skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that the term NPE is a misnomer. I disagree that there's no difference between patent holders.

No single behavior makes a patent holder a troll, but a combination of behaviors do.

Good: A patent holder partners with licensees to produce their invention.
Bad: A patent holder waits until somebody produces their invention to sue them.

Good: A patent holder tries to get their invention produced.
Bad: A patent holder takes no steps to get their invention produced.

Good: A patent holder sues for infringement that does not discourage going to court.
Bad: A patent holder threatens to sue under conditions that make going to court pointless.

Good: A patent holder is the inventor.
Suspicious: A patent holder bought the patent from the inventor.

Good: A patent holder takes the necessary steps to make their patent known.
Bad: A patent holder exploits the system to hide their patent as much as possible (submarine patents)

Good: A patent represents a suitably complex/worthy invention with a clear and narrow definition.
Bad: A patent is overly broad and claims a trivial invention.

A good patent/patent holder will never fulfill all bad criteria listed above. However a patent troll will always fill all the bad criteria for obvious reasons.
It's actually already pretty usable, on the Galaxy Nexus.

You can follow the details of the progress per device here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArLs7UPtu-hJdDZ...

Note that there's a host of other devices with "unofficial" support: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Devices
This seems like a giant extrapolation based on only the merest hint of any actual evidence.

The big question to me, is why would Apple, the quintessential hardware company, be going out of their way to try and sell you less hardware? They don't want you to reuse your iPhone as your main computer. They want to sell you both. In general they detest the whole concept of shoehorning bits of technology into roles they are not meant for. In Apple's eyes, each device you own is exactly optimized for its unique role.

This whole thing sounds like Cringely's personal fantasy rather than anything Apple would actually do.
School, typically. Had to do them at 9, 12, 17. I got dumber with each successive one.
As a teacher, I far prefer to have parents who are involved in their kids' education, than the parents who are not involved.

There's a correlation between affluence and parent involvement, yes, but there's a stronger correlation between parent involvement and pupil engagement/learning.

Edited to add: Helicopter parenting is often a symptom of poor communication between the school and the parent - better and happier personal communication tends to resolve tension.
The answer, of course, is to tell your daughter she just doesn't have to do this shit. It's middle school. It doesn't matter. When she gets to high school, if teachers try to put her in non-honors classes (where she obviously doesn't belong), you sign a waiver and put her in the right classes.

Of course, if you by any means have the time or the money, the real answer is not to send your kids to these idiotic institutions at all, and to teach them yourself, or higher tutors. Hire college students; they can use the money.
>You seem to have missed my point.
>Which is that you're doing nothing.
>And saying nothing.

Actually I do do things, I do write and air my grievances with my local representative(s). I do expect them to be accountable.
There is no marks for having homework, there are only negative marks for not having it.
To transform PHP code, it seems [1]. That's not quite the same as the backend and infrastructure of Facebook and Google.

I'm not trying to start a flame war or anything, just pointing out that C++ is good at some things you cannot really do with friendlier languages.

[1] https://github.com/facebook/lex-pass
> there's a difference between mental arithmetic, […] and the pen-and-paper variant, which is not

Until you are working with variables.
Works for me - Ubuntu 13.04, Chromium 28, Firefox 24.

It looks way better in Chromium, since it's got the correct focus color and the animation looks more smooth. Firefox is way more jerky and the color/outline is all wrong.

I still like it, even in Firefox, because it's such a nice addition!
Our insanely good fuzzy classification skills let us select and continually update a solving strategy. In computing terms: writes to long-term memory are slow, but reads are fast; short-term memory is extremely size-constrained and time-volatile, but fast for both writes and reads.

Efficient algorithms for human brains should rely as much as possible on pattern matches, long-term memory reads, and limited short-term storage—exactly the opposite of what you want to do on a computer! It’s no wonder that the polynomial-time multiplication algorithms that work fine on paper aren’t going to perform very well in our heads.
A current-generation Casio scientific handles this well - the display shows exact numbers such as 1+&radic;(2) which suggest it's doing the precise calculation where reasonable.
British spy agency GCHQ hacked EU ally Belgium's telecoms firm using NSA tech
Edit: Sorry, I just noticed that actually I was missing the point - I thought your comment was in response to vacri. Leaving my comment here, just in case.

I think your comment misses the point. It's important to learn when to use a calculator and when to simplify the equation instead. Your example obviously should be simplified first on paper, resulting in 2. This can easily be enforced by requiring the intermediate steps, such that a calculator won't work. The point of parent is, that learning pen-and-paper calculation is of basically no value (except if you go into computer science, where remembering those algorithms can come in handy). Your example is not calculation, it's arithmetics, a necessary step towards algebra.
It is like they are deliberately pushing for features which require more processing and rendering power so the previous hardware instances can be rendered obsolete.
That's one way to deepen a diplomatic relationship.
Some thoughts:

* This is something like an obvious thing to do; the question is when and whether the mobile OS vendors are going to be bothered with the work to make it happen, including the internal revenue/political frictions to overcome (ChomeOS vs. Android, anyone?)

