skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it is more that they are trying things all the time in a genuine desire to improve, but most of these don't get pushed live. Since they've tried most things internally over the past 11 years, it is highly likely they already have code that does more or less what competitors launch. Of course, I'd also like to hear something from real x-Googlers...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VantageScore

Sounds like it is a step towards transparency but doesn't seem to have much adoption yet.
pat explanations were getting old a year ago. please don't upvote this crap.
Honestly, how many actual software engineers do you know that are in favor of patents and that think it will help them protect their invention, rather than being terrified of accidentally running afoul of someone's patents? And how many cases of software patents have you actually seen used to protect the little inventor from the big bad corporation trying to steal his idea, rather than used by patent trolls to extract money from whoever has deep pockets, by big corporations as anti-competitive tactics against startups, or by big corporations against each other in a kind of mutually-assured destruction detente?

I think that the historical record is pretty clear that software patents are a huge net negative for the industry and do much more to harm innovation than they do to protect it.

How many startups wouldn't be started if people couldn't patent their software, and merely had to have it protected by copyright? Hardly any (probably just ones that deal with things like video encoding). How many startups will be sued out of existence by big corporations or patent trolls due to ludicrous patents, and how many startups won't be started at all because the landscape is already a patent minefield? A whole lot more.

Patenting isn't an inherent right, it's a pragmatic right granted by the government in order to encourage innovation and openness by providing people with temporary monopoly rights in exchange for sharing their inventions. Software patents serve neither to foster innovation nor to foster information sharing, since software patents themselves are pretty much universally unreadable, unenlightening, obvious garbage.
python 4 spaces

anything else (php, c++, html, etc.) tabs
bet tracking software and odds aggregation service..

what im working on now.. have four others but i will keep them in my head for now
no I think it is good to see it.

Just within a few seconds of getting to that screen I had about 5 boxes appear in front of me and it was a bit confusing.

Maybe just a reorganisation of where they appear?

EDIT: ok I went back to have another look. It's not the placement that put me off; it was the speed. It sounds crazy but I think the popups are too fast in appearing - I bet if you got them to fade in a little slower (2-3 seconds) then it would feel more natural.
Maybe they just want people to use this instead:

http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=003849996876419856805:erhh...
I'm not saying the patent system doesn't need repair but I don't think the problems are as broad as your example lays them out to be. Whenever someone tries to make such a broad patent it's almost always knocked down by the prior art clause (the example you gave would only work if no one had ever put a piece of wood over a puddle to get across before)

I personally favor the establishment of some kind of universal license fee that prevents patent holders from hoarding an innovation or charging ridiculous prices for others to use it. That way those who created a concept still get their just due while not being able to prevent anyone from using their patents to innovate.
Ig Nobel: Researchers named the cream of the crop
I'm unclear as to what exactly the robot is doing. what does it do with sensor data? does it test possible paths to a certain point and then backtrack or is it naive hill climbing? something else?
I don't see how you arrive at the conclusion. So the facilities are not there. That doesn't prove anything. One time, there were only mainframes, and "home computers sadly didn't work".

I'd like to see some innovation by architects, for stuffless living. Since almost all of my personal things fit into a computer in the future, living space could be a lot more generic.
No like Google Analytics.
Developing on the Edge - Thou Shalts and Thou Shalt Nots of Cloud Interop APIs
Yeah, I've looked at ge.la.to, and it's kind of similar with what I have in mind, although they don't really seem to do a lot of stream analysis (I could be wrong on this).

You're completely right, it's a hard nut to crack, and gaining traction will be tricky, which is why I'd probably just start in a few major cities first, or maybe just go after one vertical - think JDate but maybe for the younger/tech crowd.

Actually, I think that one of the big problems with dating businesses is that if you're doing a great job you actually loose customers. This may be why no one does a very good job of it.
Sure, what I mean is that the pursue for individual success is a key feature of Homo sapiens species. Traditional capitalism declares it as its main trait. The fact that participants of a capitalist system are encouraged to act according to their natural behavioral patterns makes capitalism the most stable system ever known.
Boston Globe report with complete list of winners:

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/missconduct/2009/...

And the official announcement (with rather slow response time at the moment):

http://improbable.com/ig/winners/#ig2009
Yeah, I like this a lot.
The real reason it is so crash-prone => fiat currency and a fractional reserve banking system.
Like tsetrich, I also thought it was an interesting experiment. But I agree there is a lot of evidence that most people don't want to live that way. Even in countries in Europe where the rate of homeownership is very low compared to the US, and renting is the dominant social norm even for families earning a good wage, people are still mostly immobile, with a decade in a particular property not at all uncommon.

Still, it would be nice for a while.
I know, and I'm not claiming to have the answer, but basically the idea seems to be "electronic checks".
Cool, I hope it works out for you guys.
Okay, I'll play with the timing and see what I can do. Thanks for taking the time to look again!

