skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It can totally be legit.

1) Is pretending to be a different device ID copyright infringement? Probably not? Patent infringement? Probably not? Violation of the DMCA? Since it's not even touching encrypted tracks.... Probably not?

2) iPod syncing has been fairly well documented and reversed engineered on Linux clients. It's entirely possible Palm used this code to protect their former Apple engineers.

Legally if Apple wants to fight this they are begging for anti-trust litigation IMO. If not in the US, definitely in the EU. They should be smart and just accept they got out played by Palm on this.
good point. i've known about them for a decade(just by being from boston).

they make the screens in the kindle and sony ebook.
For suits, I wear shirts with a variety of spread collars to match the formality of the suit. (Yes, suits vary in formality depending on colour, pattern, weave, and fineness of the fabric.) And with those shirts, I like the Windsor and the half-Windsor knots.

For sport jackets and button-down collared shirts, I tie the less formal four-in-hand. I have used the half-Windsor with Oxford-cloth button-downs (OCBDs) too.

I have also used the Pratt knott for OCBDs if the tie is too long for me. (I'm only 5'5" tall.)
Ties are manageable just by loosening them and not buttoning your top button right from the start. No one will notice or care. They'll just be surprised you're wearing a tie (for a coder) usually. I've coded a lot in ties. Sport coats are more uncomfortable.
Sure. But whatever Mahalo's done, they haven't made it seem like they wrote the questions themselves. The visual design attributes the questions to the 'fluther' Twitter account (and link to the exact origin Tweet).

Are you angry they're making questions by your users seem like they were written by Fluther itself? That seems a legitimate concern, but your own Twitter stream similarly blurs question authorship.

Are you angry that they synthesized a 'fluther' account on Mahalo and thus made it look a little like you're endorsing Mahalo with your participation? That's what I would be most angry about, if my question-tweets were showing up, under my unique username, at a site I'd never opted into. But one remedy for that concern might then be to remove attribution -- making the questions from 'an unnamed Twitter user'.
He's using the word "legit" where maybe the word "sanctioned" is closer to his intent.

Also, even if Apple is destined to lose the suit, there's enough grey area here that they could surely get it into court. There's a legal backstory here with ex-iPod developers on the Pre team, and so there's a ton of discovery Apple could throw Palm's way. And if Palm took any shortcuts at all, that could be the end of Palm.
1) Cash in your discovery for US $1 million [0].

2) Fund your own disruptive startup incubator, a la YCombinator (using the publicity from your discovery to attract hoards of scrappy geniuses).

2.5) Optionally, focus on startups that monetize P=NP - again, for publicity reasons (as well being able to leverage your own expertise in evaluating biz ideas).

3) Profit!

(profferred tongue in cheek, of course - it's not very private :)

[0] http://www.claymath.org/millennium/P_vs_NP/
Ask HN: if I work at Apple, can I sell iPhone apps on the App Store?
I'm assuming the answer is "no" but I don't know anyone at Apple, nor have I been able to find a definitive answer on the web.

If I am an Apple employee, am I forbidden to have applications for sale on the iTunes App Store?
Yeah. The rap is pretty well deserved, regardless of what happens in the future.

I have a friend who's at a venture-backed startup here in Beijing (not software). At a local startup meet-and-greet, he started talking to the founder of a local web startup. The business model?

"We copy FriendFeed."
We're not saying that other people can't ask or answer those questions elsewhere... we're saying that copying questions verbatim, and simply removing the attribution link, is not okay.

