skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>4) Most "software" patents (which can't even be cleanly categorized as such) are not crappy, at least with respect to all other patents. There are studies presenting this view [2, 3], but it's also based on my experience having read hundreds of patents. Almost none are revolutionary, but just as few are really as bad as the media portrays. The PTO has gotten pretty good at finding prior art (interestingly around the same time Google came around), and the really broad patents are dying out.

That's only a person assessment, not a fact, as you are making out it is. The consensus in the tech industry among almost everyone (from software developers to tech legends) is that the patent system is broken and continues to routinely pass invalid and valueless patents.

>The "crappy software patents" view is common mostly because tech media routinely publishes uninformed (or disinformed? [4]) rhetoric, mostly because they garner some easy rageviews, and audiences accept it without critical thought.

No, it's because it's actually the truth and the software community is not nearly as susceptible to junk journalism as you make out.

>I am not a patent lawyer or an agent, but I believe in the patent system, as I have actually worked for the mythical small-guy firm that was ripped off by the big guys and almost died, but eventually prevailed with patents.

For every example of a situation as you described, there are 10 of a patent troll shutting down another small-guy firm or making them work for slave wages.
Absolutely... This was the nicest lawyer's letter that I have ever seen, making sure not to slight the recipient, explaining their reasoning in clear terms and trying to be fair all around. If I ever need their type of services, I'll be choosing MailChimp.
Apple Developer website mistery solved.
Email received from apple a while ago:

Last Thursday, an intruder attempted to secure personal information of our registered developers from our developer website. Sensitive personal information was encrypted and cannot be accessed, however, we have not been able to rule out the possibility that some developers’ names, mailing addresses, and/or email addresses may have been accessed. In the spirit of transparency, we want to inform you of the issue. We took the site down immediately on Thursday and have been working around the clock since then.

In order to prevent a security threat like this from happening again, we’re completely overhauling our developer systems, updating our server software, and rebuilding our entire database. We apologize for the significant inconvenience that our downtime has caused you and we expect to have the developer website up again soon.
OP is on flaky legal ground reproducing and distributing other's designs without permission as it is; but then to suggest that MailChimp is in the wrong, simply for, in a very polite, even friendly, letter, acknowledging their brand and their legitimate copyright, and asking OP to play fair...wow.

Also, he wanted someone from MailChimp's design or development team to reach out to him? Really? Maybe they're busy, you know, designing and developing things! This is not a design or development issue. They have legal council to worry about copyright and brand dilution issues.
:) Indeed. You can turn it off using the control at the bottom right if it bothers you.
Once its come to their attention, no manager/director is going to go to one of their dev's or designers and say "Hey, go ask person x to take that down...".

If this situation escalated it could look sloppy on their part if they didn't handle it properly with the correct resources from the beginning.

There is no reason why this issue at hand can't be handled in a professional manner - in this case by an actual lawyer.

I've received a number of C&D and this to me is by far the most level-headed and polite that I've seen in a long time.

Just because you didn't expect a response form a lawyer doesn't mean its "aggressive" by default.
Legally, I completely agree, they're allowed to. But by that same token, hundreds of PSDs are posted on Dribbble every day. As Allan, the designer for Designer News and Layervault, said when I asked him if he wanted me to take the resources down, he said 'Why? It's wonderful'. Same thing from Heroku. I'm not saying that MailChimp isn't allowed to have the resources taken down. I never presented them as anything other than a learning resource — something that is extremely common in design.
iWork for iCloud beta
That's not the only reason why Omega 3 is prescribed.
They make more off of Android devices than Google does. Maybe their strategy is to build such sucky products that more people pick up Android devices.
The decline effect and the scientific method (2010)
That's not the case where I work.
No, Nate left.

Read this NiemanLab article from 2010. It was always clear (to me at least and a few others) that the NYT thing was just a step along the way (partnership vs acquisition - 3 yr contract, etc):

http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/06/articles-of-incorporation-n...
Your comment makes it difficult to tell whether or not you realize the UK and USA are different countries.
I think it's not interesting to vast majority of the HN users. They probably don't even know who this guy is or care if gets job at X or Y company. What is happening is here is though there is small number of people who does know him (may be < 100) and they all upvote this link or write redundant comments of congratulation in quick succession driving it to the top. This is one of the scenario that downvote button could have prevented allowing rest of the users to indicate that they are not interested. Without downvote, their only recourse is to vote something else which gets pretty thinly spread at least in some small time window while those 100+ users are upvoting this.
was so pumped to install this then realized my Photon was not compatible with this, mer.
I don't think posting PSDs is a dick move - they're just gussied-up screengrabs as far as I can see. Obviously you can't sell them or misattribute them, etc.