EDIT: I slowed it down a few seconds, but from the feedback so far I think I might need to rethink how the instructions work exactly...
Another reason moving around a lot is always going to be a painful because your address, you being known to be available at a location, is important for legal and financial purposes for lots of service suppliers. Any kind of ongoing transaction will be made difficult by history of moving around a lot.
Sony claims 60w wireless power transmission over 50cm distance (translated)
paypal is a registered bank
The problems you mention aren't unique to software. How many mechanical engineers look at a device and think it is obvious? Or they read a patent and think, "This is unreadable, unenlightening, obvious garbage?" Lots I'm sure.

To answer your question. Mint.com patented their software. Yext.com has patents. Lots of startups patent their software and the algorithms that give their companies a competitive advantage.

My argument is that software isn't a special case in the field of innovation. If someone can patent a solar panel that extracts 10x more energy from the same area, then why shouldn't a company be allowed to patent a software algorithm that can compress data stored on disk to 10% of its original size? Ultimately, math and science are behind both inventions.

I also do not agree that it is pretty clear that software patents are a huge net negative. You'll have to provide evidence for that. If you do that, you'll also have to show that patents for software are more negative than patents for mechanical devices or designs in all the other fields if you think software patents should be disallowed, but not patents in other fields.

The question is, why don't we disallow ALL patents? Think of all the lives that would be saved if pharmaceuticals could be sold at generic prices!

There's something really wrong with the philosophy, religion perhaps that motivates a group of software engineers to think their work isn't valuable and shouldn't be protected and isn't worth paying for. The arguments just don't seem rational and my experience with the world tends to discount all the arguments in favor of degrading the field of software engineering to that of garage bands just hacking out code because they love it. Eventually those hackers run out of money and need to eat.

Perhaps there is some idea that software engineers should just really really love what they do! They should love it so much they don't care if they get paid. It's as if getting paid for what you do makes it work. That's not true though. Athletes get paid to do what they love. Lots of doctors and lawyers love what they do. I think it's totally fine to get paid to do what you love.
I'll become interested in the Olympics when they add programming to it. I've been an aspiring prograthelete for years, but alas, the Olympics still doesn't have the most grueling sport of all: the prograthelon, 36 consecutive hours of mind blowing competition:

1. IDE Finger Gymnastics
2. 100 Lines-Of-Code Dash
3. Individual Text Editor Medley
4. Regular Expression Datelifting
5. Greco-Roman Webpage Translation
6. Modern Compiling
7. Databaseball
8. Hackstroke
9. Printer Throw
10. Debugging Marathon
"Since almost all of my personal things fit into a computer in the future, living space could be a lot more generic."

To me that's a truly dystopian future. I'd rather my skis, surfboard, bike, kites, hiking boots, etc were not virtual.
4 spaces in python otherwise tab
Google can't copy features that would only work well on a small to medium site. Can't think of much more.

Also, Gabriel, your work is wonderful. Keep it up, you're an inspiration to me.
How To Install WordPress Using FTP
That's a fair point, but it's also a little unfair IMO - on the stalkee. I can totally see the market but I would never want to corner someone like that for 6 hours. Plus, what if I snore on the flight and totally alienate the CEO? ;)
I'd like to use tabs, unfortunately pythons 'significant whitespace' mess makes me have to use spaces instead. To make sure I stay clean I've configured things such that I can actually see the spaces.

Especially with cutting and pasting sample code this is a total pain.

The interesting part is that many samples in python tutorials have their spacing messed up so that the samples don't work the way they're intended.

Python is a great little language, but this really keeps tripping me up.
Steve, just a heads up, I'm running through a few things on ge.la.to and it's super slow/crashy. Just thought you'd like to know.
CitySourced just launched to do this at TC50:

http://tc50tweets.techcrunch.com/story/180036092/citysourced...
Sounds cool until you consider that there is usually a crosswind component to every landing. (i.e. the rubber is being lost perpendicular to the tire rotation as well, and even if they were rotating this would still occur)

I wonder if the benefit would be enough regardless?
flight plans of important decision makers

If they're that important they're either in First Class or private aircraft.
Anything run by greed is crash-prone.
Why does intelligence have to be a function of living being?

If intelligence is a matter of the kinds of mental activities someone/something is able to perform, what activities require DNA?
http://www.cupcakesonline.com/
Maybe with her roommates, but that would never fly with me.
Np. The way I think about it, an "icon" for a piece of information has to be three things:

An accurate portrayal of the contents

More compact than the original

Sufficiently different from other icons of the same "type"

With web pages that means more than the title + favicon. If a page has a video embedded in it, that's a BIG clue. Also there is tons of structured information that sites put inside pages to make them more tasty to search engines, like microformats. Facebook recently created a de-facto standard for video_src nd image_src link tags.
Social darwinism rears its ugly head in odd places.

