skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is no evidence that patents help innovation in any industry. There is evidence that patents harm innovation.

http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2014/04/15/do-patents-truly-promot...

http://archive.mises.org/10217/yet-another-study-finds-paten...

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100203/0303448024.shtml

> Regularly, patent advocates tell me how important patents are for the biotech and life science industries. However, there apparently is academic research in the works that shows that patents actually slow down innovation in biotech. The specific example we discussed was that there is increasing evidence that when a professor or company gets a patent in the field of genetics research, other researchers simply stop doing work in that specific area. As a result, the number of researchers on a particular topic decreases, especially if the patent is broad. It's not hard to theorize that this results in less innovation around this area over time.

The patent system is not designed to encourage innovation. Instead, it is designed to enable entrenched players & the government to control innovation. This means, they can control the market & by adding legal barriers to competition. It's similar to how the mafia carves out territories. If you go into someone's ip territory, you will get the shakedown or whacked.

The way to have true patent reform is to abolish patents, as patents are holding us all back. However, that would mean removing a branch of government & a slew of other people who's livelihoods would be taken away. Unfortunately, the structures in place will prevent such reform.

Another way to have true patent reform is to effectively make patents obsolete. That is why DIY culture & black markets are "dangerous" & necessary ideas.

Patents facilitate the transfer of wealth & energy from the creators to the administrators, enforcers, & holders of capital. Is that how we want our civilization to evolve?
HTML5 indie game
True. This always comes up whenever it gets posted here or on Reddit, so I just renamed it to the "Model S JSON API" to stop that argument from coming up again.
You're still changing its state. If you have one horn you can do whatever you want with it, just like a normal person would. What the client does with a resource is only limited by the API, REST doesn't care what the messages contain. The semantic of the message is up to the API to resolve, you could encode that "stay on for 10 seconds" however you wanted.
Is this only interest based on search terms? If so, is that a representative measure for measuring relative popularity of two online publications?
My initial thought would be that a request for a "honk action" is not idempotent, so it should be a POST.

You could do it as a PUT or PATCH, but you'd have to do it differently from in your example in order to preserve idempotence, due to the complications of working with time.

Remember, if the request successfully goes through twice that should have the same effect as if only the first succeeded. One way to accomplish that would be to give an absolute start and end time for honk to be on. e.g.,

PUT /vehicles/{id}/horn { "enabled": true, "time_start": "2014-04-12T20:12:36.1", "time_end": "2014-04-12T20:12:36.6"}

for a half-second honk.
Modern Tools for Mom-and-Pops
Sometimes you just need to call a procedure, remotely.
Interesting to see. I'd love more explicit measurable predictions and then, like this, observing the results and reflecting.
When driving through the area, I've spoken with a few of the residents, and they seem to enjoy it from what they told me. You have to remember that they're all among their peers.
> why nobody brought gesture-based inout to iOS

It's available for android:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.access_com...
Yes, you have a good point. I think the price of everything would probably go up, so you might find that the basic income is suddenly not enough to live on.

I think it's impossible to know for sure whether basic income would be financially viable unless you actually implement it.
Only based on search terms. Shows a lot but not definite, especially with Hacker News having multiple names and possible search terms.
Irvine is definitely not a commuter city. It is the hub of business in Orange County with many people commuting from other cities and counties into Irvine. Mission Viejo on the other hand is a commuter city.

Both are the brain child of Donald Bren (who happens to have donated a large sum to UC Irvine and the CS school is now named after him )

Zot.
You don't want to make a new horn, but you want to make a new 'honk'
You are busy. For which type of fermentations does this work? For making vodka, beer, pilsner, etc.
Here's a good resource with more data. Including federal vs state. http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/current_spending

I'm curious what that 20% of social spending covers. It certainly includes health so we can't say "eliminate medicare/medicaid, but you get a yearly check for $10,000!". That's not gonna cut it. Federal+State+Local welfare spending is only 8% of total gov. spend and only ~3.1% of GDP. A long, long, long ways from being able to cut a $10k check per person.

Edit: Why on earth would anyone downvote that? It boggles the mind.
username + gmail
The problem is with the reporting, not the race. You can't write an article about "wow look at this 70 year old boat that's winning races" and bury "oh, did I mention that these races use a handicap system?" ten paragraphs in.
popular startups don't have a high percentage of dying.
Note that the cost of interface{} is, essentially the same cost java imposes.

Luckily it's used less, but that doesn't change it really. Anything becomes a double pointer indirect.

