skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The current monoculture is much worse. It's a monoculture where the developers are not supporting the popular thing because it's popular, but also because it's what they themselves prefer. This is much more dangerous and it spills over to other areas. If you walked into a coffee shop in San Francisco you'd be hard pressed to see anything other than macbooks, iphones, and chrome (maybe safari a little bit). So forget about WebKit, there are plenty of sites out there that specifically target iOS and iOS only. This is not going to get any better.
Patent Filings at Record High
And that's not Apple's fault. Brazil has insanely high import tariffs to protect local industries.
You skimmed over the key point a bit. "If" tech is invented, it gets distributed faster/quicker/cheaper without patents.

If. What incentive does anyone have, large or small, to put large quantities of money into R&D work if it will give them next to no market advantage? The overlap between companies good at innovation and companies good at mass manufacturing is surprisingly small - large companies, which completely dominate manufacturing, are absolutely terrible at innovation.

A huge amount of early innovation is done by small firms and universities, which then license that technology to larger companies to produce. Modern technology developments are too complex to be done by a man in a garage. It takes teams of people years to develop better engines, better batteries, better industrial processes. If the financial support for that work is removed (which it would be without patents), it would stop.

A functioning engine or machine could be copied in weeks by a large team of engineers. What isn't seen is the years and years of iteration and lessons learned from the development of that machine. If a world without patents is not of benefit to the person creating these machines, why would they bother?

Software is a very different case to physical technology. The investment required in software is almost all labour (and so can be bootstrapped). The functionality can be provided seperate to the source code, making complete copying hard.
More good discussion at this submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5211953
Wow great!
Agreed, but even worse than that, it makes GitHub's pricing O(n^2) with time. If a project involves creating a repository and then leaving it up when the project's finished or in maintenance, that costs money forever; and if a person creates such projects at a fixed rate, then that gets unreasonably expensive.
335253616173627`1+
Exploiting human irrationality and stupidity is one of the most venerable, time-proven ways of making money.

If you feel your intelligence insulted, then don't buy it...?

(aka, vote with your wallet, and let others do the same)
+4407870826787
Tim Cook: Apple Will 'Never' Make a 'Crappy Product'
"I'd probably shuffle off to a quiet, dimly lit corner somewhere"

That's the rest of Dublin for the majority of days.

And sorry, you can't go to a park unless you have a waterproof notebook.

But maybe you can hide in the corner of a pub or coffee shop (with Wifi) and have a pint/coffee/tea etc. With soundproof earphones you'll be fine.
Robot Research Lab Willow Garage Will Look to Become a Business
Some potential selling points:

Despite not being open source they've long supported the standards-based and royalty-free web.

They have server based compression tech for low-bandwidth usage.

Long history of developing mobile browsers.

They're one the few that make both a mobile and desktop browser on multiple platforms. I use Firefox on Android and it's best feature is that it has all my bookmarks, history etc. from my desktop usage on Linux.
DNA as storage, and now DNA as logic gates. But is there any benefit for using DNA for anything non biology related?

For instance, one would think works for using atoms themselves as storage would yield a far superior logical/physical size ratio.
Bill Gates On Google: “Bing Is The Better Product”
It's not the new IE, far from it.

You can run Chrome on Linux, Mac and Windows! And at least in theory you can have a go at trying to port the Chromium browser to other platforms, as well.
How about allowing other distributors to buy a license anywhere in the world and resell it, just as if it were a physical good?
>I happen to be a software engineer and try to apply my knowledge of "machines" to the psychedelic experience. While I don't believe in anything supernatural, I do think that there might be a chance that psychedelics, especially LSD, help your consciousness tap into some deeper abstractions of the human mind, maybe even the universe. Let me explain that insane claim as best I can

I don't find this claim insane at all.

A substance that changes how the mind functions (at whatever level) is also likely to help one see abstractions, connections and solutions that he normally bypasses.

Heck, even the morning coffee helps a lot of people to tackle some problems they would otherwise have difficulty in tackling.
You act as if copyright is like property rights. Copyright only lasts a certain amount of time, is that "telling others what to do with the things they have created"?

There is no end of law about how companies can sell things, what they can/can't charge for (e.g. minimum warranties). Are you as outraged over that?
When Google got flu wrong
It's very clear that their pricing model stinks. I told it to Scott Chacon once, his answer was something like "yeah, we have to make money too, whatever".

So I give my money to BitBucket.
Like most other architecture-level software problems, it comes down to baking the right layer cake. Small, focused applications at the top that integrate using a shared data access and communication infrastructure is the best of both worlds.

I've never seen a great reason to create multiple databases that support different apps, unless the applications' data access patterns are completely different and/or their data is completely unrelated (and will remain so). It's dangerous to not have a single source of truth, because read/write replication problems are a special kind of hell.

