skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People will do a lot of dumb stuff without talking to an attorney. They'll think,"OMG, lawyers are saying they'll put me out of business," or "OMG, the IRS/SEC/FBI have told me I did something bad," and they call the number on the letterhead. People want to believe that other people are reasonable.

I wouldn't advise this for the latter group, but it is quite enjoyable to wind up time saying a lot of nothing (except maybe a nice description of your bowel movements) to the legal firm, who then charge their client for writing it down and telling them what was said.

In general, keep your effing mouth shut. It's generally safe to ignore "scary letters" (and especially emails) if you're not actually served, because it's inexpensive to carpet bomb potential suckers. Once they legally act against you (such as the IRS telling you they have started auditing your returns), break out your rainy day retainer fund. There are good attorneys out there and they're not hard to find.
Seems accurate enough to me; the headline says 'perform during RNC' not as part of the official convention activities, and AAN is identified by name in the opening paragraph. Also, an additional story indicates that the RNC were in fact coordinating with AAN, citing emails from the the RNC 2012 director of external affairs.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/article/2526265?slideout=1

Having said that I don't really know what this story is doing on HN, but it is mildly amusing.
Partly, Microsoft themselves since they withdrew significant parts their patent claim pretty much as soon as they were forced to make them public:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-withdraws-one-...

But you can judge for yourself:

"Loading status in a hypermedia browser having a limited available display area":

http://www.google.com/patents?id=DwEJAAAAEBAJ

"Remote retrieval and display management of electronic document with embedded images":

http://www.google.com/patents/about/5778372_Remote_retrieval...

"System provided child window controls":

http://www.google.com/patents/about/5889522_System_provided_...

"Selection handles in editing electronic documents"

http://www.google.com/patents/about/6891551_Selection_handle...

Take the "loading status" one for instance: the entire patent consists of displaying an animated graphic while a page loads and then removing the animated graphic afterwards. That's supposed to be an invention worthy of protection because otherwise Microsoft might keep its implementation secret, thus the public should wait 20 years to use it. In my view, that is exactly the kind of patent that makes a mockery of the patent system.
Out of curiosity, why would you have a strong preference for one of the two over the other? Both are open source and very fast,

http://www.arewefastyet.com/#machine=12&view=breakdown&#...

each beats the other on some benchmarks. Is there another reason for your preference?
There is no way that V8 remains viable in WebKit.

There will be no-one to maintain it and a lot of the friction between the platforms was the JS engines. Both WebKit and Blink are excited to rip out the conflicting codebases and I think they've both learned lessons about maintaining multiple JS engines.
- I often read my mail on a second monitor. The new compose shows up at the furthest place from my eyes.
- I often drag attachments onto the upper portion of the old compose and it would attach it for me. Now the only way I can drag seems to be inline with my mail. Some recipients find it difficult to download attachments that are in line with the email.
- Once I enter my subject, there doesn't seem to be a way to switch my from to another email.
To be clear, I meant that Amazon can dedupe what is uploaded through their Dropbox competitor, vs. the ability to dedupe Dropbox's data as it hits S3.
My Comments to the FCC on the No Code NPRM (1983)
Everything I Forget About Git
I agree that it's important that early adopters have an incentive to adopt early, no doubt, but given the current market, what's their incentive towards: saving or spending?

I imagine for a currency to work, the incentive has to be at least tilted a little towards spending. Economically, that's essentially why we have inflation -- the system can't reward people for just hoarding dollars, because that's essentially an economic no-op. If just holding currency was more profitable than investing it, than why would people bother to invest in the first place? I'm not an economic keynesian, but all the same, I don't think it's an accident that hiding a pile of money under your bed isn't going to net you new money in a functional system.

Right now owning a bitcoin is a lot more analogous to owning a stock than it is to owning a dollar. Which is to say it lacks liquidity.

A currency without liquidity isn't really a currency, it's just an asset. The whole point of having currency is the liquidity of it, and that liquidity generally comes from a somewhat stable valuation.
Personally, I'm glad to see cryonics being given more attention and discussion. It is a subject not well understood, even among biologists. If you think people undergoing it today are wasting their money (arguable, though I don't concede to it being obvious), there is still something of value to be gained by discussing the specific obstacles it faces, particularly in a technically inclined entrepreneurial crowd like HN. Many of us are younger, and will benefit from technological development that is only in the beginning stages at this point.
> I'd put a rough upper bound on that at $20k

Um, what? There are public addresses with thousands of Bitcoins. Why aren't they getting looted?
Somebody should let them know that unit tests are for us, not them.
Ebert's criticisms of videogames sound exactly like the layperson's criticisms of cubism: doesn't look like what I think a picture should look like; it doesn't appeal to me; it doesn't make rational sense to me. One clear example is when he equates Braid's 'reversing time' mechanism to 'taking back a move in chess'. It's not - it's a game mechanic used in the game to progress, not to have a do-over. He is operating from some very wrong assumptions.

