skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We couldn't sue because we didn't know what we would sue on. They wouldn't even tell us the patent numbers - so we didn't have the knowledge necessary to even file a complaint.

As for suing because of the forbearance agreement, they try to write these things so they are just on the side of the line, and it is really hard to make a RICO suit stick (see Cisco and Innovatio).

We, of course, think that it is just BS. Now we are on record saying so.

- Van (Rackspace VP of IP)
One of the things I miss most about working with CouchDB is its REST interface. I hope something like this surfaces for Ruby.
Did you try leaning in?
Caffeine (mobile app for coffee enthusiasts) is now available for iOS
He refers to Facebook, but he mentions he wishes Twitter were like this, hence the question what utility would this have for Twitter.
Sorry, Libertarians, History Shows Bitcoin Isn't the Future
Sorry for the late response. I cant recall anything that I missed from NotePad++. Once I was all set up in ST2 (which was super quick thanks to the package installer), everything felt the similar.
Ask HN: Does anybody need 16 years old designer? Hire me
I'm very good with HTML5, CSS, Photoshop and some of css frameworks like Bootstrap or Gumby. I know also basics of javascript and jquery.

Here is my recent work:

- http://ewooy.com/img/streamio.png

- http://ewooy.com/img/edure.png

- http://ewooy.com/img/flare.png

- http://ewooy.com/img/enyo.png

- http://ewooy.com/img/karla.png

- http://ewooy.com/img/truffle.png

Can any of you suggest me a way to get some recognition? Or maybe how to get a freelance job? Any design job related tips?

Thanks!
>As a professional movie critic, he earned respect through his craft, but I think world of cinema is better off without any movie critic.

Totally disagree - the critic, at his best, spotlights movies you would have missed, unlocks movies you would have found confusing, and rescues movies you would have hated. They facilitate love of cinema.
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/12/win_ben_steins_mind.... doesn't read like he could hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time.
I don't use the word "evil" pretty much for anybody, but I think the business model is at the very least screwed up. If it's a valuable service, why do they have to be so shady? I'd happily pay facebook $10/month or whatever (I can't imagine they make more than that on ads on me) to use their service. The problem is that they make it seem free, and people just don't understand the extent to which it tracks you. It's the same business model car dealerships use when they try to steer you towards negotiating in terms of monthly payments to avoid your focusing on the bottom line cost--you can get more out of people when you hide the ball about how much your service actually costs them.

Indeed, my non-technical friends have only the vaguest idea that their usage has a correlation with the ads (Facebook isn't exactly full-disclosure about how their targeted ad model works). This is especially true with kids. You think my 13 year old nephew understands the privacy implications of using Facebook?

There is also the worry of what happens when Facebook stops being "the good guys" (which is a possibility for any corporation). What happens when the constant push to meet analyst expectations causes them to monetize user data in more and more insidious ways? I don't think anyone thought at first that the credit card companies were "evil", but the whole credit card/credit score mafia is doing legitimately devestating things to many peoples' lives now. Some people can't get jobs because of their credit scores. What happens when Facebook starts selling user data to employers doing background checks? Do we just assume that Facebook is full of "people like us" so they would never do that?
"How about when they post pictures of what they have eaten? [...] It's very rare that I take my phone out of my pocket to check up on friends through social media."

If your friends are posting pictures of what used to be something that they've eaten, it's not surprising that you rarely want to check up on that stuff.
The problem comes when you realize if you unfollowed everyone who posts unteresting stuff on facebook you would end up with an almost literally empty feed.
When will these be shipping?
Clickables:

- http://ewooy.com/img/streamio.png

- http://ewooy.com/img/edure.png

- http://ewooy.com/img/flare.png

- http://ewooy.com/img/enyo.png

- http://ewooy.com/img/karla.png

- http://ewooy.com/img/truffle.png
I'm getting in the habit of letting the caller decide, something like the following:

myAsyncFunc = function (param1, param2, callback) {
var usingPromises = (callback === undefined);
var returnVal = usingPromises ? Q.defer() : this;

someFunction(function (err, res) {
if (usingPromises) {
err ? returnVal.reject(err) : returnVal.resolve(res);
} else {
callback(err, res);
}
});

return returnVal;
};

