skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Each glaring victory in these patent battles are only eclipsed by the crushing defeats of losing a patent lawsuit.

New Egg losing one case and potentially having to pay out millions is devastating.

What do you do as a startup if one of these companies targets you? What do you do as a company that's been around for a while? Amazon pays out. You would have to as well. What if you can't pay? America will lose its foothold as the place for software companies to be grown and nurtured if parasitic behavior isn't removed from the tool belt of its own corporatations.
This wouldn't allow the author to post it to another repository, if not legally required, distinct from his home page. (It was IEEE which was more aggressive recently, but from reading Matt Blaze, it looks like ACM and IEEE have traded off that role; neither is as bad as Elsevier, but they're allegedly 'on our side' vs. a commercial publisher, so anything short of full OA brings dishonor to them.)
This is great news!

It means I can actually have a full java plugin installation and just activate the applets I know are safe!

I can have my java and eat it, but people can't make it eat me :)
Evolutionary Licenses
Why We Need Explicit State
The reason why people don't understand the value of coding is the fact that they think it's one of the many skills you can learn in life, just as nursing, knowing how to do heart-surgery, playing soccer and so forth.

However, learning how to do code teaches you problem solving and it does so by teaching how to break down things. This is the MOST important skill in life. That's why coding encompasses ALL the other skills, because if you know how to code you can learn anything else, heart surgery, physics, biomedicine, a summer sault, save money etc.

You can also learn how to break down things through studying something technical such as Bio Engineering, Physics or Math, however these academic studies are hard and not for everyone! In turn, coding is simply the best way to learn problem solving, because it shows you results immediately and everyone can learn it.

With everything else you can BS your way through, not with coding.

Now, there is one thing that coding doesn't teach you necessarily. It doesn't teach you is how to connect with people, how to make friends, how to excite people or how to . If you are a really curious person, it also teaches you that, because the study of social dynamics/how people communicate is also all based on logic and breaking down things. However, it takes a while to learn that.
No we definitely don't. (perhaps only in rare cases)

The Math Curriculum at my high school was as follows:

* 9th Grade - Algebra

* 10th Grade - Geometry and Proofs

* 11th Grade - Pre-Calculus

* 12th Grade - Calculus

It would have made sense to teach integrals using for loops, and some proofs using if/else statements, but we did not use either of these methods.
Most of these pictures have been online for a while, I specifically remember that this[⊗] one was photoshopped because the machines in the racks left and right are mirror images of one another...

[⊗]https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/all/23
10W30 is used regularly with standard cars in warm climates.
Which is a mistake a lot of developers make - trying to replace one data store for another wholesale, and then being surprised when problems arise.
Introducing Kickoff - a lightweight, responsive front-end framework
We the netizens
The very creativity you mention is what gives hackers the insight to understand the potential, and in some cases very real, impact of these threats to openness, freedom and equality. In the case of government, the NSA, even piracy to an extent, we can foresee a world where we are far less free to pursue the creative endeavours we love as the information currently gathered is used to stop 'terrorists', 'dissenters' and 'troublemakers'. As for patent trolls, banks and big corporations - they already stop people doing things that they enjoy by (ab)using 'rights management', lobbying and the courts to curtail our freedom to do things like reverse engineering, coding, and sharing. What you believe is a strange and impossible imaginary Dystopian scifi future, we see as something that, without careful opposition, could become a truly terrifying reality.

Besides, hacking isn't just "making stuff". We can hack politics.
Let's see Obama hire a programmer for CTO instead of some Harvard economics grad who has only learned: (i) to be the recipient of privilege and (ii) to justify the unfair system that gives him that privilege
Same here. And to get the flame bait machine started, we even do it in Perl!
With power comes responsibility, you should choose what to hack and why :)
A 3rd party to VLC tried getting VLC in the Mac App Store and then later it was pulled for violating the GPL. VLC had to relicense their whole code base to get in the App Store fully legally. Most open source projects will be unable to do that due to the sheer number of contributors and resistance to hobbling the copyleft license on their code.