I don't mean to restart the debate here, I'm just pointing out that his arguments are insulated and prejudiced, and hence my main point: that by denying any debate on the topic (it's the first sentence in your link - relented only by sheer volume), he refuses to learn about the topic. Again, I think this is in stark contrast to the quote I was initially responding to. I think it is profoundly anti-intellectual to behave in this manner.

I don't care whether or not he likes games, or whether he thinks they're shit art or not. Each to their own. But for an influential person in a related field to make such a contentious, declarative statement, and then refuse to entertain debate... that's anti-intellectualism, in my opinion. Just like the layperson who doesn't get cubism and calls it inferior as a result.

He did change opinion over time and concede that they could be 'non-traditional art', which suggests that yes indeed, engaging in debate (even if it has to be forced upon you) can actually change your views; help you understand why people say what they say.

PS: the snarky person in me had to laugh at Ebert's characterisation of games as 'not art' because the audience's actions can change the outcome or plot. Clearly he never played Mass Effect :D
I'm trying to find more info about the certificate burnt into the CPU. Thus far, all I can find is the UID, which is an AES key burnt into the CPU and protected from cryptanalysis. However, I can't find anything about an asymmetric crypto key burnt into the CPU. Do you have any more info on that?
This really spoke to me. Perfectly articulated why I am not on Facebook.

"This is the curse of our age. We walk around with the tools to capture extensive data about our surroundings"

Less and less people are actually enjoying and engaging good moments in life and instead trying to construct a frame around said moment that will look good on FB/Twitter.
Bitcoin consuming web applications, such as stores/exchanges, are routinely being looted.
How To Hack Facebook Accounts Via Installed Apps (Skype,Dropbox)
Another wrong issue in the article is that Haskell was not created with the intent of it being a general purpose programming language.
Strongly disagree- many people have put years into these projects and are incredibly passionate.

They will all still have to cooperate on standards committees and I'm sure there will be a lot of interaction- the browser community is fairly small and all of the companies collaborate to some degree (even Microsoft, somewhat ;).

No reason to burn bridges, I see it as more of a sad separation of ways- each knowing it was for the best.
I'm r/skeptic/
I don't think sending an e-mail is the right way to get this info out to them. Honestly though, do we really think that they don't know most, if not all, of this? I think that a lot of it is quite nit-picky, and in the scheme of things, whether or not these changes happen isn't going to make-or-break it for Apple in any significant way.

Yes, and I mean that in regard to the Mac Pro and iPod Classic, too.
There is no single best language. Instead, what you get from any sufficiently good programming language is a series of tradeoffs. Haskell, for example, provides the benefits of pure functions (lazy evaluation, composable memory transactions, ability to reason about code) but in so doing it takes away your ability to arbitrarily mutate state and perform IO. That's a tradeoff. Python provides a clean, easily readable syntax that leverages whitespace. But you can't define multi-line lambdas. That's a tradeoff. Most of the languages on the author's list use garbage collection, yet another trade off.

Importantly, it is nigh on impossible to understand the pros and cons of these tradeoffs unless you learn the language first. So get a dart board out and pick a language at random. Learn it well enough to find things you don't like about it. Then learn another language that fixes the problems you had with the first and figure out what you don't like about that language. And so on.

Also, be aware that this process will never, ever end. Because there is no single best language.

Except Haskell ;)
The popup (and e-mail) only notify you that a device has been added to your account. The approval is done by logging in with your Apple ID.
It's definitely out of the norm. Especially when the VP of IP (I'm guessing also general counsel) participates in a forum discussion on the topic. Then again, he's the one who can, and is supposed to, speak on such matters for the company.

It could also be an attempt to get Google juice for anyone else looking for info on these jokers.
"Winning" is subjective, plus commit activity doesn't really correlate something to be of a higher quality.
Eh the thing of it is, everyone can have 10x days, as a developer's output variability is high, the trick is to hit that consistently, and to do that you basically have to have 100x days at least once in a while.
So what do you use as your inbox?
I have a feeling that if you have all of these other features (statuses, profiles, messages...), why not just stick in notes, groups and pages? I feel like (what you're saying) the big problem is that FB became a huge clutter of some sort. I gather this from the way you say "whatever the hell Facebook is becoming." However, it seems like in trying to cut down the tree, you end up just snipping a few branches off by cutting out notes, groups and pages. :)

That's just a minor observation. I think t0 says something really cool. It's about doing one thing really really good. Maybe it's reinventing the statuses system. Or maybe it's about the calendar.

