skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The current structure of patent law isn't the result of heavy lobbying, or at least as we understand it in the modern form. See: http://www.ladas.com/Patents/USPatentHistory.html

The basic structure of the current law dates to 1952, and indeed even that update wasn't a big change from the 1836 Act. Maybe the 1995 amendment regarding biotechnology inventions is a lobbying-influenced giveaway, but most of the changes have narrowed the patent law, not expanded it.
HATEOAS 101 - Opinionated Introduction to a REST API Style
DoggyStyle Capture the Flag Fast Cast - Nuketown 2025 Black ops 2
I suspect he thinks it's good because he's not poor.
Internet humbles UN telecoms agency
Really !! AT&T will do that for free without giving me trouble ? If so that would be fantastic.
The Rubber Room is intended for critical ground crews. The zip line is intended for astronauts.

This is mentioned in the piece as the zip-line is the safer option when you're at the top of the tower and the base of the rocket is on fire.
Sadly false for two reasons. (If I wanted a directly and short-term self-serving policy, I'd just advocate for a $1t/yr national defense budget, half of which to be spent on IT security; I actually think total defense spending should be $50-100b. I am confident I have little enough political power to not matter.)
Google Voice is in the App Store these days. It's pretty clear that they've worked to come up with a fairer and more consistent set of approval guidelines.
Thank you. +1, would read again. I have no mod points.
'I would love to hear ideas for ways we can fix this that are realistic'

Peer-to-peer social with discovery. A system where companies/people/groups could self-host their own server, companies could host for others, but all the systems could talk to one another. Data gets stored where you want it to - on your own system or on another (though it's portable even there, by design).
I was talking to my daughter (17) about this. As others have said, Facebook is out, and Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr are in. The one comment about Facebook that stood out: "It's been taken over by moms."
I really like Reddit (with Reddit Enhancement Suite for UI Improvements + Reddit Gold for extra reddit features) for discussions.

It is really easy to follow conversations, and like you mentioned, chatter can vary a lot. I don't miss the old days of forums and other linear bulletin board software/mailing lists where it is impossible to follow relevant conversation...
I think this is to avoid that split-second when hard walls would create a concussive shock. That shock would make the door ring like a bell and emit a very loud noise that might deafen the ground crew in their secure room.
They're leaving Facebook because their parents (and parent's friends) are now on Facebook and are friending them. Sure, there's privacy settings and groups, but what teenager wants to hang out at the same place as their mom?
Ask HN: What kind of games are fun to make?
It seems like gamers have very strongly held opinions on what is and isn't fun to play, but what about approaching the topic from the other end?

I personally enjoy playing RPGs, but designing and programming a good RPG is time consuming and difficult, it can be rewarding, but you have to do a lot before that becomes true. On the other hand, I've enjoyed making simple dice games, but I don't really see myself enjoying them or having fun.

So to any game developers, amateur, hobbyist or otherwise: what kind of games do you enjoy making?
Full Disclosure: It’s Just Good Customer Service
Windows Azure Websites (http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/scenarios/web-sites/) is similar to what you're describing, you can install a variety of popular platforms in one click (ie Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, DotNetNuke,...) and get up and running right away. You own your data, the apps (ie Drupal, not Azure itself) are open source, and most things are easily managed for you.
> more articles without a change to how WP works will lead to more of those diminishing the overall quality of the project.

You know, if you let everyone use the Internet, the average quality of the writing will go down!!!

The average is completely the wrong metric to be using here. Not as good articles do not 'infect' the good articles, and the average is meaningless. If you don't need to know about a topic covered by an article you disapprove of... you don't have to read it.
One could argue that every application which would benefit from OSR is essentially a micro benchmark.

I can't disagree with that, because that statement is absolutely true. The only difference between those two kinds of programs is the intention of the programmer. In both cases you have at least one heavy function which is called just once. As far as the VM is concerned, there is no difference whatsoever.

But it's also true that there are sometimes long running functions which are aren't frequently called. In Java, JavaScript, or C# you won't have to worry about that kind of thing. You won't have to break it down in smaller pieces just for the sake of spreading the load across more function calls.
That may be part of it, but it's certainly not the only reason.
This video is how people will feel and react to Facebook in 2 years
> Poems about trees are indeed lovely, as Joyce Kilmer promised us, but data of any kind represented as a tree … isn't.

If you don't see tree data structures as "lovely", then I have to wonder if you even understand them. Putting data into trees can make difficult problems easier to solve in an elegant way: searches, file systems, space partitioning, and so on.

> Rigid hierarchy is generally not how the human mind works...

That's why we keep creating ontologies to explain the world? Ask any 10-year-old, and they'll tell you that tigers are cats, which are mammals, which are animals, etc.
Here in Malaysia, there are plenty of children under 12 years who regularly use iPhones. It's not uncommon to see toddlers swiping away on iPads.
Have to disagree - lived in Seattle 2 years, have also lived in Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, SF, and NYC - Seattle's transit is by a very wide margin the worst out of that bunch.

