skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> A more nuanced approach would be to stop software patents and lawsuits brought on by non-practicing entities.

ARM, MIPS, and many research universities would count as non-practicing entities. As they are, they only produce "intellectual property", and sell licenses to it to fund their operations. They would be forced to find an alternative business model. Universities have alternative funding sources, and they might not be affected too heavily.

Whether this is a good or a bad thing is open to debate, but it's clear to me that non-practicing entities that produce valuable results do exist.
This is a cultural thing. By selecting a personally-meaningful name (unique or not) you give a person some form of self-expression. This self-expression can be related to online presences. It could become culturally common to do so.

But it loses the connection to ancestors that our current naming culture has. My name (first, middle, last) refers to some of my ancestors. I would not change that name. I have a few screen names that I highly favor and use in emails, forums, and gaming high scores, but I still also like my given birth name for it's genealogical associations that link me to my identity across generations.

Similarly some people's names are chosen for religious associations. In any case, will we abandon our current naming culture in favor of personally chosen names in the style of online identities?
As a technologist I sometimes forget that for many office workers their tool kit is Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. They can't imagine a world where they don't spend most of their time using those applications. At times I see what people do with Microsoft Office, and I'm dumbfounded by the inefficiency.

I think the consumer part of this technology cycle is pretty well played out, but there is still a lot to be done for businesses. I'm calling for the death of what I call the "PC operator," which many office workers are. I think the valley is going to catch on to this in the next year.
The irony of this security vulnerability being announced by 37signals on Google Groups on the same day they release a new product called Basecamp Breeze [1] which is a direct competitor to Google Groups (and they compare it to Google Groups) ... hasn't gone unnoticed.

[1] http://basecamp.com/breeze/compare#google
Via http://www.infoq.com/news/2013/01/RegEx101
I never heard of the concept until a few moments ago and I already know that I don't like it.

EDIT: Now I reflected why I didn't like it. And it is the word gratitude. Granted, I am not a native English speaker but Wikipedia tells me this: "Gratitude, thankfulness, gratefulness, or appreciation is a feeling or attitude in acknowledgment of a benefit that one has received or will receive. " In other words, it implies that there is someone in the other end of a happy feeling to be feel thankful to. And sometimes there is, but being grateful for nice weather, hearing birds singing or being able to walk (not being disabled) implies to me that there is someone "larger" (read a God) out there to be grateful to. And that does not sit well with me. For example, I can be happy to be in good health, but that does not imply that gratitude goes with it.
For another interesting look at the subject of travel times, check out Stanford's ORBIS (http://orbis.stanford.edu/#map), which lets you estimate travel times from one point in the Roman Empire circa 200 AD to another, based on several common modes of travel.

What's fascinating is how little transportation changed between 200 and 1800. Sixteen hundred years pass and the basic means of getting around are still the same: foot, horse, cart, boat. Then in the hundred years after that there comes an explosion of new options: bicycle, rail, automobile, airplane. Gives some perspective on how relatively new the travel technologies we take for granted today actually are.
And #2,4,10 are the only 3 over $500
Whatsapp Hits 7 Billion Inbound Messages a Day - 75% Growth in Four Months
The problem though as canonical seems to have discovered on the desktop is that there isn't much of a business model for catering only to a geeky community of enthusiasts.
Improvements between 1857 and 1930 is truly impressive (6 weeks to 3 days from NY to CA). The lack of progress since then (1930 to 2013, almost the same amount of time) is stark; it still takes 3 days to get to CA from NY by train. Almost no investment in railroads since US started building highways.
If you've activated your Google+ profile in any way, Picasa will now detect this and will no longer offer to upload photos to PicasaWeb, only to Google+. I believe the back end may be the same, but the sharing UI and access control is different.
First image of a new planet being formed with star dust
> because it greatly reduces the repeated boilerplate code? Which is pretty much how I define objective c in a single word: tedium. It's been a few years but all I remember from my brief foray is comparing every tutorial to how much shorter everything would be if it were written in another language. Pretty much any language other than c++ not just c#.

Do you mean "shorter" in the sense of fewer characters, or "shorter" in the sense of fewer tokens? I've found both to be true to some degree (the state of text processing in Cocoa is positively barbaric), but what people usually complain about is the former, and I can't agree that it's a problem.

I can understand why too much typing gets tedious, but I think as a criticism it's a red herring, because it's essentially the complaint that Objective-C tends to be descriptive. That's normally considered a good thing! With autocomplete, typing Objective-C isn't harder than typing code in any other language, and the descriptive names help when reading unfamiliar code. I can come across a method call in somebody else's Objective-C codebase and instantly understand what each argument is and does without having to jump around and look at definitions.

If you actually mean you have to do more, though, I think that's one of those things that varies a lot from program to program. It's not really inherent to the language.
Michael Dell did say that about Apple circa 1999 I think.
This is pointed out every time a link to a closed SO/SE question appears on HN (for about three years now.) So why is there still no programming opinions website? Maybe because it's a bad idea.
A good interview question can be clearly defined in a few minutes, and it can be answered in a few minutes by someone with the general background shared by most programmers without reference to documentation.