So if I call myAsyncFunc(foo, bar) it returns a promise and if I call myAsyncFunc(foo, bar, cb) it returns itself for chaining.
Well it speaks to the 'trollness' of patent trolling. In the Prenda Law case (and other copyright cases) the judiciary has decided in many cases that the 'threaten with action' strategy used is an issue. Had this been a "real" patent case the patent holder would approach Rackspace, say we think you infringe on patent X and you need to license that from us or stop infringing. Then license negotiations begin, and then either they license it or they break of negotiations and it becomes a lawsuit.

The steps here of attempting to intimidate them into a favorable position without any way of knowing if they are in fact liable, is what pushes it into the extortion space for me.

No, the course of action I would try to take in this situation is that as soon as I was presented with this demand I would respond, "Either sue us and open up to discovery, or go away, and if you go away and try to sue us later we'll use that as evidence that you didn't really believe we infringed in the first place."

I don't know if you have ever been in a bar fight but I can tell you from experience that once the trouble maker has asked you if you just called them a liar (or some other affront) there really isn't any negotiation that is going to work, their is going to be a fight whether you want it or not so your best bet is to just start planning to win it.

When presented with the "possible infringement" demand Rackspace was already in the fight. Appeasement doesn't work, it can push off the start of hostilities (and that can be strategic) but the safe bet is to assume they are coming after you. (which I have to believe RS knew because they did the whole mutual forbearance thing).
"Your turn now - go on and change the following code to compute the sum of the numbers 1 through 5."

If you input 15 and submit, it says the answer is correct. Do all online code courses just check for the retured value?

How do these services deal with someone running sum(i for i in xrange(1000000000000000000))?
A student can iterate and improve their essays on their own using an auto-grader. They can get it up to a decent level just through iteration before having to get a human involved.

If awarding people degrees based on essays whose form is dictated by trial and error rather than actual comprehension and interpretation is an upside...
The Justice Department successfully convinced the FCC to expand CALEA to ISPs by having the FCC treat ISPs as common carriers. (CALEA is a long story, but basically the internet freedom fighters agreed to not oppose CALEA so long as the internet was left alone. That backfired and the EFF hightailed it out of DC to SF.)

The choice is odd because the FCC deregulated the internet to make ISPs "information services" not "common carriers". So there is precedent for expansion that makes no logical sense.
The Problem with the Tesla Model S
I'm seeing lots of numbers here of throughput, latency and IO, all of which are great, but does anyone have any experience with cpu performance. Will a GCE High CPU machine beat an EC2 high CPU machine in straight flops?
While there are plenty of online resources for self learning, what will give you an edge is to find a mentor that can provide feedback for your questions, steer you away from bad practices, and give you a roadmap/advice. You can start with HTML and CSS yourself because they're the easiest. I would recommend going to a coding bootcamp or taking a course at your local community college. They cost money but provide structure that can speed up your learning.

Online self-learning resources:
http://www.codecademy.com (Free)
http://www.codeschool.com ($25/monthly)
http://www.lynda.com ($25/monthly)
http://www.learnable.com ($29/montly)
http://www.teamtreehouse.com ($25-$49/monthly)

Coding Bootcamps:
http://www.thinkful.com (Online)
http://devbootcamp.com/ (San Fran)
http://codefellows.com/ (Seattle)
http://www.starterleague.com/ (Chicago)
https://www.hackerschool.com/ (New York)

There are several more, google is your friend :)
I won't challenge you for their names, but if so many people are working on the issue, why don't we see any progress?

Sure we have 30 ways to cure cancer in rats, but the best we can do for humans is either to poison them with chemicals (some of them radioactive, no less) or laser beams that are only slightly less likely to kill normal cells than cancer cells.

Meanwhile we throw a fortune at the problem and throw a fortune at ever more expensive treatments -- for what?

The only recent success I know of is against prostate cancer but that was only because some ex-con got rich and started to found actual, aggressive, of the beaten path research - and that is still not a cure and only against one form of cancer.