* Speaking of the work necessary, here are two technical changes I assume you'd see if Apple was actively working towards this now: one, a move towards resolution independence for iOS apps, and two, API changes to accommodate having multiple apps active at the same time. If these were happening, presumably iOS developers would be talking about them?

* iOS famously tries to abolish the file, document and filesystem (from the user's perspective). It's interesting to consider what kind of compromises Apple would or will make in making a desktop, multitasking iOS. Stick to the iOS model or try to retrofit something?

* 'Native' support for keyboard and mouse - an experience good enough that Apple wouldn't be embarrassed to be advertising it as a first-party option - would be awkward to bring in. iOS 7 may have a nice new interface for switching and managing tasks, but how much fun would it be to close an app with the throw-it-away gesture on a large-screen device using a mouse?
Earth's days are numbered
God this is a piss-poor load of rubbish. Horseshit like "startup shirts are the new band shirts". who's your crack dealer? Definitely laced with chili powder.

A terribly hyperbolic article that misses the point of why syart-ups are popular with the kids, which is:

Post-GFc exonomic uncertainty.
+
Decline of the graduate job market
+
The Zuckerbeeg/Karp archetype / gold-rush mentality.
You can do similar to what you want right now: pass to AlarmManager flag ELAPSED_REALTIME, and your event won't be delivered, until device is waked up.
I have to disagree with this a little bit. The skills you use for mental arithmetic are very similar to the skills for pen and paper. I would view pen and paper as training wheels.

It might be argued that mental arithmetic should also at least be taught, but the only way I know of to do that which will tend to generalize to a majority of students is to teach them to use an abacus (seasoned abacus users eventually stop needing to actually have the physical device). And yes, we should almost definitely be teaching children how to use an abacus.
2nd generation rewording of http://www.theorangenotebook.com/2013/09/testing-ubuntu-touc...
I doubt you can detect an OS theme with Javascript or CSS.
The teens are actually a particularly problematic period for humans in this respect, because it's a time when you have the sleep requirements of a child, but the natural bedtime of an adult. Most 8-year-olds can't easily stay up past 11. Most 13-year-olds can't easily fall asleep before 10. Both need at least 9 hours of sleep.
Really like this when using the keyboard.

When using the mouse, the transition is implied so it's annoying.

Great work though!
It is funny, from what I understand one of the old complaints about Ada was how verbose it was in comparison to C at the time.

Comparing modern Ada to modern C++, C++ has tried its best to equal Ada in verbosity, although C++11 fixed a good deal of C++03's excesses.

From what I can tell, Ada is still missing a good way to do really primitive bit operations in a simple matter. Then again, bit ops destroy Ada's type safety, so I can see why they were made difficult. Still, if one needs to start poking around the individual bits of arbitrary data, C makes that easy-ish. (I mean it could be a lot better, it isn't hard to come up with a better syntax than C's for bit-wise access)

But everything I have read about the latest Ada spec makes it seem like a nice language.

I also believe another problem is that Ada has always been a rather academic language in many ways. Where as for the longest time no one in the C community really talked about pointer aliasing (and I'm guessing if you took a random cross sample of programmers in the late 80s/90s, many of them wouldn't know what the term even meant), Ada requires you know about pointer aliasing just to use pointers at all!

Then there is the fact that the language syntax is defined in BNF, and the main reference pointed to for Ada is the official reference manual. On one hand, hey awesome, the language spec is freely available for all! On the other hand, it is about as readable as any other official spec. The experts who can easily understand the spec end up just pointing to it (after all it is so easy for them to read) and thus simplified explanations don't get created.

> In fact most of the people who complain about C++ would never even consider Ada.

If I had tooling and other people in my group had more familiarity with it, I sure as heck would. Holy crap am I sick and tired of being limited to just straight C and a very tiny subset of C++. And 90% of the new stuff in C++ is not targeted at the embedded market (quite the opposite!) where as Ada has stayed closer to its roots.
This is nice, but is pretty much useless on a tablet. I realize that desktop users are the primary focus, but it seems like any new editor has to consider tablet/mobile use.

It must be a difficult problem. Without using some kind of plain text markup syntax like Markdown, the user is required to select some text for formatting, but then you're competing with the OS's UI actions.

Are there any good mobile/tablet browser-based editors that _my mom_ would use?
Go 1.2 Release Candidate 1 released
Holy st people how can you allow teachers to torture your kids like that.

