skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, because this is not a case of A vs. B. It's A vs. all the Bs, Cs, Ds, &c patenting stuff.

So sure, a company building a battery has a good chance of coming up with an enforceable patent. But given thousands of people trying to patent battery-ish ideas and many that aren't immediately related to batteries, the odds favour one of them coming up with something that receives a patent and is vaguely related to whatever the battery manufacturer is doing.

Remember, a patent is a sword but not a shield. Just because you patent an idea and make something with that idea, you cannot assume that nobody else has a patent that applies to your "patented" idea. They may have patented some other part of the process for manufacturing your "invention" or they may have a patent for an underlying component of your process even though you have patented a novel way to apply their patented idea.

Please let go of the idea that patenting something is a license to actually do something tangible with your idea. It is not: It is actually a license to interfere with other people doing something with your idea.
His most recent post silences Beatles rumours: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/09/08/beatles
Melanin/Hair Based DIY Solar Panels
Google Books cut off before he got to explaining what the fraud was. Does anyone know?

He seemed to be complaining about assuming distributions were normal without checking, a simple mistakes that is warned against in any introductory statistics class.
yeah sorry of that's ambiguous - i clarified the initial post above. by SEO gems i mean sites which have growth/user acquisition fueled entirely by users searching for stuff.
Someone should outsource this "arts" manufacture to China and undercut his $100 price point.
Who Put the IPv6 in my Internet?
Assuming 3% inflation, $1 in 1500 is over $3.4 million today. So it's a bit of a stretch to say that lots of people had $1 in 1500. That's the miracle of compound inflation!
As far as I can tell, he's saying that there's not a lot of casual software (like games and such) developed in Perl(?)

Anyways, Perl is a fantastic programming language for non-developers (e.g., people writing small programs for personal use.)
Here's my understanding of the potential for a scalability problem.

EXAMPLE: twitter.com has 24,650 twitter followers.
If Dave gets 24,650 followers on an RSSCloud architecture then this
is what happens when he posts.

1. Dave creates a 140 char post. Hs blogging software sends a notice to the cloud server that he has an updated RSS feed.

2. the cloud server sends update notices to the 24,650 subscribed "listeners" to Dave's "RSSCloud-twit-sream".

NOTE:It does not send Dave's new post text just the alert event.

3. the 24,650 listeners then do an RSS GET from Dave blogging server. This could create "cattle stampede" (i.e. slashdot effect) and many users may not get service when Dave's server is overrun. The server would likely be swamped with this massive interest in Dave's blog in a few seconds from these real-time subscribers.

At small levels of users the architecture is effective and elegant. At very large numbers it's missing an essential optimization. Only the "new blog" text should needs to be sent... maybe with the RSSCloud event for example.

An RSS GET will pull the whole string of recent blogs posts for all 24,650 users. A lot of excess text that most users already have from being real-time listeners anyway.

The RSSCloud Blogger's software needs to see a difference between a RSS GET for the recent blog text and an RSSCloud GET for the latest update text ONLY. Reducing the amount of text being sent out but a change to the protocols as described I think.

Of course, I could be way off base but I'm really trying to understand the overall architecture and the "realtime" problem this is intended to resolve for us all.

NOTE: If you federate the RSSCloud servers you just make the "GET" problem even worse. More demand on the blogger's RSS feed in a few seconds. It's like a user driven "slashdot effect". Post a 140 char message and notify the cloud and boom... you're server falls over.

I'll await corrections to my understanding.

NOTE:
PubSubHubBub has an entirely different approach to the real-time optimization for bloggers. The Hub Server gets the blogger's new post text and the Hub Server forwards this delta to subscribed listeners. The Blogger's server never sees any excess traffic in or out. Of course, the PubSubHubBub service could require the resources of a Google, Amazon or Yahoo. A centralized service that could potentially have a "fail whale". Dave's RSS Cloud has a million "fail fishies".

Life as always is rife with tradeoffs. Go figure. YMMV.
Seems so high. The floppies only held 400KB and if you only had one drive you needed to hold a System folder, the Application you needed to run and still have room to save your document.
I'd just start the test over. If you want to do rebucketing, see the following Ruby-esque psuedocode:

http://pastie.org/610630
With any luck this means that there will be more room for the development of a commercial space industry and the success of companies like SpaceX.
It's interesting to note how many people here are commenting on the inefficiency of writing in the cursive style. This got me thinking about the role of handwriting today.

I imagine that our English script originated (probably from Latin) as a way of either carving text on rock or writing with a feather pen. It probably wasn't designed with speed in mind.

The same with the East, where Chinese characters were originally designed to be written with a brush vertically, and not in a fast manner using a pen. (Even they have something almost like cursive script called "grass script").