So since you know these people, what do they need to get some useful research out there? Money and fame upon success is a given (Jonas Salk comes to mind) but what stops them?
will Google move in the same direction?

They could already have if they wanted to- they own the code for the stock launcher, after all.
Assuming you're trolling but worth pointing out that Meteor includes a Spiderable package so it's indexable by search engines etc.

http://meteor.com/blog/2012/08/09/search-engine-optimization
Core dev on IdentityCache here. Excellent point, and truth be told we hadn't considered setting an explicit expiry to let those unavoidable problems fix themselves. We do have a finite amount of space in memcached so the LRU there accomplishes something similar but gaining complete control over the expiry duration does make sense for the reasons you listed. Truth be told however I think I value the flip side of explicit expiry more: we can use any corrupt/un-updated information for debugging which we have done and found really useful in the past. We're also in a way forced to deal with anything which might interrupt our after_commit hooks instead of letting the problem just go away in a day. Hooks firing is also critical for other services we have (like elastic search) that rely on them, and for which I'd rather not create other auto-healers for.

Thanks for the intelligent suggestion!
Or something like a candu reactor that doesn't need uranium to be enriched.
Right, so drunk people at 3AM are going to say "Oh wait, what if one of my friends has Facebook Home?"? Not likely.
Not too long ago when iOS was released users jumped ship to Android due to the maps fiasco.

If Facebook forks Android, do you think people are willing to give up Google's ecosystem in exchange for Facebook's?

Even if you find Facebook chat / messages a viable replacement for Gtalk / Gmail, this still means no access to Google Play Store.

Amazon was willing to create a second competing marketplace and sell its devices as media players, but Facebook will not have those in place if they fork Android. Do you think Facebook has enough leverage to pull this off?

I don't think so, but since the phone is already in the works time will tell.
It already is, at least IP lawyers should be aquainted with the term, even some scholarly articles at ssrn.com use it. But it probably wouldn't be a prominent term in judgements, because it is too broad and doesn't describe "what the troll did and why it is bad", so it isn't really useful in that sense. I guess the standard formulations would be more like "abusive conduct" etc. (My own jurisdiction isn't angloamerican)
Empty? Don't forget about your steady diet of sponsored post.
If this is deployed nationwide, how long before students start submitting carefully crafted nonsense that tricks the dopey grading algorithm into giving them an A? My bet: not long at all.
Ask HN: How to know when somebody responds to one of my comments on HN?
I'd like to comment & discuss more on HN but I find it tiresome to always go back and check my threads to see who answered to my comments.<p>Are there any way to get alerted when somebody responds to one of my comments on HN?
for anyone else interested in what approach they were using for it:

<video style="display: block;" class="_534g" id="fbhome-cinemagraph" autoplay="1" loop="1"><source src="https://fbcdn-dragon-a.akamaihd.net/cfs-ak-ash3/676434/970/1... /><source src="https://fbcdn-dragon-a.akamaihd.net/cfs-ak-prn1/676663/942/1... /><img class="_53ol _53ol img" src="https://fbcdn-dragon-a.akamaihd.net/cfs-ak-ash3/676513/617/1... alt="" /></video>
Additionally, certain scholarships require a minimum GPA be met. A B vs. a B- can be a huge difference to someone faced with losing their tuition check.
Related announcement @ http://newsroom.fb.com/News/597/Introducing-Home (HN discussion @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5493993).
I second this -- if lifting heavy things makes you nervous, try lifting lighter things. There's a lot of small stabilizer muscles in your body that will be really weak if left unused, and lifting any free weight will help build them up.
Ask PG: San Francisco or Peninsula 
What location (in general), is better for tech entrepreneurs? And has the bulk of the startup scene shifted from the Peninsula to San Francisco?
Without an ontology this is not a facts database more than a graph of strings. It can be interesting anyway, maybe an ontology will emerge from it.
No, the evidence for each of those is far more limited, ambiguous, and in one case contradictory. You would not advise your parents to maintain strength enough to stand because only prospective studies link standing strength to longevity?
Whenever I see several different groups behaving in a manner I find obnoxious, I wonder incentives encourage this kind of behavior, and how those incentives might be reduced.