Most of us that had been watching Apple had projected that Apple would launch a Mac App store and make it the main place to get Mac software while still keeping clauses in their App Store license that are GPL hostile. That came to pass. As for Gatekeeper, expect that Apple will switch the setting in the next couple years. After all, Mac went from allowing installs of any software by default to restricting unsigned apps, essentially going from the lowest Gatekeeper setting to the middle, with little fanfair and minimal pushback from their userbase. They'll have an easy time taking it the next step as well. It's only really holdouts like Adobe that aren't in the app store that matter at this point. And Apple will likely force them into the App Store to get their 30% cut in the next couple years with the Gatekeeper change.

All of this fits with Apple's core values of making things easy, exercising complete control, and forcing an excessive revenue share from all publishers. It already works that way for iPhone/iPad/iPod apps, music, videos and books. The only holdout is Mac apps and that will happen soon enough. The only folks that usually argue that it won't are the so-called Mac power-users who continue to think that they are critical to Apple's success. This was true for a time when they catered to media professionals. But they don't anymore, nor do they have to. Apple's entire desktop/laptop hardware business accounts for 12% of their revenue and falling. They're a pure consumer company now, not a computer/tech company anymore. There's simply more money in it. That's why their bread and butter OS, iOS, is so completely locked down compared to all of their competitors. There's no reason for them not to follow suit on the desktop/laptop and get their 30% there as well.
New Chromecast apps for the holidays
Can't you though? We're really talking about defaults here. If you don't want to use the hardware RNG, you can always disable it in either the BIOS or the OS. Or use hardware that doesn't have one. The trouble is for the common user who doesn't know anything about any of this and is just going to take the defaults for everything, who is exactly the sort of person who is going to take the binary driver to "just make it work" and then be exposed to any vulnerabilities it may contain.

You have to make the defaults secure because they're what most people will use. It doesn't matter that you can change it if most people never do.
Leo The Homeless Coder Finished His App, And You Can Download It Right Now
I encounter this issue frequently, so I'd prefer if it was resolved.
Why do I, after several years of people complaining, still have to log in to unsubscribe from your however many different types of emails?

And even logging in after clicking "Unsubscribe" doesn't unsubscribe you: you then have to go to options and find whatever caused the email yourself.

For a company that puts members first, that seems very member unfriendly. But it does mean more emails to users, which no doubt increases some metrics.
Those calls are uncanny. We are this close to getting systems to pass the telemarketer subset of the Turing test.
They hired quite a bit more than 4 people and there are positions open currently.
This headline almost makes it seem like this is a bad thing. How about: "FAT patent invalidation saves Android OEM's from Microsoft's illegitimate rent-seeking?"
The Parallella Gen-1 has single precision throughput of 90 GFLOPS, power draw of 5W, and unit cost of $99. This yields 0.91 FLOPS/s per dollar and 18 FLOPS per Watt.

By comparison, the NVIDIA GTX 780 Ti GPU has single precision throughput of 5046 GFLOPS, maximum TDP of 250W, and unit cost of $699. This yields 7.22 FLOPS per dollar and 20 FLOPS per Watt.

This makes the GPU board 8 times cheaper and at least 1.1 times more power efficient than the Parallella board.

Note that the average cost of electrical power in the US is about 10.5 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh), which means a single GPU board running 24 hours at peak utilization would cost about 63 cents per day - so it would take over 3 years of 24/7 peak operation for the nominal power cost to equal the upfront unit cost. So while power efficiency is very important, that doesn't mean the unit cost can be ignored.

In addition to FLOPS/$ and FLOPS/W, one must also consider the processing power density, which essentially measures how many "FLOPS per cubic foot" are yielded by each device. This is important because these machines take up physical space and physical space (i.e. real estate) is costly. A single GPU board has 56 times the throughput of a single Parallella board, and I would say that a GPU board is only slightly larger than the Parallella board (mainly because GPU boards include massive cooling components which Parallella lacks). A machine that requires 56 times more real estate to achieve
the same performance is clearly not competitive.