I'm young and I never had this kind of work load hell if i did i would have either gone insane or just said fk it and ignored all that homework.

Yes I'm not from America I'm from Easter Europe. I would never allow this to my children. If this is the state of education I can do a better job.

"If Esmee masters the material covered in her classes, she will emerge as a well-rounded, socially aware citizen, a serious reader with good reasoning capabilities and a decent knowledge of the universe she lives in. What more can I ask of her school?"

No she will emerge as a well informed drone with good reading skill but no desire to do so because she is reminded of the amount of reading forced upon her and very weak reasoning and deductive skills.

“Memorization, not rationalization.”

What the point of that? If you don't understand what you have memorized it is useless not to mention a lot harder to remember.

Cyberbullying really? Is that person a complete idiot? Why would i ever let my child learn from a person who would attempt to threaten me with some ridiculous accusation in order to make me back off from my opinion.

It is manipulative and instead of addressing my concerns they are trying to make me go away.

From what they are telling the parents the teachers are just a bunch of drones following instructions sent by a higher power.

Exactly what they are teaching the students to become.

Where's the critical thinking where the opinion and power of the teachers to teach in a manner that they see fit?
I recall that most people can manage 4 hours of intense concentration per day. If you are doing 5 hours of homework per night (after a full day of school), memorization is more effective at completing the workload - since you don't have time/energy to spend on rationalizing.

But it does seem likely that she's repeating this phrase from a teacher. Worrying. A positive interpretation is that the language teacher intends this to mean exactly what you say - languages are best learned through use, and can't be learned rationalizing the rulesets of grammar.
LOved the music but, yes, I found it very distracting as well :) Fortunately the text wasw very clear, and so was the live demo.

(the music, was it µ-Ziq? it sounds like him)
Surely it can't be per class. Depending on the class schedule of the school, that would be suggesting that 8 hours of homework for a high school student was "within acceptable parameters".
Can anyone argue with a straight face that there exists any creative person anywhere in the world whose creative output is in any way dependent on whether or not their estate will have the legal right to collect royalties from derivative works 83 years after their death?
I don't know much about how Apple works, but any software of reasonable size simply has to ship with bugs. I'd bet there were more important problems being fixed up until the last minute.
Hadoop 2.0
It would be nice to see performance benchmark between 1.1 and 1.2
> Go to your desk at work and, using Bluetooth and AirPlay, the iPhone 5S or 6 in your pocket will automatically link to your keyboard, mouse, and display. Processing and storage will be in your pocket and, to some extent, in the cloud. Your desktop will require only a generic display, keyboard, mouse, and some sort of AirPlay device, possibly an Apple TV that looks a lot like a Google ChromeCast.

What is the networking? iPhones don't have Ethernet ports. WiFi has limited bandwidth and much worse security (you can sit in the parking lot and listen for authentication creds). Cellular is more secure, but expensive and slow.

What is the network identity and permissions layer? There is nothing on the market that comes close to Active Directory, which is probably the #1 reason that so many businesses still run Windows on the desktop. As far as I know, there is no AD integration in iOS.

Can businesses run an iCloud sync service locally, within their corporate firewall? I'm guessing no. Corporations are rarely comfortable with sending all their proprietary data out to some 3rd party--even more so following the recent NSA revelations.

Can you run antivirus on an iPhone?

I think Cringely is not fully appreciating the corporate mindset when it comes to technology--a common failing among tech pundits.
It will be useless far earlier than that, because this type of memorization leads to about 0% retention past the point of one or two weeks. And of course the situation completely precludes the possibility of using an effective memorization strategy, like spaced repetition, because there's no time to add that for every class on top of everything else.
The colours might make you unwell, but have you seen game centre in iOS 6? Forcing the user to use some sort of command line interface would be less offensive.
When Tech Turns Nouns Into Smarter Nouns
Me too. That is why after thinking for a long time, I ended up buying a netbook instead of a tablet.
Even without any search, you can come up with a lot of problems: Will you calculate an alternative route as soon as a route gets blocked? What if it is a friendly unit? Should it move to open way? What if it's already moving? What if it's too slow? What if there are more, moving to different locations with different speeds and priorities (For example: A tank going to help defend the base vs. a resource gathering vehicle)? What if the blocking unit is an enemy unit? Attack it or move around? Can I attack while moving? What if I can't move around? Can I crush it? Am I part of a formation? How to pass through a narrow path? Should formation alter?
NeatConnect Is The Wireless Scanner You've Been Waiting For
Super nitpicky. The huge improvement in this picker is that it's inline. The previous one was modal. That's fantastic.

Who gives a shit you can't drag from below "PM" to scroll up? That's the worst you can say?