One such way is countersuit, which Rackspace is doing. If everyone (successfully) countersued, the incentive to be a patent troll would diminish.

There might be other ways. Is there some common property patent trolls depend on that might be penalized or forbidden? I've noticed that patent trolls rarely seem to produce anything. Perhaps some sort of "use it or lose it" clause, in which patent holders have a certain amount of time to effectively license their technology to some degree of effectiveness before they can't enforce infringements.

It works in other areas. For instance, in my home state, many people would love to live in the country extremely cheaply, so there's an incentive to set up dubious Christmas tree farms to get nice tax rates. To combat this, you have a certain number of years to turn a profit, and if you don't, you lose the farm credit.

(here's an example of why they do this: http://www.huntingnet.com/forum/wildlife-management-food-plo...)
Hope somebody does one with a video codec, like Splashtop. If you can handle the CPU and bandwidth hit, the responsiveness is awesome.
I'm not aware of any significant amount of Facebook marketing (outside of Facebook itself) but quite a lot of good Google marketing. I would have said Google was far more experienced and capable in that area.
It's KVM on Sandy Bridge; effectively the same as EC2 cluster compute. http://blog.zencoder.com/2012/07/23/first-look-at-google-com...
If you did Y Combinator and regretted it, what were your reasons?
Ebert wasn't just America's Foremost Film Critic, though he was that.

He was also America's Foremost Film Lover.

Universal sadness being expressed across the film community today.
Google Answers is the only service I can think off. I don't think it was popular though.
I am not quite sure that makes sense - polio is was pretty complex too and yet there weren't that many years between the early attemps by Maurice Brodie (36) and Jonas Salks success (52).
This is good news - the momentum of the Meteor community & of dev efforts is really infectious.

Probably not ready to be building 100 million user services on just yet, but utterly fantastic for quick prototyping & iterating services (which is a large part of what I do day-to-day).

I love Backbone & Ember and all the rest, but as mainly-a-designer/front-end-dev, if I can get away without writing an API in Rails and have everything just work I'll choose that any day.

I've also got this idea of a scale of 'magicness' from 0-10.

- 0 - writing the JS by hand, maybe with jQuery.ajax etc.

- 2 - Backbone - easy to use, easy to debug — just not very magical!

- 5 - Ember & Angular - pretty cool but still enough that the headaches can be off-putting

- 9 - Meteor - always seems to work, never frustrating, so magic that the occasional thing that's tricky to implement is totally worth the rewards.

edit: also, shameless plug - if you're in London and like tech meetups that aren't boring, come to the Meteor meetup. It's fun.
Roger Ebert on the mystery of how the rice cooker knows your rice is done:

"How does it know? There are no dials and settings on the Pot. As far as you can tell, there is only a heating element beneath. There doesn't look like room for anything else to hide. How does the Pot know how long to cook the rice? It is a mystery of the Orient. Don't ask questions you don't need the answers to. The point here is to save you some time and money. If you want gourmet cooking, you aren't going to learn about it here."

source: http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/11/the_pot_and_how_to_u...
Excellent reference, thanks Van. This comment from the judge in the WSJ coverage[1] of Cisco ""It is enough for now to determine that Innovatio at least has a plausible argument that its infringement claims are still viable," wrote Judge Holderman. The "licensing campaign is therefore not a sham," he said." So did Innovatio include the patent numbers? I have read in other cases that legal test for extortion was "credible but not actionable" threat of exposure. (Crosby vs Upshaw as an example, she wouldn't provide paternity data)

FWIW I've added you to the list of technology companies being harmed by patent extortion (I try to keep my congressional representatives informed in order to disallow them the excuse that they had no idea how bad the problem is)

[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732490600457828...
Ask HN: I'd like your opinion on my social network idea
Critiques/Upvotes/Downvotes appreciated. I'm 19 and young, I think there's a better way, so why the fuck not? Everyone's calling me crazy so I'd like some HN opinions.