Certainly lots of different people will ask the same questions all the time. But this wasn't different people. It was the same people's questions, copied.
solve protein folding, become evil megalomaniac with doomsday virus.
I was worried about that too, but yes it's allowed.
Really good point. Totally forgot about Galoob.

http://cr.yp.to/softwarelaw.html
Though to be fair I'm sure Palm would love for a Pre logo to come up, but Apple doesn't make that possible. The only way it can work is by looking like an iPod.
I hope Natal works out as well in real life as it does in the ads. I really like some of the motion-sensitive Wii games... but Wii games have terrible graphics, and I find that distracting. Having games that are both motion sensitive AND full HD will be wonderful. (I wonder if there will be a Mirror's Edge 2 that takes advantage of this.)
There are indeed two cameras and a microphone array. The hardware design is still not final, but it is able to extract accurate depth information. Similarly, the software is not final, but the skeletal tracking demos which I have seen have been pretty impressive.
There's three factors here:

(1) What does "rich" mean? If it is net worth of >$1bn, it is more common to have taken investment at some point. At $50mm, it is far less common.

(2) What does "investor" mean? If it is VC, it's not true at all that most rich people (by either definition) required investment. If it means they took at least one of equity-linked dollar for their business, then most did. But there are many, many wealthy people who have not taken $1mm+ in equity dollars. (Many can rely on bank financing, e.g. receivables LOCs.)

(3) When did they take it? Many rich people have taken substantial investment, but only after they had built substantial businesses and got to define the terms (example: Joe Mansueto at Morningstar).

If the question is whether it is necessary to take seven or more figures of equity dollars at an early stage to own equity whose worth could be reasonably estimated at $50mm+, then the answer is no (and asking rich people will verify that).

If, on the other hand, the question is what portion of the superrich ($1bn+) took investment somewhere along the way, then the majority likely will have.

However, I think the first question is a more useful and relevant question for people here.
The voice recognition stuff also looked impressive.

Buzz (Quiz game) with voice recognition is a killer feature. (My mother in law would probably buy one for that)
It's a hack and won't be a reliable one and that will make the device look second-rate in a way that it doesn't have to.

If Apple wants to break this, they will also have to break all of their own (unpatched) iPods. I doubt they will do that, so this "hack" will probably end up working pretty well.
Ties aren't cut, so they can't be ill-cut. Nor are they the province of tailors, but of haberdashers.

Ties are intrinsically constraining. Unless you want to go the Reagan wattle route, a route which which a stylish, aristocratic, polysyllabic gentleman like yourself would surely eschew.
It's turtles. Turtles I say. Turtles all the way down!
E3 2009: Microsoft's No-Controller "Natal" Steals the Show
Javelin launches with $70M fund for early-stage startups
That's only true if (a) Palm did a perfect job of making their device indistinguishable from an iPod in the configuration presented to iTunes AND (b) Apple never saw this coming and didn't landmine the iPod/iTunes link.

It's definitely a tightrope walk. This exact arms race has occurred many times in the past, and I can't think of a single instance where the adversary didn't make at least one mistake.
Two monitors at the same time, friend.

In seriousness, I'd be careful because as others have pointed out, some crypto systems would be vulnerable.
This was, along with SICP (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html), posted on the web long ago for free.
I thought protein folding was harder than NP.

IIRC, calculating the free energy of a molecule is in #P (count the number of solutions to a problem in NP), and you still need to step it through time or otherwise deal with the actual folding bit.

I might be remembering incorrectly though.

Edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp-P-complete
Also: whoops - looks like structure prediction can be done with high accuracy in NP - just don't try to animate it :)
It depends on which group or division you're in. Some let you do it as long as it's "under the radar", others strictly forbid it.

If you made the app and got it on the store before you started working at Apple, they're generally fine with that, as long as it's not directly competing with an Apple product.

The best person to ask is your prospective manager. If she/he says "you have to go through the internal process", you're probably screwed unless your management chain is non-software and/or unusually cool.
For more background of the deal see here:
http://chucksblog.emc.com/chucks_blog/2009/06/emc-makes-surp...

(The Global Marketing CTO)

Who had this to say about dedupe 14 months ago:
"Guys, it's a feature. Not a product, and certainly not a market."
http://chucksblog.emc.com/chucks_blog/2008/03/data-dedupe---...
T shirts Custom Digitize
Sacramento based Abacus Designworks offering a wide range of promotional products as well as screen printing, embroidery, and signs. The site features an on line design tool.
Can't wait to put my hands on it and start hacking some crazy software. Of course someone will have to write some drivers for it...
I was referring to the cut/selection of the shirt coupled with the tying of the tie. My mistake for not making that clear.