For example, at Adzerk, our delivery system (that actually renders the code that displays ads) is driven by a read-only, in-process, in-memory database because we need to maximize performance performance during ad requests. In contrast, our user interface uses a traditional RDBMS. But, the former is generated from the latter, meaning we have a single source of truth.

I think if you start writing a gossip API between your services, you're essentially re-solving database clustering. I'd rather leave that up to someone smarter than me.
I think the problem is that "idea" is such a broad spectrum. The "idea" of 1 click purchasing being patented -that's not helping anyone. The "idea" of a specific valve design which gives a 5% boost in efficiency? Something like that might have taken 10 years to figure out, but if it has no patent protection it can (and will) be copied by competitors the moment they can get their hands on your first machine.

Thomas Jefferson lived in a very different time to us. The investment in time and resources required to develop incremental modern technology is so vastly greater than it was then that his words are almost moot.
And I thought this land in the north was way further up on the "good for the internet"-ladder...

Sad to see, it implemented the same dumb idea, the Germans fought so hard to stop, when promoted here by lobby-politicians.
Exactly. Unfortunately this kind of discussions often leads to "black"/ "white" suggestions instead of the looking for a good balance between poles.

I wish all the energy of these polarized discussions would go into learning of the ways to find a good balance.
Can you elaborate, if you have a moment, on the reasons you chose Squeryl over ScalaQuery/Slick and why you feel it's better?
7 Key Job Skills to Look for When Hiring
Hacking blogs for a profit, is it possible?
Guy makes money. Has 5 blogs under his belt. Shares "secrets" we can take to the bank. Let's see...
Exactly, and if they can't they will lower the price. This is all a beat up really.
There seems to be this persistent stigma that over-engineering is this terrible, terrible thing. 'Architect' has become a dirty word in a world where frameworks promise to solve all your problems for you, and if you're not writing the least amount of code possible, well, you better have a damn good reason for that! (Race to the bottom much?)

We have highly dynamic, expressive languages, and yet we don't want to think about coupling or interface width. But that's what the game is about!
Yes.

I was working at MWC when Aaron was born. I think I met Aaron once when he was two or three, just briefly. I knew him from stories told by others, and eventually by following his writings.

MWC was quite an interesting company in its own right.
Or you can just email them and I'm sure you could work something out.
Show HN: Wigwamm's UI journey so far
Fairphone, a smartphone putting social values first
What you're describing is "innovation" in its weakest form. It's basically incremental improvement, rather than real innovation.

Real innovation is far more drastic and disruptive. When it comes along, it often meets heavy resistance from those who are entrenched, especially when these people may not benefit from it. This is true even within open source projects. Unorthodox ideas will often be brutally crushed, even if the benefits they provide are immense.
Minimalist VP?
One copyright reform I'd make, would be removing copyright protection from works like this where are sold as massively different rates between markets. You'd need to look at average wage in the country and compare

Just thought I'd try and run such numbers.

The median Australian household income in 2007-2008 was US $69,085. [1] The median US household income in the Northeast in 2010 was $53,283. [2] So a 31% difference versus the 66% difference in the software's price.

However, the Australian price probably includes GST of 10% which when deducted brings the difference to 51% vs 31%.

So yeah, there's a correction waiting to happen there unless other duties or taxes are causing the problem.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_household_income_in_Aust...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...
>I picked 2010 as it was about the time Chrome started it's push around here (I'm in Czech Republic at the moment) - ads in radio, tv, outdoors, on homepages of google.com, youtube.com; Opera was often blocked from accessing gmail, apps,; was deprived of features (by user-agent sniffing) google-wide

I think by far the biggest impact was bundling Chrome and autoinstalling it with Java and Flash updates. Google must have paid top dollar for it which Firefox and Opera had no chance of matching.
I'd imagine that with 300 developers, a good fraction of them already use git and github for their own projects, and so they would be comfortable with using the interface. Not that SVN is a bad choice -- depending on your company's workflow, familiarity with git and the need for more localized version tracking there are tradeoffs in either solution.

However, even if you're counting 60.000 euro per year, it's not really such a large number when you consider that you have 300 developers. Saving on average 7~ hours per developer per year in work efficiency would more than make up for the fees, but the costs of switching over and perhaps picking up a new version control is also something to consider.
Looks beautiful! I would hope there was planning for Python support though, Django sends the most annoying Internal Server Error emails. I've got hundreds in my inbox right now. Is there any reason Python isn't on the roadmap yet?
I don't understand, why can't you keep it secret? Daniel_Newby talked about rogue employees, but you probably don't have them if you can't afford $10k for the patent. So, how exactly would your competitors get hold of it?
wwow..
I do not know if Vertu was ever run at a profit, but, evidently, their new owner thinks it is possible.