Luck and intelligence can each work alone to produce fortunes. But after the initial fortune is made, only intelligence helps grow it.

Wow.
That would violate most regulations on insurance.
I don't think so -- Fundable was targeted toward much larger transactions ($5k+ campaigns weren't rare, iirc) and specifically set up to 'self destruct' if the goal wasn't met.

So for example, if you had a small neighborhood looking to fund the purchase of a $5,000 water well and they only raised $4,000, everyone who donated was supposed to get their money back.

(Also, TipIT doesn't seem to suck.)
Deep search of local stores.

Several times I have needed to get product X, be it a hammer, sandals etc. but have no idea where to get it locally. Do I have to take the bus to center, or is it sold in some of the smaller shops around me? One weekend we spent hours looking for sandals. At least here local shops don't list specific items they have on their websites.

I imagine this would work by people contributing product info from shops as they visit them, perhaps snapping pics of aisles with their iPhones, and then having a separate group of people tagging the products they see in the photos.
Well, I guess I shouldn't have shared this idea with so many people over a year ago then! :-D
Alternately, this could be a service the important decision maker signs up for, reserving the seat next to them and letting people vie to fill it. The IDM would be considered to be "donating their time" philanthropically.
Important decision makers aren't always at the extreme top of the pyramid. There are plenty of people who have the power to help you that do not get their own Gulfstream (e.g., someone who can authorize a big contract for your firm, or at least fight on your behalf).

Not to mention you can totally do this in first class.
Ideo CEO on Design Thinking
I like having a place I call "home." I want more than a roof and a bed to sleep in. I want a place that feels like my base and is emotionally comforting.

Also, the pop-up chat thing is amazingly annoying.
Hey! I'm the writer of these tools and was kind of surprised to run into it here, since I have not posted about this before — the submitter must have been an adventurous PyPI visitor ;)

This particular tool was mostly written to replace all the ad-hoc aliases and symlinks with something that could be easily maintained and brought to other commands (eg. cdbm, lsbm, mvbm, cpbm, etc.). To speed things up some more there's also tab completion and prefix matching, which is pretty convenient IMO.
The Freak Revolution Manifesto
It takes two to sit in awkward silence for the duration of the flight.

I'm a pretty shy guy myself - but every time I've opened my mouth to start a conversation with my seat-mate, I've never been disappointed. One key realization in life is that the guy next to you is (in general) just as awkward and desiring of social contact as you.
I'd argue some fraction of HN readers are, despite their brilliance, not incredibly good with people. It's just more "It's not me, it's them" thinking, and sort of masturbatory.

People love to upvote things that make them right, but I guess that's kind of the idea.
This quote is one of the better mainstream-media explanations of cloud computing I've seen:

"Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM is responding to the increasing corporate demand for inexpensive e-mail that's run on computers owned by an external supplier instead of the company relying on the service. This approach has become trendy enough to get its own catch phrase - "cloud computing.""
Tabs...though in a way I don't think code files should have any whitespace in them; in my ideal world the disk file would be packed and the programmer's editor would use your preferred code beautification, just like syntax highlighting. Obviously that would be a hassle if you didn't use a contextual editor but I question the ongoing importance of that option.
http://www.weebly.com
The Hedgehog and the Fox: Learning How To Think
Google still finds http://thepiratebay.org/browse

But Bing wins with the front page: http://www.bing.com/search?q=pirate+bay&go=&form=QBL...

On a side note: The way bing shows the first result it made it feel like an ad and I skipped it the first time.

Also: The related search results in Bing are quite useful.
Architecture of the World Wide Web
Just as a reminder, universities outside the US don't get .edu addresses (for example, mine is just a .bc.ca adddress.) This may or may not be your intended effect.
Actually, extending the analogy, evolution shows that generalists tend to be much more successful. It's the reason panda's are endangered and crows dominate most cities.
FWIW, Yahoo! Research Labs had a version of their search engine with "more/less commercial" sliders years ago.
You might not want to use the word "attacking" when talking about location-based dating software ;)
You can't, for the general case, prove whether or not a program terminates. For many programs, you can.
So there's more to Latin than Lorem Ipsum? ;-) Actually, I studied Latin for two years. It's good to see other people outside the Vatican think it's cool to study it too!
I'm an ex-Yahoo, and there were all sorts of things like this in the Research Lab.
Python 2.6.3 Released
This appears to completely ignore the fact that money gives you power, privilege and opportunity - and that can be used to make more money. It's not impossible to get rich from nothing, but you start with a huge disadvantage.
And constituents in 2010 who will not care about their congress-person's stance on this issue when it is time to vote.
Because much of the perceived value in capitalism is based on assumptions, and assumptions can change in value much faster than physical assets?

