skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Somebody please show me a single patent on software or a so called business-process that is worth anything (i.e. not obvious to somebody skilled in the art).

Just one... I'll shut up then.

Patents were supposed to encourage innovation, now they are doing the opposite (at least for software and business processes) and causing billions of wasted dollars and fat bonuses for patent lawyers.

This move seems a bit desperate to me. To avoid fair competition on products, MSFT and Apple are using patents that they did not even invent. Pathetic and despicable.
> a "navigation tool for graphical user interface," describes a way of navigating through electronic documents. Another describes an "Internet protocol filter," and a third patent describes an "integrated message center."

Sigh. Where are my anti-depressants.
No I'm not kidding you - patent trolls sue looking for a settlement because fighting the suit usually costs much more than settling would.
There is nothing about the broadband market in most major US cities that resembles competition. You generally have painfully slow DSL or fast but expensive and potentially unreliable cable internet from a single provider.
But with Android, the choice is between your OEM overlords and the Google anti-fragmentation efforts overlord. Yes; you can flash your own ROM and switch to CyanogenMod or Replicant. That is the freedom you are guaranteed in Android. But how many people actually take advantage of it?
South Africa's Students are addicted ~ ESET NOD32 SOLUTIONS
With all due respect, you're showing emotional bias. The fact that the government can do and is doing things very few programmers could even imagine, while spending untold hundreds of millions on a site a 13 year old could have built better, is little more than frustrating, especially when you consider that we paid for it.
That seems busted. I'll see if I can get someone to fix it.
> a platform to display ads.

Wow, you used just a single line to describe an entire, complex, (possibly superior) open source operating system?

I'm done reading comments here.
Yes but is great fun seeing people say out web address's. Ah the early days when they spelt out the http:// part as well.

If it was realy a bother though somebody would of pulled a Prince and called it squiggle.

ALl this though is based upon English use of the letter W, sure other languages have there own quirks and idiosims.
That reminds me "if you're a honest person, you need no privacy". It's not like there are tons of bullshit patents on everything on Earth from hyperlinks to rounded angles. Of course if you're a honest man you have never to fear from bullshit patents and the words "patent troll" mean just a character in Discworld novels who is a troll and makes living my analyzing patent applications.
Google’s Secret Revealed: Barge To Offer High-End Showrooms, Party Deck
> The fact they're using Google's attempt to bid for the patents originally against them is even worse

That's just lawyering 101...it's a very common thing to do to try and add "weight" to your arguments is to say the opposition was aware of the "value"
Has Apple lost market share in terms of users who purchase apps or make in-app purchases?
I wouldn't rush to that analogy. Microsoft dumped IE and we mostly agree that that was kind of dirty. From another angle, Google is trying to leverage one monopoly in order to break into another, and they did it by poorly copying the iPhone.

There aren't really any "good guys" in this picture, but I at least give Microsoft a nod for trying (and failing) to do something different.
"wubba wubba wubba dot google dot com"

Also, the Latin alphabet is used by many languages, in which other letters have more than one syllable: off the top of my head, Spanish has many (not to mention things they count as letters that we don't), and French has i grec for y.
It's not just you. I get the same behavior. Logged in with default shipping address (Hong Kong), but only find out on proceeding to checkout as you described.
Actually, I hold the opposite opinion, and there are a few reasons why I think "www" is probably the best choice.

1. Communicating it by phone or radio is unmistakable. Have you ever had to spell things out for people over the phone? It's awful, even when using the NATO phonetic alphabet. Abandon all hope if you have to relay case sensitive camel-case directory paths, class names or passwords. This is why I always encourage the use of underscores, particularly with table names. EM-AS-IN-MARE-EE-UNN-DER-SCORE-PEE-AS-IN-PAUL over the phone just flows, when the person on the other end tries to reconstruct your words, but having to say CAP-EE-TAL-BEE-AS-IN-BOY-LOW-ERR-CASE-VEE-AS-IN-VIC-TOR feels as cumbersome as being a Cherokee code talker, and you repeat yourself like five times, restarting in the middle, pausing, and then repeating end-to-end, the same confusing sequences of letters, over and over again. WAIT, ALL CAPITAL??? NO. WHICH IS LOWER-CASE??? ALL ONE WORD OR WITH SPACES??? WHAT'S A KUMQUAT???

2. It's better than EIGHTCH-TEE-TEE-PEE-KOH-LONN-SLASH-SLASH

3. The best defaults are always optional, changable things that no one wants for themselves.

4. It's highly specific and unique to the internet. And even the most inept people can tell the difference between an e-mail address and a website, if you include the dub dub dub subdomain as an optional prefix. This is invaluable, when trying to inform non-technical people about your new thing on the interwebs. (..."oh, just go to www.intarderp.ly.io" sparks less confusion in the uninitiated than "intarderp.ly.io" might)
They have one that's $30/month for 100 minutes talk + unlimited text and web (first 5GB at 4G speeds) which I think is what he was talking about. It's just below the "pay by the day" section.
"Pretty much anyone out there is infringing," said Rockstar's CEO, John Veschi.