The future prospects for Vertu are probably on an upward trend. If they can keep the software on their devices updated, a nice Android phone should have a five year lifespan before it is hopelessly out of date and unable to run new versions of the OS or lack the peripherals to support new features.

The size of phones, and screen resolution might be stabilizing. Several years of incremental improvements to power efficiency and other parameters will still add up to obsolescence. But, eventually, phones may become more like wristwatches. I have worn the same watch for more than 20 years, and it was made to last.
Poor Man's Continuous Deployment
The UK is pretty much in line with the US, but here in Ireland (where their European distribution centre is :s) it's a fair bit higher. Taking the iMac 21.5":

US $1299
UK £1099 - 20% tax = £879 = $1368
IE €1399 - 23% tax = €1077 = $1452
Yep, we are. No, that's not the case.
Read carefully young souls:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faust
What I never get about this and the differences in pricing in movies, music, books, branded clothes, etc. is that this is all tacitly approved by all the governments. That Nike or Adobe or whomever can stop people from buying it cheaper in one country and then selling it at a profit in another country is frankly bizarre.

But then they'll throw a fit at each other if one country says 'no, you can't sell you're cheap bananas here' and all start blathering about free trade.

Free trade is good in everything apart from IP apparently.
Enough with the Kickstarter pens already
> Should we hire someone else? No! It's cheaper and more reliable to outsource these responsibilities to a team working 100% of the time on it.

Well if he did a good job it would be adequately mitigated. This isn't 1997. It is trivial and cheap to set up reliable redundant systems. Outages happen. But not very often if you have done your job half right. Hopefully so rarely that you decay to near zero.

> and having large parts of the company unable to work because particular services are down.

If it was real time critical yes. But tis a distributed VC we are talking about. Just wait 15 minutes to push and spin your build to the customer. It isnt the end of the world.
The repo owner was stupid for not checking what they were merging, and the author is stupid for making the pull request in the first place. If they wanted to prove a point, they should have merged something a little less harmful, like "echo This file could have deleted your home folder. Don't run random scripts from the Internet without inspecting them first."
Social Media and the Future of Your Business
I'd say the Greeks..

Freely translated from a slide of a lecture I heard:

Aristoteles ("The Policy"):

"The peoples in the cold areas and in Europe might be	courageous, but have little intellectual and artistic potential and thus easier claim their freedom, but are unable to create nations and to dominate their neighbours.
The asian peoples [probably Middle East from his perspective] have a bright and artistic but fright fearful mind, and thus are always servants and slaves. The greeks however have access to the advantages of both and are thus courageous and intelligent at the same time. Therefore they are always in possession of freedom and the best institutions of state and would be able to rule over all nations if only the greeks would band together to one single nation."

It's quite clear what he is trying to do here: Give a reason why his people are better than others, and most of the old lines of reason had that goal.

The lecture I heard led it to a new concept, possibilism (which does not seem to translate well, I'm sorry). The difference between Determinism and Possibilism is that in the second case the environment is seen as only boundary conditions, but humans are free to develop anyway. This new idea was created in the beginning of the 20th century, and it was stated that social facts can only be explained by social circumstances. It seems to be the accepted theory at the moment (not exactly my field of study).
The problem of chain-of-trust still remains. How do you transmit the public keys for verification?
Remember that everyone except the US has been first-to-file for a long time. Can you provide evidence of this being a problem somewhere else?
Australia just needs to pass a law requiring a price match for online products.
Whether you get upvoted or not has as much to do with time of day of submission and random factors as how much people like it.
The largest similarity to Windows is that Android has the potential to be as dominant on tablets as Windows was on PCs, and that tablets could replace many if not most PCs in business settings.
Pay It Forward
Wow. I didn't know Disney put these online. Thank you!
I'm guessing that by piggybacking on biology, we can use a lot of preexisting abilities of the living for our organic computers, such as self-repairing.
I'm wondering if you could do something like this automatically, so users with access to journals could download a little program, and then other users could send queries via a P2P program, which would end up at nodes with access to journals.

There could be various settings to ensure each node with access to journals throttle the amount of downloads.
This reminds me of the prat that decided to teach me a lesson in PHP security by exploiting my first script & deleting my entire website when I was 15. :(

Lesson learned, and it got me into PHP security, but I can't help but feel there are nicer ways to go about giving such an important lesson...
Also this:

http://readwrite.com/2013/01/09/how-long-does-it-take-to-bui...
Unlocking Product Market Fit
Those kind of assumptions are highly idealistic and theoretical, usually don't hold true in the real world.

It depends a lot upon the talent of the people involved, their past experience, their knowledge, and so forth. It also depends on the systems in question.

The amount of effort needed to build some particular functionality can vary immensely between two experienced developers working for the same organization on the same system. It usually varies even more so when multiple organizations are involved, or multiple systems are involved.
I don't know who are crazier here.

