skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
biggest != technical innovation

Quake 1 had better graphics and editors eons ago
Thanks fr the reminder, must get involved in that, it's fascinating stuff.
Excuse my ignorance, but is there an equivalent to git for digital music production?
You can actually get a licensed codec for Linux, if you're willing to pay for it, like the Fluendo[1].

Personally, I just use x264. Fuck MPEG-LA.

[1]: http://www.fluendo.com/shop/product/complete-set-of-playback...
ugm, that "serious" business (I don't think they make money as of today) competes with Google.. you know, THE google, that gives you 5GB free, instead of D-B 2.

I say they have serious _competition_. But serious business -- not so much.
You mean the template pattern as described in GOF? Very nice nice and underused pattern

The template pattern was when I finally "got" design patterns, realizing that they were ways of describing and communicating (some) things that I was already doing.
economies of countries with patent rights exceed economies without patents.

And at the top is the U.S.A. with strongest patent rights.
It's not out of the mainstream, but I think that some on the gun control side really believe that gun owners don't care that these shootings happen. They basically opine that if you don't agree with their proposals then you must not care about preventing the tragedies from occurring again.

Piers Morgan is a good example (http://bit.ly/12q3n4q) -- he contributes nothing to the conversation or debate because he insults anyone that has a view opposing his.
I don't think "as a result of this decision". If their claims cover these things, they probably could have sued before this ruling just as easily.
NYE.com Domain Name Sells for $175,500 at Auction
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Holland_Duell
You'll know what companies are leading innovation by how much they get done, how broad they go, how big their ecosystem or breadth becomes. Apple is a good example, Google too. Mind you, these are both massive companies so they have tons of resources to put towards innovation - so they may not actually be doing a very good or efficient job, but they're able to ship.
1,458 Bacteria Species 'New to Science' Found in Our Belly Buttons
Is this really an operating system? It looks more like a distributed, 9P-esque filesystem to me.

The Wikipedia article [1] says it's "Cross platform". Does this really qualify as an operating system?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Hadoop
Well, Fred Phelps is a violent psychopath. It would not surprise me at all if the suing was just to support their hate.
Of course it would. Obligatory XKCD:

http://xkcd.com/743/
It's a nice theory, but resistive supports multi-touch just fine. (Although I'm not sure that any shipping products back then actually supported it - but it's certainly possible to do it with resistive.)
> I think the blogger made a mistake here: desktop licenses are per 5 users, web licenses are per 500k page views, but app licenses seem to be for any number.

Indeed. So the "mobile" license is equivalent to 50 desktop users or 5 million pageviews in price, but without the limits.
> I wonder if you will get your account blocked by publishing a Google Maps/Street View link right outside the person's house instead?

I would hope so.
Apparently spiders aren't the only ones with a long history of evolved behavior; before I even recognized what I was looking at, I had an immediate "WTF?!?!?!?!" fight or flight response to that fascinating image of a mother spider with many tiny spiders on its back.
The Wayback Machine has served me well over the years. I sent half a bitcoin. The title should include something about the 3:1 matching, this usually makes me much more likely to donate.

I hope they reach their goal and show pictures of what 4PB of storage looks like.
Hey Josh, congrats on launching! Unfortunately, it seems down for me.

Anyways, we met last month down in San Antonio. Let's stay in touch man and good luck!
neat. Can I be the first to recommend that you peruse the federation specs (OStatus/Tent.io, also there is a w3 working group mailing list http://www.w3.org/community/fedsocweb/) and try to solve the silo/walled garden issue?

to elaborate, I think there is a huge future in what I call Status Update Services, and I think the trend will be for organizations to move away from the incumbent service providers towards infrastructure under their own control (as in the e-mail model.)
What the heck are you on about?