And just for completeness : even java has better tools for abstractions.
It's not that specific. I know lots of companies will use a third party service for something like a helpdesk and will setup support.theirdomain.com to point to the third party. The cookies for the root may then be leaked to the third party.
I have been using the Echo Livescribe pen for 4 years now, and it has saved me on many occasions. I taught myself Quickscript before I ever had the pen, but because of the lack of OCR for it on the pen, I don't really use it much.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript
Groomsmen Surprise New Bride with an Epic Dance Set
This is RIDICULOUS
During the Boom, I worked on some Del Webb communities after the brand was purchased by Pulte. There are two major segments to which retirement communities are marketed:

+ Retired to Play

+ Retired to Save

From a community perspective, this means that you have people who are wealthy purchasing very modest houses right alongside blue collar retirees and talking grand children and exchanging lawn fertilizers over coffee and beers. And you have blue collar and corporate VP retirees playing golf together on Tuesday morning...and one of them may live in a 3000 square foot house and the other in 1150 and there's not a good bet as to which one owns which house.

Retirement communities aren't like typical homeowner associations. There's much more self selection of residents - people don't move to a place like the Villages because of a job or schools or generally without the knowledge that they are buying into a particular image of the 'retirement lifestyle'. To put it another way, the set of people for whom a community with lots of golf courses holds appeal does not strongly overlap the set of people who take great pride in non-conformance to the social norms of golf course communities.

Unlike a general golf course community however, there isn't so much moving there because it's 'right neighborhood'. People have sorted themselves out. They're not climbing the corporate ladder. They've been there and done that. That's not to say that there aren't insecure people, just that there tend to be a lot more people with a mature sense of identity on the balance.
> A REST API must not define fixed resource names or hierarchies (an obvious coupling of client and server). Servers must have the freedom to control their own namespace. Instead, allow servers to instruct clients on how to construct appropriate URIs, such as is done in HTML forms and URI templates, by defining those instructions within media types and link relations. [Failure here implies that clients are assuming a resource structure due to out-of band information, such as a domain-specific standard, which is the data-oriented equivalent to RPC's functional coupling].

I don't even know how I'd write a client against a server that arbitrarily changes endpoint URIs. I honestly don't see a benefit of RESTful if REST requires complete decoupling of the server and client. REST isn't SOA. There is no discovery API for REST. If I don't get to hardcode /api/vehicle/, then how else can I write a functional client?
You have potentially very serious problems if the company runs into trouble, or simply changes direction, though. If a local authority runs into financial trouble, then depending on the jurisdiction, it may be given more money by the central government, or bailed out, or given artificially cheap loans, or similar, but it will rarely just be _abandoned_.

With a company-run town, however, you have a serious problem. What happens when things go wrong? One solution, of course, is that the local authority takes over, and this has happened a lot in many countries on a smaller scale, with privately managed housing estates and so on taken on by the local authority, but this really isn't a great solution; it's expensive for the local authority and an essential subsidy to the company, and couldn't be permitted on a very large scale.

In particular, you'd expect a company run town to be a disaster waiting to happen in the case where a property bubble collapses.

Of course, there are other problems; unless you're very careful, and regulate heavily, you'll end up with uncompetitive local supermarkets, and so on, for instance. And at a certain level of regulation, you're just using a private company to perform a government function, with the government telling it how to do it; this is almost never cost-effective.
I'm not seeing it. What I do see is an organizational change. I can't agree with the argument for the gloom and doom.
The Villages: where baby boomers go to die.
Amusing that this should be on the front page at the same time as the Atlantic article about Denver's transportation policy. The Villages is basically a pedestrian's nightmare, without sidewalks or anything worth walking to or past. It also has no businesses, being completely reliant on the surrounding area for goods and services and entertainment.

Anyway, whenever you see the claim "fastest growing" you should just go ahead and substitute "small" and then the whole phenomenon makes way more sense. There was a period where Bryan/College Station, Texas, was the fastest growing metropolitan area in America. That didn't make it a nice place.
Interesting how Slash is declining while HN seems to have hit a plateau. I wonder if that means there's another site on the ascendency out there somewhere.
It's not your fault, its just that people w/ Macs care more about their setups than everyone else, so they appear more.

(But I've gone back to your site dozens of times to check on people I admire.. say jrockway or rich hickey etc. So thanks a lot for building it)
Comparing Tactics: the NSA and Stalin
> Very few concepts have been so hugely corrupted to mean exactly the opposite of what they mean as REST. This is probably the least REST API in existence.

This is the first time I've seen URL APIs not being referred to as RESTful. What makes it non-RESTful?
reddit.com subreddits possibly.
Bucyrusredmen
bucyrusredmen
Matt Levine sheds more light on this story[1], backed by evidence whereas the NYTimes is just hearsay. Why would Barclay's screw over institutional investors who account for a large majority of their $4 billion in revenue for HFT who bring in only $3 million? Because without HFT (which is a bad, bad word to the ATG's ears), nobody would be trading on it, and nobody wants to admit that. It just doesn't make sense.

[1] http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-06-26/barclays-no...
Reminds me of the low-orbit satellite network in Society of the Mind.