It's serviceable for some contrived use cases, but a long, long, long, loooong way from "fantastic".

I lived in Belltown first, and then Capitol Hill (right along the Broadway corridor) - both transit experiences were pretty shitty.

The transit is serviceable during off hours, but during rush it is an absolutely, completely unmitigated clusterfuck. All buses leading out of downtown are at crush capacity, and the ridiculous rule that back doors can't be opened means that at every stop there is a massive pile of human bodies as people towards the back shove and squeeze their way to the front to get out - only to run into crowds of people outside trying to get in.

If you work in the central business district, and live in one of the nicer "trunk line" neighborhoods, and you can stagger your work hours to avoid the worst of the inhumanity of Seattle transit during rush hour, you can get to work pretty well. If any one of the three conditions is not met, commuting via transit is going to be absolutely dreadful.

The only place I've ever experienced transit worse than Seattle was in the industrial slums of London, Ontario.
Ask HN: Google trying to nickel and dime on tablet shipping?
I just ordered a Google Nexus 7 (32 Gb with 3G) and found out there is a shipping fee of $13.99. I see staples and other stores are offering free shipping on Google Nexus 7 (without 3G). I could not find the one with 3G on other places.

My point is that for such a big company like Google, is it worth to nickel and dime it's customer on shipping? Or is it just hurting me because I have been ordering electronics items online with free shipping for a long time?
That's a good point. My school is often criticized as being a white upper class school, mainly because of it's location in my city. I thought about trying to mention this in my article, and in hindsight should have.
4 tricks for designing data-heavy applications
If I wanted to become an assassin, how would I start?
Advice from a 30 year old: Go learn to code now. At a minimum know HTML/CSS/JS. It takes 10,000 hours of practice to master something. Cut your teeth in high school and college. When you get out, you'll be incredibly hirable because you'll actually know how to get things done and launched. College doesn't (usually) teach you that.

Need help getting started? Find a small company in your town that needs help with their website. Offer to do it for $10-$20/hour. You'll build up your resume and portfolio in a single go.

Sorry for unsolicited advice - just cheering you on!
> "Don't you get bored with the constant sunshine?"

NO

(former Seattleite, and the weather has been the absolute greatest gain from moving away)
In all seriousness, what's the likelihood of bootstrapping something like this? Intuitively I'd say near zero, high upfront costs, low profit margins, slow ROI. For some reason though, my gut isn't convinced.
Why We’re Building Collections
With all due respect etc., I think you're sorta making the parent's point. Technorati (and related) was useful for the Xrati to create their commentariat bubble that was largely irrelevant to the world or even the tech-focused world as a whole. Not that such bubbles don't still exist to significant degrees with or without specific websites whether Technorati or HN.
Ask HN: How safe is it to login with Facebook or Google?
Lots of sites offer to avoid creating accounts with them and instead allow you to sign in with yor google or Facebook account. For eg Flickr. If I were to sign up for flickr using my google id what am I giving up in return for the convinence of not having to create a separate Flickr account. How much privacy am I giving up ? Given a sign up choice website specific account vs google/Facebook acct based sigh up, what is the better option ?
I think Anil missed something in his allusion to AOL. There was an Internet before AOL that a few of us were actively using. There was a thing called “the web” that some folks were toying with while the masses toiled in Prodigy and AOL. Were those services bad or evil? No, but they accelerated the onramping of the next generation of Internet adopters that then quickly moved to the wild and free Web. With the development of the web came all sorts innovation and novel services that brought order to the often chaotic web.

We are on the same onramp now as we were in the late 90’s. Facebook, Twitter, et. al. are just another stopping point to whatever comes next. We lost some things along the way, we abandoned some of our anonymity, and in some ways our freedom and experience suffered. But we have also gained tremendously in the decade since. We have smartphones with apps that guide us to cool places and discovery new experiences. We have apps that make our shopping experiences easier and cheaper. We have apps that let us express ourselves in sounds, pictures, videos, text, and to share those expressions of ourselves to the world in a few clicks. We can find any number of experts and sites that offer assistance without flipping open phonebooks or blindly Googling the world.

Yes, we lost something. I also agree that we have forgotten some of the earlier values that made the web such a joy. We got enticed by free apps and gaudy user experiences. However, there will be a backlash someday and the next generation of Internet users will jump outside of these walled gardens to take control of their own online identity.
Why else? The trends are interesting, but the why matters more than the what for teaching HN members how to pivot.
Dollar Shave Club: The Unboxing Experience is F***ING GREAT
It depends on your budget. Something like a good quality pen or a book wont hurt. But for book you have to ask him for his taste though.
Let's see, YouTube, iPhone, Palm, iPod, Google Talk, gmail, Facebook, iOS, Twitter, Temple Run, FarmVille, Instagram.