Also the owner of the script saying that the person should not made a pull request (and a issue) instead is missing the point, not that I agree with a dangerous pull request (in case the owner of the repository is crazy), but the owner of the repository merging the request just because it was a request (instead of a issue) sounds like someone wishing to shit to happen.

It would be like pushing a wedge into the train tracks and blaming the guy (that also had the bad idea) to put the wedge near the tracks.
Like adding a note that he could've deleted all your files. This is just vandalism disguised as a "heads-up."
Video job applications
Right. If you are going to troll, do it with something annoying but harmless: download and play an audio file, lock the screen so they have to sign in again, pop open 100 gnome-shells, etc.
> The problem is the government/customs knows that and thus catches and taxes a lot of people who try to bring over $500USD worth of products.

Does this mean the difference in the price of the Macbook is entirely taxes? Or, after paying an import duty at the airport, would the overall cost still be lower than buying the hardware domestically?
Django Software Foundation now requires Code of Conduct for support
Scenario - You run your software company in the US. Cost of living is X and taxes are Y. You now expand to Japan. Cost of living for a sales person is 2X and taxes are 2Y. How do you pay that person if your price is the same? Don't operate there?
More importantly, with the portable work stations available today. It used to be a big event to move desks. Now you can work in another floor, no need to take your bulky computer and all the cables and network configuration with you.
Old news. Adobe is currently at Creative Suite 6. Here's an article about Creative Suite 3: UK will pay £1,000 more for Adobe CS3 http://www.zdnet.com/uk-will-pay-1000-more-for-adobe-cs3-303...

It would appear people keep buying it or Adobe would have changed the policy.
Show HN: Your Startup Perk Provider AnyPerk (YC W12) Gets A Redesign
We just redesigned AnyPerk, and we couldn’t be prouder. The products and services are now showcased on the website, instead of being hidden, and members sign in to access the perks and discounts. What do you think?
Yes, I meant 700 micrograms :(
Same story in the UK http://www.davidarno.org/2008/09/15/fly-to-new-york-and-buy-... (2008)
This is one of my pet peeves of late - so many tools and tutorials advise the user to curl and pipe some script of the net to install and make it work.
Why aren't we teaching people to be a little cautious - to download, review and then install?
How did developers become so lazy, and so coddled that we desire convenience over security or forethought?
Or worse, is it really due to an increasing number of developers who are unable rather than unwilling to review scripts, tools or libraries before use.
Do we need a new movement for 'the literate programmer', that emphasises the need to learn than just the core language or framework or ecosystem that they are using?
thats the route I would take as well. But, I would use SEMrush to sniff out the rankings for Demand Media and other content farms, and then create quality content to target those keywords, trying to displace their crap hat content.
Openbiz Cubi Platform - RAD PHP
Goddamn, Ulysses 31 was creepy. I remember the one with the dead people floating around or something. Anyone remember Silverhawks?
Minor rearrangement / rephrasing of the sentence is another common way to fix the problem. E.g. in this case, changing "it is" to "it's" on the previous line may have been enough to pull "stating" up a line, solving the immediate issue. Of course, this may cause a number of other overfull h-boxes later on.

While I understand why the problem exists, it really is one of the most perplexing issues with LaTeX, since it completely breaks through that layer of encapsulation that's supposed to be provided for you (i.e. you now care about specifics of the layout, which was supposed to be handled for you by the system).
The founder sold a lot of stocks recently (yesterday), bringing his controlling stock below the percentage where he can block an acquisition.

It definitely feels like the winds of change.

EDIT: Found the article: http://www.arcticstartup.com/2013/02/12/opera-founder-sells-....
Robustness does not come from more rigid standards. For instance, it doesn't matter how standardized JavaScript is, it will still be a bad language in so many ways. If anything, standardization locks in the bad feature set, making is far harder to remove or fix.

Robustness often comes from the opposite approach. It's the willingness to throw out ideas and code that are observed to be broken. Replacing JavaScript with a more sensible scripting language like Lua or Python would increase the robustness of the web, while standardizing it further only entrenches the problem deeper.
Jordan's Cheese Selection for February 12, 2013 (Python modules)
Ern I believe we purchased the same xbox package deal for christmas. My pet peeve WRT kinect is the agony I feel when I have to wave like a lunatic 25 times for 2-3 minutes to navigate a simple menu of songs when there's a perfectly good hand controller that could have done what I want in seconds.

One undiscussed economic effect is free trial/demo games and their impact on the market. Before I tried the demos with the kids, I'm planning on getting kinectimals and not getting minecraft... after the demos its intensely the other way around.
What kind of title is this? "Evil Open Source". It has nothing to do with the content. The linked post itself is titled "OMG rm -rf ~ in a valentine bash script and its partly my fault??!?!"
Video - Change your app design in realtime, from my website.
It seems more plausible that they hated elephants rather than wanted to do science.