Well, that's pretty damning. If it's true, then it indicates that the patents never should have issued in the first place. If the overwhelming majority of "Anyone out there" managed to independently re-invent these alleged "inventions" without reference to the patent, then that seems to point out that whatever inventive step may have been involved was obvious.
Can't blame 'em.
Is there any money in pirate hunting? I would think not....
I agree that this will hurt Apple's reputation, but, in my opinion, this should already have been "priced in". Apple never really repented after the "look-and-feel" lawsuit. Many hackers just didn't notice because they were an underdog climbing out of a deep hole for so long.

Now that the worm has turned and Apple has their do-over we can see that they never changed their spots. They just improved their legal tactics.
Mostly the lack of any ability to disassociate stuff. You need to start in PlanAhead and design all the hardware then build the software stack for that hardware, and then you can maybe test some of your ideas you were trying to implement.

My goal is to put together a system for teaching people about computers. Looking back one can teach the equivalent of a 4 year CS degree (the CS classes anyway) from 20 years ago to get them the fundamentals, to pretty much anyone, except that the platforms available to do that are very complex. I was trying to teach basic concepts to kids and either the systems were too complex (PC's) to really understand them all, or too simple (AVR) to do all of what you wanted. There were a lot of MCUs but most were designed (like the Atmel ATMega 328) for "embedding" so they had not enough RAM and too much flash for the kinds of things I got to do on a PDP-10 or a PDP-11 back in school. So I wrote a PDP-11 emulator for the ATMega 32. Its not all that hard and even running it out of serial FRAMs and with SPI emulating the front panel and switches, it can be as fast as an 11/23 was. But the reason I started there was that there was already other software that had been written for it (I was targeting an RT-11 bootup, but the smallest SD Card you can get is bigger than the largest Hard Drive you could use with RT-11 (140MB).

A number of people argued (successfully) that while a PDP-11 could teach basic concepts well, it would be better if you could re-use the experience in a more 'modern' setting, so I've been using ARM Cortex-M processors in my latest iteration. The ARM-9 crosses a bit to far over the threshold but provides a great 'follow-on' after the basic concepts are covered. One huge problem though is video.

My first video card was a Dazzler card (really easy S-100 video card) and later CGA, and VGA graphics. And while you can kinda/sorta to register level code on the RaspPi it was nothing like the C64 or Amstrad of its time. Those were machines you could understand completely. So a side project grew to build a '2D Framebuffer' for an inexpensive ARM system. I had been working the STM32F409 but just picked up an STM32F429 which has a simple frame buffer built in. Prior to that I was thinking something along the lines of the sun CG3 frame buffer with shared DRAM connected via the FSMC port on the ARM chip to provide 16MB of memory accessible to the FrameBuffer and user programs. The Zedboard provides a nice HDMI plug connected to FPGA fabric for doing that research even if the ARM9 is over kill, once finalized my plan was to move the Framebuffer design to a Spartan3e series (the one I was looking at is $10 in 1K quantities.)

But what I have not been able to do is to build a system with the Zedboard and just iterate on the Framebuffer part. In the ideal scenario I'd be able to reconfigure the FPGA on a running system but that has its own issues. I'd settle for rebooting into the next generation framebuffer but all I've been able to do is full up place and route followed by full scale sysgen. Very very painful.

More than you wanted to know I'm sure but it's a sore point with me :-)
Google has always done this, if really always felt like they're so smug they know better than you. I've been complaining about it for well over a decade, and the reason is I travel a lot for business and hit exactly the problems you describe. It was the main impetus to move beyond Google's garden.

There is the "ncr" workaround for some of their idiotness but it doesn't always work. I was sad to see Bing copy this cancer "feature" as well a few years ago.
But there's no / in that command, or any way for it to rm the wrong directory, unless I'm misunderstanding something.
All of this assumes that Android is Windows and that another open source platform, such as Firefox OS or Ubuntu Touch, wouldn't be available to pose any challenge to Android. The mobile sphere is probably dynamic enough to support such changes.

If the FOSS projects in mobile work hard enough now, they can eat into Android's market share, at least in the developing world. We shouldn't consider Android's position to be unshakeable.
This advice is posted to HN quite a bit, this is the same reason websites have press kits available.
Long story short, journalists are lazy, just like the rest of us, and they have deadlines, just like the rest of us.
Exploit them to your advantage and help them out at the same time, and if you are especially different, they will love to be the first to report.

Speaking of that, be careful about who you send what when, a lot of people will break your story before you officially release something just to say they were first, and then your site will be offline and all that traffic will be for naught.
"even" beyond the grave?