The challenge to this patent is prior art.
I agree. Sometimes you simply must have recent versions of certain packages, and it's much likelier that you'll be able to do that out-of-the-box on Debian/Ubuntu.
EFF Mission statement has disappeared from their site. They should have their non-profit documents available somewhere. Wikipedia restates it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Frontier_Foundation

Its mission is to protect against abuses of civil liberties in the digital arena. To protect against govt malfeasance. To protect and aid people who are being abused by willful ignorance of the law and miscarriages of justice and to inform the public about these wrongs.

Btw, I think we can all agree that it is failing in these goals. So now is probably not the best time to widen its umbrella.

I fail to see how the legal use of patent law is a miscarriage of justice. I don't disagree that the system is in need of reform, the EFF should be focused on its aims rather than trying to expand them.
It's curious that Samsung's lawyers didn't manage to bring about the invalidation during trial, if its lack of validity was evident enough that the patent office is now retracting it. I'm curious if

a) Samsung did present the evidence that the patent office relied on to invalidate but it was rejected by the jury

or

b) Samsung wasn't allowed to present it for some reason

or

c) Samsung didn't try to present it

Option a) or b) would provide yet another indication of a miscarriage of justice in the trial. Option c) would be be an indictment of Samsung's lawyers who seem to have performed quite poorly in many respects.
You're the one misunderstanding.
A big company don't take any risk to file a patent, it's a few thousand of dollars and a few lawyer hours, and that's chump change for them. And that's a great sum for the small guy.

That's why you see companies like IBM, Samsung, Microsft and Apple patenting the hell out of everything[1]. It's actually a great defense move (so, yeah, it's the inverse of risk) and sometimes take no research (just lawyers and money).

There are some patents that USPTO keeps rejecting from Apple, and Apple just changes the wording and try again[2] (no small guy can afford that) until they finally get the patent. Such a wonderfully new researched and risky idea shouldn't take more than one try on the USPTO, don't you think?

Sources:

[1] A Patent Warrior’s Education: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/technology/patent-wars-amo...

[2] The Patent Bureaucracy: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/technology/patent-wars-amo...
The micromanaging comment near the end demonstrates that he is, for all he thinks otherwise, at best a mediocre boss. Why? Well average bosses try to bring their worst performers up to par. Great bosses try to improve their best performers to be even better.

It turns out that, for effort put into someone, you can get about the same percentage improvement. But 10% more of a star results in a superstar. 10% more of crap is still not good.
More than just a cubicle dude
Apocalypse Counter
This is great. I've never actually had a customer dispute a charge through Stripe, but if it happened, I wouldn't be able to challenge it before (I only charge $10 at a time, so it would have been cheaper to just accept it). This always concerned me because it left the possibility that a customer could go back and dispute the last year's worth of charges and there's nothing I could do. This happened once when I used Amazon FPS to process payments, and I was forced to just let the customer take $120 from me. I know it's not much money, but it's really discouraging when you do everything you can to be up-front about billing, (monthly payment notifications, no-question refunds, easy cancellations) and then you have to accept frivolous chargebacks which is basically admitting to the bank that you did something wrong.
Well yes and no.

Sure, you will take a runtime performance hit if you do a QML UI because all the QML needs to be parsed.

But then again, no it's not all javascript and no it will not suck up all of your CPU. When you write simple bindings (for example someProperty: otherPropert ? "yes.png" : "no.png") the QML engine actually detects these simple cases and doesn't invoke the javascript interpreter when it needs to evaluate the expression, but handles it internally instead. Also if you don't want to do things in javascript you really don't have to as calling QObject slots is super easy. If you stick to simple bindings and write your logic in C++, the javascript interpreter won't have much to do.
Aww... I would love to see the shots that this thing took.

EDIT: Found some of a similar rig they built in the comments of the same page: http://www.petapixel.com/2012/12/17/project-uses-a-bullet-ti...
Most mobile browsers do it for a long time already. So it's a good thing for everybody.
I love the look of it and am tending towards it in lieu of Puppet.

Now I just have to convince the others at $work.

