skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, but that's not how oil companies sell their product. The average consumer has no idea that octane is the description of a specific molecule. They're conditioned to believe that more expensive means better, and the oil companies certainly aren't going to cut their bottom line in order to properly educate consumers.
If you have visible success, you have a target on your back. If you don't, your risk of getting ripped off is small, and as the author puts it, you have to force your ideas down people's throats.

Look at what happens when something like Twitter or Ebay takes off. The idea isn't difficult to clone at all, and quickly you see competitors of all sorts show up -- often very experienced and well capitalized.

Those two companies got protection not from patents and other paperwork, but from network effects and the first mover advantage.
Siegius Arena
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693920

"everything is turing complete" is a perfect example of the kind of middle-brow dismissal i understood pg to be talking about.
It's a win in the sense that you will always take home big bucks. Yes, it's a lot of work, but there isn't a risk of no payout in the case your side loses. Startup success or failure means big bucks or no bucks. Lawsuit success or failure means big bucks or even bigger bucks.
Bootup.js - cache and load static files from local storage
My father runs a company which has been in our family for 250 years. It weaves silk fabrics for luxurious furnitures for mansions and alikes (Versailles comes to mind).

He's always told me that he'll never try to register its designs to any authority since the company's main competitors are the chinese, and that they do not care for forgein laws and registrations. Well, obviously.

Surely, this is not suitable to every businesses, but I couldn't think at the time that this would apply to the space industry as well.
> I also consider the lack of LTE to be a feature. LTE chipsets are still immature

Not to mention the speeds with LTE are not actually that much faster than T-Mo's HSPA+, especially now that there are lots of iPhone 5s in the wild using up LTE bandwidth: http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/31/3582684/the-nexus-4-the-v... (the data in the post is pre-iPhone 5, so the LTE speeds will be much slower than even that now)
I was actually at the same fair, I was tempted to leave my own booth a few times to go sign up. It does look promising.
Hacking your way to hipster
would be cool if you get it working
Parse.ly: Please make the header on your blog link to parse.ly, not blog.parse.ly.
The problem then shifts from competitors using your patents to competitors actively engaging in industrial espionage. Considering how easily the JSF program was penetrated by the Chinese, I hope that SpaceX has well guarded data.
I'd say that "inek" firmly lies within what others would call "bookworm", having been called that. Maybe even implies a lot about schoolwork but not about much else. It implies that you don't have a personal life, because it is spent with schoolwork.

Nerd, on the other hand, conjures up a whole subculture that is quite different. The nerd not only is naturally good at schoolwork, but also has a personal life, but chooses to fill it with abnormal curiosa: Sci-fi, larping, reading, learning, etc.
Whomever wishes to? If you already operate a desktop, a laptop, a smartphone, a tablet device could without too much trouble be considered a luxury and not a lifeline to modern society.
There's lots of reasons for NDAs besides stealing ideas. I doubt Apple is afraid I'd steal the next design for their new phone (although they may worry Samsung might), but they still probably don't want me blogging about it. There's marketing impact.

Also companies often don't like to commit to product before it's committed. I learned an important lesson at one of my first startups that customers will try to hold you to your "proposed" roadmap. Even though we say, "We're just trying to be transparent. This WILL change. We don't know of this we can do." -- people will tend to find things they like and essentially view what you showed them as a promise to deliver. You suddenly have customers who claim you not only didn't deliver a feature, but that you broke a promise. Until I know I can ship, I really prefer not to talk about it publicly -- even with tons of caveats.
What are the main differences between martian & earthling patent laws?
Codebug 0.9.1 is out
So I've recently released a new version of Codebug.
Some of the new things include: - Drag and drop of folder and files fully supported - Better contextual menus - Tracking variables without having to select it again - Some bugs and memory improvements overall

And it's also 40% cheaper :)

you can get it here: http://codebugapp.com/

Codebug is a Xdebug frontend client for OSX in case you wondering at this is ;)
adding answer to my own question: with Ruby(Motion) you can make native iOS apps, and it's 20% off http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4732827 (just saw it in frontpage)
I thought the ironic sharing on social media and reward system was a nice touch ;-)

Seriously though, I think the value add is that it can send you alerts when permissions change, or just nag you to clean up the permissions -- sounds like useful nagging. I don't see Facebook making any attempt to help me reduce the number of apps/permissions.
But the comment does not say "you must not be a developer". If the context had included a "the guy in front of me, also a new hire, was greeted as "so...you the new developer", then yes we would have something that might be sexism here.

But we do not have that kind of context. We only have a assumed intention on what the person meant by it. If we do such assumptions, we assume bad faith.

It could be that they hired a new web developer, also called web designers by many, or designers as short. If a back-end or sysadmin meet someone who is working on the front end, or even on a API structure, its fully plausible to call them "designers", be them male, female, or alien.