As for the view hierarchy, cool viz but is it actually slow on old devices? I doubt it. Even an old GPU should handle those transforms no problem since they're the only thing animating.
Well, I was talking about basic arithmetic, addition/subtraction/multiplication/division of integers. Doing algebra (which is usually where you'd find square roots) on paper is certainly still useful, but usually the numbers aren't very large, so it's essentially orthogonal to the type of work mentioned here. Algebra and more advanced math has multiple ways to go about dealing with an expression and requires understanding to proceed, but long multiplication or addition is just rote application of an algorithm.

(I suppose the fraction in the problem in the article makes it a bit trickier, but I suggest that the dilemma of ordinary four-function calculators not being able to do exact fractions is not a common real world problem, or they would be able to do them.)
Can I patent Conan Doyle estate's complex douchebaggery?
http://socrates.io, built with Firebase.
Yeah, who gives a shit about usability when designing UI!?
> Above all other things, internet communities is what makes me cynical about humanity.

What makes an internet community any different from any "other" community? They are both human social constructs. The only difference I would argue is that online communities are much more public about their members' views. "Offline" communities can often hide under a veil of an organizational hierarchy of structure (usually in the form of a representative such as "head of").
Demonstration is the best path forward. Show, dont tell, your abilities. The rest of my comment assumes this is based on a real life issue.

Youre interviewing at the wrong place, with people you shouldnt work with. When leveling a candidate two things matter, technical knowledge & leadership. Ive literally never heard anyone suggest leveling a candidate based on work history. Experience might affect comp, or indicate retention issues, but it _does not_ affect leveling.

To qualify my argument Ive a decade of experience. Ive been in "senior" roles for the last 4. Ive worked in a couple 4 man llcs, and a couple multi billion dollar tech cos. Ive probably done a hundred interviews, and ive coworkers in the hundreds and thousand range.
What happens when you compile your code into C, like how Vala is done, which now supports Python, Java and I think functional languages like Haskell and Clojure.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QrGmA_RR4E

What happens when you can compile Python using LLVM for embedded targets like Cortex-M CPUs?

I like C as much as the next guy, but I know how deeply complex, verbose and difficult it can be to program and debug it.

I don't think Python is a craze, I think it's a fundamental philosophy to make a certain subset of computing more approachable and what is wrong with that.

I can do some very simple things in Python and it won't be overwhelming.

Just the building, linking, preprocessor process alone in C is what makes the language almost to difficult to use.
1. of course phones will replace desktops, it's been coming for ages. If your phone is powerful enough, why buy a desktop too?

2. in general, phones are "overshooting" what is needed in a phone: 1080p, 469ppi, quad-core, 2GB RAM etc

3. the real next market is a smaller form-factor (which this better tech now makes possible), not larger - maybe watches, maybe glasses, maybe something else. Apple has being absolutely extraordinary in leading new markets several times - but only with Steve. Sony also did it several times - but also only with their founder.

either don’t see a competitor rising up or are too complacent to feel threatened.

Christensen says it's far worse: even when they do see it, fund it, prepare for it, take it seriously, they still can't do it. Factors: it's a different emphasis from everything else they do, so it's not only learning/adjusting, but also unlearning/unadjusting (entrants only have to learn/adjust). Specifically: the rate of releases (eg Windows vs iOS); what users value/prioritize; how they use it (tasks); how to communicate to customers (a previous positioning works against them); financial analyst expectations (new markets start small and unexciting); corporately, small and possibly-failing new markets do not always attract the best talent; and well-established corporations tend not to attract risk-takers - and why wouldn't such people strike out on their own? That's often how it goes in practice.

Basically, like animals, companies become supremely adapted to their niche. When that niche disappears, they can't adapt. Fortunately for Apple, the same people will probably buy iWatches, iGlasses, iWearableWhatevers, for the same purposes, the same priorities as they buy iPhones.

Still, cringely is right.
Check out http://firepad.io, it's an open source project that uses Firebase on the backend. You could use that as a starting point and then put together your own backend.
I just got HotS a few days ago and started to write about the parallels I see to running a startup & building a great product.

Not ready to play ladder yet but I'm motivated to get there :)
The fattest Creative Market's design bundle for designers and hackers
Exactly. We spend, on average, over $10,000 per student per year on public education. For that, you could easily hire a private tutor to teach each child for one hour per school day, helping them with anything the parents can't handle. For everything else, there's the internet.

And on that note, just how in the hell is the teacher:student ratio as low as it is in public schools today?
Honesty of Pinterest CEO strikes again
That's a ingenious little addition.

You could extend it to all the tabbable elements on the page too. So once you've tabbed outside of the form element, the blue glow files to the next link, or the address bar in the browser and so on...