skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Um, as the person you replied to in that thread, I thought it was pretty obvious they were going to break it. From Apple's perspective, the ability to sync a Pre is a bug, and they fixed it as they would any other.

What isn't obvious is why you seem to find it so offensive and threatening.
They already are, look at all the worthless twitter, blog, and forum posts that Google has stored in their data centers.
The classic Flatland also helps. http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/~banchoff/Flatland/
I don't - it doesn't carry an implication of malice for me, but rather an all-too-believable one of gargantuan cost overruns and subsequent recrimination and backbiting. I see the distinction you're making but the reform is heavily predicated on government's ability to deliver massive productivity savings by mandating a new information infrastructure for healthcare.

I have friends and relatives who hold very senior administrative positions in both private and public (European) healthcare, respectively. It's not going to be easy to computerize, and I am quite worried about the long term implications for the US economy.
Ask HN: What to do when competitor copies your app (exact design)
We run Ronin (http://www.roninapp.com) - an online invoicing and client management app.

When I was browsing around, I ran into these guys: http://www.net2invoice.com/ who have basically copied our application asset for asset. We haven't updated our site screenshots recently, but their screenshots are dead on to the current version of our app. Even the sign up chart and marketing copy are the same!

As I understand it, we can only retain our copyright if we intend to enforce it. What's the best approach at this point?

I remember this happening to StackOverflow at some point as well - was there a resolution on that?
iTunes is cross-platform, widely in use, and comes with a built-in music store. If I bought a non-Apple music player, I'd much prefer it to support iTunes than to come with its own music management software.

Apple's being an ass for not letting third-party music players legitimately interface with iTunes.
So if you plant a lot of these around real trees will they suffocate? Will someone think of the trees?!?!
Ouch, I'm not sure what to say other than that sucks!
Reinventing Ray Tracing
Dominoes AI in Python
If they get into the PC support business (as suggested in the article); I foresee doom for the Geek Squad / any other consumer tech support shop.

They don't even have to be any good at support; they will get plenty of customers just by having the Microsoft name.
Honestly, this is no big surprise. I can definitely see the benefit for Palm providing syncing support, but if they thought it was going to last very long they were only fooling themselves.
Regex to check for prime numbers
Perversely, license agreements usually bar users of proprietary health IT systems from reporting dangerous bugs to other health care facilities. In open-source systems, users learn from each other’s mistakes; in proprietary ones, they’re not even allowed to mention them.

I knew EULA's could be bad, but they can kill people? Dammit, where'd I put that tinfoil hat?
Imagine you bought a million dollar house, with nothing down (for simplicity's sake).

It's now worth $900K and you're considering walking away.

What if the bank took 15% ownership of your house, in exchange for reducing the principal balance to $800K? You'd pay less on your mortgage (balance of $800K instead of $1000K), and while you'd be slightly upside-down (you'd owe $800K on $765K worth of house), you're still much closer than when you were $100K in the hole. (Plus, you don't have the PITA, stigma and credit rating destruction of getting foreclosed on.)

Fast forward a few years and you can sell the house for $950K and decide to do so. You get $807K, the bank gets $142K (compensating them partially for forgiving $200K of your original balance in exchange for the 15%). In almost all cases, that delayed $58K loss is better than an immediate $250K loss from foreclosing and selling for $750K or so.

That's but one way to accomplish the debt-to-equity exchange.
Did you apply to MENSA for the fun of it and get in? Impressive.

Egads. I was curious about MENSA and went to some meetings. A more self-congratulatory group of people I'd never met. I was offered membership but turned it down!
I'd personally much rather see the source of the problem fixed (reduce carbon emissions). I also hope this doesn't turn into an excuse to clear-cut more rain forests.

i.e. We'll cut down the real trees and replace them with efficient carbon collecting "tree" buildings.
I kind of get the feeling that Clojure is running into the 90% milestone now (only 90% more to go!). The core the language is pretty good, but now people are starting to find the warts, and they appear largely Java related.

