skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would guess that there are asymmetries that make this an untenable approach, long term.

First, there is the asymmetry of cost, ie. it probably costs less money to file for and be granted a bogus patent than it costs to invalidate said patent.

Secondly, there is the asymmetry of motivation, ie. patent trolls have greater financial motivation to file for bogus patents than other parties have financial motivation to invalidate these patents.

These asymmetries are really the root of the problem. What's really needed is a lobbying group to pass legislation that changes the incentive structure, including, in my opinion, abolishing patents.

The problem here is that many of the organizations who could fund such a lobbying group (like Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.) have been coopted by the patent system, because they themselves are patent holders.

Actually, its worse than that; they seem convinced that their patents have actual intrinsic value, which kind of makes sense. They spend a lot of money doing research and development, so of course they want to believe that a legal mechanism for preserving the value of that R&D is legitimate.

This whole thing is frustrating...
"When you’d rather have someone shit on your face than go to work, it’s probably time to leave." sums up the article.
I never used AppGratis, so I need some help understanding here.

Were 100% of the app recommendations "sponsored"? Were those that were "sponsored" marked as such?

The comparison is made to black-hat SEO, but having a list of apps as well as some sponsored apps is fine if they are marked as such. The article makes the comparison to black-hat links, but including "sponsored" links is what Google does with AdWords/PPC and is completely legitimate. So what did it look like with AppGratis? It's all about organization and transparency.
A lot of people requested it. Hence `reverse` option is on my todo list.
Exactly. Their social media dollars integrated very well with their overall campaign and brought a high ROI.
Just fyi, the phrase is "death knell" not "death nail."
http://www.puredarwin.org/blockers#TOC-OpenDirectory-depends...

Good luck with that.
Specifically: just because you thought of an idea, does not give you any moral prerogative to go stealing other people's real property because 1) you got to the government bureaucrat first and 2) they happened to think of it too.

Patents are morally reprehensible. If society is going to have some vaguely patent-like thing, it's going to have to be radically different from what we think of when we think of patents, something far more modest than this insane binding of other people's thoughts for the sake of the childish whine: "but I thought of it first!"
To confuse furthermore:
4. Are you honest?
> In my case the hacker asked to all my contacts with an automatic message for some Liberty Reserve money. Most of them trust me and my account, so they were inclined to accept.

I'm not sure why anyone would give money to a friend via Liberty Reserve, just because a friend requests some via an instant message. The average person has probably never heard of Liberty Reserve either. Before sending any money of any kind, wouldn't one ask the friend what's wrong whereupon it would become obvious it's not them?

Maybe I'm just deeply skeptical and distrusting and the rest of the world is more optimistic.
A major problem with the high-density occupancy issue is the persistent absolute insistence that every vertical structure end at a few hundred feet, forcing everyone to ground level. Of course frequent forcing of a volumetric problem to a planar solution will have congestion problem, and increasing the range of the third dimension just makes moving from one building to another worse.

To wit: stop limiting buildings to single-block dimensions. Span the roads, not just with the occasional bridge, but by extending whole buildings.
Polite cycle activists hack streets, create bike lanes
If there's some way of figuring out what the hotspots are around your specialization (forums, groups, verticals etc) for the purpose of more targeted lead generation that would be awesome. The act of actually trawling for leads is pretty unsophisticated at present. Guru, Freelancer, oDesk, elance are ok but they're just meeting spots - you're not participating in anything by using those sites. I'd say doing the work and managing the pipeline is the easiest, its growth that's hard.
The basic problem is that non-residents who would like to live there can't vote.

Until the 1970s, anyone could basically build whatever residential housing they wanted to anywhere. Not coincidentally, prices were low and relatively stable (by modern standards). During the 1970s, the city of Petaluma in CA passed the Petaluma Plan, which drastically restricted development. Courts accepted this and more and more residential restrictions.

In the short term they didn't seem to matter much. But in the last 40 years, as the population has grown and as people have realized that cities are pretty awesome in many ways (including economically), supply and demand have gotten way out of whack. One example is Santa Monica, which has the same number of residents it did in 1970 but vastly higher prices: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/10/12/sustainable_s.... Existing property owners, especially of existing single-family houses, like restricting property so the value of their property goes up (although they often disguise this in other rhetoric). Potential new residents can't vote, and courts have empowered existing residents and municipal boards.

Hypothetically, if we had some kind of national zoning / municipal board setting policy across the country, people in Texas or Arizona who wanted to move to SF would get equal weight with the people already in SF. As it stands, property owners in SF can exclude Texans through voting. I cite this as a thought experiment, not as a proposal.