IIRC, the protagonist wanted a internet-connected TV product with a small antenna. The only way to do it was to create a satellite network where the satellites were so close they would re-enter after a short timespan. It was countered by a continuous stream of launching satellites.

Replace "TV" with "LTE Phone", it's basically the same idea / value add.
Will people really agree to an unpaid internship for some brand-new, unknown company? What's the reasoning there?
Ask HN: What to do about poor project manager?
I work as a software engineer in a still-small but fast-growing bio-tech* start-up. I enjoy my work immensely, often work after hours, I go to conferences and meet-ups, stay in touch with the latest technologies etc. Our department has about 3 - 4 software engineers, one BA and one PM. The problem I have is that the PM is deeply out of touch with the products we are developing and has been doing very little work except sending mostly useless e-mails, spends a large part of his day reading online newspapers (I can see his screen from my desk ) Essentially he is .. "slacking off"...
The schedules he sets, decisions he makes, are pretty out of touch with reality and slow down the team a lot. This has been going on for a long long long time now.

* The management office of the company is located in a different city, so the situation is not visible to them.

What can I do to address this type of situation ? I know such PMs are common in government IT environments. Since this is a start-up we are talking about here, I think that there's still time to address and fix the situation.
You Shall Not Pass: Japanese Version
The key element is a shared opinion about how other people 'should' behave. That's what makes golf courses a successful focal point for retirement communities in a way that say a shared interest in hunting probably can't.
> let alone whether mixing it with REST would even be acceptable

Why wouldn't it be acceptable? Can you think about any reason? Because I can't. (And you could reach some very nice API independence by carrying RPC metadata at the REST API.)

The only thing I see here that I think is wrong is that the API uses GET when it should use other verbs. But lots of people already pointed that.
Let's talk bout the real reason this was posted: YOU CAN HONK THE HORN VIA A REMOTE API!
In such a circumstance we might even hazard that's a win for everyone. 1000x earners are presumably doing something great for the world to be worth that much.
Exactly. In reality :

Artificial intelligence algorithm acts totally bonkers because you're not telling it what you want it to do, telling it "it/he/she has to figure it out for itself". To put it another way : car without steering goes off the road.

If you do what seems to be common in Asian countries, pressuring the kids into either becoming outstanding students (which sadly means memorizing) or face homelessness at 18, and remind them constantly, you will get different results. Not entirely sure it's better though.

Nothing, and I mean nothing, strange about that.
How evil is too evil?
SLC light rail is significantly cheaper than RTD. The furthest zones in Denver are $10 round trip. When I was in SLC it was $2.50 round trip for anywhere on the entire line (I'm sure it's more by now).

Personally I believe that public transportation pricing should be based on an algorithm to maximize ridership rather than on being self-sustaining. Since the point of public transit is to reduce traffic, people that prefer to drive should be subsidizing public transit through registration and gas taxes.
I've been following The Setup for years (it's a dream of mine to eventually be interviewd) and I—if I correctly understand what your getting at—respectfully disagree. Daniel is really good about featuring a wide range of people from a number of disciplines on a bunch of different platforms.

But careful readers will notice a trend. There are a number of accomplished artists/developers/makers that are really happy with their current setup as their "dream setup." In addition, many of them are using 3-4 year old hardware (controlling for time).

The moral is that we can all probably accomplish our dreams (cliché) with the hardware we've got—and that's my biggest takeaway from The Setup.
Why functional programming matters  [pdf]
As with a lot of things in REST, the answer lies...in your browser. How did you know how to answer that last comment? You clicked a link for it. Not everything about REST can be answered by "just look at your browser", but a lot of things can.

If you follow a link you don't care what the URL is. You never needed to type out "/reply" to use Hacker News, you don't need to do it to use an API. That's what the article is about.

The actual URL is unimportant, you just need to know what the link for "/api/vehicle" returns to do something useful with it. Like you knew that "/reply" would give you a form with a place to type out a reply.

> I don't even know how I'd write a client against a server that arbitrarily changes endpoint URIs.

The thing is, you don't have to. I can write one for you and you'll never need to write another one again. You could use it and just have to implement the part that matters to your application, the semantic of it. You wouldn't need to hardcode anything, or even handle URIs at all.

You could use it for Tesla's API, Twitter's, Facebook's, whatever. If they used links you could use the exact same client for anyone, just needing to re-write the logic part (like creating a post on Facebook, a tweet on Twitter, etc).

Problem is hardly anyone actually implements links so you can't do that. It sounds like utopia but it's just the product of extreme decoupling. It's not really any different than browsers.
Well, number purchases do work when you top up with credit first! :) The problem amounts to the app realizing you don't have any credit but not showing an error message. This is the top issue I'm working to fix.