For instance, Detroit has not been a valuable place to have a business or home for decades but it has faded slowly, but the assumption that housing prices would go up forever was worth trillions, but as soon as it was disproved, those trillions disappeared fast.
I disagree . . . the fundamental differences are that 1) copyright already protects software, 2) any given software program could literally fall afoul of hundreds or thousands of patents, 3) the patents themselves do little to encourage innovation, and 4) that duplicating a software system is a far different process than copying someone's drug formula, such that patents are unnecessary.

On balance, patents do more harm than good to companies and their engineers.

The companies you mentioned don't patent for competitive advantage, they patent so that when they get sued by someone else they can countersue. That's what everyone does; if you don't have patents and someone sues you, you can't fight back.

Patents on pharmaceuticals do encourage innovation, because the one essential element is the chemical formula (to a lesser extent, the process to produce that chemical), which would easily be copied without protection. A given software application consists of thousands of lines of code and thousands of algorithmic decision (often hundreds of thousands or millions); if you knew that someone was using an XOR in order to flip bits, it doesn't exactly let you copy their system. My argument is that patents on software don't encourage innovation because they don't increase the protection that's already there, and the threat of other people's patents is constantly looming and stifles innovation.

Look, I'm a software engineer, and I know a lot of other engineers, so I'm not discounting my own or anyone's work or saying it's not valuable and that people shouldn't get paid for it. What I'm saying is that patenting isn't a useful or appropriate mechanism of protection, that copyright combined with the inherent difficult of duplicating the thousands of features in someone else's application is barrier enough, and that patents actually hurt entrepreneurs and software companies and make it harder for engineers to get paid for their work.
I don't. I just want to be left alone, UNLESS there is a cutie next to me; then I am interested.

But, that happens almost never.
A super-simple way to email groups. Something where someone can easily subscribe and unsubscribe. Something that doesn't require signing up for an account, but only add an email address.

Concept:

Go to www.saturdaymorningrunninggroup.emailgroups.com

The webpage will have a box to easily add your email address.

To email the group, you send an email to saturdaymorningrunninggroup@emailgroups.com and it is broadcast to everyone on the list.
In praise of the fast, reliable, cheap breakthrough known as "wires."
Display ad clicks drop by 50% over two years
I want to highlight this paragraph:

I think the worst attribute any team member can have is not wanting to make waves. In fact, I think it's the number one attribute I would actively seek out to exclude from a team. Everybody has to work without nets on an agile team. If we're not taking emotional chances and communicating, we're losing ground.

Is this wisdom born from long experience or is it unwise naivety? Is there any grounds for saying "if you want to encourage waves then you have to have an environment where people wont fear being fired for sticking out. At all."?

I think actually having such an atmosphere and acceptance that everyone believes would be a lot harder than it sounds. Perhaps that's something that startups have - the founders have equity in the company, they can't fire the other founders and they can't be fired, so they have the freedom to do whatever they think will make the company progress, and no particular benefit (e.g. "not being fired") for not rocking the boat.
The first several pages give one the impression that this is just some kind of bleeding heart tripe. Once you progress to the meat of the document it is actually quite good.
I've used Visual Studio and variants for 7 years professionally. I've had some familiarity with vim for the the past 3 years or so, but it was only in the last year that I have come to really enjoy using vim. As tiring as these articles may seem, they need to keep coming in a slow, but steady, stream so that others can find out what they have been missing.
I was unfamiliar with args and kwargs in Python, despite using the language for lots of scripting, and liking the language immensely. It's a simple concept and now I get it, but I'm still unclear on what star and starstar mean, which is something I keep meaning to look up.

Does that make me an unqualified hacker?
Is forking lots of common commands really less cumbersome to maintain than just using shell aliases or `expansion`?

EDIT: By forking, I mean "having to maintain separate frontends to", not the process startup overhead. (That's obviously inconsequential.) E.g. if I want to use a shortcut for a default path to clone a git repository from, then I would need gitbm. Etc.
Hi,
I triggered a 500 error somehow.. probably because of my javascript being disabled. You should add a small but very visible warning that js is required. Wondering how many hn-readers are using noscript.
About the whole concept. I do not get it. At least I am not sure if I do. To be fair. I spent less then 90 seconds on your page.
I would recommend that you produce some sort of workflow-demo. Wink (http://www.debugmode.com/wink/) does a nice job. I use the linux version to do the screencapturing and use the more advanced windows version to add audio.
Do you have a business model in mind? Or is this just a fun project?
Best wishes,
have fun.
I tried DuckDuckGo as my primary search provider. While I liked some of their features, I couldn't live without maps integration (called universal search in this post).

Honestly, it would have been fine if they just forwarded me to google maps or mapquest.