skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really want to give a "fuck yeah" for using qt as the app backend. I think qt5 is amazing and hope it can really take off. Especially with Necessitas you can port Ubuntu native apps to Android easily, and then porting to the desktop is trivial. I don't think they talked enough about how you can easily write a qt5 app that can run on everything but ios (and even that is seeing some traction).

I wonder how this is going to conflate with their ongoing focus on the desktop towards python + gtk apps. Also, Plasma Active is already targeting mobile and I don't like how once again the GNU stack is fragmenting in approaching mobile into 3 camps (plasma active, gnome, ubuntu).
I personally think the biggest reason to go to college is that it's just plain fun. A rare chance in your life to have very few responsibilities and explore being yourself.

Unfortunately, add mounting costs, difficulties of finding jobs, and debt, and I'm not sure college is the perfect answer for long term success.

I wonder if many hot startups would rather hire someone that dropped out to do their own thing vs. someone who finished their degree? There is no replacement for real-world experience.
> "How would you process a credit card payment for someone who has only one name?"
The Sripe API doesn't require a name at all, so they're clearly ahead of the curve here!
One simple reform to the patent system would be to force an automatic review of any patent involved in a lawsuit where the patent might be rendered invalid before the court needs to weigh in on the matter.

Right now the court needs to decide if the patent is enforceable, which seems like it's basically doing the job the patent issuing entity should've done in the first place.
I have absolutely no evidence to back this up, but: I feel as if the "shallowness" of recent SV-culture startups can partly be attributed to the glorification of what I'll call "dropout culture," that being a subtle anti-intellectualism and an acceptance of the idea that only technical knowledge is valuable.

University forces you to be exposed to a lot of different fields (that you would never see otherwise).
I planned on dropping out and found myself back at school - we had on path to profitability and California costs a lot more than Illinois. When my parents started getting collection letters from my university and we were running out of money (strange how $20,000 doesn't get you that far), I knew it was time to go back. Of course, my family couldn't afford to send me to school without loans, so ymmv.

I found that the time I spent in the trenches actually made me appreciate school MORE. When I got back, my desire to learn was back. I don't think I would have appreciated school as much if I hadn't just gotten out there.

I've decided to count my time in the valley as "studying abroad" ;)
I don't know about the different kinds of patents, but shouldn't the printer manufacturers be paying up licensing fees?
Does this make it substantially easier to get Python on the phone?
Does anyone actually use the Rankine scale?
SEEKING FREELANCER - remote

Requirements:

-Deep expertise in a programming language

-Prior teaching experience

-Fluent in English

Email teachcs2013@gmail.com if you're interested.
It would been even better if you got there in half the time. I would love for Concorde to come back with some improvements of course.
And inside the East Coast corridor, regular bicycles are prohibited on all Amtrak trains at all times. I would literally pay an extra $50 per bicycle round trip if they offered it, but they do not. Oh, and the train from NYC to Montreal runs slowly, which gives it an ideal duration for a night service, but none is ever offered. You have to do the 12-hour trip during the day, which for working people is nonsensical.
One of the top three classes I took at my university (next to "Algorithms" and "Data Structures") was "Introduction to Drawing." It's changed the way I look at aesthetic beauty. I would have had a hard time motivating myself to have that experience otherwise.
Toyota is weird, in that all of the nuts & bolts on their cars are metric, but their tolerances in the factory service manual are listed in thousandths of an inch. I did a double-take when I saw the deck flatness tolerance of ".002" for my car, for example.
I think it is more important to be mindful when you code, rather than writing code that somehow (but doesn't) help you "be more mindful."
Here it talks about what you can use for apps:

http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/phone/app-ecosystem
> If I were to do that with an Ubuntu phone, though, I'd have access to much more mature productivity software built for the desktop.

Sure you COULD, but serious productivity software is written to make maximal use of input devices. Keyboard shortcut usage is often not optional. That isn't going to translate to a touchscreen, or even a slide-out microkeyboards.
Agreed. College afforded me time to find out who I really was, what I enjoyed doing, and who I enjoyed doing it with. I envision myself making many, many mistakes in those departments had I not gone. The debt was completely worth it in my mind, I just treated it as an investment and worked hard to make sure I got an appropriate return.
The chromebook was the biggest selling laptop this Christmas on amazon.

http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/chromebook-christmas-be...

Definitely far from not working out! I think it's pretty darn proven as a consumer product.
If you find ChromeOS limiting, you can always install a full Linux distro on the machine.

My Samsung ARM Chromebook has two partitions, one of which loads into ChromeOS and one which loads into a full Ubuntu/ARM rootfs.
I've Given up.