They're onto the desperate measures now because without Steve they can't hit their revenue targets through actually making better products.
I think this fits better than 'dub dub dub' for web addresses
* Would have pulled a Prince
Solving people's biggest regret with an app
Pretty sure the untaxable offshore holdings of all of these guys are a drop in the bucket in legal fees. This is just a sideshow.
Plain PHP without any frameworks is just a really thin layer on top of C. So it's not a suprise that it performs well.
Note, I'm not the one that noticed this, I just tried the difference between literal construction "{}" and using dict().

Good points on the overall (likely) impact on the benchmark(s).

> We prefer idiomatic code and, assuming dict() is idiomatic for such a case, this would be a good change.

I think you mix up two things here: dict() is slower (presumably method look up and maybe class instantiation? Just guessing here) -- and I'd say using the literal notation is in general more idiomatic:

http://docs.python.org/2/tutorial/datastructures.html#dictio...
Mystery Google barge will be invite only Google-X showroom, says report
Personas with a halloween twist
Also, front page is a low bar...
There really are good guys and bad guys here. Lumping them all together is false equivalence.

Google isn't "dumping" by giving Android away for free. They have a different business model, and it makes money. It also keeps the competition sharp. Nothing wrong with that.

What's shitty is that Microsoft and Apple are doing everything in their power to delay and destroy innovation for their own benefit.

Google's actions have accelerated innovation. Android has been good for customers, good for Google, and good for the industry.
Crazy Unicor Head Dancin' Brazilian
Look, H.264 is the standard for online video. All Macs and Windows PCs can play it, the content industry is already tooled to provide it, and it's tough to beat on the compression front.

The fosstards who object to patent issues are a minority of a minority. Man up, pay your license fee, and comply with the fucking standard.
I think you misread, I mentioned in the first line I was simply sharing a story. None of the people involved were American, and I didn't claim this resulted in poverty or validated the article in any way.
That's a very fair point and we have work to do to optimize our site for mobile viewing (I'm an engineer at Scalyr).

One twist on the optimization that we could have used but didn't was trigger the tokenization on mousedown and then the first token selection on mouseup. Testing with modern browsers shows that the newly visible div will receive the the mouseup event. And the average 100ms time between mouse down and mouse up gives us more than enough time for Angular to do the work of creating the tokens for one line.
Runtastic Releases Scary, Exciting “Story Running” To Encourage Your Ploddings
Northwestern Walk On Surprised With Full Scholarship
Looks like Rockstar will be this generation's SCO. It's almost exactly the same tactic as last time, except now Microsoft isn't even bothering to hide its role.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_controversies
Did you account for VAT? That 20% pushes your £220 up to £264 ... Only 35 quid difference.
Right you are, a small slip on my part. To clarify for anyone playing along, a granted patent doesn't make using the invention illegal, but it does mean the owner of the patent how the right to a)exclude you from using it if they so choose, and b) they may also seek reparations due to potentially lost income from someone making use of their invention. (as well as other stuff)
Ok. I read it, I'm confused though.

I was expecting the contextual clues to provide some sort of hint as to why the statements that he has made would or should be considered decent.

I was expecting the things he said to be far less bigoted than everyone is claiming, but I didn't find that.

The pretext is that state constitutions require it - but it is absurd to claim that these constitutions require marriage to be defined in ways that were unthinkable through all of human history until the past fifteen years. And it is offensive to expect us to believe this obvious fiction.

Takeaways, for me personlly, about OSC :

Law should be stagnant as long as I(OSC) fall within it's purview.

I (OSC) can in no way imagine why the constitution must be amended. Our forefathers had great wisdom and foresight.

Relatedly, I (OSC) am totally oblivious to the bill of rights, and the seventeen additional ammendements to the constitution.

I (OSC) lack the insight to realize that with marriage comes not just the incorporeal divine benefits from God, but also material benefits and incentives for those engaged in the behavior from the government that supports it.

I (OSC) define tolerance as the ability to avoid direct conflict with those whom I disagree with, while publicly lobbying for interest and support against their best interests. Tolerance is but a psychological trick to drop the defenses of my enemy long enough for me to strengthen my agenda.

I don't really get it. Also, the first "quote in context" is not a quote. It's a summary of events. How about a quote?

""leave the laws on the books" was simply recognizing the law at the time"

Yeah, sure. That makes sense. It in no way is implying that the law should not be changed. Sure.

Honestly, I don't give a shit about an author's opinion if he writes good work. Ender's Game is a signifigant part of fiction, and the author's bigotry doesn't hurt my opinion of the story, but "if it walks like a duck, and it talks like a duck..".

Is this just a poor form of damage control to ensure box office success and stave off a possible new anti-gay-chicken-franchise scandal? Sure seems like it to me.
Doh! On it.. In the meantime, this is the link you want:
https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/docs/re...
> they did it by poorly copying the iPhone.