I was one of the early adopters of Facebook. I remember it used to be very interesting with posts about you, topics that mattered, where people used to post on each other's wall. Now they're coming out with a phone and making other choices which I feel are nothing but detrimental to my original Facebook experiences. I've had a declining Facebook experience these past few months and I want to bring some of that back.

Name: PeopleVector? (Work in progress) A much simpler social network. People can post statuses, write on each other's profiles, send messages, and upload photos or videos under 1 minute long. People can also send money to one another, track who owes who money, create a cell phone number alias to receive texts, and manage a calendar which your friends can "pin" events, notes, and photos to.

That's it. No notes, no groups, no pages, nothing. That's our key feature to make sure that the site doesn't get too overloaded and remains a social network, not whatever the hell Facebook is becoming.
You may look silly but it works.
A comparison can be found here: http://docs.picloud.com/howto/celery.html
Aryan Brotherhood of Texas: How did neo-Nazi prison gangs become so powerful?
Yes, but last time I checked it's exposed to DDoS's, as it uses a headless browser, which is largely inefficient.
Looks interesting, but I don't really see it taking off. I just can't picture normal people thinking "wow, this is just what I needed, I'm so downloading this!"
Facebook Home Keynote
than you for writing were, rather than was
I'm curious why more smaller and medium sized businesses haven't banded together to form some kind of larger entity to combat these trolls.

There's security in numbers. If I was a patent troll and knew if I was going to sue a company like RackSpace and knew they had 25-50 companies standing behind them with a large pool of legal and financial resources, I'd be more apt to try and find an easier target.
Same as Facebook--maintain the relationship but reduce the noise. You can only DM with followers for example.
Yep, you're a very special snowflake, you've always known you were different, and those sheep are just so ignorant.

If they find value in telling each other about their life experiences but you don't, that's fine. Maybe they enjoy seeing the cool things their friends do, maybe those posts give them great ideas for vacations or what to make for dinner or what kind of dog they want to get.

You can leave the "yeah, what sheep" bullshit for a t-shirt at Hot Topic, where it belongs.
Facebook Home’s killer app: Big, pretty advertisements
New York Public Library Launches Digital Collections API
Machines will also "know" that the course leaders' model essays put through a bog standard article-spinner are superior to Orwell.
Links to the authors website and the paper for those that are interested.
http://filebox.vt.edu/users/ypzhang/research.htm
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201300766/ab...
Never trusted FB to begin with. I've got a profile that forwards notifications to my email in case someone needs to contact me. Good luck extracting data from that.
My "hack" is to ask strangers the following questions:

"I'm going to watch a movie tonight, what's a really good movie that I probably haven't seen."

This works best with strangers or people you've just met. I find that people who know me always recommend movies that I've either already seen, or decided that I don't want to see. If the stranger has any affinity towards movies, they can almost certainly come up with a gem that you've never heard of.

I discovered this works when I asked this exact question of someone on a whim and they recommended "Castaway on the Moon". It was a darn good movie, that I never would have found/watched on my own. I've since asked this question of all sorts of people with great results.
He comes from an old school of critics. There are plenty other good ones today, they're just not as fortunate with the media exposure Ebert got.

Some of my favorites are Glenn Kenny, David Bordwell, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Kent Jones, and others I'm missing.
Porsche’s First Plug-In Hybrid Is a 416-hp Super Sedan
The problem with online privacy, is that people believe it exists.
This builds up LOTS of good will with me. But still, I'm not sure you are right. The cost of fighting a troll in court can be shockingly large. If it were worth MORE in public relations than it cost in legal fees then it would obviously be an investment they should make, just to become more profitable. I doubt that... I think it is worth a lot in public relations, but less than the same amount of cash would buy in advertising. Nevertheless, it is worth it for two reasons: (1) because it scares patent trolls off of Rackspace in the future, and (2) because it's good for the world, even if it isn't profitable. Sometimes you just have to do things that aren't profitable.
I've never grade-grubbed (you can't really where I went to school), but I've had to explain a B versus a B+ in an interview before.