Simply put, the comment without any additional context to vilify the speaker, is not sexism. With some context, it might be, but in many others, it is not. Assuming good faith is to default at those context that do not mean sexism.
You may want to avoid sharing your ideas with anyone who has a keen understanding of the patent system.

If you get out-executed, its your fault for not executing. If someone steals your execution because they patented your idea, then it might have been better to keep your mouth shut.
UK takes huge step forward on Open Standards
I'm wondering if they could work the phonetic angle since the "ph" orthography doesn't exist in spanish. Instead they should conduct the entire case calling it the "eep-hoan-ey". In ads and campaigns they could go out of their way to never pronounce iPhone (then again, I'm not sure trademarks extend to the phonetic pronunciation, so maybe the pronunciation used in deciding the case matters. I think trademarks only cover orthography).
That depends. I know that HN is more focused on ideas that boil down to making a website, the concept isn't true in the general case. For example, if you're doing ASIC/FPGA optimization, coming up with an idea is hard, and implementing one is (relatively) easy.
very interesting. he also made a clever move on the patents.
Something tells me, that even with a loss in court, it was worth having a few years of iPhone sales as the "iPhone".

It'll probably eventually be called the "Apple Phone"; but people will still call it iPhone.
LTE is not widely available. Where ever it is available its unreliable and inconsistent. You can have LTE chip but what would it do if there is no network.
Get rid of merge hells
Good for them. There's still more opportunity for enjoyment for younger folk, though. Even if a 60-something manages to do the same activity, like snowboarding, it's going to be done in a less youthful body. It's a big waste for 20-somethings to overly focus on their career in that decade, unless work is what they most enjoy.
We're working on improving this flow.

However, if you tell us to trust a given computer when you log in, you shouldn't have to enter the code more than once.
I bought SnapHeal a few weeks back, but is nothing like an inexpensive photoshop alternative. Photoshop is extremely powerful, snapheal feels extremely underpowered.
In fact I used snapheal in a few photos, with such terrible results that I deleted the app. My experience certainly didn't match the results that the app screenshots showed, even after spending hours trying to do so.
Most people use OSes to run apps and contain data/media. The fact that most of the applications used are on Windows is a huge reason folks haven't gone elsewhere. This is more true in the business realm than the consumer realm that has the major growth in alternatives.
Why I Care (a mini-rant on education)
Metro Bank charge the wholesale rate with no fees. And one either UK bank I forget which. You can open a no fee Metro Bank account just for this. If you bring a dog with you they pay you I believe...
Do you know anyone that has been sued for breach of an NDA?
Ideas are indeed cheap and not particularly scarce.

Yet, when you're implementing that idea or talking to a business about buying your implementation of an idea, it is no longer a run of the mill idea. If your or your client's competitor gets wind of what you're doing, they may try to use that knowledge in their role as competitive antagonist. After all, business is war.

Further, ideas can eventually become methods honed by experience. I worked for a company that discovered attempts to sell their system had the unintended consequence of providing valuable consultation to the prospective client. The prospective client could then use hard-won information on how to roll an in-house implementation. They would do this even if the costs were higher, to avoid relying on an external service. In the end, the company ended up charging for consultation, for some reason, bit their tongue when national news credited the client for the innovation.
Though I am the greatest breaker of this rule, I agree so much with it.

Anytime I see a "Facebook killer" that has all the current features of Facebook I smile and tell the builder(if he/she is a friend) to observe that the sites after FB that ever got so big (Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare) had only one real feature before building out over time.

I am sure even Pinterest will become more complex, but for now, it is all about Pinning.

Nice article Joel, this point cannot be emphasized enough.
So you do not want to be part of it? No news here. Honesty without a reason CAN be worthless.
https://www.facebook.com/whitehat/bounty/ describes our bug bounty program, linked to from the "bounty" tab on the left of https://www.facebook.com/whitehat/.
Is there life on Mars? NASA could settle that question today
An obvious counterexample is sittercity/care.com

"On July 20, 2006, Sheila Marcelo and Nick Beim flew from Boston to Chicago to visit a company called Sittercity. The business, which charged parents to access an online database of sitters and nannies, had been launched in Boston five years earlier.

“We took the meeting to talk about an investment,’’ says Genevieve Thiers, the Boston College alumnae who founded Sittercity. She’d met Beim, a partner at Waltham-based Matrix Partners, that year at a trade show. “Nick talked about how Matrix worked with companies and founders,’’ Thiers recalls.

Marcelo was serving as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Matrix, hoping to join or help start a business that Matrix would back. “I wanted to do family, health, or education - those areas were my passion,’’ Marcelo says.

