skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do you know how to read a patent document and assess the scope claimed? Because with a comment like that, it's pretty clear you don't. The scope is both quite clear and narrow/specific and most definitely could not apply to almost anything at all on the internet.
MonkVG: a vector graphics API implementation optimized for gaming
Interviewer: Is the government winning the battle against terrorists?

Helpmann: Ah, yes. We're fielding all their strokes, running all of them out. We're consistently knocking them for six. I'd say they're nearly out of the game.

Interviewer: But, Mr. Helpmann, the bombing campaign is now in its 13 th year.

Helpmann: Beginners' luck.
how do you download the video? is it a browser plugin? I use chrome, and the old youtube downloader extension no longer works after their UI revamp (and the extension is no longer updated as far as i know).
Democratizing Tech Education at App Academy
Bob didn't run the developer portal did he ?
I tried to clearly define Kanban as a "Kanban (meaning signboard or billboard) is a scheduling system for lean and just-in-time production. It’s a system to control the logistical chain from a production point of view. Kanban was developed by Taiichi Ohno, at Toyota, to find a system to improve and maintain a high level of production. The Kanban Method was later added to as an approach to incremental, evolutionary process improvement for organizations."

The point is that it is a mistake to take a methodology that was created for incremental process enhancement along a manufacturing line and apply it to software development.
I also love the bit about the floating point divide non-optimisation, and how it turned into a success.
New Social Bookmarking Website
Share and discover the best content on the web.
The hype before the Segway was so immense, that even if they announced something exactly like the Hyperloop people would have felt disappointed. People actually considered anti-gravity belts to be a possibility at the time.
Props to them for capturing the feeling of a beautiful magazine on a web page. I wish my favourite newspaper websites would pull that off in their larger pieces.
I've used this service for a couple weeks now, and it is an astonishing time saver. Same day delivery opens up very a different way of thinking about things. I have a couple thoughts though:

1) I currently feel guilty because its so easy to just buy one thing at a time, and theres nothing stopping me from doing it, that I end up making micropurchases. I wish Google would either prevent this or say "Oh its fine we use all electric vehicles any way."

2) I'm curious what their pricing plan is going to be like. I've compared the service to instacart which has minimum delivery amounts to avoid delivery fees. Google Express looks to be going more along the lines of an Amazon Prime type membership, where one price gets you unlimited deliveries. I don't know if they'll end up with this though.

3) Groceries! I would love to be able to buy produce, dairy, etc from Google Express.

4) I wish the delivery windows could be tighter... Maybe it sounds picky but Instacart has very nice delivery windows compared to Google Express.
Here I thought it was sarcasm.
The age difference in the cultural superiority question is really eye opening. It went from 60% of 50+ Americans saying 'yes', to 37% for 18-29 -- second lowest after France.

Glad to know that my generation has a sprinkling of modesty.
If only they worked with Fry's and Costco ...
Yes. I think they are related to the "scrumdamentalists" who I have written about in the past as well.

See -- The Holy Scrum War - http://blog.aha.io/index.php/the-holy-scrum-war/
For the sake of a headline, giving a relative difference is perfectly ethical I think. While providing the absolute difference is much more meaningful, it just wouldn't get nearly as much attention. Lying is of course unethical, but a relative difference is hardly a lie, just spin.
I read your post, but I don't understand why the first link can't work. Is there a problem with a wave propagating along the tube with essentially infinite envelope? Here's a nice animation:

http://www.acoustics.org/press/151st/WaveVectorDemosmall.gif

In other words: decompose the standing wave into its forward and backward components and just keep the forward one. This is not the same thing as the air having a net velocity, so you don't bleed all your energy into friction with the walls. (You'll still lose some energy as the sound wave is naturally damped by friction due to the residual motion of the air molecules, but this might not be a large effect.)
Monitoring fabrication in industry and chess
Yep, I expected to hear that Intergraph were responsible.
12 plus years after disasters in NZ and Australia, (the latter resulting in a Royal Commission) they are still at it.

Some links:
(Australian) Victorian Police Corruption
http://www.smuggled.com/Inte1.htm

NZ Parliamentary Record:
http://www.vdig.net/hansard/content.jsp?id=76345

"This year [2000] we see the very two people who were involved in the police force who were making all the recommendations about Intergraph, go to work for Intergraph."
Display and animate SVG images on iOS using Cocos2D
I've seen businesses choose a plan up from a perfectly good lower run plan simply because the name of it was something like "Solo" and didn't think it fit. It's just clever marketing to anchor people towards the middle.
oxyclean
That's not at all how the prior art base of the USPTO, nor any other patent office, is defined. The problem is that these are the most easily searchable bases of prior art because their fields necessitate it: academics are required to find everything piece of related are on what they're researching when producing works like a PhD thesis, and as such huge databases of academic work exist which are easily searchable; patents in the US are also required to disclose all know prior art (I believe, US patent law isn't where my experience comes from), and as such, the larger patent offices (the European and US particularly) have had to develop tools for effectively searching patents. Patents are also usually a good source for prior art because they like to disclose things as broadly as possible so they can claim as broadly as they're allowed. If you find a document which describes something within the scope of the claim you're looking at, then you've got a great novelty citation.