Regular coding requires that general background, but often involves larger (and less clearly defined) problems, more complex schemas, more lines of code, more working with other people, more supporting legacy code, and so on. To balance this greater complexity additional tools are available.
I would be surprised if the majority of people follow your example.
I've been there. I think the idea is to look for people who can "solve problems" and can use the right algorithm for the right problem. In the end, it seems that candidates just spend a lot of time practicing algorithm problems in online competitions to get good at the questions so that they can recognize the base problem in interview questions and implement answers really quickly. Just because you've been spending hours doing online competitions and remember algorithms really quickly doesn't make you a good engineer in my book. Especially when you will probably forget all of them the second you get your job and stop practicing.

I can't blame other people for studying for tests, I can just blame the tests.
Lightweight markup languages are not powerful enough to create pdf's suitable for printing.

PDF/dead tree is a still a huge platform. Dealing with front/back matter is the 20% end of the solution that no one wants to deal with ;(

Disclaimer - I've written multiple ebooks (which are relatively easy, though older kindle/mobi7 has quite a few warts), yet still have big demand for print. I've yet to see one source to rule them all. (Personally use rST and tools around it).
> and as long as they are not too in-your-face about it

"In-your-face" such as prompting me with a page-modal dialog every time I log into YouTube, demanding that I create a G+ account, and if I say "no" actually requiring a reason before the dialog will go away? I currently work around it by logging in, closing the tab when the dialog comes up, and opening a new tab.
[Show HN] SimpleCoffeeClub.com
Hey guys,

CJ here Co-Founder of Simple Coffee Club!

This is a project we have been working on for about a month now.

A bit about me, coffee has been a passion of mine for years and years. I have a background in web design, I love long walks..... you get it.

After reading 100s of articles about business, I finally realized to be successful in business you truly have to do what you love.

But to cut to the chase, we are looking for any type of feedback both negative and positive.
Which is the problem: it tries to create singular pieces of software, then cater around all the different customers it has. No-one in the software business (with the exception of Google, sort of) is trying to do that anymore. Consumers hate it.

That's why I think MS should form two separate companies: one consumer facing and one enterprise facing. Then they can both focus on their customer.
> Nokia has started discounting recently launched Lumia phones, indicating that they’re not exactly moving like hotcakes

Huh what? The Lumia 920 is selling so well that it's going out of stock and Walmart increased the cost to $240.00 on contract and it still got on the best seller list.
[1] http://nokiapoweruser.com/2012/12/27/walmart-raises-the-pric...

http://wmpoweruser.com/walmart-complains-of-overwhelming-dem...

http://nokiapoweruser.com/2012/12/28/lumia-822-makes-to-the-...

http://msoftnews.com/mac/lumia-920-extremely-popular-at-walm...

The article is pretty misleading flamebait.

Forbes Online is cookiecutter flamebait junk written to exploit Google News and nothing else.
I also love it.

I had been designing a language in my head like this.
I called it "spacy" as in space rich and a bit off the wall.
(As others have noted there are similar specs/languages around)

I had been struggling with what to do about continuation lines and multiple arguments. I think you solved the second very nicely.

As for chosen indentation; let the programmer decide. The first use of space (number of) or tabs determines it for the rest of the file. Any other indentation is a syntax error.
Small Does Not Mean Safe
On the bright side you need not fear this bug for your apps using MongoDB. Mongoid and MongoMapper do not use SQL, so there should be no SQL injection problems using those two options.
Retargeting as a concept is so counterintuitive.

User X visited your site and bounced. Now you need to show an ad to convince him to come back.

If this is a solution to visitors bouncing, this seems to be going about it incorrectly. You should give them a good reason to stay on your site in the first place. If this is a solution to visitor retention - as in people leaving because they used your site and forgot about it - then you need to provide them a reminder that you exist as well as some ongoing value proposition.

I guess if this is delivering ROI though then I'm totally wrong.
I hope abuse of process requires bonds per lawsuit/legal communication. I want the prices of suing to go WAY up.
Ask HN: Does anyone out there embed a lot of video?
Hey guys, I am looking for a few people that embed a lot of videos on their site / blog so I can ask some questions.

Thanks for any and all help.
Not really a rubyist, but if you must do something as crazy as composing a query at runtime, isn't Object#tainted? the way to find out whether a string came from application code or from a user?
From the sounds of it, and in reference to everyone using the term 'patent troll' here, I think this particular instance could be more appropriately labelled as 'patent scamming'.
EasyESI (http://easyesi.com) - Berkeley, CA - full-time, H1B welcome

We are a 6-person, tech-led startup that nearly hit breakeven last year and just closed a funding round. We are looking to fill 3 positions:

Front-End/UI Engineer - Must have a good attention to detail and be able to use and contribute to a large, modular Javascript codebase (built on dojo). Good understanding of HTML/CSS/Javascript is a must, and a good eye for design is a nice bonus. We support only modern browsers (no IE6 headaches), so we have a very rich HTML/Javascript interface that relies on AJAX queries to pull down data and perform much of the work.