Further reading: Edward Glaeser, The Triumph of the City.
In the short term, I'd like the government to start with RMS's plan--anything done in software is math and cannot be targeted by patents. They (apparatus for performing X patents) are overly broad, most are not non-obvious, and the system is retarding far more innovation than it enables. Especially when we consider the pace and relative lack of cost in software development.
A trademark is different from a software patent. A trademark addresses specific product branding in a specific market; a software patent -- at least the ones in question -- address a generic process that's not limited to a specific market. Consider the trademark on the Wikipedia name versus a (hypothetical) software patent on "a method for storing and displaying user-generated content."
I still find it strange at times to wrap my head around the fact that for decades we championed a distributed and an open world-scale system - The Internet.

And now, we are going back to policies controlled by 'guidelines' and rules and terms and conditions of large corporations -- Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Blackberry. Either we as a developer community got lost somewhere; or this was a careful, well thought-out move by the said corporations. And it is only getting stronger as people are replacing laptops with tablets and so on.

I'm not commenting on the AppGratis fiasco, I couldn't care less about it. Sorry for ranting.
Empowering Change: Programming Literacy for All
Manhattan is precisely the right thing to compare to San Francisco. San Francisco's borders are drawn in a way that encompasses what in other cities would just be the dense inner neighborhoods. E.g. Oakland is a separate city while Queens is part of New York City proper, but they're functionally and geographically equivalent.

If you go neighborhood by neighborhood, you'll see that San Francisco isn't really very dense. No neighborhood besides Chinatown and the Tenderloin are more than 50,000 per square mile, and popular areas like the Mission are only 25,000 per square mile. In New York, the UES and UWS are over 100,000 per square mile. Greenwich Village/SoHo (same community area) is 60,000 per square mile. Chelsea is about 45,000 per square mile.
It’s time gamers took gaming more seriously
Also the only VCPU that is pluralized on your pricing page is the 1 VCPU under the 16gb plan.
> A legal precedent for interfering with the ancient practice of saving seed and selection of seeds from desirable plants [...]

This seems deliberately vague, and covers a lot of scenarios not covered by any court ruling I have seen. If you're going to call them evil, you need to do it with some specificity.

If you're proposing that we abolish GMO patents, I'd say that's a reckless policy that risks cutting off the funding source for increasingly important GMO research. There's probably going to be a couple billion more people on this planet, so it seems that we need better farming yields. Your arguments against the law seem to be on the form "the law is easy to break, hence it should not exist", which I think would apply to way too many laws to be a viable argument. If the law was hard to avoid breaking, I would agree more.

On the other hand, I agree that Monsanto's production of chemical weapons for the US government during the Vietnam war was probably evil.
The patent holder would have to sue someone first or there would be no standing to bring a case.
>as a user I want to be able to find the best apps for my task. Quality apps. Apps that will help me achieve whatever it is I'm doing. And I want Apple to decide that

Why?

Anyway it's abundantly clear that Apple is failing at that task, especially with new changes to the way search results are displayed.
Yep, apple completely wrecked the app store discovery process with iOS 6. It's a real shame IMO.
See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5539447 .
Okay, I swear I've read the exact story of filling up the screen with @ signs before, but it wasn't on Ron Gilbert's site.
You're being rather tunnel-visioned about it. It's a much wider thing than just the social aspect.
Any plans to allow sites to use their existing authentication/identity system, rather then require users to signup with moot to participate in the forum?
City demographics are changing. I think it will become viable soon. Most San Franciscans are tired of filth and squalor, and moving the dependent population onto land cheaper by a factor of 100 is compelling.
I took a quick look and still prefer Thunderbird. Over the years tb has matured enough that it's solid and reliable. All I want from my work email client. For personal stuff, I'd never consider a client, other than the browser.
Why so silent about data mining operations done by .gov and not about .com's?
It would be interesting to put zoning issues like building height and affordable housing policy up to the voters. When the BART was being built, many SF residents organized against it, fearing the "manhattanification" of SF. I see similar attitudes today; I think a lot of SF residents are fine with the small-town "charm" and lack of big-city services, even though they are paying big-city prices.

I honestly think a lot of people in SF don't understand how much better big cities can be; there's a reason you don't see many NY transplants in the Bay. In more ways than one, the Bay Area is in a bubble.
Watchlisted — they have an amazing hacker potential that could make a dint in the triade of Last.fm, Rdio and Spotify, what can I say for HypeMachine, Exfm, 8tracks and all the other youngsters...

There still isn't much to go on with speculation. It is safe to assume though Twitter won't be going near music-distribution — their tap into the existing infrastructure of Digital Music is a great example of "new way of building", which is frankly: "not inventing the bicycle all over again".