The reason sometimes known things are allowed through is because the patent offices can find no proof that it is well known in the form of a single document before something can be called not novel. In some other juristrictions, common general knowledge in the art is more often used when it's known that something is already routine. even if there's nothing that clearly shows is, simply because it's so common.
Gigablast Search Engine now Open Source on GitHub
Can configure the alt (option)-key behavior in your iTerm2 profile.

Left/Right Option Key Acts As

It is common to use a modifier to send so-called "meta keys". For most users, selecting "+Esc" here is the right choice. The "Meta" option sets the high bit of the input character, and is not compatible with modern systems.

http://www.iterm2.com/#/section/documentation
So, I've had the opposite experience: lean-type incremental process enhancement has had dramatic improvements on the end-to-end results of more than one company I've been involved with.

I look at a book like The Phoenix Project, written by some fairly respected software industry folks like Gene Kim, and they also recommend the opposite: that software development and IT operations actually are a lot like an industrial shop floor and benefit from being organized in an end-to-end pull flow like Kanban.

I look at Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank, or Lean Startup by Eric Ries, while they aren't specifically dictating a Kanban board in their work, they're clearly philosophically in the camp of a pull-based approach to organizing work and limiting work-in-progress.

So, what I haven't determined from your article is, what specifically is flawed with these authors views and my experiences? Am I being over-broad in their inclusion? My interprtation of your article this far is a well-meaning but under-argued philosophical aversion to being lumped in with other industrial engineering practices.

Edit: clarity
Oh. I do this with docker all the time :)
A New Role for Amazon: An Engine for Jobs
I'll look up the language. I never spent any time on it. I have to say that I am somewhat of a purist when it comes to the idea (and real power) of notation. If we are going to evolve computing we need to try to move away from trying to fit everything into some mutation of an ASCII bag. I am not proposing graphical programming, been there, done that, it blows. However, a carefully done true language (meaning something with a unique and concise notation with which to express ideas) could be incredibly powerful and evolutionary.

A quick comparison of the code necessary to calculate all primes up to a limit in K and APL:

(!R)@&{&/x!/:2_!x}'!R

(2=+⌿0=(⍳X)∘.|⍳X)/⍳X

This tells me that K was written to fit APL functionality into and ASCII character set. I get it. I understand where some of that came from around that time. As I said before, it was hard to display and generally deal with non-ASCII character sets. K was created around the time of Windows 3.0. It was still the wild west. I can totally see wanting to have the same level of abstraction with easy-to-deal-with ASCII transliterations. The problem is that this is absolutely going in the wrong direction. Notation (symbols, icons) are incredibly powerful and are at the core of some of APL's ability to become a tool for thought.

I feel the same way about languages such as ObjectiveC. Another abomination. There was no reason to do that. Nothing whatsoever was gained by saying: "Hey, let's do the same thing but come up with a different way to write it." Sure, O-C has a few nice things here and there but it did not advance computing in any appreciable way as far as I can identify.

As for the other extensions you listed come with K, that's probably great. I'd have to dive deeper into the language in order to offer even a superficial opinion on that.

One of the reasons I abandoned languages such as APL, Forth and Lisp, languages that I used extensively for many, many years is that they became less and less practical and relevant. I can apply C to nearly everything from embedded to system work and even in modern hybrids where FPGA's are integrated with capable microprocessors. On the hardware front languages like Verilog are very reminiscent of C and, as long as you understand that you are actually describing hardware and NOT writing software, are easy to pick-up with the appropriate background. You move up to languages such as C++ and other layers open up. PHP, Python, Objective-C when I absolutely must and Java if I have no choice. All of these are very flexible and relevant tools that have, for the most part remained relevant and useful for years. That range of applicability will never be achieved with something like APL. If an APL-like language is going to come to the forefront it will be for very specialized applications where it makes sense. It will not be to run a shopping cart on a website or control a servo on my robot. That's just reality. I love APL. I devoted a huge chunk of my professional life to it. I can't see using it or the wanna-be variants for anything today. Sorry.
New CUBRID PHP and PDO drivers now support altHosts and loadBalancing
Unfortunately not all of us are blessed to work with well organized stakeholders who are able to plan ahead rather than wait until the last minute to request whatever they need from engineering. Agile only works when the entire organization abides by its rules, sure engineering teams can train their stakeholders to some degree but upper management can just overule the process and insist engineering should be like a service desk that responds to whatever is needed today. Sucks, but it's a reality in many workplaces.
Instacart works with Costco.
Isn't that the role of PM, and management? That's what they are for. To ensure that people do not lose sight of the bigger picture.