BUT, the metric system in the US has ben usurped by base 10 US units. As a civil engineer the measuring tape was in feet and "tenths of feet". A "mil" is a thousandth of an inch.
I worked for the US government civil engineers in the 1990's. They were going to issue contracts in metric years ago. I don't think they ever did.
Codepen.io and CSSDeck.com are the Dribbbles of code.
It'll go down, but at least it won't be destroyed. Storms last less than a day, so you can get power back on then, rather than months later.
Don't forget, cross-country air travel generally requires at least an additional 3 hours of travelling outside the city to and from the airport, checkin, security, taxiing, unloading, etc.

A five hour cross country flight really takes 8 hours, so a 15 hour train between city centers doesn't sound so bad. At half the distance, a 7 hour train vs a 5.5 hour plane excursion, sounds delightful.
Eh ...

Before you try that, you should try an older product called the Wild Divine.

It's a nice game, but since my practice has stabilized, I have not played with it.
That's why plywood in Europe is usually sold in sheets of 240 cms, i.e. 2.4 m, which seems easier to calculate with, in particular when adding lengths.
They had a working prototype that would run Android and Ubuntu side by side. Would work as a standard Android phone. But when you dock it to the desktop, it's a 100% capable Ubuntu computer, sharing resources with Android. That was perfect. It's the best of both worlds, I'm sure it would be a huge hit. Leverage both the Android mobile ecosystem + Linux desktop at once? That was genius. But instead they chose the greedy path and try to control all of it themselves.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv1Z7bf4jXY

edit: I just learned that Ubuntu for Android was not abandoned. It's still a separate project. They wanna release Ubuntu for Android first in mid 2013. And hopefully that will be a gateway to get Android users interested in the Ubuntu Phone which will launch in 2014.

http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/android
I wrote a bot a year or so ago which implemented a very basic subset of Turtle / LOGO using python for minecraft classic and a repl. When the newer protocol came out, I stopped working on it after the protocol changed but it was a fun exercise.
Szabo's bit gold ideas, or Bitcoin's ideas, when taken individually, are not remarkable.

It is the combination of all of them, that truly gives the whole distributed currency its elegance. And I would argue that Szabo is the first one to put almost all of Bitcoin's ideas together, in writing. Yes bit gold's proof-of-work takes a trusted timestamp as input, but simply changing it to take a head of the "chain of title" as input is really the only (minor) difference between bit gold and Bitcoin.
Sure you can. I have rented cars a bunch of times without a credit card. Enterprise makes it pretty friendly, but most companies will rent you the car. Lost sales are lost sales, if you show up with money in hand they will try and get you into the car. Enterprise takes a deposit of some sort which is reasonable and the same thing that most hotel chains do.

A credit card isn't a ton of protection for the rental car company anyways, regardless of authorization it's not likely you have a credit line to cover the entire car.
For heaven's sake, don't apologize for giving an honest opinion. If we had to apologize every time someone in the world found something to get offended by then half our speech would be apologies for the other half.
Lumber isn't 'weird' the sizes make perfect sense, if you're constructing something beyond a picknick table you'll see the logic immediately. Nobody said anything about integer whole numbers.

But I can't seem to get around your mental block that the system you are working in is Imperial, not metric so I'll leave it at this.
I agree that it is extortion in spirit. But I wonder if patent trolls can be prosecuted on current extortion laws, as their defense would be "We're just trying to enforce our lawful patents." If prosecutors would not want to try, then I wonder how we could change extortion laws to include this practice.
Apple Reportedly Adding High-Speed 802.11ac Wireless To 2013 Macs
"What about things like wheel nuts"

I can verify its 30 mm with my wheels/hubs on my car. Supposedly that's "unusual" and most cars that size are 28mm or 32mm so people end up mystified why their 28 doesn't fit something that looks visually at a distance like a 28, or they use a way too big 32 and neatly round off the corners of the nut when it slips. I imagine using an imperial impact wrench is an effective way to round off the wheel nuts on a Saturn.

I would imagine if you bought aftermarket wheels/studs alloy or steel you could have most any size within a narrow range that's compatible with the hub.

"hitch"

LOL at the idea of my tiny little 2-door subcompact towing anything like those giant RV trailers. I do know standard american trailer hitch on pickup trucks has been 2 inch square for a century or something like that. Kind of like how we're not going to change every piece of railroad track and rolling stock in the USA to a metric equivalent rail gauge any time soon, until the end of time we'll be stuck with 50.8mm trailer hitches. I bet you could slam a european 50mm in the hole within manufacturing/rust tolerances.
The anti-fork rules concern Google's support and applications for devices, not the source code of the OS itself.

