skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "This is the realistic world of grown-up work life."

Actually this sounds like a statement from someone who is fulfilled outside of work, or on different projects within work. I'm of the same opinion. Most people can't have ann interesting workload, so why does this guy have to be "unimaginative" and "uncreative"? Why attack anyone for a statement like that? I'd much rather not work with someone like you.
I never feel like doing anything
Did you see this fun South Park episode?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Centipad
Your first comment ever as randomfool is below. Should we question your impartiality then?

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I believe that Scott Jenson put it best in 'Why Mobile Apps Must Die'- http://vimeo.com/33692624
Watch it.
The problem with native apps is the installation barrier- if I had apps installed to do everything that I'd love my phone to do, I'd be overwhelmed with hundreds of apps installed. Web-based apps have the potential to slip in and out of use as necessary, with more applicable discovery mechanisms (geo, proximity, etc).
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I use both thunderbolt and my HDMI out on my rMBP daily.

This guy is a bafoon complaining about being unable to fix a problem by not accepting T&C, but he's using OS X?

I'm not denying his problem, but he is certainly cause for it being a lot worse for him than it really is.
"[...] in Firefox, Privacy Badger will be automatically deactivated when you enter Private Browsing Mode [...]". This is kind of a deal breaker for me. I frequently use Private Browsing to quickly open a single browser window without waiting for all my session windows/tabs to open.
i think that was aimed at me. i said in a now deleted comment:

> Wow! Even though I know it's allowed, some coolness points deducted for posting the question yourself :-). I'd definitely do the same though. I'd be stopping random people in the street telling them the hack!

i know posting and answering your own questions is encouraged on SO, it was just a joke!
The author claims prior art based on things that were published in 2013, but Makerbot filed their provisional application on October 29, 2012. This also explains why the patent was filed October 29 of 2013, as that would be the last date they can file.

I don't really care if you hate the patent system, or hate that somebody wants to treat 3D printing as a traditional business instead of altruistically open sourcing all the things. To publicly lambaste a competitor through disinformation just because they don't share your personal values is about as classless as it gets. This is open-and-shut witch-hunt territory.
Business reality: patent trolls exist.

Rational strategy: patent things that you think you have no business patenting. Use for defensive purposes.

If Makerbot starts using such patents offensively, then anger is warranted. Not before.
I doubt it, the surface team actually does regular AMA's after a product launches. They do listen to criticisms and manage to correct most of them in the next iteration. If you watched the keynote event, Panay talks about it, especially in regards to the trackpad issues. Not to mention the usual flurry of "M$" and "Who uses bing?" comments they have to deal with.
It's as far away geographically (even further for the north in terms of miles), but even if you get to harlem/university heights the types of buildings and the way the streets feel is different from the sunset/outer richmond. There is just some sort of gloom and emptiness because of the density of people & climate in those neighborhoods compared to manhattan. You'd hardly find a street in manhattan that has the feel of this : http://foundsf.org/images/2/23/Photo9Ungaretti.jpg

Maybe the light colors in San Francisco's outlying neighborhood's architecture make them look just even more distant and quiet / abandoned?

Also, the ease of getting into the heart of manhattan (say Union Square for both cities) from north Manhattan just feels different than taking the Muni/Bus in SF. You're inside the subway, enclosed and underground. The neighborhoods that have that distant feeling in NYC are ones like Flushing, Gravesend & Jamaica. Or Canarsie. Canarsie is so far away...

Also, Hi Tom - This is Alex from the first Stuy meetup :)
Restaurant Menus As Analogy For API Copyright
Same, I run 10.9.3 on five machines - 6 year old Mac Pro, a 2 year old 13" MacBook Pro, a 2 year old retina MacBook Pro and a 6 month old MacBook Air.

I use AirPlay, external monitors and projectors all the time. No problems here.