I'm wishful.
The site is already back. This story is from last night.
Yes, if I understood the author has 1000 contacts in his Skype, FWIW.
Early Dinosaur Embryos Found in China
It isn't even necessarily about changing your mind, it's about misclicking. It's like filling in the wrong bubble of a Scantron form and the answer automatically being sent as soon as you put the pencil on paper. It shouldn't be making those assumptions until you verify that's the response you want to send. On multiple occasions I've clicked a radio button in a form thinking it was the most relevant to me before reading the rest of them (which is not really relevant to this poll in particular, but how the interaction should be treated regardless).

But I definitely agree the responses should not be visible until you've voted.
Chat Heads come to Facebook Messenger for Android
I discover almost all new music via Twitter, be it by following other musicians who share who they like or magazines like Pitchfork who publish critics.

Both musicians and magazines are businesses selling something.

Just today I discovered Microsoft's Infer.Net for probabilistic computations. It's not a commercial product but it's a product nonetheless, and it's a tweet that made me read their documentation.

Social media is definitely not inefficient, if done properly.
I have a strange sense of sadness for my friends who are "stuck" on Wall Street. Strange because it's weird to feel sad for someone making $250k+ per year, but I've heard their first hand accounts of how much they hate their jobs. If you're the type of person who can step back from the ego-driven culture of investment banking I feel like everyone reaches the same meta-conclusions that Nick did. It's just unbelievably hard for them to step away from the money.

I mean, I'd like to think I would be able to make that choice and that purpose and meaning would ultimately trump a large paycheck. But nobody's putting $250k+ in my pocket so it's genuinely hard to say.

Kudos to Nick for leaving. It took guts.
Everytime there's a discussion about the walled garden, people say that it's to prevent malware, but Apple is going way beyond that by forcing a cut of in-app purchases, banning application prototyping apps, rejecting an Android magazine app, and crap like this.

I somehow feel that if AppGratis was paying the 30% cut to Apple, it wouldn't have been banned from the store.
Social media has turned into a channel for maintaining relationships with your existing customers, rather than growing your customer base.

A campaign that generates a million likes probably got most of those likes from existing customers.
Did the iPad have features the iPhone didn't?

More screen real-estate, but then again, it's like glass. It doesn't do anything my smartphone can't, except give me more room for bigger apps.
This post is a bit on the extreme side of not talking to your customers. Of B2B that fail, I'd be surprised if most burn out this badly. Most get someone to use them.. just not enough.

As for the advice of getting clicks, strongly product dependent.

Imagine you are a PaaS, say Heroku. It'd be a bit hard to adequately market such a product without convincing docs and people actually playing around with it. That is.. building the product.

And even if you could get some CC conversions, it still wouldn't validate the product because so much of the stick/not stick with it will come down to user experience. Which for a pretty technical product is a bit of an unknown.
New Tool Promises Private Photo Sharing
The unfortunate thing here is that, as you point out, nobody can see the cause. We have some general ideas, but they're not even very good ideas.

The point that the parent was getting at was that our entire diagnostic process is to measure the symptoms. This is the case for almost all disorders of the brain, and it makes your Jeff Foxworthy quote especially interesting - if the only way that we can determine whether someone has a given condition is self reporting, then what's to say she doesn't? Everyone has a brain.

I think that people who beat this drum are missing an important point - it doesn't matter whether or not someone who doesn't need special treatment or attention has the underlying disorder - by definition, they don't. Brain disorders don't become brain disorders until they have an impact on your life or the lives of the people around you. This is spelled out plainly in the DSM. Even if you have exactly the same chemical condition as someone with Aspergers, unless your life can be improved by treatment, you don't have it. This will continue to be the case until we know for sure what's going on. It's impossible to know how someone else experiences pain, as well, but that doesn't make their suffering less valid.
No - not at all, but making absolutist claims about it, and about how no-one should have to "endure" it, does - and there are multiple comments of that nature in this thread.
> 2) There isn't actually that much volume compared real electronic exchanges. Just looking at the Mt Gox page from today it looks like $30MM USD worth of bitcoins have been traded. Hard to make any real money off of that.

While it might have much less volume compared to a "real" exchange, MtGox fees are 0.6% of each transaction. $180k daily revenue is certainly "real money" for a startup.
Not sure what you mean there -- these are two completely different things. That disables using a service (Google or Bing) to autocomplete. It does not affect what extensions like the DuckDuckGo one do.
Yep! Still in the area? (Has the degree paid off?)
RSA is actually kind of a bad example. It's an eminent example of almost-pure number theory ported over to a software domain, and mathematics is explicitly non-patentable. Next you'd be telling me that Fourier transforms should be patentable.

I get that it's difficult to incentivize the development of truly difficult abstract ideas, but mathematicians and physicists have been doing exactly that for centuries and they appear to be doing alright.
But what about SEO and SEM? Don't you think that to grow ecommerce players, SaaS vendors, etc... or directories need to be aggressive there? It's true for every platform where there is mostly one path to entry.
Now with the open web at least, there are multiple paths...with social media, etc...
The simplest solution to that is not to define equality for the reals.
It is miserable when architects are trying to cram everything to tiny sizes because of costs caused by real-estate speculation.