When you first implement a process, any process (waterfall, kanban, scrum, whatchamighticallit) the first cycle is going to be hard as everyone is trying to adjust to the new way of doing it. Some people will buy in, some people will call it a fad, some people will like to wait and watch.

So first time around you are going to see these issues, but then the question to ask is, are you measuring the activities? Are you looking at the metrics? Are you debugging the process by trying to ask questions on what the metrics are telling you?

If not any process will fail. And in case of Kanban, metrics are the most important data to understand your cadence. How else will you identify waste, identify bottlenecks and also get into "continuous improvement".

To me goal of any good process should be:
a) Provide feedback as early as possible on every activity thus improving the possibility of success.
b) Reduce the cost of transaction in some form by either improving productivity or reducing waste.
c) Build a team which works as a collective whole with everyone aware of what needs to be get done and when and for what purpose.

If any process fails to do these, you have a failed process.
I'm surprised people find this hard to believe. It's less than 2 years after the defeat of SOPA, a bill that enjoyed incredible, nearly unprecedented bipartisan support and in the end, after the blackout, faced massive, unprecedented bipartisan opposition and retreat.

Politicians may be slow, but they'll respond to momentum.
Oh look, French bashing, how very avant-garde.
If there is one thing I would most like to see changed it is this secrecy required of companies compliant in this surveillance.
New Babies, Remote Working & Startups
From my experience and from what I am hearing it (meaning Kanban) does not work for most folks or companies. That's it. It might work well for you and that's great too. I don't think Kanban and Agile philosophies are the same though - but that's at least another long blog post.
As an industrial engineer, this is the equivalent of a developer walking into a factory and hearing about how "the mythical man-month" is a terrible book/idea because it allows for waste.

Right. The Mythical Man-Month is a great book/concept for creative/engineering projects. Kanban is a wonderful way of implementing a Just-In-Time manufacturing system.

Props to the OP for explaining the origin of kanban. May this post help fix the co-opting of an IE term for something totally different.
The PCT relates mostly to claims for priority of patents, so if a document is files in say the US, the applicant may then later (within a specified time period) file an application in another PCT country and claim the same priority date as the US application (ie, the date of filing). All patents are applicable within a single nation only, so just because company X has patent Y in country Z down not mean you can't use the invention in country W unless X has a patent to the same invention in country W as well. However, if they've filed using the PCT they will by default designate they wish for all member countries to examine the patent, so until that patent has lapsed in each country, there is a possibility that the inventor may persue protection and you may then be infringing that patent. Fun stuff.
Previous Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5454677 (41 points, 46 comments, 122 days ago)
Of course - Snowden was about as "low level" of a guy as they come (contractor for four months) and was able to basically access everything.
Of course they are, the trick is to get the most utility out of each one. I work at Tokutek where we use a data structure that does this, in the sense that when your working set is larger than RAM, we still don't incur very many I/Os for writes. If you want durability, there's nothing you can do about the logging fsyncs except buy yourself a nice battery-backed disk controller.

Partitioning is often a bad idea because it messes with your queries. I don't know what's new about partitioning in InnoDB but I think it's generally a symptom of the over-use of B-trees, which don't try to do anything smart about random writes. The change buffer is a decent idea but it's just a stopgap, when you have enough data it doesn't make a dent any more. A better idea is to use a data structure that can handle lots of writes.

I have just started learning about Riak, and from what I understand, they need to do a query (so, a disk seek) on every insert (to calculate something with vector clocks), so they aren't actually using the write optimization that LevelDB's LSM-trees can provide. I don't actually think it should provide that fantastic performance, but I should admit I haven't run it yet. Maybe they're more interested in the compression LevelDB gives them.

Shameless plug time! http://www.tokutek.com/2011/09/write-optimization-myths-comp...
What is there to feel shame about? Opinions are just that - opinions. You shouldn't feel ashamed for people that have different opinions than yourself. That seems overly judgmental and elitist, especially the "relatively rural" nonsense.

I for one am glad that we don't share the same views on the whole as Western Europe, especially the self-reliance and choose-your-own-adventure. It's the over-reliance on the government that has Western Europe in the terrible economic shape that it is.