So far we've only looked at floating-point throughput. One must also consider memory capacity and bandwidth of each device. The GTX 780 Ti has 3GB GDDR5 memory, and I understand that Parallella has 1GB memory. I don't know how the memory bandwidth compares between the two.

It's clear that the Parallella board has a long way to go before it could be competitive for supercomputing applications. And as Parallella tries to catch up, the industry will keep moving - GPUs (and other accelerators, like Xeon Phi) we continue to improve along all these dimensions and I imagine that NVIDIA/Intel/AMD have vastly larger R&D budgets than Parallella/Adapteva. So it is difficult to see how this could ever be a viable supercomputing platform and not just an interesting hobbyist board.
Bravo.

Okay... I got fooled. I clicked on this link bait because I read it quickly and thought, hey it's from Wired and they're somewhat reputable in the topics I follow. Oops, nope, it's the Wire.

Well, you got me "thewire.com." You got my impressions with your poorly written, straw-man argument. You got my attention writing things like "plugging hot career" and "blowing air" to instill some sort of emotional response. You even got me going back to this horrible article so I can accurately quote your hyperbole in this HN comment.

Bravo. Now let's downvote this so we can stop sending them traffic.
Tip for the new NSA/CIA/FBI Director

One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.

BTW NCIS wont need this as they have Jethro Gibbs just run every thing past him and if he doesn't hit you on the back of the head your golden.
That still means it would only be about 5 months.
I have a silly request, can timings on Network tab be displayed on mouse hover? I hate having to click to measure which part took much time? This is @Mozilla Web inspector
Apple doesn't exactly provide many great deep-level hooks in it's OS. This is one of the downsides of that.

In all honesty, Apple has never made any effort to provide a level playing field for anyone that isn't Apple on iOS. So I don't blame any company that doesn't bend over backwards to be a part of their ecosystem.
The Price We Pay for Cheap Meat
Genetic Testing Doesn’t Improve Warfarin Dosing
You're right. We send them to Gitmo, or the Salt Pit, or Abu Ghraib. Does held indefinitely without trial or charges qualify as a political prisoner? It certainly fits my definition.
>> Complaining for the sake of complaining?

No.

>> When you hover over "Go Inside" it says "View all photos," so isn't that its exact intention?

I'm not sure I even realized what happens when you hover over it. I clicked it and it scrolled past a bunch of thumbnails, showed me a spinner for a while, and then showed me an image. It didn't give me the feeling that I was seeing the first image in the thumbnail list (Maybe it was, but giving proper context is important). To provide context, expand the image in place, or show a lightbox, or show the large image with some thumbnails so I still know that I'm looking at the first image.
I had some where it was bleached up to straw-yellow. Looks gorgeous ... dies pretty quickly.
Show HN: ChitChat.js - add chat bar client to your site in minutes
Um, what? He makes NFC sound inconvenient to customers - how can you be more minimalistic in approach other than just pressing two devices together and having the transaction complete seconds later?

I think he may be on to something - there is the current development of presenting cards by an NFC enabled device, like a phone. This is a huge process to get the virtual card to the customer securely - one of the abstract approaches, which I don't think is really being taken seriously, is virtualizing the card communication in a cloud, so the card is never downloaded or emulated on the device, like an Android phone. This is kind of leaning towards an "invisible" transaction he speaks of, where a secure payment could be done as an after thought without an actual device or interaction?
The original Call of Duty from 2003 is built on the Quake III Arena engine (id Tech 3) so John Carmack and ID made money licensing it. So of course he has kind words for that franchise.
"An edge case" where science has managed to hop-along with someone's hobby.