Three months after the trip, Marcelo started a website, Care.com, to compete directly with Sittercity. Matrix Partners and several prominent investors poured capital into her new company - totaling more than $16 million so far. It wasn’t until late last year that Sittercity raised its first round of venture capital."

http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2009/11/2...

A lot more backstory:
http://www.boston.com/business/technology/innoeco/2009/11/th...
> Every Android phone (and most tablets), every Blackberry and every WM phone all use MicroUSB now.

Not quite every phone. And I still catch my mother-in-law cursing under her breath while trying to mash the mini-USB connector from my tablet's power cord into her micro-USB phone with surprising regularity.

That anecdote alone makes me suspect that there's more than a touch of nerds' traditional disdain for non-nerds backing the "they should have just used USB" argument.
How long do they plan on keeping it proprietary? Is there a timeline?
> Shouldn't the platform owner (e.g. Facebook) make sure that no intrusive apps can connect in the first place?

When "intrusive" conflicts with "making money", guess which one wins?

But seriously: Haven't found an app that was worth a damn to enable in the first place.
The problem is that there are companies and people with way more resources than you out there.

They could take your idea and execute it faster and maybe even better than you.

Look at Zynga: They continue to rip-off smaller developers because they have a much bigger pool of resources.
quite.
Smalltalk is OO and Haskell is Functional are about the only (currently) accepted facts about the definitions of OO and Functional.
Apache CloudStack's new homepage
Absolutely, and I applaud CBC for running an article on it because it is a common misconception that ends up costing a lot of people a whole lot of money.

I'm just not sure this should be news to hackers.
Actually very relevant in medical field, diagnostics on its own is about patterns. What best to represent and collect patterns than big data.
Sometimes less is just less. The argument for Apple-style skeuomorphism
So you're an employee of a company, and the company goes bankrupt in part because you're not doing your job properly (and the lawyers were probably doing their job properly - they just incorrectly predicted the outcome of the case, or an executive pushed it through anyways), but you still got paid your salary. That's a huge win right?

Lawyers (good ones) want to provide value for their clients/employers as much as a (good) developer does.
The author offers an alternative that would require a change to the language. Callbacks and their use in "callback hell" are a little different than use of "goto"; "goto" appears to have an obvious alternative that was more logical to use already implemented in the language. For javascript, there is none of the nice syntactic sugar (reminds me a lot of C# recent async changes) that the author suggests and is not even being proposed for ECMA 6.

I agree it would be nice to have that stuff, and that callbacks can get a little hairy, but they are the best solution available at present. Shall we stop developing applications in the mean time while the language catches up, or even worse, browsers actually consistently implement the changes?
This is def. not true in general in my experience. There tends to be a huge gap between people who can implement an idea, and people that can come up with an original idea (even if they can not implement it themselves).
I disagree, I think this is sexist -> just as if I knew that I lived in an area where a certain race commits more crime, it would be racist of me to cross the street if I saw a person of that race coming. If you assume a woman in your office is a secretary or a designer rather than a coder, that is a sexist assumption regardless of your fine knowledge of statistics.
We're all Skeu'd
This is a subject that I am constantly challenged with while working on my ideas/projects etc. Every time I think I have the next facebook killer idea, I tell myself to go back to the drawing board because I am thinking way too much ahead and not starting small.

This topic is never going to be too cliched or repetitive. Very hard to get it right.
Just because it's signed doesn't mean it is authentic. Do you trust the keys it would be signed with? On the other hand, OpenBSD makes the source available. If you want truly pristine and trusted binaries/ISOs, you should download the source yourself, create your own release (they have docs for this), and sign it yourself. That's the right way to accomplish what you're asking.
domshot is a Python API that lets you include JavaScript / CSS modules (e.g. jQuery, d3.js, your brand style). You then render PNGs using from Jinja2 templates. Under the hood, what it does is render static HTML from the Jinja2 template, open a PhantomJS headless browser instance on that page, and then render it into a PNG.

This way with a few lines of code, you can go from Jinja2 template -> rendered PNG without having to worry about the details of passing information back-and-forth between your Python app and a PhantomJS instance.

Sound interesting? We're planning on open sourcing it. Ping us (hello at parsely dot com) and we'll notify you of when it's available.

It would be open source already, but we're a bit backlogged on spare time projects at the moment. We just made an open source release of http://schema.to a couple weeks ago, and now Sandy struck so we find ourselves catching up. But, soon!
Photons traveling along an X axis are traveling along a Y axis at 0 m/s. If you're traveling along the Y axis, you're going faster.
There's not. We are stuck in a C/C++ world for the time being. I had hopes for something like Oberon or D a couple of decades ago, but no one wants to go tilting at the windmills.
Infographic: 2000 films, 20 genres, 100 years
That looks awesome and engaging. Great work.
I think your theory hinges on the idea that most, if not all, of the players in this scenario are single. I work in a start-up environment with a bunch of men, but most of them are married or in a committed relationship. For what it's worth, I'm engaged. The whole "mysterious feminine influence" thing that you're talking about tends to disappear when people don't see you as a potential romantic/flirting partner. I think I'm seen as off-limits, especially because I try not to flirt with the guys in the office. At that point, it doesn't matter how attractive or competent I am. I'm seen as just another member of the team, and probably subconsciously devalued because of my gender.
I think it might be time dilation. You intercept photons that were transmitted a bit back in time?
Check http://wash.ly
I think the key (single-sentence) paragraph is:

Windows 8 is designed for a touchscreen.