It will be interesting to see if projects like Clojure-in-Clojure will help resolve some of the niggling issues like dealing with classpaths and odd performance issues where people aren't sure if they should be passing type hints or not.
China's Economy Grows 7.9% in 2nd Quarter
Compare with Tile Studio:
http://tilestudio.sourceforge.net/
And Mappy:
http://www.tilemap.co.uk/mappy.php

The market for tilemap editors is a fairly competitive one. I'm working on a combo tiles(collision) and stamps(graphics) editor myself.
(though to be honest, I would much prefer my music player to require NO software. I love that my iriver is just USB storage when hooked up. If I wanted to sync music, I'd like the choice to do whatever I want.)
Following, liking and people searching
Anil Ambani all set to tie up with Spielberg
In what defenses as the leading deal out of India in the media and entertainment space, billionaire Anil Dhirubhai Ambani has proclaim an $825 million backing for director Steven Spielberg’s Dreamworks SKG in a part-equity, part-debt deal.
Well, as I remember, Stack Overflow just kind of let it happen. Didn't hurt them none.

But in your case? IANAL, but get a lawyer.
Sounds like a good opportunity for someone to undermine iTunes, or at least make a decent music synchronizing app for competing smart phones.
I find this hauntingly amusing.
You can select the music you want through playlists using iTunes. I find dragging and dropping audio files (usb storage) very un-intuitive .
Actually you can further extend color. Color it self is on a 3 dimensional space (RGB). Now you have 6 dimensions to play with. Although in practice I found that doing Brightness and (Red/Blue) is a good way.

If you are doing points on a multi dimensional space, you can start using various shapes (Length, Width, Height) or Number of faces. Alternatively you can also do stars with spikes coming out (more spikes per higher value), I find this the easiest to visualize rather than shape sizes.
You need to talk to a lawyer. What you retain, how you enforce, etc all vary.
It seems that Doubletwist is doing just that, and I think that hthey're going through iTunes' api, so it seems to just work from version to version. Either that or they're doing a fine just keeping up to date on things.
seriously getting tired of all the people using such inane ways to grab attention so they can rant about something. It's like these people didn't learn how to be polite and kind in kindergarten. Ohhh look at me I'll use as many superlatives and curse words as I can fit in a page and jump up and down and maybe you'll flock to my site.
Sam Hart, Zed Shaw, and anyone else who feels like acting out like a 5 year old kid, it's time to go to time out. When you feel like talking like a grown up and a professional, please send HN a link and most of us will be happy to have a friendly discussion and constructive argument with you.
most of his posts are similar in nature imho
Know a good one in the bay area?
I haven't personally switched away from Mongrel yet, but the community seems to agree with you and Passenger/REE probably are the "future" (er, current?) best deployment method - which is fine by me.

What bothers me, though, is how for some at least, Mongrel must be completely vilified before Passenger is able to become the next in a long line of Ruby deployments progressions.

Idk, I just don't understand the need for those type of motivations.
As I understand it, we can only retain our copyright if we intend to enforce it.

Copyright is not the same as Trademark. You must enforce trademarks, not copyrights. Copyright is much stronger than trademark.

If they've directly copied from your application, you have very solid grounds for a lawsuit. I would go see a lawyer. In a strong copyright case (e.g. where you can prove you wrote it), a lawyer will take the case for nothing. Or, even if you're paying out of pocket, you will win if you can prove you wrote it. And when you win your competitor will pay your court costs and damages.

You aren't going to make a killing, but your winnings will give you another month or two of runway, and will shut down a competitor that shouldn't be allowed to survive.