FYI, pairing PhoneCard with Google Voice can require a few tries. I've had issues intermittently where Google Voice wouldn't ring for the verification call, and even then it didn't always forward to PhoneCard like it should. Then again, Google Voice often causes me to miss calls.

If anyone else has problems crop up, please email me at support@getphonecard.net.
I am a person who switched from Slashdot to HN. The discussions on /. very quickly went downhill when the beta was forced by default. It was already precarious at the time. HN is definitely of higher quality with the discussions (even though it has a few of its own issues), but Slashdot still has a few interesting front page articles that I don't notice on HN.
"50 Top" vs "Top 50" - I didn't realize that, but you're right, it's a subtle yet important distinction. Well said.
Well that may be true. Of the cities you list I'm only familiar with the metros in vancouver and vienna, both of which are very nice. My point was not that muni doesn't have issues, but that they mostly stem from regional political problems which presumably those other regions dont have to the same extent. If the whole bay area would get on board with bart, things would be a lot better.

In any case comparing it to a third world country like the parent comment is a bit of a stretch.
Most people use REST as a synonym for "API you can call over HTTP".

I've never liked the dogmatic aspect of REST anyway, saying that API's should only ever be REST-ful is like saying that you should never call functions in your programs and only ever use getters and setters.
Chinese users are excluded, and if not, HN numbers will be way higher.
Plus spreadsheets are a purely functional programming language :

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1194878
I went through that madness when trying to figure out Hypermedia APIs. Supposedly you're not RESTful without hypermedia, but the whole thing seems crazy when you get into it.

Perhaps, just as JSON became a more functional and popular format than XML we can build a new REST spec that simplifies all this.
There are a few good looking RPG Maker games out there. For example, this game (帽子世界 〜A Little World〜) was made in RPG Maker VX Ace:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-daU4t0Un8

The dev has even made it free (although it’s in Japanese).

The dev’s (えぬ, romanized as 'Enu') website is here:
http://rpgex.sakura.ne.jp/home/

The site for the game is here:
http://rpgex.sakura.ne.jp/littleworld/index.html

Also, if you’d rather not watch a video, the same person who uploaded the linked video also wrote a review (with screenshots) on their blog:
http://otakuoverdrive.com/2014/05/25/game-review-boushi-seka...
Ask HN: Learning PHP through Wordpress
I'm studying PHP lately but I like Wordpress a lot. Is it possible to understand how web development and PHP works through Wordpress? you know learning how to build themes and plugins with Wordpress?
I was going there to read about all this high end PC setup, but the interesting thing is how many just have simple, older PCs. Makes my 7 yr old PC feel much more adequate.
The Genesis of the Gang [1899]
It's not according to both RESTs:

Fielding's REST says absolutely nothing about URLs or their structure.

Everyone else's REST (and, the HTTP spec) says that you shouldn't use GET to cause a side effect.
This API documentation has already been posted here twice today [1].

I remarked how non-RESTful this API is, which may have been the motivation for the title of this submission [2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7961944

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7962260
> I'm skeptical about the value of applying REST semantics.

One must at least take the basic protocol promises into account. And there is no certainty that a GET will reach its destination, nor that it (or a PUT) will reach destination only once.
And since January, we can buy other fun things too!
Pilotless fighter jet lands itself (1970)
PhoneCard probably didn't like your destination number (either invalid or deemed too much for the test call). If you (or anyone else) would like to give the real thing a spin in exchange for some feedback or ideas to make the app better, please email me at support@getphonecard.net and I'll give your account some free credit.
The lost promise of the Internet: Meet the man who almost invented cyberspace
I for one welcome our new HN overlords? In soviet Russia, hacker news posts upvote you? What cheesy Slashdot jokes am I forgetting?
Show HN: kouto swiss – A complete CSS framework for Stylus
Slashdot seems twice as popular as HN by Alexa ratings:
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/slashdot.org

Vs.
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/news.ycombinator.com

Note that Alexa also shows 35% of inbound search traffic for HN is hacker news, but only 6.5% of slashdot's inbound traffic is from the slashdot term. So comparing the two terms to each other short changes slashdot.
Two excellent thinkers in this area:

http://andrewchen.co/recent/

http://platformed.info/

Read their articles.
True for me. Just a few days ago I realized I hardly read Slashdot any more. There's not enough posts on Slashdot's front page.
Thats what I have been doing with my current website. It is a website for links for Swift. I have 300-500 daily visitors but haven't seen a large uptick in traction. Right now i easily have the largest collection of swift tutorials and references and my plan is to just stay the course and continue to build my repository. My hope is that there will come a tipping point in user traction during this growing of the repository of links. But thats just my theory. :)
The Northwest line is already under construction to Arvada, correct? I believe they are working westward right now.

As for the line up to Boulder, blame the expense of building a completely separate right-of-way along the BNSF Brush Subdivision, a very busy funnel for coal trains :-/