This seems to be the TL;DR of many reviews. If this becomes 'common wisdom', which looks likely, then I think MS are going to lose a lot of people on the upgrade train as this guy suggests.
Has anyone tried Gimp for OS X? http://www.gimp.org/downloads/
I really would like a 'real' dependencies system.

But not until at least 2017 ... :(
very cool; thanks for the links.

and that would be absolutely amazing; though in some ways (and not to discount musk’s undertaking at all) i feel it speaks more so to a failure of governments (generally speaking) in investing to drive technological advance.

it should be the public sector that leads in these types of endeavors. one of the most important functions of a state is its ability and willingness to invest in projects that would be otherwise unprofitable or far too long-term for any rational player in the private sector to take-on. these investments, while maybe unprofitable to a single entity, are what lay the foundation for significant productivity and standard of living gains down-the-line (which, in-turn, spur many future profitable companies). it’s how everything from highways spanning a continent and parks in the middle of crowded cities to the internet and atomic energy get developed; and it's so crucial to society..

it’s really quite sad to see this important economic function of government neglected, particularly in the us where its proven so successful in generating wealth and societal good time-and-time again.. i mean would we have microsoft and apple around if it wasn’t for the development of the internet? (and google certainly wouldn’t exist).

it’s also sad that the great focus that the nation apparently (long before i came to be) had in driving technological advance has stalled, and such investments have become issues of budgets and ‘big government’ (which i am not a fan of at all by the way). if governments are going to run ridiculous budget deficits anyways (even in years of economic growth) then there should at least be something to show for it at some point; that doesn’t seem to be the case these days..

fortunately there are irrational players in the private sector, like elon musk, who are able to fill the voids. unfortunately though, if (and most likely when) such endeavors prove unprofitable in the long-run, little may show for it.. you’d think more people would be interested (and economically incentivized) to have a government that covers the expensive research and development costs associated with spearheading technologies which they can one-day build-off of (and in incredibly profitable ways), but i guess economic self-preservation (and therefore political pressure) prevail over advance.

with all that said, i really do hope he succeeds.

(also, off topic, but i really wish i could afford a model s right now!)
Thanks for reading all!
Most probably because of all of the press and Apple store feature. The feedback I've read has been mixed. It's definitely got more use than their first app but I'm not sure it fits into my usage pattern.

I think the app looks great and has some nice imagery. It's rather unintuitive though. To read something you have to download the stories like it's Instapaper, when the categories were preinstalled in the app.

It's also confusing how to navigate, you have to swipe up to load the webpage or you can also double tap that just loads more of the story, swipe down to get back, swipe right to go to the next story and if you tap on any part of the story (Say to copy) it opens spiralling social sharing icon.

The problem for me is that Flipboard and Twitter are the only ways I really choose to consume mainstream news, barring HackerNews or Reddit. This app isn't social and has set about 10 categories, you're supposed to be able to generate others but when I typed in 'Startups' nothing happened. I think the reason they pivoted from summarising any text into articles is because you can cut an article down much easier. They're broken down with an introductory line, summary and summary paragraph.

For example: If you wanted to summarise this comment you could take the first line and the first two lines from the paragraph before this and that would be just. If Flipboard bought them and used it in their iPhone app so that before you click to read more of an article it's summarised it instead of just leaving a quote I'd be quite happy.
Webcams are a very small part of this hack.
Tinkerer Invents iPhone Interface for Ham Radios
I come to the HN web site on slow work days or when I need a breather and generally look at front page stories or glance over the Ask HN list.

I noticed what seemed like a pattern: stories with a high ratio of points to comments were often more valuable and the discussions more interesting. Entries with more comments than upvotes are frequently pop culture-y or bike shedding discussions.

So to try and see a "best of" without lower value discussions I threw together a Twitter feed that lists stories with high points and a high point to comment ratio: https://twitter.com/HighSNHN
Its more of just a fallacy for those who dislike the law game. People shout out "only the lawyers win" type line when its pointless lawsuits going back and forth and is only ever true in cases where the lawyers are hired on a per-case basis, like divorce struggles.

In corporate legal warfare, such as this, the lawyers are just doing their assigned duties. To win or lose probably doesn't mean a bonus usually.