Software Engineer - With just 2.5 programmers right now (our CEO has a CS PhD but a lot of other responsibilities), we all wear many hats. Our server is written in Java 7 and runs on the latest Jetty. We use Hibernate and Spring with annotation-based configuration (minimal XML). We use Lucene for indexing documents, Cassandra for logging and searching user events, MySQL for storing relational data, and it all runs on AWS technologies. We have a separate Python codebase for performing offline work. We strive to write all of our code in a modular, reusable style that maximizes code-sharing and minimizes repetition. We schedule weekly time for refactoring so that we avoid the accumulation of technical debt. If you're sharp and you're interested in learning how to write performant code that uses modern academic research and operates on the latest infrastructure, you'll like this role.

Systems Engineer - We deal with many terabytes of data. We just recently ordered a 48-bay fileserver (basically a more robust, beefed-up BackBlaze pod) to handle our expanding storage needs over the next couple years. We need someone with Unix experience who is comfortable in Python to help us work more efficiently. You'll manage our AWS installations, manage our internal systems, and help make our entire setup more robust. We're happy to hire someone with solid fundamentals who wants to learn on the job.

Salary is competitive with other Bay-area startups. We also offer equity, healthcare, 3 weeks of vacation and 10 holidays, and a relaxed and fun work environment.

We consider all applicants; please apply for the position(s) you're interested in at http://easyesi.com/jobs.shtml.
Emailed them myself about this yesterday and also reached out via LinkedIn but not sure if they got it. You can see an example of what it does here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/0p63pc89s5mhwe5/2013-01-02%2004.33...
the dust is spreading from the journals to their tools ;)
If Bioversal/Verdaso employees who cooked this up ever apply to YC, they have a good answer for the "Tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage?" question.
Exactly. Just look at all the "cool stuff" Apple worked on in the early 90s (OpenDoc, Taligent, Kaleida, ScriptZ, QuickDraw 3D, Apple Telephony...). Giving those as examples of how great Apple was doing back then would be about as cogent as this article.
That might be a way to measure short lengths of wire, but a cylindrical thumb with a girth of one inch would have a diameter of about 8mm, so no, it wouldn't, unless it was invented by an aye-aye.
You should contact owners of regexp snippets websites like regexlib.com and allow them to embed your graphs next to their regexp.
Could have been spun as a feature. Apple believes you should be on a break during this time of the year so DND stays on until the 7th. Because we believe in choice, you can still switch it off manually.

Okay maybe not.
"A few gems in the credibility department from CEO Steve Ballmer: 'We don’t have a monopoly. We have market share. There’s a difference.'"

For a financial magazine, lampooning this comment shows a surprising ignorance of economics. Even 100% marketshare (which Microsoft never had) isn't equivalent to a monopoly. They'd have to be the only supplier, usually the result of significant barriers to entry (most often cost or government intrusion on the market).

Windows competed with Unixes, OS/2, Linux, Mac OS, BeOS, and others. Likewise, IE had Netscape and (later) Firefox, Opera, and Chrome.

Windows had obvious usage advantages over its competitors; but feature-parity isn't something the market guarantees. Its competitors had advantages over Windows, too. In the end, all were available, each had pros and cons, and users freely chose Windows computers in far greater numbers than the alternatives.
Palo Alto Networks Firewall App-ID Cache Poison: What you need to know
Technical q's or content related?

I used to work at YouTube and wrote a lot of their player embed and API code, so if it's technical I might be able to answer some q's.
Yes, it's true. You'd have to pass symbol keys. It's not easy to reproduce.
Wow, someone thinks Hangouts are complicated on mobile? All one has to do is open the app, and bang, they can start/join hangouts.
Yeah, no shit! I’m not quite sure what is the point of that article, because it’s fairly obvious that the main reason for which Plus was conceived is to be the uniform identity provider for commenting, reviewing, and overall communicating throughout Google’s services.

At the time Google lacked the pictured user profiles that every other app seemed to have and so Google Plus was born.

I think that the discrete social network is secondary and the competition with Facebook is constantly being overplayed by the media as the reason for this social play.

The author just seems oddly surprised that G+ is doing what it’s supposed to do.
I believe if you do Post.find on a nonexistent id, a ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound exception is thrown, but this doesn't happen with the dynamically generated finders like find_by_id. Given this difference, it's possible you want to handle a missing record in a more graceful, non exception catching matter.
Sounds like Yahoo Pipes, or YQL (as already mentioned).

Auth should be linked separately from the individual requests if you can. It would be a lot better to auth against $yourService, and $yourService has the cached / OAuth'd credentials for $otherService and handles the auth dance / request signing / whatnot.
Medical treatments, vaccines, and drugs cost enormous amounts of money to bring to market due to all the regulations and requirements we've created ensuring a pill is not fatal. Why would any company in their right mind develop any sort of drug if it cost $100m and anyone after them could take the idea free of cost?

Patents are good/needed to promote the quality of medicine. There they're good.
Easy to use and nicely designed email signature generator
This project is missing one major, necessary feature: direct submission from your IDE/editor of choice. Creating a write-enabled API is probably the first step towards that.
I worked with brightcove so I could answer questions/give insights.