Thankfully (?) I was sent to a rather intensive school where I learnt cursive writing at young age, and had to use it in all my written work. I'm surprised to say that NONE of my friends today know how to write in it. This speaks for itself as to how inefficient cursive writing is since noone really cares for it.

There are "shorthand" methods I've heard of, but I guess I've just been too lazy to learn them:

http://www.alysion.org/handy/althandwriting.htm
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/shorthand.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand
I would consider those task something a good sysadmin would be great at doing. Those scripts will need modification and I think that is what a good sysadmin should be able to handle. Sysadmin are automation engineers and infrastructure engineers. Maybe this person is more the one who integrates the pieces together in your model.

Sysadmins deal with more than just hardware and pressing go on the upgrade script.
Maybe I am missing something obvious, but aren't logs and containers floating a foot below the surface also fatal for non-hydrofoil vessels?
Like most businesses the Internet will change the model of car sales. In a few years there will be fewer dealers and
the prolonged negotiations and manipulations will from another era.

Costco is already moving into this space cooperating with local dealers to manage inventory and service. The number of dealers will collapse to the organizations that create an internet buzz around fixed and fair pricing and solid service.

Expect Amazon to move towards this highly leveraged model to connect buyers with inventory.
Vast amounts of code is written by people who don't primarily self-identify as a programmer/developer/whatever. Python is huge within the science/engineering community who want to use NumPy for example, Perl has virtually no presence there.
I find it interesting that a few of you are suggesting that the logical opposite of a brand new shiny car is not simply an old, still well maintained car, but an unpleasant poorly maintained ("ugly", "scratched") car.

If you buy a timeless design and maintain it properly, there is nothing to be ashamed about, but letting your car get scratched to the point of rusting below the paint, this is sloppiness.
Yes, tens of good ML + NLP ideas. feel free to email me.
Ask HN: Anyone else play Magic: The Gathering?
I'm just curious. I played pretty seriously from 1995-1998 or so and recently started playing casually again. It's one of those few things that's as fun as nostalgia convinced me it was. Magic and Quake1 (CA/RA/CTF) both hold up 10+ years later.

I know it's died down a lot since its heyday, but with all the geeks we have here surely some play? What do you play? Written any code for it I can use?

A friend of mine and I have been dabbling with creating our own web based (simple) player for it, since we're too cheap to pay full retail price for digital cards (that can't be redeemed!) with The Official Magic Online. I've checked out Magic Workstation, which seems bloated/lame and doesn't work under Linux or Mac.
Yahoo Answers?

Surely nobody actually goes there intentionally, creating a website dedicated to giving the incorrect answer (but with an awesome page rank and truly unique rants) to your every Google Search, and twice-weekly providing the Fail Blog with material.
crackberry.com is another great one
Sorry, maybe i'm just not thinking clearly this late at night. Why in the world is supporting eval related to hanging on to 500 megs of unused memory?

Ruby is neat and all, but is there really anything in ruby that's not dressed up smalltalk? Squeak doesn't randomly hang on to 500m, afaik.
ha ha yes yahoo answers kills it. on the other hand i f-ing hate experts exchange
Our alphabet is derived from the Roman which is derived from Greek which is derived from Phoenician. Our uppercase letters are copied from Roman versions meant to be carved on stone. The lowercase are derived from medieval variants (mainly Carolingian) designed to be written by hand.

So lowercase letters were designed with speed in mind. Though, interestingly, if you write uppercase fast (like I and a lot of other people do) you tend to reproduce the evolution of lowercase.
no, although i also used to play a while ago, ending around 2000 or so. won a JSS in my prime.
Anyone who is a premium member of ADC or went to WWDC got an advance copy. You don't need to "make the advanced copy list."
Considering that he was unable to get a job after a full college degree, how much do you think a community college would have helped?

He Couldn't Get A Job. The path that he had been told was that education was the key to getting out of the ghetto. He Still Couldn't Get A Job and now he is in a worse position than when he started.
But if it relies on your patent as prior art, I still have to cough up the baksheesh.
Market crisis 'will happen again'
Marketing: Meeting the needs and desires of the customer at a profit.

It's a pet peeve of mine when people conflate advertising (hiring a seductive model), and some very narrow areas of marketing (identifying that successful, young customers like sport-luxury vehicles) with marketing as a whole.

I'd agree that from a product stand point it's not so different from a BMW, Lincoln or Acura... but it's not remotely similar to a Chevy. If you're interested in a sport/luxury sedan, Chevy has nothing to offer you. They can do sport, or sedan, but not sport, luxury and sedan simultaneously.
I certainly played. I also played online (7 or 8 years ago?) with http://www.magic-league.com/.