But you need to decide whether you're asking permission or getting offended. I don't think you can have it both ways.

edit: you do misattribute them (e.g. "Facebook Timeline UI by Luke Chesser" https://github.com/lukechesser/Popular-UIs/ )
Funnily enough, last time I set up a supervision tree hierarchy with Upstart, I was thinking the whole time, "this would be so much nicer with Erlang." I think that was my a-ha moment for OTP.

For most standalone systems though, Upstart works nicely enough as long as services don't need too much coordination.
please, i would totally use this (and blog about it) :)
I am not sure if this is real influence or perceived influence. But it would be extremely interesting to get his personal take on his very own path towards punditry. In my opinion becoming just another shouting voice in the wind weakened his expert opinion that he previously had through his academic credentials. Previously quoting Krugman had at least some a general appeal, but today it is making a political statement.
Thanks, Dan. I'll check that out, especially for good ideas on how to solve things I haven't solved yet. Spidering and scraping seem to be very related, but not quite the same -- and I admittedly know nothing about spidering.
Agreed. This a you-got-your-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter moment. Really good match.
What a great paragraph: clean, logical and completely valid.

"Further, while your intentions appear good, those who download the UI file may not act so altruistically. For example, a nefarious downloader may use the file to set up a fake website to lure unsuspecting users to log in or to try to trade off their own service or product as part of our brand (5). We’ve seen both of these situations happen before, so they aren’t just products of our paranoid imagination."
There are actually many Microsoft shops that still consider the stuff you listed as too new/unproven.

In general, .NET shops are more risk adverse than "open source" shops. Some reasons are cultural, some are business. I think Microsoft is trying to change this as they're clearly growing tired of their own developer base being reluctant to adopt their own technologies.
Had someone from the MailChimp design or
development team reached out and asked me
to take the resource down, I totally would
have understood.

This is what happened, and yet here we are. You did something they weren't comfortable with. They sent you a friendly, personal letter asking you to please not do that. You responded with an irate blog post and ran to HN for support. Why should anyone be sympathetic?
Most walkable city in the world? Do you have sources to back this?
That's worrisome; they should be using a purpose-built key derivation function, like PBKDF2, bcrypt or scrypt. Using only SHA3 means it is easy to brute-force the key by searching for likely passwords.
Not being able to save $700/month or to come up with $2,000 in an emergency situation in the USA is poor, no matter how much useless crap you bought with the rest of your money.
First off, this isn't a debate. Secondly, this completely ignores the use of tone in communication.

People get defensive when it appears they're being attacked. The "if you'd have asked nicely" response is, in my experience, the best response to give to a random being an asshole. Either they'll double down (confirming your suspicions), or they'll realize they came across wrong and rephrase.
Actually git status is the most annoying part when I'm using Vagrant with Windows. At last I could only use git in Windows to commit my code.
The case for "dumbing down" games
How can a high school student learn to code?
I'm a rising high school senior. I've studied some Python before on my own, but I want to take my skills to the next level. What should I do to practice? Any advice for an aspiring programmer?
Every day tens of thousands of pirate TV episodes are posted to Usenet, but that doesn't make it legal.

There's nothing in your little agreements—or lack of one with MailChimp—giving you the right to parade around as if they have harmed you.
> ... these people are thus more likely to be people who are invested in the success of Linux as an environment.

I think that you are correct -- at least in part.

I have zero desire to play games but I have purchased many of the Humble Bundles, for example, simply to "support the cause" and encourage other vendors to also consider Linux as a viable platform. I usually give away whatever it is that I've bought.
According to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6083583, Coreboot is being ported to ARM.
OH, I did work there, I've left :)
My point was missed I suspect. I said it's easy for Crap-degree holders to get job in Singapore, vs the rest of the world.
Network Enabled Samsung TVs vulnerable to Denial of Service Attack
Show HN: Serverless OAuth on a Github page
I think the added value that any of these forecasters, including Silver, is greatly overstated. When their accuracy is touted it is usually based on the prediction the day before the election. Is that really useful?

More importantly you can get the same predictive power by just directly using recent polling data.
We have over 25 machines with them. How do you cope with having to pay individually for every single machine, every single month? Their billing system is non-sense, unless I'm missing something?
I agree with just about everyone here so far.

What the OP has done is take someone else's work, duplicate it, and post it online for free without their consent. Then get all bothered when the company did what companies do, ask their lawyer to sort it out.

And the lawyer sorted it out in the nicest possible goddamn way I've ever seen a lawyer sort something like this out.

That others were OK with it doesn't really matter. That's up to each team, each company, and one saying "OK" doesn't automatically make every other company obligated to say OK.

All that matters is the OP took someone else's hard work, copied it, and posted it online without consent.
Why does the baby have Daddy's eyes but not Mommy's?
Well it goes back to Vietnam really. The idea was that bullets fired by American soldiers towards civilians would automatically turn those civilians into Viet Cong. That was basically the unspoken policy.