I can come up with examples as well, but they're not even really a blip on the radar screen as far as science funding is concerned.
Ditto. I can't imagine they didn't discover this during the submission process -- seems like a strange decision to go ahead with it..
Made a mistake when rearranging parens. It's not wrong, just a little ugly. That should of course be:

order = log(max(abs(s), 1)) * (s / max(abs(s), 1))

Or, better:

ns = max(abs(s), 1)
order = log(ns) * (s / ns)
Linus Torvalds: Long Filenames (1992)
These things do have intrinsic power, they don't go away just because you ignore them.
That's an issue with this implementation, not the idea of hooking up stdin/stdout to websockets.
Fair point, but the 'nice' approach seems like it may be a little bit more of an investment, in that the author at least got herself listed on the 'authors to support' list of that particular site, and maybe changed a few minds. It's probably still a drop in the bucket, but at least she came away feeling like she did something, rather than sitting still while someone was ripping her off.

(I'm the one who wrote the blog post, by the way)
Yeah - people have never been persecuted for who they are in person.
I like the question, and I hope to hear more insightful answers than mine, which is more of a nit-pick than an actual answer.

Government and NSA actually have power. They have it because we gave it to them. They have power because they have drones, tanks, guns, and armies of people willing to use them at their command. Refusing to recognize the authority of a government, even one you aren't a citizen of, even one whose borders you aren't within, seems naive at best.

If the US government decides, tomorrow, to kill you, that isn't a threat that you can shrug off... or at least, not one that you can shrug off and expect to live a long life.

Sure, perhaps government intervention won't interfere with my creation of something, but in many cases, that isn't even necessarily true. In order to succeed as a business, I have to obey the laws, or be subject to its retaliation. I can't ignore paying taxes, or obtaining appropriate license, or cease and desisting when the FDA tells me to, etc. Pretending that it doesn't exist isn't really an option.
There's probably a middle way here....How about "Everyone who wants to code should learn how to code?" That sounds about right, and hey, it's exactly how it already is!

I'm kind of torn on this because I know that a lot of people just don't have any interest in coding. Their natural aptitude flows in a completely opposite direction, they enjoy things that I could never enjoy, and I don't see why I should be forcing them to code just as they would never force me to do what they like. On the other hand pretty much everything is going to be software in a very short amount of time, and those people are going to have a hard time of it if they don't learn to code at least a basic level so they know something about what's going on. Does that make coding as fundamental as reading? Possibly.

I think some sort of remedial coding should be a requirement in high school until the student meets a reasonable standard of ability, and then they should be let off the hook to be allowed to do what actually interests them.
Basically, but it also handles some details specific to the websockets protocol.
Mine was algebra for 2 years and then geometry with more algebra (only 3 required, guess how many people elected for more math). I don't remember much but I never saw calculus in HS. I think the advance math classes went to pre-calculus.
Thanks. Wish this practice was followed more. Direct link should be easily accessible if not first.
You still have to unlock your phone and press some buttons on it. It's arguably not any easier than pulling a credit card out of your wallet and swiping it.
To partially mitigate the hivemind effect / burst the filter bubble / bring balance to the echochamber.
Well, other people drop out of uni to pursue a startup. If your GPA falls, it's not really that bad.
Unfortunately those who couldn't were unable to read that article.
There is already https://code.google.com/p/shellinabox/
The difference between HW RNG and binary blobs is that the computer loses no functionality without an HW RNG, although it might suffer slightly in performance. Pragmatically, this is a huge difference.
I'm guess you're getting downvoted not because you are right (I think you're right) but because the tone of your reply is a bit harsh ..
Sounds musically delicious! Thanks!
Nostrademons doesn't know what he's talking about. See bct's comment, and my heavily-downvoted comment. Security has nothing to do with using STDIO and everything to do with how you code your program.
A large portion of the userbase is likely more tech news junkie than hacker. Everyone knows about this site - it's not an elite clubhouse.
Heh - were we separated at birth?
Looks good to me! I went straight to the site without reading your post and was confused about what I was supposed to be doing, but I did come up with some some silly headlines.
I don't think I can get a good idea as to the quality of his code from this video.
Peak indifference to surveillance
I'd like to know if some web developer has decided to use 5 GB of offline storage for their app.
As I've also recently finished reading _Masters of Doom_ (as a result of HN's discussion of Jeff Atwood's blog post about it [0]), I know that the Wired article has it wrong in the first sentence. Doom wasn't uploaded to a Univ of Washington server, rather Univ of Wisconsin.