You are correct. Ties are intrinsically constraining. And so are belts. I find that if I want to be more thoughtful and creative, removing my belt does the trick. ;-) The people around me, especially the women, have gotten used to my trousers down at my ankles. :-D
More than some, I think. Most strong crypto short of one-time pads makes use of NP (or at least problems solvable by NP problems, factoring is probably a little easier than NP).

NP is nice for crypto since it has P time checkable solutions - so just make the "password" an encoding of the solution and you're golden.

It's easy to check that a password is correct, and it takes EXP time to brute force. Hopefully the crypto implementation blocks IPs after some number of login attempts that is less than EXP :)
nice job. let me guess, you own a Mac? :) Beautiful UI. mouse cursor over items on left remained as arrow for me. Maybe hover color or hand cursor?
Cum Laude in Evading Bandits
Yikes. I wonder how Nintendo can respond to this. Microsoft is really going for their throat here.
Paul, this says more about the people that you know than anything else. Nearly all the people I know who got rich from software were at Microsoft during the IPO. That doesn't prove much.

Tim Gill made close to $1b from Quark. Jim Goodnight probably made $5b from SAS. John Sall made $2b from SAS. Bill Gates made $50b from Microsoft. Technically, Microsoft took VC, but that was just a favor to give David Marquardt bragging rights... it was a nominal investment right before the IPO.

I could go on all day if you count $100m as rich, but we're just counting swans, here, not really proving anything
Programming is a design job. It's just a different kind of design.
As a current entrepreneur and the son of a PhD physicist insurance salesman, I don't agree that the best way to get rich is to sell insurance. As far as I could tell, selling insurance seemed to be hard, slow, and not especially lucrative, even for somebody relatively smart.
I see nothing wrong with that. It's a winning strategy until these services are mature and commoditized in China. At that point, you'll perhaps see market pressures drive innovation. If FriendFeed doesn't want to support the Chinese language, or doesn't support it well enough, there's a great opportunity. Maybe they'll get bought out by FriendFeed at some point!
"[A]bsolutely no individual user or listener information was supplied to the RIAA by Last.fm or any division of CBS Corporation in the past, nor do we plan to do so in the future," CBS told Ars. When we asked if perhaps CBS had transferred the data to a music label or other third party, CBS said, "We never handed over user info to the music labels or anyone else."

Ok, TechCrunch. Your turn.
Beautiful! Rocks on FireFox 3.0.10 on Fedora 10. I expected it to be slow, but was pleasantly surprised to see the overall speed after initial loading was over. The '5 seconds remaining' idea is elegant.
Recap of Hacker News NOVA/DC Meetup (2009-05-31)
Quick recap of the first Hacker News Readers NOVA/DC meetup (http://www.meetup.com/Hacker-News-NOVA-DC):

We had 17 people come out. Not bad for a group that didn't exist before last Wednesday. Started at 8pm, ended after 11pm. The beer flowed like wine, and consequently, so did the conversation. Almost everyone had some sort of side project in progress, at least one person had recently launched, and another is launching in just a few days. Quick poll early in the evening indicated a contingent of Rubyists, Groovyists, Lispers, and Erlangers among us. Probably more, should have taken another poll later on in the evening.

Sincere thanks to everyone for how well the bill was handled. Everyone paid their own share, which made it nice and easy for the group and for the waiter.

Any suggestions for the next meetup?

Some ideas are Iota (http://www.iotaclubandcafe.com/), Continental (http://www.modernpoollounge.com), East Potomac Driving Range (http://www.golfdc.com/sites/courses/layout11.asp?id=691&page=38684), QuarterDeck (http://qdrest.com, crack and eat crabs), or bowling.
I wonder if Bill Cattey (my first boss at MIT) still has his debugging tie. The idea was that software bugs hide when programmers are near, but you use the tie to fool them into thinking someone important is using the software. Then they come out.