What's next? Google+, The Elder Scrolls, Google Glass, Telepathic Siri. And or course Windows 8.1. It's the cat's meow.
Thought this was going to be about Jony Ive. It isn't. Dead to me. (Sorry.)
AIS releases touch panel  PCs
Just do what you really want to do.

If you want to go to Harvard for the piece of paper they give you at the end, you're doing it wrong.

The relationships and skills you could build there are all within your grasp, and are up to you to take advantage of.

Don't wait for a professor to deliver knowledge on a silver platter, go out and grab it!
Ya, a desktop program.
Mixpanel in general seems like a really cool company not only to do business with but to work for. I haven't gone into the meat of the product, but from the descriptions on the site and a couple of demos I've seen, it seems pretty powerful and well-designed. However, I have been told that it is a bit pricy in general. Does anyone have any insights on how Mixpanel fares against some others in this space (KISSMetrics, etc.)?
I think we should stand our ground on this one. We've let every word that can convey the correct definition of "literally" slide down the hyperbole treadmill. I realize that languages live and evolve, but the loss of all unambiguous indicators of actual literalness has made our language objectively worse.

You might argue that we can always tell the intent from context, but the whole point of "literally" is for when the context suggests that the expression in question may be figurative. If I say "I literally ate all of the soup in my house last night", you don't know if I'm actually out of soup now, or if I just ate a bunch of soup.
Its very hit and miss, not something I would build a service around. In my circle of 4 friends, it only had data on one of us.

One big flaw is that you can't provide multiple sources of data as the basis of a search. Eg no phone AND email, only o ne at a time.
Yes. And it would be better than simply adjusting for inflation too. Disposable income has an effect services, which leads more more interesting interpretations of where things are going.
It would probably be easy enough to write an extension that lets you pre-populate the form fields that are likely to be present in most check-out systems.

That wouldn't automatically submit the form and complete the checkout for you, but I don't know why you would want that in the first place.
Blogger starts a crowdfunding campaign to keep its servers running
the danger you run into tho, is that the whole neighbourhood conspires (whether deliberately or not) to fix the price at $2. Price fixing like this completely favours the employer, and they can do it if they have the knowledge that the employee can't possibly find employment elsewhere.

The least worst situation, in my opinion, is the minimum wage, and the only cost is that it has an overhead on society (in the form of benefit pay outs for jobs that got destroyed by the minimum wage).
Well, a b-tree might make a good backend for indexes or storage engines in a (large) number of databases, but mostly that data isn't looked at in the same way as it's stored. So Jeff has half a point.

However I agree with you that for hierarchal data such as, for example, family trees, biological classifications, and, dare I say it, threads of conversation, a hierarchal representation does seem to make sense.
I still have my PalmOS-powered Sony PDA with it's infrared transmitter and remote control program. It was so much fun to mess up the television and change the channel.
Money Saving Tips: 5 Simple Steps To Take Towards Becoming Debt Free
I think trying to convince you that where you to go school isn't as big of a deal as you might think it is may be fruitless. Harvard is great nonetheless. First and foremost you still have a shot of getting in, in April or whenever you find out. Second and most importantly, examine why you really want to go to school. Do you want to meet new people, study/experience academics, be independent, or any linear combination thereof? If you want to school, I think for more than just the name and the fact that it's the next step, finish your applications. It can't hurt and you don't have to go if you don't want to. BUT if you are feeling a lack of motivation because you're tired of school, the rigid structure, or whatever it is, then don't feel like you have to step in line. Many people, brilliant and not brilliant, have taken time off between high school and college. I certainly wish I did. Whether this is the right move or not is certainly particular to you and what you choose to do with your time off. You can do great and wonderful things that school could never offer but you have to be self-motivated. Good luck.
It depends on what permissions they ask of you. If they don't ask for any, then they might not even get your email address. Typically signing up for a service manually requires you to provide more personal info than they may otherwise get via FB or Google. With FB there are many permissions that you can 'skip' albeit this isn't intuitive.
There's even an imgur community, which I think is weird.
I would build something with them if you can. Use the display or connect the iphone via usb after "jailbreaking" it. I'm sure the wonderful people here can offer a multitude of suggestions.
Second Skin
It's not just the cost of going to court you have to think about, it's the cost of having your lawyers investigate a claim too.

There was a company going around asking $25k from e-tailors for a seemingly bogus search patent. The lawyers we worked with recommended that the client just settle as they'd blow through that way before it ever got to trial.