By the way, you do realize that you say one of your features is to "manage a calendar which your friends can "pin" events, notes, and photos to," but then you say right after that, "no notes" will be included as features. :)

I would say give this a little more thought. :)
well, the latter two of them seem to have created their domains from scratch, back in the day. Now that they are done with the trailblazing and lots of other smart people crowded in, who knows where they stand in comparison to the right tail of the bell curve.
It's a real bummer to hear that the planned API doesn't talk directly to the hardware. It makes sense from a speed/service perspective, but a product that only works through Google services is hardly worth purchasing.

What if Google changes the game? Drops support? Creates a walled-app garden, etc.

If Glass is to take off, especially in a "Googley" fashion, it probably needs to be at least as open as Android.
I have an iphone and even if I had an android, I'd never install this app or get an HTC First. I cannot say the same for everyone I'm fb friends with.

Question: if one of my fb friends installs this or buys that phone, will fb have any additional access to MY personal data?
How To Create An Unhackable Password You'll Remember
Why do Iranians love Jeremy Clarkson?
https://github.com/angular-app/angular-app this project has an interesting CRUD structure for mongodb and angarjs
Your driver sounds quite clever and profit optimizing. I had thought a couple of weeks ago about whether Uber should somehow allow drivers to specify destinations for more efficient routing. As a customer, what do I care of the guy 1/4 mile away has to drop someone off before picking me up, especially if the next alternative is a mile away? This was not an original thought on my part as I once worked on scheduling software for a large truck fleet, and we had implemented a similar feature.
I don't understand these questions:

“Is optimization of speed premature while productivity languishes?”; “Are semantic elegance and lexical simplicity just means by which to further our productive capacity?”

The flowery language is confusing me. Is there any real content here? I've never heard anyone talk about programming languages like this. Writing like this just makes it harder to understand and seems like putting on airs
He’ll have no choice but to reply to 300 people or more.

Yes, he has plenty of choices. Forward it to a subordinate, select an canned response from his email client/intranet, ignore it ...
Prices Reduced for Windows On-Demand EC2 Instances
Is your insurance company stealing from you when your house doesn't burn down?

When someone buys or sells a security, they take on risk in exchange for money. When someone is on the other end of the transaction, they give up money to reduce their risk. That seems fair to me. Just because it's a zero-sum game with respect to money doesn't mean it's a zero-sum game in totality. It's just that you can buy less iPods with risk than you can buy with cash, so you mentally overvalue cash and undervalue the lack of risk.
I read this as part of my research designing my RSS reader. Somebody in this[0] thread mentioned trn being an awesome news reader, the only problem was that Usenet was dead. I remembered olduse.net[1] from another HN post and figured that was the only way I could get a decent reading experience with trn.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5481980

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2622250
I use an app called pocket informant on my phone. It's a nice all-in-one organizer that supports GTD-style tasks and syncs with my Google calendar.
If true..

>One childhood friend recalled a time when Sherman committed insurance fraud. He described driving on a highway with Sherman when they were 16. Suddenly, Sherman told his friend to "buckle up." He slammed on the brakes and caused an accident. Later, the friend says, Sherman would collect thousands of dollars from insurance companies for the self-inflicted injuries.

Fuck the dude.
> developing the CSS specs

There's a long list here: http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/members. A quick look at LinkedIn profiles seems to indicate a lot of them are end users.
The graphs seem to imply that functionality wise C# is the best choice....
I don't know much about languages but if that's true I wonder why it's not taught more often in schools, most classes I've seen are either for java or c++, and then assembly and matlab
"The disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work."
That makes a lot of sense. In that case, it seems the easiest way to wiretap an iMessage account would be to compromise one of the devices. Not surprising that the DEA doesn't have that kind of expertise/authority, though.
Is there any way someone in the developer program can confirm how accurate this emulator is?
I like Facebook. Not the company, but the service they created. I get to be myself with my friends, but just remotely. I can name about 20 people who were just acquaintances in "real life" but became good buddies via Facebook. A lot of them are people with whom I have heated online arguments over politics, religion, and economics. But we respect each other for it.

There are definitely people who don't fit into my Facebook paradigm. Those people have their posts demoted. After a small amount of effort configuring my feed, I now get content I mostly actually enjoy from people I mostly actually want to hear from. It's quite nice!
Can I suggest you also share what parameters you use with scrypt? Scrypt is parametric and you can choose weak or strong choices for parameters depending on how long you want to spend validating passwords.
You are overlooking the fact that patent trolls do have real patents.

From the blog post, for example:
"""
Until Congress reforms the patent laws, companies of all sizes and industries could – and likely will – find themselves in the crosshairs of a greedy patent troll looking for a quick cash-grab. No company is immune, and, sadly, small companies can’t afford to fight. If they don’t succumb to the troll’s demands by settling, they face certain ruin.
"""

Patent trolls are on the right side of the law. The law is the problem.