Here's bill when he's not debugging: http://ourdoings.com/brlewis/photo.html?th=9f/6t/g5hn.jpg...
I use Flex Builder 3 - the Flex platform is pretty elegant and although Flex Builder is not cutting edge, it fits in pretty nicely with the platform.

Just watched some clips on labs.adobe.com about Flash Builder 4 (next version of Flex Builder) and there are some nice improvements - they say it can run alongside FB 3 so I'm going to try that now. Excited about the new Flex 4 SDK.
China has a "second-mover" advantage in that they can copy the most successful models and technologies in the West (including Taiwan and Japan) and leapfrog ahead. But China's development isn't that sudden-- they've embraced more-or-less capitalism for a good 20 years. It was already insane when I was living there a decade ago. It is an enormous and potentially great country of ambitious, hard working people who respect business and learning. The challenge is ensuring we make room for them in the global community, and that their political systems evolve with their economic progress.
Give HN: My Banner Service - 2nd Banner Free
When you checkout - put in HN in the additional info field and you'll get one extra free banner (any size)
Makes sense. Ubuntu's currently the most popular distro and Google incorporates clickthrough into their recommendation metric IIRC . Even if Bing does too, it hasn't hadn't enough time for it to be a significant factor.
Abstract Nonsense for Functional Programmers
If you use a word in a way that most people don't, how can you be surprised when they misunderstand you?

I use "straightforward" to describe trivial problems, when I can see the implementation path clearly. "Trivial" implies easy and quick to most people. It's not hard for them to grasp, you just have to communicate more clearly.
Wave is not Open yet, it may never be.
Two-Three Trees: a different approach to balance
DhtmlxScheduler, a Powerful Ajax Event Calendar
Java Has Type Inference and Refinement Types (But With Strange Restrictions)
The Future of Twitter Visualized
You hire programmers? Good ones ? And they are so desperate to work for you they will waste there time on that nonsense?
If they were to have someone monitor the feed, make minor changes, and post to their own site would that be acceptable?
Heavy hacking swords were wielded and no bystanders suffered any severe LARTing. It has been a meeting of utmost awesomeness: gentlemen, you rock!
She's naive. There's no way that I'd consider doing a software startup in China, and I live here. There's just no good way to make money at it.

First, it's damnably hard to get people to pay you for anything software based. With the rampant piracy, nobody has ever needed to pay a dime for anything. Convincing people to BUY software is virtually impossible. Even if you could convince people to pay, the payment systems are byzantine at best. Forget credit cards, you'd better be prepared to go collect cash from people at home or work.

Advertising-based models MIGHT work, but the competition's going to be tough. You'll be competing with corporations like Google, Microsoft, YouKu, and others that have billions to burn while they build marketshare. However you might succeed. Games like WOW can also make money.

Regardless, if you start making any money, it will probably be taken from you. The government already has its fingers in your pie, because you must get licensed from the government to run a website. That means dealing with government officials who will demand kickbacks, or might just up and seize your business. The same goes for any partners that you have, who will inevitably try to squeeze you out and take over any profit-making venture. The odds of you having your business simply taken from you are very very high.

Naturally, you have absolutely no legal protection for anything. Zero. If anything, the courts are your enemy, because they side with whoever has the most influence and that's not you. Your employees embezzle from you? Your competitor (or a partner) steals all of your equipment? Government officials demand "protection" money? Too bad! Better luck next time. You can also forget about patent, trademark or copyright protection, but that goes without saying.

I'm not even going to cover things like hiring engineers or building hardware here, which have their own special headaches.