Looks like the programs to play online are http://www.magicworkstation.com/ or Apprentice: http://www.magic-league.com/download/apprentice.php
StackOverflow.com
Ask HN: Do you keep a journal?
I've had a really hard time overall in life for the last year so today I started venting through a written journal. I've always appreciated writing and the way it can be used to express some things more poignantly and elegantly than the spoken word so I figured it would be a good outlet for my frustrations.

How many of you have kept a private journal or an anonymous blog in the interest of getting through difficult situations? Any stories or suggestions from past experiences?
Honestly, I don't know. It could be that smaller online retailers were afraid of the inevitable rise in returns, chargebacks, and other customer-service hassles that would accompany any measures that encourage impulse buying. I know I would be.

While the idea of one-click ordering is obvious, it takes some nontrivial business infrastructure to make it safe and robust. You need to be able to consolidate separate orders placed within a brief timeframe, you need to allow your customers to view and edit their existing orders and fix accidental ones without human intervention... and probably most important, you need to be large and well-known enough to be trusted by your customers to retain the financial and personal information needed to execute one-click orders.

The idea was indeed a ballsy one, and it took some real work on Amazon's part to make it happen successfully. But it was still an obvious idea, it wasn't the least bit creative, and it didn't deserve patent protection.

Hard work on my part shouldn't, by itself, entitle me to stop you from doing the same.
Open Source jquery plugin, Data TAbles, controls to any html table.
I'm pretty involved with the tournament operation side of Magic - it hasn't died down, it's done pretty much nothing but grow. It's always bigger than it ever has been.

Magic Online is actually quite worthwhile, especially if you don't have much access to physical Magic. You can redeem.

Magic Workstation hasn't been actively developed in years, but you can get it to work on linux with Wine (and probably OSX too).
Perhaps a bad choice of title. Although I know that inline styles are bad, I still find myself using them in my own projects out of laziness, and I thought it was cool to see an example of what is possible when style and content are kept totally seperate.
That is so far from anything I would ever want to see on a slide (unless it's just meant to poke fun at such code), I don't even know where to begin.

When you program, do you think of it as an exercise in bending your mind to the whim of the computer, or the other way around? I, for one, would rather make the computer understand what I'm thinking.

If I'm thinking "hey, I want to evaluate this bit a bunch of times with different names", why can't I just say that? Isn't Ruby supposed to be the "English With Some Bits Of Punctuation" language? Assuming I've met any security concerns, and I'm not doing anything incredibly complicated (which, honestly, wouldn't pass code review with or without eval), what's wrong with writing the code the way I want?

Looking at the author's received "fix", I don't understand it. I'm not a big fancy Ruby expert, but I've been through the poignant guide, I've written some medium-sized stuff with it, I've used most of the syntax constructs, and I think I get the idioms. The original makes sense; it's clear to me. We do three string format operations, and eval each one, thus defining a module each time. Great.

The "fix" confuses me: "what's Module.new (I thought you just did 'module Name; stuff; end')?", "what's define_method (it looks like def, but why doesn't it just say def)?", "what's Object.const_set, and why don't I see 'name' until then?". With some reasonable inference, these aren't tough questions, but there remains one: "what the hell is the control flow diagram for this?". There are three anonymous functions defined in here, and I have no idea when the inner ones execute, or worse, are defined or compiled. I thought I understood Ruby's control flow, and I could make a guess at this, but there's no way I'd bet money on the result.

So what if eval turns code into strings? Code _is_ strings! Do you think files are made of parse trees? eval doesn't hide information, it adds another level of abstraction (and there's an old saying about solving problems in computer science somewhere in there). Syntax highlighters, test coverage reports, static analyzers, and cyclomatic complexity calculators (really?) should all be able to handle it. Why? Because the feature is there, and it makes my life easier sometimes, and in those times, I want to use it.

So, umm, there! That's what I think about eval.
The Palm Pixi is official (Hands-On Video)
Sprint Pulls $99 Palm Pre Special Offer
Software is different. For most commercial programs, it's obvious in advance whether they can be implemented or not. Okay, there are lots of academic computer scientists devising new, unobvious algorithms, but I think a relatively low proportion of businesses need new algorithms. Whereas all new medicines, to take the other extreme, require new science.
Why exactly wouldn't I want a royalty on the sales?
Texture filtering | Codedstyle
http://developer.apple.com/products/mac/program/software.htm...

The ADC Software Seeding Program is an exclusive benefit for ADC Premier and Select Members and enables developers to incorporate the latest Apple technologies into their development, test for compatibility, and report bugs.