And invalidating a worthless patent doesn't harm the troll at all -- no harm in trying, right? They can always get another patent. As non-practiciing entities, they don't have any business at risk. It's asymmetric.
Cross validation doesn't change the fact that you're trying to predict a non-stationary distribution. Machine learning techniques generally make an assumption that your samples are being drawn from at least a close enough distribution to any future data that may enter the system. With problems like text classification in NLP you can generally make a safe assumption that, though language does change, it changes slowly enough that you don't have to worry. In other cases a model may simply need to be retrained after a certain period of time. Even in text classification real world systems will often incorporate an unsupervised novelty detector as well to indicate when the models may need to be retrained.

Additionally normal cross validation (random or stratified sampling) does not work on time series data since you are in effect cheating by training on events in the future, which your model will not be able to predict. In order to test your model on time series data you would need to hold out a significant chunk of data at the end of the time series.

If you're interested in the general case of predicting the stock market you might enjoy reading up on the Efficient Market Hypothesis[0] which deals quite well with just that question.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient-market_hypothesis
"This is why we have regulations that attempt to provide some of the symmetry required for fair exchange."

In the case of Ebay, Uber, Airbnb, etc., technology can replace regulation as a means of providing power to the previously disadvantaged party. And, technological solutions almost always are more efficient than the regulation they replace.
Intuit Continues To Make Sure Filing Taxes Is Complicated
Thanks, lots of greats tips.
From my recruiting experience and from asking around others who do programming during recruiting, there are 30% programmers that can't program even simple problems (FizzBuzz, String reverse)
I don't think its really okay to post "Fuck the dude." in a story about his suicide and failed tech startup.

The guy was 16 at the time. It even says he had a rough childhood. Are you really going to post "Fuck the dude" when you know nothing of the situation or what actually happened? Clearly, he was immature at the time, but I don't think judging a person by what they did at 16 years of age is very appropriate.
I have to disagree.

I don't like to think of this as a necessary evil. Given the OP's philosophy, I definitely don't think it's appropriate to describe what he should do as an "evil."

It can be done differently. He's not questioning the fact that there's "only a limited number of businesses [that] can exist in any one market." Jh understands that the world is finite. What he doesn't understand is that this concept of "hurting" someone is not real. It's not sports, where the aim is to defeat the opponent (yes that is the aim of sports...I know what I'm talking about there). This is business. If there's too much in one place, go somewhere else. Jh's problem is that he can't go anywhere else. He's stuck in the middle of nowhere because every decision is blocked by an internal rule he has written.

There is no necessary "evil" here, there's just necessary. You have to abandon your train of thought. :) That is, if you want the solution to your dilemma. :)
Dr. Oz Coffee Diet - Green Coffee Bean Extract
You probably are correct. Initial regulations likely were earnestly enacted for the public good. I believe NYC implemented the medallion system (the first in the US?) because it was concerned that taxis would become so numerous that they would clog-up the streets. Over time, politicians figured out how to exploit their increasing power for personal gain. There's nothing unique to taxi service in this pattern.
It absolutely can work -- I used to work at one. The model is for a few principals / partners who are responsible for finding clients, negotiating contracts, and attracting talent. The clients tend to be sales, marketing, or finance organizations who are looking for projects to be built, but need a separate team from the internal IT group because of either a) bandwidth, b) expertise, or c) politics. The day-to-day project managers act as product managers, lead consultants, and team leads. Developers are encouraged to work closely with client contacts and attend all of the relevant product meetings.

These shops tend to stay small and maintain an specific expertise. It probably doesn't fit most definitions of a startup (clear business model, slower growth, requires little capital, not product focused), but it can be a good business opportunity if you can keep your pipeline packed. A developer-centric culture can indeed thrive, but doesn't appeal to everyone. You're building something new, but you're walking away from it in 3-6 months, and getting started is usually untangling and navigating an existing mess. There are tons of business rules that require some laborious and byzantine exploration of the business, and doing something new because it's cool and interesting usually isn't an option. You're far less likely to have the freedom to pick fun new technologies, but instead need to pick existing stuff that the internal IT team knows how to maintain when you're out, even if it's two major versions behind and you're not allowed to access the machines directly.
lol, I'm losing all my valuable karma points!! I'm melting. No, really; I am sorry for being rude. I was being short sighted. I understand the issues encountered in responsive layout are new and evolving. I am sure you will create a great tool that fits your vision. I happen to think that LESS combined with media queries can accomplish any responsive layout I have yet to fathom. I hope that I can post more meaningful comments in the future.
No, think about the logical consequence of such an expansion. It would effectively make all encryption such as SSL/TLS illegal.