Another story was from a helicopter pilot. They would capture what looked like "enemy combatants", load them into a helicopter for transport, then proceed to interrogate them under a threat of being thrown down on the ground. And then they would get the information and throw them off the helicopter But the issue was that they had to count the casualties. So the policy was to _always_ count when disembarking the helicopter not before. As those two numbers were sometimes quite different.
I like FP as much as the next guy (who dabbles in it out of curiosity). But I can't get over thinking that the need to invoke function composition composition for operations which are trivial in other languages suggests that somewhere we ended up trying to use the wrong tool for the job.
Who would you expect to receive a message from? Presumably this happens more often than you think, and the company protocol is to get legal to deal with it. I think you've misinterpreted this as in any way "aggressive" - this is just a company trying to tie things up as efficiently as possible. Sure, you'd like an informal response, but when a company is operating at the scale of Mailchimp, that doesn't seem realistic.

I was also quite impressed by the tone of the message from Mailchimp legal - probably the clearest, most polite takedown request I've seen.
Supervision has many benefits besides automatic restarts after crashes. Supervising programs provide a consistent way to start, monitor, and log long running programs. Nginx reinvents its own interface for some of this functionality (like daemonizing, log rotating/compression, conf reloading, etc.), but it's useful for all services to work under the same interface. This is especially true for monitoring nginx's status, where a supervisor like runit is much nicer than 'pgrep nginx' or 'ps aux | grep $(cat /where/nginx/dumps/its/pid)'.
Setup a PHP Vagrant Box VM using PuPHPet
As an owner of a MBP two Dell Laptops and a custom Win8 PC, I feel bad for ya son, I got 99 problems, but DSL ain't one.

I hard boot Win8 in <30 seconds and have never felt any heat during updates.

That MBP on the other hand? Since it doesn't get constant love, I hate having to pull it out b/c it's gonna whine and it's not got the SSD, so it's gonna pant... therefore, Apple sucks all balls. Anecdotally, we're tied now. FFS people - nobody gives a shit when you're a re-newb how horrible you are at your re-acquired platform.
> as a consumer I don't want any of their new stuff.

I think we could've guessed that from your use of "M$" in the prior clause.
You can turn of daemonization in nginx.
we ended up with pretty standard terms. our lawyers had lots of info on data from other funds they helped raise and our LPs gave us their feedback as well. the reality is that if you're looking to make money being a smaller VC, it's really about raising multiple funds over time, so the opportunity to work with the best backers trumped any small concessions we could have gotten from less sophisticated investors.
First of all -- I think the letter from MailChimp was very polite and straightforward. The posters expectations (hopes?) are insane

That said, what are the rights around "clean room" implementation of website designs? If I simply pull up a site on another monitor, and build a clone of it from scratch (omit the logos of course), what are my rights?

Sadly, it appears the Popular UIs guy didn't even bother removing obviously trademarked and identifying logos. His argument that "sharing PSDs is a great way to learn" doesn't explain why he left logos in the work.
That's basically true. The MIT license generally doesn't provide for any restrictions. That's why it's so awesome.

But ultimately, there's no legally binding rules about using the MIT license. I can "use" the MIT license and then say, "Only cats who can ride motorcycles can use this code", and then, while MY license is "based" on the MIT license, it now has a totally valid motorcycle cat restriction. Cause I added one.
Your point about having his girlfriend's labor as a huge contribution to his venture is pretty correct. I don't think it down plays his success at all... but it's certainly a significant contributor. If my wife would embrace my madcap ideas and work on them full-force, it would be quite awesome.
I saw this through a friend on Facebook and it really resonated with me. I'm slowly approaching the completion of my PhD and it occurs to me that I'm not entirely certain what I plan to do with it. At this point though, I'm fairly certain that I don't want to go the R1 route.

I sometimes forget this myself, but I don't really have a master plan. I just do whatever seems most interesting and important to me at any given time, and I really don't think it's too terrible a philosophy. Interestingly, that would make this PhD the longest pet project of my life so far.

Edit:
Just noticed that this article was already posted

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6081501
appreciate it. the world of institutional LPs was completely new to me when i started this process so was actually perversely fun figuring it out
Jay - i think Boston has some strong entrepreneurial talent but as a startup ourselves, we're trying to focus on critical mass in a few geo areas to start.
Yes, and the .beam files are interpreted (i.e. they are not native code).