(end feeble reply)
I wouldn't worry too much about web vs mobile. Give it 5 years and mobile browsers (on Android at least, the other two platforms are in lockdown) will be beefy enough to run webgl + html5 applications so I imagine a lot of people will start switching from apps to bookmarks of their favorite games.

Especially if internet service (and in particular the wireless) in the US gets less shitty.
HL7 is a data interchange format, not a data storage format. You can't code to that spec the way you can to DICOM. EHRcon and CDA are jokes.

And, of course, the vendors who stitch together siloed datasets from proprietary vendors make a killing. So that's yet another group who loves the status quo.
The First Unreal Engine 3 Game Ships For Linux
The tough bit is still getting a chargeback in your favor as a merchant.

Refunded fees are nice, don't want to know how much money we have lost due to half fee refunds on PayPal.
The small investors are grouped together into a fund. So the startup only sees one new entry on the cap table. The overhead is the same as adding a single large investor to the round.

More details here http://angel.co/help/invest.

Let me know if you have any more questions.
lol, yeah, im sure it works. it isn't json tho...

you could also say Cache (it's a post-relational database... whatever that means) is a standard database used in medical systems, but it sure isn't a postgres.
seems it was more about marketing than anything :(
they probably dropped the ball midway for reasons similar to firefox
> I think this is actually a bad thing because at a certain point it discourages innovation and the creation of new things because competitors will just copy whatever you create.

That's an absolutely ludicrous conclusion in this case, irrespective of the suitability of software patents. The patent office has said these specific patent claims are unpatentable due to prior art. That means that they're saying Apple didn't actually make anything new.

Further, in 2011 the US moved to first-to-file, so expect unpublished prior art to matter far less and give even more security to those who file patents.
Great writeup, but utterly incomplete without a demo.
This is against my interests, but I was trying to imply that you are undercharging :). 5% is very cheap for hosting, charging, handling customer service, etc. You could probably charge 10-15%, and reduce it to 5-10% in volume (course sells over $xxxx for its lifetime). Gumroad, which is a simpler use case, charges 5%.

For the mailing list, I'd want a mailing list I own to be auto-updated once the user opts-in (vs me having to export then import into MailChimp separately, redoing confirmation emails, etc.).
When I saw pinch to zoom, my first thought was, Minority Report.

Can a 2002 movie be prior art for a user interface? Because in this case it really deserved to be.
Actually, Everest is considered as on the easier side for an eight-thousander [1]. Annapurna got %38 (2007 figures) [2] and K2 got %25 [3].

For some interesting discussion on Everest fatalities, try this one [4]. "No shortcuts to the top" by Ed Viesturs and the well known "Into thin air" by Jon Krakauer are two good books on the subject, if you want to read more.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-thousander
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annapurna
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K2
{4] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1978295
Box2DGame: A javascript game engine based on physics
This is going to be quite challenging as long as things are under government control. In fact, the best solution may be some sort of rapid transport that allows people to leave the government's jurisdiction fast enough to be treated and return rapidly. I'm still waiting to hear about Musk's hyperloop, but if it's for real, it could make a difference in this industry (among many, many others).
How we built Firefeed
There are thousands of developers working right now on coming up with new ways of interacting with touch-screens and coming up with new gestures. The market is providing plenty of incentive for these innovations. The only thing that is discouraging innovation are these patents and lawsuits.
I've started building AR prototypes recently and would very much like to chat with someone who's been at it for 7 years. If you'd be amenable to letting me pick your brain, I'd very much appreciate it. My email is in my profile.
That being said, as it gets cheaper to distribute information and turn that information into physical goods, the amount of value in the production of physical goods is going to approach the cost to manufacture those goods. There will always be some money in service, repair, etc. but a lot of things value will be destroyed along the way and it is not yet clear if that is a net positive for society at large.