As we have to remind ourselves at work, hundreds of thousands of happy customers don't complain, but the hundred who do (quite rightly) are very loud.
i might be being a bit grumpy, i guess it's estimable to take that kind of approach to agreeing to t&c's, but honestly on a case by case basis, you can quickly work out which sets of agreements you should spend time worrying about.

i think in his shoes i'd rather spend time debugging than peering over a somewhat self imposed roadblock.
Someone else was wondering if this was a parody, I think they might be right. There is so much funky with this, it does feel only half serious.

For me it started with 'Book from San Francisco'. I clicked on the 'Boston' button, and it shows this weird top status-bar drop down thing which flashes the message: 'Going to "Hahvahd," perchance?'. What?

Then the browser starts, a little bit too slowly, scrolling itself down automatically... Off putting.

A moment later, the mocking message slides up and away, and the top nav has been replaced by mostly broken status bar. Try clicking on some of those links in the status bar if you want to get totally lost.

Then that calendar view... I mean, if it showed 'From $199...' or whatever under each date, I could understand taking up so much space. I thought it was a lot harder to find the right date this way than with their standard date picker.

After picking a date, the flights table is significantly worse than their current design. No way to step forward/backward in dates, no weekly overview, super low contrast, overly spaced out, scroll down forever trying to see all the flights, no sorting,...

Even the seat map is weird, I don't know if it's just due to the super-low contrast, or the weird icons they put in place of seat numbers for the seats which are taken, or maybe the weird way they show the pricing for each seating area, but there was a lot of cognitive dissonance trying to understand what I was looking at.

What it comes down to is an interface which was trying to make things simpler actually introducing a huge amount of cognitive load where there didn't need to be any.

In the end, I zoomed out to 33% to get a birds eye view and while it's interesting to see everything on one page like that, I think they have a LOT of work ahead of them making it actually flow properly, fixing the contrast and layout, removing all the weird and distracting gimmicks, and bring back some of the core functionality that's missing.
I think Apple has had an uncanny ability to build excitement around their products. It is something MS does not traditionally have.

I think the Surface sounds great personally; and it has a very good shot at being my next laptop.
systemd is a linux only thing.

As for the GSOC project:

-----

Project: Provide bsd-licenced, os-agnostic, dbus-api compatible systemd-{hostnamed,timedated,localed,logind} replacements.

Brief explanation: More and more desktop-level applications now depend on apis provided by linux's systemd. We need to have an equivalent to keep up with them.
Now that the USPTO is a first-to-file system, they may have felt pressure to file for defensive patents before someone else did so offensively and came after them.
This honestly sounds like hardware failure. Bluetooth is very stable for me with a Magic Mouse.

Your USB and HDMI issues seem related. I'd wager a power issue.

Make the problem reproducible and they'll swap it over at the Genius Bar, who are extremely helpful if you're polite to them.
On Android you can record without the user knowing which is way cooler.
Ng-drum: AngularJS drum machine
Bellabeat (YC) Lands $4.5M Seed Round
You'd be surprised at the number of "obvious" things you'll miss when shipping your product. The fact is, the people designing these things are human, with their own biases and blind spots. Furthermore, your beta test group will probably miss a few "glaring" problems with your product (even if you've shipped multiple versions before!)

In the resulting bashing and crowd pleasing "this sux" comments, there will be a few people who WANT to love the product but just can't, and are willing to explain exactly why. Those are the people you latch on to, give free products to, and pick their brains for their insight so that you can iterate better on your next version.

And that's exactly what Microsoft is doing. This is the correct strategy.
I have seen increased lockups with 10.9.2. I replied because mine seem also to involve external displays (and/or Thunderbolt accessories). A possibly-related issue causing app lockups (Matlab) was caused by an old Java runtime interacting with multiple displays. Updating JRE fixed that. I have also gotten system-wide lockups on Thunderbolt plug-in (never used to happen with 10.8).
Very well done. Beautiful and simple to use. Most importantly, everything is kept on the same page and it loads quickly. I can't begin tell you how frustrating it can be using something like Expedia or Continental and having to wait so long for the next page to load.... Sometimes it takes too long and I click 'back' and have to start the process all over (resubmit the form). By keeping it on one page that expands downwards, it easy to tell when the next widget is loading and prevents all of this from happening.
> Don't forget that a lot of people get on the internet for leisure.