While we have gone a bit overboard in letting corporations dictate so much of our rules and regulations, all in all, the capitalist system we have gives people more opportunities than our European counterparts. Our culture may not be superior (how could it be when we've only been around for ~250 years), but our economics most certainly are.

I think the Europeans' smugness and looking down their noses at the "upstarts" in the colonies has gotten to you.
I notice that they added "* Some restrictions may apply" to the landing page -- do they ever state the restrictions anywhere?
Gurley to founders: VC isn’t always right
So what methodology have you found that works well in that environment? I am curious what helps you manage the madness as best you can when PM is not organized and "management" meddles.
I believe the future of the West is profoundly more conservative than the present, because Darwin.

Ironically, Darwin's work and ideas will be banned as a result.
Ask HN: Practical ways of dealing with UK porn/other bans?
So it seems I need to educate myself with how to get around these forthcoming content bans that will effect me in the UK?

I understand I can change my DNS proxy to another countries, such as google, to get past DNS level blocking.

Other than this, do I simply need a fast VPN which does not log data? I am on 4mbit but FTTP (fibre to the premises) is being activated here soon, so I should be on 100mbit fibre.

Thanks!
I appreciate that. I really do. It's rare to receive an ounce of props on HN. I must admit that I was totally surprised to learn that it was not designed for software development and that the author of the Lean Methodology has been trying to convince folks to stop using it.
"The sudden reconsideration of post-Sept. 11 counterterrorism policy has taken much of Washington by surprise"

It shouldn't have. But this is how these things happen. People don't act immediately on them, even if they think differently. They just build and build up frustration inside of them, while the politicians keep stepping on them more and more, growing ever more brave in doing that because they see no one protests against their actions - until one the people day blow up and the move seems "sudden".

Politicians should consider themselves lucky this is not a violent revolution meant to overthrow the government, and they should fix the problem as soon as they can.
Hey man, you can't start speaking the truth in the middle of a HN anti-patent circlejerk!
I agree. That's the reason I love Kanban. It allows us to capture metrics on what is being done, how long it took and where are we spending most of our time. This numbers in turn allow us to push the story to management on what they are doing wrong.

For e.g. We worked on a team where Sales made a feature request (1 day, PM and design team worked on it and released it to engineering (5 weeks) and engineering released it to sandbox (2 weeks), qa tested it and released it to production (1 week).

Guess where the bottleneck is? The whole cadence for the feature was 8 weeks. Obviously Sales where jumping on us for not getting it done on time.
This way of looking at the whole board, allowed us to identify a bottleneck and push for changes on how the whole company operates. If you kanban a board only for engineering then you lose the big picture, How is the system as a whole operating.
Do you know how difficult it is to build and maintain an evacuated tube of that size? Not all loopy tubes are created equal.
creative idea
> As for getting the government we deserve, this is a coalition, the public voted and no one won, we didn't ask for this government.

That's an interesting take on coalition government. In continental Europe they are generally seen in a more favourable light. (Though, in proportional representation one party governments are much less likely.)
Fair ball. I'd say if its being latched onto as a panacea, almost all approaches to process will fail if you lack the basics: a good market, an insightful product owner/manager, good engineers, and at least an adequate morale in the company.

I've seen companies/projects with all of those things still fail because of a poor process. This is where something like Kanban can help, IMO. Not trivial to implement though.
My current bedside reading is: Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges - http://www.amazon.com/Collected-Fictions-Jorge-Luis-Borges/d... (NOT an affinity link, just the link).

He was a genius. His writing is wonderful. As others have said his ideas are well suited to the kinds of folks who frequent HN. The other interesting thing is that never before have I had people approach me about my reading. But sit in a cafe in San Francisco with Borges and suddenly the world and her friend wants to spark up a conversation about my choice of book.

Cannot recommend this highly enough. If you are looking for reading material that takes you away from technology and work and the usual stuff we fill our heads with, explore the universe through the words of Borges. You won't regret it.
Claim 1, the broadest claim, doesn't require that.
SGB palettes aren't recognized by the CGB, which instead only has a hardcoded set of 12 to apply on regular GameBoy games. Backwards-compatible CGB games used another incompatible format. Some games (Pokémon Yellow) contained both.
If you want you can see all the gory details in The Game Boy Programming Manual (huge PDF):

http://chrisantonellis.com/files/gameboy/gb-programming-manu...
I'd also like to see an end to secret interpretations of laws by the executive branch, secretly approved by the FISA court. If a law is passed by Congress, its meaning should be clear, and known to the public.

And I'd also like to see the PATRIOT Act seriously scrutinized from the point of view of civil liberties.