---

Let's assume that because of patent protection not being available, smartphones are widely copied and become really cheap and all the 5 billion adults in the world have access to them. Clearly the smartphone makers themselves would make less profit. Now what? Would it make society as a whole worse off? There would be a lot of ideas that will be born on top of the smartphone - in fact, we are already seeing many of them. And profit would shift to people who execute on those ideas.

There was a time not that long ago AT&T used to justify its monopoly and sky-high prices for long distance calls on the investment it was making in Bell Labs. The profits that used to be enjoyed by AT&T have become distributed (to Apple, Google, Qualcomm and so on) and the R&D has also become distributed. If you looked at Bell Labs in isolation, the end of AT&T monopoly was a big negative. But if you look at the ecosystem as a whole, there is no contest.
you should check out Picturelife - http://picturelife.com

disclosure: I am the CTO.
actually even nightly is supposed to be mostly stable.

mozilla-central is where stuff is true bleeding edge/may kill your cat more often than not, etc.
> but in Germany I would beg to differ. Here, if you run a service, you do NOT have the right to arbitrarily reject users.

Sure you have. It's called 'virtuelles Hausverbot' and heise.de makes heavy use of it for their forums.

Most prominent case: Guenther Freiherr v. Gravenreuth was legally banned from heise.de forums with this instrument.

Here's the german wikipedia article: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuelles_Hausverbot
That's a good point and to be honest, I didn't deal much with things outside of the hospital itself (I mainly worked in the ADT 'sphere') but I could see how the 3rd party stuff could get hairy... especially if they're trying to deal with different message formats within the same facility.
After finally using Google's new maps for IOS last night (to actually find a destination I was trying to get to, as opposed to just playing around with the app), I'm really liking the ability to control zoom with a double-tap-drag. Its especially nice being able to quickly zoom out then back in with just one gesture, so you can figure out where you are within the larger map.
Absolutely (for both points). I found HL7v2 to be more of a 'standard of communication of data' as opposed to a 'standard of data'. A lot of the work I did in my last job was dealing with these differences... I think the best investment of my time was the code I wrote to more easily interact with the messages, just to help alleviate those differences.

All in all, very fun times :)
We launched much improved dispute management recently as well, enabling you to better handle chargebacks: https://stripe.com/blog/better-dispute-management
I used GnuCash for a year to organise my own finances. It's good, but in the end my needs were sufficiently simple that migrating to a LibreOffice spreadsheet worked just fine.
Well if you look at regular GDP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28nom...
, China is right there at #2. They are hardly known for their strong patent enforcement. To the contrary, they're known for "lax IP" and as a place where anyone can start a factory and start making almost anything for export. They're said to be growing faster than the US too, probably in no small part because it's easier to make things there.

If you look at per-captia GDP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP... instead, the US is way down at #8, behind Luxembourg, Qatar, Macau, Norway, Singapore, Kuwait, Brunei, Hong Kong, and Switzerland. How many of those countries are known for having "strong patent rights" and $B lawsuits and sales injuctions by patent holders against vendors?

Hmm, looks instead like most of those are countries known for their ability to produce things of value and export them to other countries such as the US.
I think this article is a great summary on how to improve your skills as a knowledge worker. I see people that believe their mental capabilities will never improve. It really comes down to step #3: the stretch. Many people skip over "the stretch" in all areas of life and reach "steady state" relatively early on.
I don't have personal experience with SAP, but I have a parent who does, and from what I've heard, it's a nightmare. It's expensive, has lots of problems, is very inflexible, etc.

