git support can do. Why not?

[edit: to clarify who "they" are]
The examples in the annotations RFC that he links to actual use C# style attributes syntax:

<Attribute(Value)>
public class Sample { }

I think that's a better approach as it makes the annotations an actual language construct and keeps them out of comments.
I've used Self Control, and I like it in principle (it makes it difficult to disable it after it's been turned on, which I like).

However, in practice it doesn't work too well for me. If you block youtube.com or plus.google.com it tends to block other parts of Google (including Search and Docs), which is a big dealbreaker. There's an Issue on Github for the bug, but it's really old and there hasn't been any progress on it. If it worked as it should, then I'd actually consider using Self Control.
In regards to the disaster testing:

How did Google do this time? Pretty well. Despite the outages in the corporate network, executive chair Eric Schmidt was able to run a scheduled global all-hands meeting. The imaginary demonstrators were placated by imaginary pizza.

How does one decide what will placate imaginary demonstrators? Who calls them off?
Best PHP site page
https://www.facebook.com/9lessons
It looks like you're from the UK. Are you going to renounce your citizenship since your government has done such awful things as attacking countries like Iraq? By your logic, I should forever associate you with that decision and deride you for it.
Please refrain from commenting on subjects that you're ignorant about.

"Distasteful" subreddits that consist of compromising photos of teenagers taken without their knowledge are to be tolerated."

As per http://as.reddit.com/rules/

"No child pornography or sexually suggestive content featuring minors."

These kinds of things are not tolerated on Reddit.
Jack Dorsey: Leadership Secrets Of Twitter And Square
Then what are you worried about? Did you delete your Google account because Google links to distasteful content?
> In fact, while much of the content in the article has been written about before, it's still probably 2-3 years or more behind where Google is actually at. I left in 2010 and did't read about anything I had not experienced.

What if they just plateaued and didn't really go beyond what you had done when you were there, and this is totally accurate to today?
The infographic is titled the 'perks' of working from home, not the 'unbiased analysis of working from home'. You could make your own inforgraphic about the negatives to balance things out, or just list them out here.
We're all biased towards ideas that suit us. If the FUD is beneficial to his business then he's likely to be highly receptive to it.
Compromising photos of teenagers published without their consent.

(I'd go further, but I feel like that's a bright line we should all be able to agree on).
I may be off base, but I see it as a sign of weakness when someone lies about something they don't know. Like, that person probably either has an inferiority complex or is a little too prideful. If you're smart and you know you're smart then you don't have to prove it, and you don't feel the need to bullshit about topics you don't know.
Crap, I've been working at home for two years and it never occurred to me to try to get my auto insurance lowered. I probably drive an avg of 15-20 miles a week. Doh!
I learned basic Mandarin Chinese by using those CD's (Pimsleur) on the way to work and back for a whole year.

I am still amazed of how "organic" was the learning.. I mean, after some time I just started "understanding" more advanced conversations to the point that even my chinese friends got startled.

Also, I have not used the CD's for over 3 years (or spend time in china) and I still recall most of what I learned.
I think if you read my comment carefully you'll discover that I didn't say "child pornography" or "sexually suggestive content featuring minors".

Are you suggesting that "child pornography" and "sexually suggestive content featuring minors" is the bright line, and that anything on the privacy spectrum that doesn't cross that line should be defended? That's the implication I get from your comment, but I'm happy to be corrected.
Flagged for blogspam.
Hi Helen - thank you for the feedback, you make some great points!

I definitely need to iron out who the target market is, but for the time being I have expanded the note to include "(though you are introduced to these topics later – so don't panic if you don't know what they are just yet)."

I think I had envisaged that people coming to this book would have already made their minds up about learning Rails and perhaps already looked at some of the other books but felt a bit out of their depth - so would have probably come across some of the terms. Hence I though that I'd keep the more in-depth explanations to their respective chapters. But yeah I totally see what you mean so I may have to rethink that! Thanks again for the feedback.
There's always hosts.txt.