There is a native-code compiler (HiPE). I'm not sure how "much" it compiles the code (e.g. whether type-dispatch code remains or not).
If you use a credit or debit card, yes. PayPal, however, does everything possible to (get you to) use ACH transfer from your bank account instead. In that case, I believe that you would end up with $600/$850 sitting in your PayPal account and withdrawing can be a PITA in some cases.
Bottlenose Dolphins Can Use Learned Vocal Labels to Address Each Other
I think you're missing my point. You don't care what happens from the point you get affected until you find it in whatever utility--be it 5 seconds, 10 minutes, or 3 days? No matter how vigilantly you stare at procexp, you're not going to stop it from running.
Influence: http://www.influenceapp.com/
Disabling daemonization allows nginx to be monitored initially and through conf reloads but not binary upgrades (e.g. nginx 1.5.1 -> nginx 1.5.2). The binary upgrade process forks the master process, which it 'orphans' from runit and reparents under pid 1.

oops, edit: pid 0 -> pid 1
Emacs package Geiser improves Scheme development
There are some good points there, but they're not particularly applicable to nginx. nginx's relative robustness, its need to log to more than one file, and its need to fork itself in order to perform graceful configuration state transitions suggests that it's not really a low-hanging fruit for robust process supervision.

Besides, its control interface is the same as any other subsystem if you've configured it correctly -- i.e., "service nginx <verb>".
We have the same question, they did not mention anything about battery life. I'm not sure about the video, I don't have my sound card installed on my office workstation. If this could last as 5 hrs for an Ubuntu Desktop, I'll buy one.
I'm quite impressed by how well it was written actually. You'd be very unlikely to get a response like that from any other company.
Kate Middleton Gives Birth, World Reacts (TWEETS)
I doubt most of the other deaths were ever given much of a fair trial, so the implication of innocence should probably be applied a bit more broadly. You know, since we're defending democracy and all.
Dude, I upvoted you, but you really want to prefix your post with "Show HN: " - you'll get a lot more attention that way.
Grow a pair?
I personally think it should be additional input to whatever, for your desktop or laptop.

I'm planning on creating my own laptop startup and eventually try to integrate Leap(or something similar). In many cases it may not apply to general usage, but there are many use cases where it would be preferred.

1) Cases where user interacts with a GUI where user is visually engaged, imagine I am on Youtube, personally because stupid instability of HTML5 and Flash on Linux, I hate using it, especially when I am full screening. That's something that can be replaced with a gesture. So try doing a pinch gesture(basically zoom out) and the browser can interrupt that as put video in full screen.

2) Rather than using your whole arm what about just one finger. Lets say you want to scroll down and both hands are on the keyboard, rather than moving one hand back to the mouse you can just flick one finger. This gesture could scroll pages, it could flip through tabs and you wouldn't even have to take your hands of the keyboard.

3) Now there are a lot of edge cases I would say where using a keyboard/trackpad is uncomfortable. When I am lying down using a trackpad is very awkward and strains my wrist. This is certainly the case where I would want to flick some stuff around, maybe even talk to the computer.

4) My parents connect their laptop via HDMI cable to the TV and that's all they use the laptop for, basically to watch youtube and Netflix(if Leap motion had the range), it's something I would want to control almost as an imaginary but intuitive remote.

And this is kind of just the start. I think with the increasing number of input devices available interfaces are going to have to be clever to hide that complexity from the user and make things intuitive.
This is probably a really dumb question, but can you explain what a "chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter moment" is? I've never heard a phrase like that.

OT this is awesome. Congrats to both parties, obviously a great choice.
I'm saying let's throw them all away starting today. We'll turn off the internet for a while but when we switch it back on it will be way better. :)

Kidding of course. Despite my optimism for this, I'm a pragmatist. It would take many years to switch, and would be a gradual process. I have just seen time and again how if you make things simpler, more natural, you reap drastic rewards. Look at the introduction of touch interfaces. Hundreds of millions of people are now using more powerful computers than most of us owned just a few years ago.

I believe there's a huge pent up demand for people who want to get their hands on the DNS layer of the Internet, and simplifying the protocols would be one big step toward allowing that to happen.
While I agree that a hacker being from country $FOO should bear no negative association with everyone else from the country, this doesn't appear to be racism, which is a label that already get applied too often.

You can make disparaging remarks about a nation without it having any racist intent. The people on HN and elsewhere who disparage the USA, for instance, could hardly be singling out a single race.
How do YOU differentiate? I SEO like a muthafugga.

First I copy the trend and slap it on the free platform, then I get all blustery and religious in my tribe. Then I game the goog and watch the benjamins rain dOwN.

If you need to build a business around publicly available search engine results... link deep and deliver content, not jumping-off points.

If you rely on search engine referrals and can't "replay" to some nestled in state in your SPA, then DO NOT DO A Single URL Application (SUA).

Hey, everyone! Let's get back to load screens and useless navigation!!! View this site in HTML or wait a minute while we load your Flash.
IIRC: Crossroads I/O was forked from ZeroMQ by its original author, who subsequently decided to start from a clean slate with nanomsg. His blog has some really good insights on various design decisions and "lessons learned" from ZeroMQ: http://250bpm.com/blog
pid 1, actually :)
Thanks I appreciate it! Did you make a search?