There is a purpose besides leisure, selling to the leisure group or building technologies to improve the internet's effectiveness for selling to the leisure group?

Looking at pictures of cats, pornography and buying trinkets are all clearly leisure activities.. but commenting on vaporous articles about living underwater is something I expect to get academic credit for according to the social norms established by scholastic reports.
Serious question that people here may or may not know the answer to. They keep making Mars Landers. With all the tech advances in the drone world, what are the pros/cons of a Mars Drone that flies around instead of rolling around on wheels?
Everyone seems to be missing the point of this announcement. They are just saying that they are now adding a feature in Webmaster Tools to show you they see your site so you can diagnose problems.
"After a few successive wins you'll be allowed more and more leeway to apply your creative energies during company time"

As someone almost as old as jblow who has worked across a wide gamut of different companies from very small to very large, this is sometimes true, but is by no means universal.

You would rationally think that if you are directly improving team productivity, customer satisfaction and the bottom-line that'll earn you more autonomy, but office politics are not always on the same continent as rationality.
Same here. Oddly, it always connects immediately at work, but fails in this same way at home, where I have an Airport Extreme router. You'd think if one combination was going to fail, it would be the one with two vendors.

EDIT: This is on 10.9.2.
patents won't help against patent trolls. These "non-practicing entities" have the distinct advantage of not doing anything that could have them infringe on a patent (in particular given that legal procedures aren't patentable).
Defensive patents are not effective against patent trolls, since the trolls do not produce any products. The publications do make sense, though.
Clearly I did not. Sorry.
Isn't the shutter sound, even where required by law, kind of pointless because unsavory users could just take a video instead of taking a picture? That's probably what perverts prefer anyway.
I came across and played with beefy[1] today. Has anyone here integrated it into their workflow?

[1] http://didact.us/beefy/
HDF is very useful indeed. I had been looking for something like it for a long time now. Any plans on adding longer words or search?
Heh, the crux of my point was the concept of "the newest older members."
> Most people I know, once they're out of school, learning stops.

AFAICT, many people learning the kinds of things I prefer to learn about when they are out of school, but they seem to continue to learn things (even if they are things that I don't value, or even things I consider to have negative value, both to the learner and to the society they are in.)
So much agree. Another big design flaw hampering good conversation: I'd like to read replies to your comment, but HN funnels me to reading only 1 reply, and then onto 1 reply for that comment, each one hijacking the conversation. And we can't collapse threads which makes it even worse.
Criticize the code? Yes. Criticize the product? No.
Thats Lenovo's fault not Microsoft's, drivers haven't been a problem in ages. I have both a Macbook Retina and desktop gaming PC. I hand built the PC and all of the drivers automatically downloaded and installed. The only thing I ever did after that was update AMD Catalyst for my 280x's, but that was my choice; it worked fine before I updated. You probably updated to 8.1 before Lenovo updated its drivers or bought an old touchpad that was actually meant for Windows 7 and is no longer supported by them. Touchpad's are also a niche product use case, 99% of users use mice, laptop track-pads or touchscreens. Thus touchpads will never be a priority for driver development teams.

As for the learning curve, have you ever seen a lifetime Windows user try someone else's Mac? Hot Corners drive them absolutely crazy, or they will accidentally pinch to zoom or they will scroll by mistake and not realize whats happening. There is always a learning curve, even in the most user friendly operating systems like iOS. And what actual computer do you have? The problem is people use a $400 Dell and then compare it to a $2000 Retina or $1200 Air. The Surface Pro 3 is a premium Apple like device, and what do you know, early reviews from places like The Verge say its the best possible Windows 8 experience. My Mac and my PC cost about the same, and I love each of them for different reasons. Each OS has its own pros and cons.