The book was a really good and quick read. One point I'll make about its content was how it told of Carmack reading Steve Levey's _Hackers_ (1984) and thought that's where he belonged. I was happy to learn about his alignment with free software.

Wolfenstein 3d was my first non-console game. I enjoyed it tremendously, as with Doom and Hexen. I'm currently a COD addict.

The term "deathmatch" was an insight of Romero's upon experiencing the beginning of multiplayer. That was also nice to find out, that deathmatch came from Doom. It has totally stuck since, as team deathmatch is considered the default game type in COD.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6570439
More and more, Microsoft are starting to look like "80's IBM" ..
There is an Airforce unit in NH tasked with tracking and maintaining government satellites which has this incredibly evil looking logo
http://i.imgur.com/jAzLyvS.jpg
Impostor syndrome? It might be a sign you're getting better at your work
On of my favorite ship names in the culture series of novels was "I Said, I've Got A Big Stick" which of course was always written in very small type.

Of course this should be used in our world by an AC 130 gunship.
Here is my analysis of the page.

My look at loading times found these biggest offenders:

GET / developer.mozilla.org 2153ms (767ms connecting, 499ms wait) 23.42KB
GET include.js login.persona.org 2151ms (1921ms connecting, 230ms wait) 16.87KB

Also there is a bunch of png like "persona-person-white.png" and a bunch of pictures like "*_screenshot_1_thumb" that take about ~1000ms each, but are taken in parallel.
The article linked above mentioned one person hired at the time of its writing (2007). Obviously it's six years later now, but even if they hired two hundred, it would still be a staggering investment by the local government ($1 million per job).

Again, I'm not sure what the point here is as US States are not much different from countries in a race to the bottom, other than sooner or later you hit bottom. I mainly just found it amusing as it was a huge deal for Lenoir and now here it is on the front page of HN!
"Did you buy that computer?" - "No, I found another one that had Windows 7 instead of 8" - "Oh good deal!" -- overheard in line at a convenience store. Nearby, computer shop advertising on a big sign that you could still get Win 7 instead of 8. Anecdotes aren't data, I know, but my experience has been consistent with the consensus of rants online.

Now MS is "doubling down" on Win 8 instead of making concessions to those who need an interface that works well with keyboard and passive monitor. One might say, this proves it wasn't just Ballmer running the company into the ground!

Seriously, what is the chance that MS will come up with something better liked in another version a year or two in future?

It may be a tired cliché now to talk of Linux for PCs becoming mass-market, but things are looking better and better for this prospect. In particular, (a) nice noob-friendly GUIs (b) hardware support better than ever and (c) games finally coming along (thanks Valve/Steam).
I suppose a fair amount can be attributed to the fluorescent tan. Little sunlight or fresh air. I found it hard to switch to the office lifestyle and frequently go for walks even in bad weather for relief. I think hackers that make physical things are happier in general due purely to the physicality.
Yeah. to clarify for people who are not clear, see this https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease/Calendar
true. yet we have this link of datacenter photos that has been around for like a year.
so old man.
I personally feel threatened by the community. It's almost cut throat.
Satellite launched to boost broadband access on-the-go
Sounds interesting - will look into ways of changing the color.
"It's not a question of whether people at a payment terminal would prefer to tap or swipe, he said, but a reality that people don't want to go to a payment terminal at all."

I think this is right. The amazing future doesn't change what I get out of my pocket. The amazing future lets me walk into a store and just walk out with things without stopping, while some computers in the background just make sure all accounts are settled.
Falling Ice is crushing cars in Texas
Here's the patent for anyone interested:

http://www.google.com/patents?id=cLAkAAAAEBAJ&dq=5,579,517