I'm anti-lawsuit on pretty much every count except for copyright infringement (and I have been involved in a copyright infringement case in the past; $30k settlement). It's just nasty business for someone to steal your labor like that and pass it off as their own.
Honestly I'd pay money for competent technical support offered at the consumer level. A tech with an in-depth knowledge of the Microsoft stack is an impressive thing to watch. Most of my experience with such people has been in large corporate environments. I'm a Unix guy through and through and when my windows boxes are misbehaving I'd much rather pay someone who knows the system well to find the problem.
As I understand it, most that will walk away from their homes are upside down, meaning they owe more on the property than it is worth. That is also the reason that they're unable to refinance.

So the authors suggest that the bank lower the interest on the loan in exchange for equity which the homeowner has none of?

Maybe this is intended for homeowners that don't owe more than their property is worth, but they are getting closer as housing prices go down.

For homeowners than owe more than the property is worth, the debt should be renegotiated if the banks want to get any money out of them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pwAFohWBL4
Summer Lovin’ Addicting Games
Blue skies. The beach. Barbeques. Relaxation. This is without a doubt my favorite time of the year (sorry, Santa). ‘Tis the season to have some fun or kick back, relax and play games. And I give Addicting Games two sunny thumbs up for a bunch of game titles that keep me entertained. Not to mention in the summer mood. There are five games online at addictinggames.com that I recommend checking out:
Bill Gates envisions fighting hurricanes by manipulating the sea
Do you want to know how an antivirus work?  Read this patent
Stack overflow also has had enormous industry cred from the get-go. Most startups don't have that foundation to build upon.
Thanks. It looks like they have a parent company that's been in business for a while. It's odd that an established company would rip-off other people's work like that.
Seems like their done by http://net2apps.com/ and their description is "IT Outsourcing & Rapid Application Development"

http://net2apps.com/Product.aspx wonder if the other two products are 1:1 from other services as well...
Dithering divides your effective resolution. If you show anything that requires resolution and good color, the artifacts are visible.
difficult to debug, because the flow of control often stopped at an interface

Not sure if I understand how this is a problem - you should always have the concrete class's name in any stacktraces that you have, either from exceptions or by attaching a debugger. Are you attaching a debugger?

Not only that, but if you have your application's logging based around logger name = class name, you'll always know exactly which classes/objects are in control.

Also, if you have the "XML tying it together" how can anything hide behind the interface?
your copyright covers your text, design (html and css), and code, so unless you're claiming that they actually stole your code (and then translated it to what looks like asp.net) or are using direct copies of your css or html, i don't think you really have a leg to stand on, legally.

someone creating something from scratch that looks like (or "inspired by") your site is not infringing on your copyright at all. looking at screenshots on the two sites, i can see some similarities, but enough differences that it doesn't look like it was directly copied. to be honest, though, neither design looks that unique. one could say you copied the signup chart on your site from 37signals or any of the other dozen sites that look like it since it's so popular.

i think your best bet is just to move on and try to be better than your competition. you can try to call them out publicly, but it will just give them free publicity and drive traffic to their site.
An interesting, apparently unintentional, side effect is the exercise in the precedence rules.

Search engines (bing, google, wolfram) get the precedence but are finicky about calculations. Humans (presumable anyway, from the earlier comments) do the calculations but sometimes overlook the precedences. I think it is rather funny.
I agree. In fact, I thought one of the reasons Apple was contesting for non-DRM songs was so users could be free to choose their media players. Sort of a... sign of good faith if you will.

I guess I learned something today.
It was not 50/50 it was 100%. They clearly said they would break it.

Yes I know they used marketing speak to do it, but after a while you learn to decode it.
This guy's rant includes a bunch of things that aren't true. Just to pick the first two I noticed: initial proof-of-concept code doesn't usually get thrown away, and TDD doesn't say you shouldn't change tests when you find out they were wrong. In other words he's guilty of the same overzealous generalization that makes TDD cultism annoying in the first place. I get the feeling he had a bad experience on a project or two and turned that into adamant universal opposition.