As for metro, what are you doing that causes Metro to show up? On my desktop, I have almost never seen it since 8.1 came out. Once you enable boot to desktop and pin your most widely used programs to the taskbar, the only time it ever shows up is when you are looking for a rarely used program. Even then it is actually pretty good when you think of it as nothing more than an advanced start menu replacement. And in the next update MS is making an option to do just that: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2138443/rejoice-the-start-men.... The real problem is Windows doesn't automatically detect what hardware is connected and change the settings to ones like these automatically.
And Hitler. Let's not forget to bring up parallels to Hitler when trying to smear up someone. Godwin's law must be fulfilled, damn it!

I don't see "criticisms being ignored." The author is dialoguing with his critics. His response was published in this very article.
From a cursory glance, it seems to me that Meteor syncs MongoDB instances on the client and the server, and therefore can only be used with MongoDB as the database. Is that correct, or is there any way to use it with a Postgres app?
He is getting(and keeping) free hardware, I would consider that getting paid. He clearly states he got the item under review for free and once he complained about the performance they said they would ship him a high performance model for free as well. They used to give away any such free loot specifically to avoid the shilling moral hazard.
Serious question: What makes them fanboys but not you?
> That said, for both of those cases it would potentially be cheaper and equally effective to file defensive publications rather than patents.

Do you mean a Statutory Invention Registration[1]? That seems almost as troublesome as putting together a regular application, just without some of the followthrough. Or is there actually a solid way to establish prior art just by publishing your method? I've been wondering if there's some threshold of "publication legitimacy" that's required for this, or if posting the method up on pastebin would work. I found a piece on how to establish prior invention for business methods[2], but that only protects the folks that can document their own prior use.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Statutory_Invent...
[2] http://www.fenwick.com/fenwickdocuments/new_defense.pdf
Everyone is getting really excited because they think this is how it works, but no, not exactly.

The shutter sound comes from the same speaker as the anti-shutter sound. The phone is mixing the tracks together and playing nothing.

It's not like both sounds are played and they neutralize each other as sound waves.
That's crazy. Is there a certain site that causes it more than others?
Defensive patents are effective against patent trolls, because if you have your defensive patents covering the things you do, you can bring those to court as proof of the origin and creation date of your ideas, should the patent trolls come knocking.
I'm not sure how a reasonable person can see that article and think Microsoft doesn't have to worry about justifying features, project management, testing, documentation, group policies, localization, security, or anything else that makes a "simple" feature for Windows complicated because the source saying so happens to be more than ten years old.

The process and consideration outlined is certainly in-line with my own experiences at Microsoft.
It doesn't seem like it would be too bad. If they are in the same spot for two weeks or so then I think it might be worth it. For a week or less then a traditional cooler with dry ice seems like it would be clearly better.

The type of soil (rocky or not) would make a big difference. Though icy ground where this would work best would be the hardest to dig...
another discussion on boarding pass redesign. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6292273
I hope you find some reason to live on this planet [does not have to be your day job].

I also thought about your 'dysfunctional == competitive advantage' question. I watched an hour long talk by John Wooden [it's on netflix streaming] about his success pyramid. It seemed quite sane, and obviously he was quite successful. So no, I don't think dysfunctional companies would have an advantage. (They might be equal, though).

The economics of software certainly are a bitch (can copy for free, obsolete upon release), although SAAS certainly changes things. And speaking of economics, this may cheer you up or depress you more: http://knowmore.washingtonpost.com/2014/02/10/the-long-agoni...