It's not impossible to make money here, but 99% of the time the risk/reward ratio isn't worth it. Personally, I'm basing my company in California and targeting the American market. We might eventually come to Hong Kong or Taiwan, but I've written off the mainland as a lost cause.
I wonder though if any users actually care? Seems like it's entirely a business issue between two competitive sites. If I were to ask a question I would certainly welcome any and all answers and, personally, not care if I was credited for asking the original question. (especially if the responses were good and helpful)
7:00am wake up - shower + breakfast

7:30am read rss feeds

7:45am do "most important task"

8:15am get dressed for day job

8:30am get on train to day job, read economist on train

7:00pm leave day job, read economist on train

7:30pm arrive at home, decompress + eat dinner

8:00pm respond to emails escalated by virtual assistant for
company

9:00pm do another company growth / admin task

11:00pm respond / read all remaining emails

1:00am sleep

Been on this schedule for ~3 years. Grew company from 1 to 6. Leaving the day job at the end of the year to pursue start-up full time now that start up revenue is > day job revenue.
What you said is exactly what Sarah's argument is. For the constraints and the whole chaos situation in China, it is definitely not gonna be Silicon Valley anyway. However, it is more likely to come up with new business models (like the virtual goods and virtual currencies) because of all the constraints you talk about.
This was the text to my intro CS class in college. It's a really neat approach to introducing a range of students to software design that doesn't leave out more experienced programmers. It can feel like brainwashing at times, but it really helps tear down rotten foundations and build new, stronger ones.
HN Chrome Extensions
Organization and intelligence
Now that I think about it, there's a strong selection bias here. Private companies are, well, private, and don't get very much news coverage. Many super-profitable private software companies that never took investment are undercovered by the media. 90% of the successful software companies that I meet at conferences like Business of Software have never come within three states of a venture capitalist.

Rather than looking at how many rich people took investments, it's more meaningful, in deciding whether or not to take VC, to look at the outcomes of founders who take VC.

Those outcomes are not disputed... about half fail outright, the rest mostly continue as zombies, a tiny number make the founders a million or two, and a very very very tiny number become big enough hits to make the founders truly wealthy.
The word "literally" literally means "word by word, letter by letter." So I assume that since you're such a stickler, you only use it to talk about transcribing the scripture... right?

Or, put another way, get over yourself. Language evolves. And "literally" has been used in ways you would consider "wrong" for several hundred years now.
I read the screems and screens of text trying to disconnect climate and weather: that's where I gave up. I had had enough of the cutesy anecodotes and attacking straw men with straw men.

It's a nice anecdotal attempt to disconnect climate and weather. but it falls very flat. Candle flame eddies, swirling winds? What bunkum. Weather is what you get? So what we get in 50 years, as predicted by climate forecasts, won't be weather?

The reason people argue that climate predictions are weak because of the inability of massive amounts of computing power and continually revised models still fail to predict short term temperature and conditions. This is with a lot of known inputs. And yet, we are all supposed to believe the outputs of a 100 year climate prediction, when the amount of assumed/fudged/unknown variables is simply immense? This is the core reason people (including myself) place no credence whatsoever in climate modelling. I'm happy to change my mind when someone can prove they know all or enough of the inputs to make the model highly accurate. What would be the effect of another 10 hurricanes per year? What about a reversal or diversion of the Gulf stream? How about a permanent el nina in the Pacific? None of these are black swans and yet they would all negate current climactic predictions.
One more thing. If you're doing any kind of social or media business, and you've never had to deal with government censorship before, you're in for a new special kind of hell.

I watched Google build up all sorts of Government relationships, spend ungodly amounts of money, make soul-tainting concessions, and then have it all blow up when somebody posted banned videos on YouTube. The whole site was instantly blocked, and it's still down after several months. You can be shut down at any time, for no apparent reason, and there's no recourse.
To use it as a smtp load balancer you would have to use the dns name they provide which has dynamic A records behind it.
Check out the Science Club in DC. That's where the last Reddit-sponsored Drankkit event was held.
RobbieStats,

The way I received it, you can negotiate with them but probably only if you are buying more data from other sports.

Due to be disrupted? You piqued my interest.

I've been thinking of a way to actually have an "open source" version of stats.

I believe ESPN just got into the stats data market.
I'm not sure if this is intentional or a browser bug (I'm using Chrome so anything Webkit/Safari should be the same) but at the bottom of the menu panel on the left I see a resize button (bottom right of left panel). If I resize the panel, the menu itself doesn't resize, only the right side menus shrink.