Sigh.
for N in /*; do rm -rf $N || rm $N; done
Also:

Memristors

Graphene

3D Chips

Optical Computing

Spintronics

Quantum Computing

and I'm pretty sure I'm forgetting a couple of other promising paths to extending Moore's Law.

Microbe computers strike me more as a path to nanorobotics.
> hurt Apple's reputation in the tech community than anything they've done before

They're not the ones suing Google. Rockstar's a separate entity with its own corp leadership that has incentives to find ways to recoup their investment.

>Apple used to be careful not to alienate hackers.

Google and their monopolistic practices and their anti-competition ploys is what has alienated more hackers than Apple ever will.

>Now in my mind they are both the enemy.

The only enemy is Google. They completely disregard intellectual property of others and attack everyone else's revenue streams by offering free products and refuse to pay IP licenses for anything.

Google's the most evil corporation today and it's sad that you, of all people, don't see it. Look closer Paul… they're the big brother everyone warned us about!
So? Filing a suit does not some how lock it into going forward. Plaintiff can stop it at any time. Motorola's suits are still going on because that is what Google wants.
A relevant comparison would be to TypeScript, which has already picked up a fair bit of steam: http://www.typescriptlang.org/
No. By market cap, Apple is the largest company in the world, full stop[1]. Microsoft is number 7, having spent much of the 90's at #1. Google does not rank at all. So at least by some definitions these companies are indeed the largest in the world without qualification.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_corporations_by_market_...
German has its own three-syllable letter: Y. It's pronounced similar to "ipsilon."
I believe Google has only used patents defensively. At least that's what I've heard their official position is, and I haven't heard anyone call them out for violating it.
> They're not the ones suing Google. Rockstar's a separate entity..

You must be new here to not know the scammy tactics Patent trolls use to hide behind and operate within.

But judging from your newly created account, I'm going with just another standard shill.
IE wasn't released unbundled from the OS as source for anyone to fork, so it's a false equivalence. If IE was released like Firefox/Mozilla was, no one would be complaining.
With the exception of iOS developers, I think that most developers would find that development is actually much nicer in Linux than it is in OS X.

The amount of pain involved in setting up a coherent development environment in OS X is almost comical after setting up an equivalent in Ubuntu or Fedora.
Coming from the world of biophysics and structural bio, I wholeheartedly agree. Multidisciplinary approaches answer many more questions, but can be quite challenging to wrap your head around.

Thinking like this is awesome when it happens: a lab I worked in would combine structures of motor proteins with single molecule studies, targeted mutation work, and even in-vivo studies. The result? You could take specific loops and helices within the motor and not only understand where and how they interact with a microtubule, but also how that affected the motor's mechanical action and cellular behavior.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22997337
Thanks. My statement is now confirmed.
I'd argue that it's the other way around: Americans don't take vacation time very seriously.
It will be interesting to see how this goes now that it is (essentially) an all-American battle. The Samsung / Apple suit was always complicated by suspicions about the jury, partly (but not only) because it seemed impossible for a US jury to take an unbiased view of a trial between such an emblematic American company and a foreign corporation. This one will be a much different contest and perhaps we have a better chance of seeing a real examination of the underlying patent issues occur.
One thing I've learned: the real value of replication is how easy it makes it to handle strange events without getting stressed out.

It's 3AM. You're being paged with a high latency alert in one datacenter. You run one command to drain traffic out of that datacenter. The latency graph starts looking normal again. You go back to bed at 3:05. You look at the logs and figure out what went wrong tomorrow morning.
For comparison, I wondered how React would fare. Turns out it can be pretty fast. I did have to use a similar trick of breaking up the line only when the mouse is over it, but the rest is just React's architecture. See the demo here: http://jsfiddle.net/ianobermiller/tZhSp/1/

Edit: updated link, forgot to save

Edit: for more info, React takes care of reusing DOM elements, and also uses event delegation by default.

Edit: for comparision, here is a version without the optimization: http://jsfiddle.net/ianobermiller/QT9Tx/1/
Macs may be better, but this has gone beyond healthy competition. This is not right, and we must do what we can to stop it.

Deploying this patent portfolio offensively can only postpone innovation. It's bad for customers, it's bad for the industry, and I'd argue it's bad for humanity.

Coincidentally, Google released Android 4.4 today. It brings a modern browser with much improved battery life to older, less capable hardware.

This is a win for people of average means, and it extends access to the world's information to people in developing countries that wouldn't have had the opportunity on more expensive hardware. Would we be where we are today without Android?

Use the patents as a defense against patent troll attacks. But when you become a patent troll yourself, you are now the enemy.

Fuck Apple. Fuck Microsoft.

I will do everything I can to avoid their products, even if the alternatives aren't as good. They're both a net-negative for humanity.