Yes, I lived in a college dorm, tiny, but not miserable (college helps, of course ;) ).

Now, see this: "http://realestate.aol.com/blog/2013/03/07/san-francisco-micr...

160 sq. ft. (or around 14m2 for the metrically able, or my favorite measure, this is the size of a square with a side of 3.7m)

That college dorm I lived, no kitchen, no shower, was around this size.
What it has led to is a little city of 600,000 having the worst traffic in the country as it tries to play host to a metro area 10x larger full of people who commute every day in random directions because the hight limit prevented the creation of a proper central business district which could be served with proper transit infrastructure.
It's important to note that both the US and EU you cannot legally make a paid-for recommendation look like a real endorsement.

For the FTC guidelines on this see:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/20635261/FTC-Guides-Concerning-the...
Local business - yes, if their customers make regular purchases

Fashion brands - yes, if it's a brand name that people are excited about sharing, and again regular purchases helps - people want to keep checking back for what's new

It's tough; I work with a lot of different retailers, everyone wants to believe that social media is going to be good for them, but it depends on both their business and their customers.

I see agencies pitch the miracles of social media and it often just doesn't pan out.
How to write marketing emails that don't suck
That's the goal of the SHIELD act, which will not pass, unfortunately.
In philly, and yes, the degree has paid off.
I use the "I am busy" phrase to make boring people go away without being too offensive.
This story isn't adding up so far.

> But sources close to [Apple] say it was more than a little troubled that AppGratis was pushing a business model that appeared to favor developers with the financial means to pay for exposure.

http://allthingsd.com/20130408/confirmed-apple-kicks-appgrat...

That's the closest thing I can find to a "confirmation" that AppGratis was accepting cash in exchange for a higher rank in their app. They didn't confirm or deny that in their "Here's the Full Story" blog post, nor does it say anything about their business model on their website.

In any case, that supposedly has nothing to do with the two official reasons for which they were most recently banned. First is 2.25:

> Apps that display Apps other than your own for purchase or promotion in a manner similar to or confusing with the App Store will be rejected.

But they had encountered that problem before and cleared it with Apple. So the only new one is 5.6:

> Apps cannot use Push Notifications to send advertising, promotions, or direct marketing of any kind.

Seems a little odd to remove an app with 12 million users over such a minor detail when it could be resolved in a few seconds -- just remove push notifications. Does Apple ever give official responses on these issues?
Route was designed with milestone-based workflow in mind. You create milestones, you set due dates on them, you specify goals for each milestone - at the end you get a nicely delineated route through the project plan. Trello is a more general solution.
Wouldn't it be a lot cheaper to hire a real estate attorney to handle the tricky bits than a real estate agent?

Speculating, the agent knows the laws, but also pays some of her commission to an attorney who does the real work. The agent is a middle man.
Sadly, I can't get them all to do the Harlem Shake.
Study: The More You Text, The Shallower You Are
The ratings on Amazon for things like pots and pans are fine and useful. Books seem to be the main target for spamming.
Most apps were not sponsored. Not more than 2 per week out of the 15 they are promoting in the US.
It's not that, it's that I wouldn't have sufficient money to do it. Or bankrupt myself in the process.
You'll be Tagged
As of this writing mtgox is down for everyone and has been for the last 20 minutes or more since I tried logging in to make a withdrawal.
I liked the car-purchasing power throughout the article to give meaning to the values. I would suggest the freemium model though.
Moo-Ryong Ra, Ramesh Govindan, and Antonio Ortega (2013) P3: Toward Privacy-Preserving Photo Sharing. In Proceedings of the 10th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI'13). April.

http://enl.usc.edu/Papers/?action=download&upname=Ra13a....

http://nsl.cs.usc.edu/Profiles/RameshGovindan?action=bibentr...
Yup, cleaning up HP will be expensive. But isn't that a perfect case for an economic stimulus project? Invest now to create an asset that will improve economic productivity for the following century.

The fact is that HP will one day be a gorgeous place to live and watch the sun rise over the bay. The question is whether that's a 100 years from now, or whether we start on it now, so we can see the benefits in our life times.
> where users receive everyday a push for the app that paid the highest bid to AppGratis ?

From what I understand of it only a fraction of the placements was paid for, you have to pay your bills somehow. If AG would only push paid ads they would have never ever been so popular with their users.
> Patent litigation typically costs defendants between $1 million and $5 million just to stay in the fight.

A battleground where only the rich can win a fight. There doesn't seem to be any justice left in the American courts :(.

The only way to win is to not play their game. It's probably cheaper to buy a shotgun and show up at the doorstep of the person suing you with the message: "I know where you live" :S