Select membership is $500/yr.
In fairness I had forgotten that advance copies were handed out at WWDC. But at the same time the conference was attended by 5,000 people many of which were journalists so I still don't think that qualifies as "easy for a developer to get their hands on" (I don't know that it was distributed to ADC members)

Also, I go back to my original point which is now that Snow Leopard is public we STILL don't have an official list from Apple of what they changed.
Convert DVD video to BlackBerry AVI format
iMacsoft DVD to BlackBerry Converter is a welcomed software to convert DVD to BlackBerry AVI. It ia able to convert your DVD video to BlackBerry AVI format and extract audio from DVD to BlackBerry audio format.
Arbitrage traders automatically eliminate the market inefficiencies which they exploit. In theory, all purely financial operations, such as hedge funds, do the same (although this orthodoxy is now less certain). This is not true for patents, because patents are a government granted monopoly.
A Discrete Model Gauging Market Efficiency
A math paper exploring some conditions that allow large predatory traders to dominate markets.
Posted both PDF and HTML (read the PDF). This is a math paper exploring some conditions that allow large predatory traders to dominate financial markets.
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The grills are available for almost any model car or truck. The companies that provide you with the custom grills make sure that you get the best designs and make your car look extraordinary. For more information log on to mytightride.com
As somebody who is over 30 and works in startups, I'd say you're right. I'd not even consider for a moment the standard YC deal ($11k + $3k/founder for 6%).

When I was right out of school, or off my first job I might've considered it... but these days? never.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenga
I do wonder whether Nathan Myhrvold really believes that patents are a good thing. There seem to be three possibilities:

- Myhrvold really believes that patents make the world a better place.

- Myhrvold is cynically extracting money from a broken system

- Myhrvold wants to bring down the patent system; IV is intended to make the absurdity of the system as blatant as possible, and make money at the same time.

I hope it's the last one.
Gaytes: Fax Server, IVRS and Voice Mail Solutions
Gaytes Information Systems Private Ltd have been providing Voice & Unified messaging (UM). It is a concept of bringing together all messaging media such as voice messaging, email, and facsimile into a combined communications experience. Gaytes offers a complete Solution for voice & unified messaging, voice, data and managed services, as well as systems integration and application development.
I read this a few years ago already, but it's still as excellent an article as it was. It's both interesting and reveals a lot of human nature.
My favorite of Flash's many non-sensical quirks:

If you create, in code, a Graphics object with a color of 0xFFFFFF(pure white), it won't draw. But 0xFEFFFF will work. There is probably some setting buried somewhere that impacts this, transparency/masking features being likely culprits, but it certainly isn't documented in the APIs.

At times, it seems like everything in the Flash APIs suffers from some kind of misfeature. You can load Sound data from a ByteArray, but not Video data. The security policy mechanisms have changed in major ways at least three times(maybe more, I've lost track) over the last three years, meaning everyone doing Flash networked apps has to keep an eagle-eye on player updates. Because Flash uses system fonts in lieu of including its own cross-platform default, you can't count on text rendering the same across platforms unless you always embed a font in your file(which, of course, adds file size). If you use alpha transparency, it will render quickly on Windows, slowly on OS X, and molasses-like on Linux, with the same hardware on all three. Accessing the stageWidth and stageHeight properties on the first frame(e.g. in a statically instanced variable) will give you an incorrect value. It just goes on and on like this.

But if you want to do something high-traffic and media-related on the web, you don't have many alternatives - Flash has the appropriate features and the largest deployment of any of the plugin-based options.
Presiden't speech to schoolchildren
With Transmission, I've found that it helps to pause or remove any active torrents before quitting the application.

As for 10.6.1, so far the update has been smooth. I have yet to see any application hiccups, though I haven't really taken it for a true spin. While the 10.6.1 update is available to ADC Mac-Dev members, I would assume the update is coming publicly soon enough.
This is how I suggest developers "prepare for Snow Leopard".
Could have sworn I opened this in a background tab from news.YC, but I guess not...
Well, it _is_ September...
This article might just save me. I agree decompressing Wikipedia takes a long time. On my machine, it took almost 24 hours. More time to decompress than actually downloading it!
we STILL don't have an official list from Apple of what they changed.

https://developer.apple.com/mac/library/releasenotes/MacOSX/...

This document is not intended as a complete list of features or changes for each new version of Mac OS X. Instead, it focuses on those features or changes that affect the development of third-party software, providing overviews of each along with insight as to how and when you might use them to create your own software. Wherever possible, this document also provides links to other Apple conceptual and reference documentation for that feature or change.

You will need a free Apple Developer Connection account to read it, and the rest of the updated developer documentation.
Went to your site, and couldn't find any info on pricing. As a startup guy that's pinching pennies I could probably handle a $19 or $29 monthly subscription for a testing/metrics service that's better than Google Website Optimizer, but anything more than that would cut into my ramen budget. All the features you have listed here are great, but I care more about when you will be launching in beta, and how much the service will cost.
So basically someone gave money to Microsoft for patents they could probably never have been able to enforce?

Wow, Microsoft really got screwed up again...
The photos show mere strands of hair connected together in what looks to be a grid. Really?!!

Crank, until verified.
Orkut - Mensagens