Amazon has forked Android, but by doing so they aren't allowed to use any of Google's apps in their devices.
By itself that isn't so surprising. After all, the trip by horse-drawn coach hasn't improved much either.

Cars are point-to-point. Berlin to Paris by train is about 12 hours. By car it's about 10, because there's no need to stop and change. While Frankfurt->Paris is 4 hours by non-stop ICE, and 5 by car.
Don't let somebody else tell you that your square peg needs to fit in that round hole over there.

I have a B.S. and a M.S. in computer science and I am 100% confident that it was the right choice /for me/. I also work at DISQUS with some of the smartest best systems engineers I have ever known, none of them took computer science, only some graduated college, and some never even finished high school. Education is a very personal thing and America's system works for most people, but when it feels wrong go find something else that feels right.
Open source Linux operating system Ubuntu finally arrives for smartphones
If he ditched eclipse, it could actually work. Developing Android apps with Emacs and the command line tools is really quite feasible, especially since there's no enterprise shit-ola which is what people rely heavily on IDEs to generate for them.

But I don't think the Android SDK is available in anything but x86... so, maybe if he used qemu emulation?
As a current student, these are the types of projects that made me want to study this field. Does anyone know if it's even possible to get a job at one of these R&D centers with just an undergrad degree? What sort of things can I do to make myself a more viable candidate for one of these research labs?
> It says it uses the Android kernel and drivers to be compatible with the hardware

Where did you see that? Are you sure you're not confusing it with the "Ubuntu for Android" project? That is a different project from this.

I don't think an Ubuntu phone will have anything to do with Android. It's its own OS, and you won't see it on all phones or anything like that - just on the "Ubuntu phones" that will be shipping starting with 2014. They might port it to some existing hardware like Galaxy Nexus for demo purposes, though, the way Mozilla did with Firefox OS on Galaxy S2.
Yeah, Stripe doing it like a Boss :)

That said, you know there's programmers out there not using the Stripe Button and coding forms by hand that will have validations on them for the First and Last name because they think it's the right thing to do. I've seen it.
Solid advice. If it doesn't work out and you quit your job to pursue the startup you might have a smaller bank account but you will have another solid item for your resume and it shouldn't be too hard to find a new job. If on the other hand it doesn't work out and you dropped out of college, you are in a much worse spot. Failed startup wont do much for getting back into school and now you still have to fund the schooling. You could get a job but it wont pay much without a college degree.
I went to deep space and all I got was this lousy Alzheimer's disease
I think you'll find, this is the general trend across the whole of society, not just programmers.
I see that you're new here. Please remain civil. This is not Reddit.

It is true that a portion of the research sponsored by Microsoft is published as academic papers, but I'd suspect that, in relation to the vast amount of money Microsoft is spending on R&D, those papers represent less than 1% of the results. We never hear about the hundreds of millions spent where the results never saw the light of day.
I was under the impression that some of these patent trolls are really just a collection of lawyers. If they're doing their own work, instead of getting an outside firm to do it, their costs should be much less.
> For traveling from coast to coast there would be little point, but for shorter distances within the US high-speed rail should beat air travel.

Absolutely, which is why I pointed out that for the distance it wouldn't be a good idea: cross-continental high-speed rail makes little sense, the sweet spot currently tops out around 1000 miles (and even then it depends, it works well in Europe because train stations can be in the city center — where things happen and mass transportation is developed — versus airport being much further out in the suburbs or countryside, I do not know if it'd work as well in the US where the most affluent segments of the population tends to live in the suburbs rather than the city and cities are more often designed around car travel).
Works for me, Chrome 25.0.1364.5 dev, OS X 10.8.2. Maybe it's a stable version bug.
I couldn't agree more. Steve Jobs is an interesting example in this case - although he dropped out, he credited a random calligraphy class as the inspiration for some of the Mac's beautiful typography:

"Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

"None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography."

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/steve-jobs-designer...
I daily-drive a 1997 Ford Ranger pickup. The engine was produced in Cologne, Germany, and thus everything under the hood is metric. The body & chassis was built in Dearborn, Michigan, and thus everything not under the hood is SAE.
Obama wants to increase the share of the economy taken up by the federal government. I consider that to be dragging America further to the left, by any standard.

He also appoints people who are activist regulators and judges who view the Constitution as no limit to progressive doctrine.
Ask HN: Expose firewalled server securely for push notifications?
The golden handcuffs are your ability to ship Android's userland (including access to use of trademarks and Play Store). If Google shuts you out, you're out. Ship all the linux kernels you want.