But none of the things it's being used for are very programmatically complicated (inventory management, sales, etc.). The software is just buggy and slow. The SAP "consultants" cost an arm and a leg and are near worthless.
You can pre-order a kit to get your intestinal biome mapped for $69. See http://www.ubiome.com/
The fact that you are "pretty positive" about that only means that you are the kind of person who is too lazy to investigate the facts. You probably still believe that JFK was killed by a crazed lone gunman, that Pearl Harbor was a complete surprise to FDR, and that 9/11 was NOT an inside job. In other words, you are the kind of complacent rube that makes it all possible, thanks a lot.
Functional-style replacement for Excel.
Exploring The OWASP Mobile Top 10: M1 Insecure Data Storage
HL7 is often characterized as a "70% standard," meaning that instead of getting complete agreement from vendors, they decided to standardize most of it. (HL7 3.0 is an 80% standard, but no one really uses HL7 3.0, at least not in the U.S.)

Think of HL7 as a language with many dialects. As a result there are whole industries for translating feeds both within hospitals (integration engines) and between institutions (RHIO/HIEs).
I am sure that I read an article a while ago that claimed that climbing Everest was more dangerous.

I guess I'm wrong. Thanks for the correction.
The fact that simple ideas can be truly novel inventions, worthy of protection, is the main problem with our patent system at this point. Not everything that is simple is an invention - and that means the only way you can tell if something is worthy of protection is to have some deep domain knowledge. The one thing our patent examiners do not have.
Metafilter seems to be going the way of kuro5hin
Aren't the docs part of the repo?
I remember you mentioned this very nice tool (that has no big dependencies and was written in 2006) a couple times before, and I really enjoyed your comments on those threads.

But... what/how can we learn from this product, other than showing that "it can be done" ?
How much R&D went into pinch-to-zoom?

When they first launched a product with pinch-to-zoom, Apple did not know if they would be granted the patent. They launched it anyway because it made the phone better just like any other company would do, regardless if someone could copy it. The patent in question has nothing to do with innovation and everything to do with threatening competitors.
Interesting site :-) It'd be nice if there were an easy way to search for a particular language or framework ... something front-and-center rather than an impressive-looking collection of bounties in areas that are of no interest to me.
I very much disagree with this moral view. Just because something is legal doesn't make it moral.

See, when I'm being up-sold almost anywhere, in a store, eating place, etc., I can make good judgement on whether it makes sense to agree to a sale. However, when it comes to medical procedures, I can't make the same good judgment, because I lack the knowledge. So I trust the doctors to make good decisions, firstly medically, but secondly financially.

If I knew that they are adding many of these "reliability" checks, it would break the trust, and I would need to start making much more judgement on my own, this way probably making the matters even worse.
that's definitely a hard situation to be in, but it's an outlier.
I am pretty sure Facebook will try to appeal. Does not mean they will get the appeal though.
ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION - MISSION STATEMENT
July 10, 1990

[...]

To that end, the Electronic Frontier Foundation will:
1. Engage in and support educational activities which increase popular understanding of the opportunities and challenges posed by developments in computing and telecommunications.
2. Develop among policy-makers a better understanding of the issues underlying free and open telecommunications, and support the creation of legal and structural approaches which will ease the assimilation of these new technologies by society.
3. Raise public awareness about civil liberties issues arising from the rapid advancement in the area of new computer-based communications media. Support litigation in the public interest to preserve, protect, and extend First Amendment rights within the realm of computing and telecommunications technology.
4. Encourage and support the development of new tools which will endow non-technical users with full and easy access to computer-based telecommunications.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation
One Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA 02142
(617) 577-1385

eff@well.sf.ca.us
As an aside, castles mostly died after serious cannons were developed in the late middle ages, some centuries before the invention of flight.
Any other problems?
Both iOS and iPhone are licensed from Cisco.
I've worked at several companies that went under; each because of internal mis-management. Even in the current economy, its been clearly poor decision-making.

At every company, the company culture came from, and reflected, the top. If you don't like the company, look in the mirror. Actually, that's what the company is for the execs, a mirror.
That should work just as you described it.
I'd just like to point out that it costs upwards of $1 million USD to design and implement a serious Unicode font from scratch (full TT hinting, all styles/weights, multiple glyph sets). So keep that in mind when referring to licensing fees. The license cost compared to the cost of production is very, very small.