The legality of using pre-settlement letters to extort money from smaller companies needs to be looked at.
That may be a small part of the reason, but here are some other reasons I would like to propose:

1. Up until a few weeks (months) ago Facebook's iPhone app was complete shit. My younger highschool brother (and all his friends) who are not techies in any sense, always complained about how it sucks. One time I even asked them why they switched to Instagram, and they told me the app works much better than the Facebook app and it's a lot more simple to just post pics/browse. That brings me to my next point.

2. Facebook has grown to the point where it doesn't know what it wants to be. Kind of like myspace was trying to do everything, Facebook is in a similar position (except their products actually work). Instagram specializes in just photos, and makes it easy to use. There is no other crap to get in the way, you upload pics, like them, and comment on them. That's it. Twitter specializes in just short, to-the-point comments. Where does that leave Facebook?

3. Facebook is establishing itself as a kind of social media aggregate. When I post anything to twitter, instagram, or tumblr, it automatically gets posted to my Facebook. But I rarely ever post anything directly on Facebook. From my experience, nobody is leaving Facebook, they just use it less. And as a side not, I think Facebook's strongest features are Groups and Events, I use those two features more than anything else. It is so easy to create groups and invite people, it's awesome.

4. Instagram has cool photo filters that make it very easy to make your photos look "cool" and cover up any imperfections in the pictures. Take any shitty picture and apply a filter, all of a sudden it doesn't look too bad. Sure it looks generic, but it doesn't look like complete crap (most of the time).

Anyways, that's my take on fb/twitter/instagram.
> Create something game-changing instead.

I can't just be a citizen on the web. I have to be an entrepreneur in order to matter.

I want the wide-eyed hippies back in charge rather than the Ayn Rand freaks.
As someone who only recently graduated high school, many of the trends are ones I saw as well, but many I also did not see.

At my school Google Talk ("gtalk") was as popular as Facebook chat. It is still used, but I personally prefer FB chat (for convenience). Not many people from my high school have a Twitter account, and many still don't. Even fewer use it regularly. I do see more and more friends using it though. I only use it because I'm involved in the tech scene. Quite a few people have Instagram accounts (about a third of my FB friends), and use it frequently. The only shift I see going on is that more of my friends are posting photos on Instagram than they used to on FB. But everything else gets posted on FB.

Maybe some of this truly is due to a difference in generations (only a couple of years).
The only time I've ever seen flat comments work is when there is essentially no discussion (stack overflow) or where there is an obvious mechanism to indicate (and link too, ideally) the comment you're replying to.

Threaded comments allow for more in-depth discussion, while making it obvious where the current thread finishes, so that skimming through is possible.

Adding thread collapsing, or have threads auto-collapse at a certain point with a separate page for that thread solves the "super long tree" issue, since the really long comment threads are hidden away if you don't want them, but still there if you want to read them.
Speaking of categories: I was browsing many pages deep in HN a few hours ago and I noticed a ton of "Ask HN:" topics buried on pages 6-10. That kind of implies those should be different category area on the site, rather than being mixed in with the regular "here's a link, discuss the content on that link", perhaps? To me, there seems to be a very broad divide between "here is a link to an article, discuss", and "here is something I am thinking, discuss". One is of the community, the other is fundamentally outside it.

> without realizing that HN actually supported downvotes

I have almost 500 HN "rep" and I still can't find any way to downvote. Is this documented anywhere? At Stack Exchange downvotes require 125 rep to cast, and cost you 1 point of rep for each answer downvote. (Question downvotes are free, but still require 125 rep to cast..) This is all listed in the FAQ.

> one thread taking about the politics, one talking about the economics, one talking about the font used on the website, and another angry that the post got enough upvotes to be on the front page in the first place

I should have mentioned this in the article (and I might revise it to add this, actually) but each one of those blocks the other. In other words, if the politics branch of the tree is first, that's 50+ replies I have to wade through to get to the next branch (say, economics). There's not even any way to collapse branches here as there is on Reddit...

Have we also talked about first topic reply advantage? How many people will bother to read past that first massive 50 reply tirade about politics to get to anything else?
Given the dismal history of anonymization, a paper on arvix is roughly up there with a blogger saying 'I've proven p!=np'...

> It's guaranteed not to screw up your observations because, by definition, if something is statistically significant it has to show up often enough that it CANT be used to single out a source.

What's 'statistically significant' here? The usual p<0.05 convention? You realize that there can be multiple measurements or pieces of data all of which individually have p>0.05 but together have p<<0.05... Information leakage should be measured in bits, not p-values.

(This kind of aggregation is one of the benefits of approaches like meta-analysis.)
perhaps unemployment benefits should give food and other basic necessities in the form of vouchers, and force the benefit taker to take (gov't provided) classes that will reskill them.

This way, they can either look for a real job to earn cash, instead of living on "vouchers/food tickets", or have to take classes to reskill/up-skill. They won't be battling for their next meal, but they also can't have leasure time.