That's median income for men in the USA. Not because I'm sexist, but because posting household income is quite misleading - why do you think government economists use it all the time.
I'd rather not see ads that are targeted to me. The more an advertiser knows about you, the easier it is for them to manipulate you into buying their product.
Conference Call Music Remixed
Does prior art, even backed by concrete proof, still matter now that US also has a "First to file" patent system?
Just rinse it off first. Most cooler water is pretty gross anyway.
It's kind of amazing that no forum or other communications system developed in the past 20 years has been as good as USENET (either in the late 1980s, or with a good client with killfiles, global cancels, etc.).
Great article. That being said, seeing some proposed solutions to this problem would have been nice. One strategy that Reddit employs quite well is the Subreddit system. This creates smaller sub-communities that aren't victims of the 'large' community problem. Of course, overtime a subreddit becomes a default or gets too many subscribers... but it's still a decent solution.

I think it'll be interesting to see how growth affects Hacker News. I'm still very impressed with the quality of the articles and comments (yes, there are some bad ones here and there, but compared to most sites HN is excellent)... I think the downvote threshold for HN has actually been quite successful in encouraging people to post useful comments. It gives a goal for people with low-karma to strive for, thus encouraging them to post better content. I think a more extensive reward system like this has potential for creating a better community.
You've gotta be kidding. everything mden said
agreed, if I was more socially responsible I'd create a wikipedia account and edit it.
The long, agonizing decline of the U.S. economy, in one chart
It would be great if someone familiar with JBuilder could make a PR to add support for it. It would actually be pretty simple to add.
Boundary drag on the wheel as it spins causes a loss of angular momentum, and so it slows over time unless force is applied (via adorable hedgehog legs) to keep it constant. Additionally, there are likely normal frictional forces at the meeting of the wheel and the supports, as I highly doubt they gave the pet a wheel with magnetic bearings in a vacuum.

And yes, the hedgehog must exert constant force in order to overcome this viscous friction.

On a related note, this viscous damping term scales as velocity, so the faster the wheel turns the harder the little thing has to work to keep it at a constant velocity.
Is it possible to include claims in the patent filing that weren't in the provisional? Just curious.
Writing Software by David Heinemeier Hansson
Where do you find the provisional application date? I read the post, and skimmed the linked patent application but never would have found that in the patent application while skimming the filing.

I'm glad that you did find it - that is indeed very important information to take into account.

One note though - your tone and suggestion of "an open-and-shut witch-hunt" is very aggressive and makes me instantly think that you have ulterior motives. No idea if you do, but I feel like you were jumping to conclusions about the intent of the author. Can you imagine a scenario where the author didn't know about the provisional application? That's not an excuse, but changes the scenario from disinformation to misinformation and witch-hunt to mistake.
Well, OS is broader than the kernel. I agree with you that Linux is not "a GNU OS," but mostly because only a small portion of any given linux distribution is GNU or couldn't easily be replaced by nearly identical non-GNU components. Certainly once you get into using something like KDE, the bulk of your environment is not in any way part of the GNU project.
Still can't change my login email ID.
'Assam Rape Festival' Article is Hoax; India to Investigate as ‘Cybercrime’
I had one crash since 10.9.3 on my MBA 2011, and I have graphic glitches in Safari when displaying images since 10.9.1, I believe.
If I was 15 again, I would register

les.bo
I don't have any tips for you. I am stuck in the exact same situation. I'm actually thankful that you shared your story and several of the comments posted here. It made me feel less lonely with my situation.

The quitting part, moving on to a new job is not an option for me as I am convinced that it is the same exact situation in most businesses around my area.

I started working on some personal projects which helps a lot, but does not solve my problem.

I find myself pushing to the last minute before the task at hand is due. The extra rush of adrenaline from the looming deadline gives me the kick I need to overcome the meaningless work I am about to do...

Good luck.
How do you avoid the chilling effects of patents existing then without getting into patent pools or cross-licensing arrangements? People will be hesitant to put any time into R&D if they don't have assurances their work won't be quashed by lawyers.