Edit: I think the people who oversold TDD in the first place ought to have known better, though. Either they believed their own silver-bulletism or they cynically computed that it was the only way to push something in the corporate software world. I'm not sure which is worse.
I think it's unwise to screw with something you don't understand.

This reminds of the changing attitude towards forest fires. Since the 1900s through the 1980s a lot of time and effort was spent putting out forest fires as quickly as possible. In the 1980s scientists were coming to the realization that forest fires are a critical part of the forest ecosystem. Fire clears out the dead trees and undergrowth allowing new vegetation to grow.

I think hurricanes play a similar roll, even if we don't know what exactly that is.
Zeo alarm clock monitors your sleep, analyzes statistics, suggests improvements
Wow, that's pretty blatant. Are you in contact with them? What have they said? Definitely talk to a lawyer about this. Any idea how they managed to copy your application?

Edit. Also, do you have any proof that your work was written prior to theirs? WHOIS shows both domains registered within 6 days (which is curious in its own right), but theirs was first (though that doesn't necessarily mean anything in the first place). IANAL, but I believe the burden of proof is on you to show that your work was created prior to theirs.
Hmm, big chunks of verbatim text. We regularly have this sort of thing happen to us:

http://www.google.com/search?q="someone+who+is+not+one+of+your+founders"

It's annoying to be plagiarized, but possibly no more than annoying. I.e. the more slavishly someone copies you, the less dangerous they probably are.

(In our case, copying chunks of our site is so common that searching for them is a handy technique for keeping track of the ever-increasing list of YC clones. That search turned up two new ones I didn't even know about.

This one

http://www.google.com/search?q="intellectual+property+agreements+that+overlap"

turned up two more.)
They have, in fact, copied large portions of my HTML, CSS, and even image assets pixel for pixel.
Sue them before they sue you. And get a good lawyer.
Well I would say it was a combination of the two that has led to whatever degree of fame it is that he now possesses.

If he hadn't written Mongrel and been quite well known in the Ruby/Rails community, in close contact with some of the core members of that community, no one would have noticed when he did his "Rails is a Ghetto" bridge burning rant.
I have a pair of shoes that have the big toe separated from the other toes (based on traditional japanese worker shoes) and while I haven't tried running in them, walking in them feels really joyful.
I don't find it threatening, but I do find it offensive. Apple is harming consumers (it's own customers of music players), in order to protect it's market share in a related product. It's just not ethical behavior.

Some people tried to say "they just don't support it", but that's not so, they broke it deliberately. (And I know it was deliberate because they said in advance that they would do it.)

So that's what surprised me so much - that people, (you for example), just don't care that they would do that. It's something microsoft does, and everyone hates them for it. Why don't people care when apple does it?
Looking at http://net2apps.com/Product.aspx, they obviously were directly copying some of your graphics/design at one point. It looks like they've moved away somewhat.

You probably have a case, but I'm skeptical you'd recoup the cost of prosecuting it (in legal fees and in distracting yourself from executing.) Best case scenario is that they decide it's too much of a hassle and fold up shop; if they decide to fight they could change the infringing aspects and still compete with the same basic idea.

I doubt any company that stoops to this sort of thing is capable of out-executing you, so if I were you I would focus on doing your thing and let it sort itself out.
I can't point you at research but I've recently found that it does seems like my American friends have a much tougher time understanding British-English than I do as a non-native English speaker and from my experience non-native speakers don't care what version is used as long as it's consistent (for those that care a little at all). Personally I don't really notice if I'm reading American or British English, I only notice when it's pronounced.

I too would love to see research.
Brute force but works. The real trick, for me at least, was to convert the number into a sequence of 1's. The rest was like an exercise in programming Turing machines (and a nice flashback into the freshman year of college).
+1 to that. Also I wouldn't worry too much, their sites are noticeably less polished than Ronin. Also, there is a suspicious lack of company info, etc - a WHOIS on the domain returns a private registration which is strange for an invoicing business. Hearing that they develop in C# - or rather their offshore team in Pakistan does - does not fill me with confidence either. A lot of question marks.