Technically, you can probably ship something based on pure AOSP, but your competitors will have had pre-AOSP access to the code for multiple months and there are no guarantees that AOSP even works without Google's magic proprietary mojo. CyanogenMod had to develop the missing pieces when Google sent their C&D over the proprietary bits. I would suspect defensive things designed to make it more difficult for Amazon to leech AOSP are either present or coming soon particularly with the rumors that Amazon is working toward introducing a phone.
I always wished for myself and for the larger web community a 'Rock solid web based Open' Mobile Platform, and the change is happening very fast.

I fell in love with Ubuntu, with the 12.04 Release. Remarkable, well thought user experience.
6 months back, I switched completely to Ubuntu 12.04 and its my primary machine now. I'm blown away with their agile methodologies, love every small part of the web-integration and the Ubuntu software market.

Worth mentioning, Ubuntu Desktop is also strongly emerging as perfect web platform with tight integration with web-services. Many Developers are considering this as a strong open platform(as its web), and have started writing apps for ubuntu software market. So these apps should run seamlessly on Smartphones too.

The concept of HUD to search inside an webapps and navigate complex menu's is revolutionary! Worth mentioning, webapps are now exactly like native desktop apps; I recently used the Gmail webapp, it opens as separate app and we can search inside gmail. (They have an API to enable such HUD controls for any webapp).

All such advancements are only possible today, as we have faster Javascript engines, can leverage Cloud services, access to cheaper hardware and much faster Internet Penetration and adoption than ever before. The web can function as a strong platform by itself and not a hybrid model.
That article seems like a bunch of useless pedantry to me.

"...refer people to this post the next time they suggest a genius idea like a database table with a first_name and last_name column."

So what's his suggestion then? Take this list of "bad" assumptions and try to build around them? Hogwash. Questioning whether you should design around someone not having a name is like asking if you exist.

I know companies that have been making millions for 15-20 years with this genius idea. You know what's so genius about it? It's simple, the developers understand it and it works for a great, great majority of cases.
Hardly static, passenger rail has been in collapse in the U.S. The eastern US is dotted with shuttered train stations and the Amtrak monopoly can barely keep its lights on.
IANAL, but I'd guess that the license pricing in their demand would play into the potential damages assessed by a suit later.

Once they admit that the patent is only worth $75 to a business, then how would they sue for $200,000 later?

Treble damages? $225?
What kind of situation is "such a situation" and why is a public forum bad?
you can set traffic to go through VPN on your iPhone
Here's a link to the YouTube video presentation that jumps directly to the section about the new smartphone

http://youtu.be/cpWHJDLsqTU?t=5m20s
California wine 750mL bottles. Obviously the imported stuff is in mL but so are the domestics.

Every OTC pharmaceutical I've ever seen, pretty much.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator
1996. Web browser, email, calendar and can run apps. I also had an iPaq, but that was only a few years later. Great little devices apart from the browser and activestink.
About the numerical argument, that's not a good argument. The fact that 92,5% of the people on the Forbes 30 Under 30 for Tech list did not drop out is meaningless by itself. Why?

Imagine that 92,5% of all population had degrees. Or even better: that 99% of all population had degrees.

It'd be more meaningful if you added the percentage of the population with degrees, the % of people without degrees who created failed startups...

But, anyways, I don't think that having/not having a degree is a fundamental factor in the success of your startup. Maybe you're already good enough to go forward. Maybe your idea is so great it compensates your lack of technical knowledge. Frankly, I think that dropping college to do a startup is neither a good or bad idea. It depends on you, your circumstances and the startup itself.
I run Ubuntu on mine.

I haven't tried running Eclipse. Oracle recently released an Early Access version of Java 8 with hardfp support to cash in on the Raspberry Pi fever, presumably that build would work on the ARM/Chromebook running Ubuntu (though it wouldn't be totally optimized for it) but I haven't tried it to be sure.

If I were doing Android development on this system I'd probably stick with ant based builds and use emacs or gedit (I wish Sublime Text 2 had an ARM build, the fact that it doesn't is kind of killing it as a useful editor for me these days). Eclipse is already a bit slower than I would like on my desktop, I'd imagine using it wouldn't be that great on the Chromebook.
It strikes me that one root cause of the patent troll problem, besides unscrupulous trolls and their evil lawyers, is idiot patent examiners who would allow patenting the process of drinking a cup of coffee of morning if there was no prior art on file on the subject.

It all comes down to incentives. Good patent lawyers know they can make big bucks working in private practice (possibly for trolls), whilst mediocre ones happy with a government salary go ... where else? ... the USPTO.
Believing that you can learn what you need without being taught by others is not anti-intellectualism.

SV-culture startups certainly value far more than technical knowledge - marketing (or "growth hacking" or whatever) for instance is certainly valued.