I wouldn't worry about it. Just ignore them.
Did they take your source code? That'd be a clear copyright case.

Mimicking your look and feel closely but not exactly is a much murkier case. Lifting a few graphics or paragraphs is technically a copyright violation but what are your damages?

You do not have to enforce your copyrights to retain them; that's trademarks. If they were using your company or product names in a manner that caused confusion among customers, you'd have a trademark case. (If they mimicked the distinctive appearance of your product so much that it caused confusion, there could be a 'trade dress' trademark case. But as elegant as your interface looks, I think you'd have a hard time proving customers look at it and think 'Ronin'.)

I think your best strategy is to outcompete them as a more reliable, innovative, above-board app. That might entail completely ignoring them, or (if you have excellent evidence they simply copied you with little original development), making the case that they are a cheap knockoff in relevant forums, just so that any customer comparing you both knows the story.
I don't think I phrased that too well. I meant that was my original idea, but then I modified it to do more or less the same thing as Siri i.e. aid in task completion like for example, you can search for a sporting event, lookup ticket availability and buy tickets all from within the app.
Yeah, I was using their app to check out how much of the HTML and CSS was a direct copy.

End result: I'm not too worried about execution vs. execution. It's more the shock factor of being copied blatantly.

Oh well... "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery"
Or, perhaps, rather than some grand plan to vilify mongrel in order to pave the way for passenger, people are simply expressing their views and opinions.
The download ie6 questionare: http://www.saveie6.com/download1.php is getting the better of me so far :( .

.

EDIT:

The questionare appears to be an Prank: 'how to keep a fool busy' :P . All the submit buttons are hyperlinks... and the last page just lets you re-take the questionare.

<a href="download2.php"><img src="_img/butt_next.gif" width="185" height="53" alt="Next step" /></a>

Nothing is submitted.

BWAAAH :'( I want my IE6 download!!!
ASk HN: Handy domain blacklists to preload a new site with?
About to launch a major update to our anonymous network, socialface.com, and we'll be adding a /news style system to the works.

Being a single dev and enjoying daily periods of sleep, I'm looking to minimize the spammers as quickly as possible and was hoping to preload a couple thousand blacklisted domains or so.

I'm not looking for email spammers, or bad IPs specifically, but a list of known social news style domain spammers.

Any tips or similar experience would appreciated?
Wired podcast Interview on Entrepreneurism: Daniel Odio + kudos to Paul Graham
FGL: High Performance Framework--I just came across this, anyone used it?
Some variant of the above sentiment is used more often to signal good taste and high intellect, than MENSA membership itself :)
I wish they made "60 people like this" a setting that you could hide - I really couldn't care less who else likes the blogs/RSS feeds I'm reading, and rather not have any space wasted in my browser window to be told about it.
When to Schedule E-Book Releases - A New Worry for Publishers
A tip for the future: most image formats have some sort of header field you can stick copyright info into. Open a GIF or JPEG saved by Photoshop in text editor to see what I mean. Showing that another site is serving files with your (c) inside them is pretty damning.
Another note: sometimes these carbon-copy sites are not to compete with you for customers, but to scam some potential investors. "Look, we're real!"

(This may not be the case here, if as appears to be the case it's associated with a longer-lived development shop. But it's something to keep in mind.)
It's on Apple for explicitly targeting Palm. I'm sure Palm would've been more than happy to update their software in response to any changes by Apple.

Apple had other alternatives as far as liability goes. For example, they could've prompted the user with a warning message the first time they connected a 3d party device.
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Yeah you may be right, but these almost "religious" deployment transition seem familiar to me, remembering...

FastCGI -> LigHTTP (+others) -> Mongrel -> Passenger, and it seems like we've had a crucifixion at each stage of development.

But idk and it's late.