skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"It was never about the money. It was about the ethics of it ... winning a court case is not winning the lottery."

Haha, bullshit. Nice to a see judge make a reasoned decision.

This site The Age is also absurdly biased in favor of this patent troll. They even play up a "small guy taking on big bad business" angle. What a journalistic joke.
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I was going to weigh in, but a number of comments already spelled it out.

> Richardson's patent, one of many under his name, relates to work he did in the early 1990s and covers a software registrations system that allows software makers to create try-before-you-buy versions of their work.

There's a lot of asinine software patents - like Apple has patented the specific touch screen motions used on the iPhone. They're pretty intuitive motions - there's only so many ways to move your fingers on a screen that make sense. Patents were made to protect inventors and stimulate innovation - patents on obvious evolutions in technology do the opposite.
http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/180587.asp?from...

> The technology in question included the use of a software activation key to keep users from installing licensed software on more than one computer.

I have no love for stupidly obvious patents, but what the judge did seems like an abuse of power.
Oh. I'm sure. I've felt it myself, and still do at some events where I feel like a noob.

What I don't see mentioned much in the discussion of women and tech gatherings is that a whole lot of guys feel awkward and unwelcome when attending tech events.

That doesn't necessarily mean there's no misogyny, but it suggests that the feeling of unease people feel is not (always) because of sex, but because some groups just are not so welcoming of outsiders until the outsider demonstrates some chops or other sign of "belonging".
When I see pre-article ads like this, I never usually close the window. It makes me wish HN had a down-vote button.

Would flagging such articles be appropriate? I feel kind of scammed when I click a link for an article and get an ad.
Is that related to http://www.osnews.com/story/19266/WTFs_m

(could have sworn that was on xkcd but I guess not)
This appears to be the patent:

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5490216.html

From the abstract, you'd think this guy could sue every software company that uses a license key or registration number.
Like what? The 3.1 SDK did not bring much more in that an app like dropbox would need.
JDate and similar sites aren't exactly religious. There are lots of secular Jews who would prefer to date or marry another Jew, for ethnic, cultural, or national reasons.
Publishing is not immune to parochialism. Everyone is a hero in their hometown paper.
Interestingly, the universal answer set of these questions, from all of the women I've seriously dated, would be full! That is, every possible answer would be in the set.

And I am certain I am not unique. Indeed, half of the enjoyment in getting to know someone is in the mutual effort expended in trying to understand how the other person was formed: thoughts, feelings, desires, etc - and this enjoyment is independent of the actual thoughts, feelings, etc themselves.

As relationships grow, both parties discover the thoughts, feelings, desires, etc. that were perhaps, formed irrationally - and then adjust accordingly. This is called personal discovery - and is evidence enough that most people are too inconsistent and too nearsighted for an approach such as the one okcupid employs.

That said - I wish them the best of luck.
> it has allowed people like Ulrich Drepper to dig out his private little Hell with glibc and torment anyone who begs a moment of his time.

It isn't patronage system that's the problem, it's the people.

Anyway, just fork his work (eg. http://blog.aurel32.net/?p=47)
Turning the tide: a hands-on look at Google's Wave by Ars Technica
Yea I think this kid was driving a cheap 90s manual car.
Wait, so the company who's tag line is "Drowning in Email?" wants to add tweets to my inbox?
I hadn't heard that Facebook had any major Postgres deployment. MySQL seems to form the core data storage for the appplication. Cassandra looks like something they will be using more and more of. They use their own Hive project to allow use of SQL to analyze data in Hadoop.

As for other big users of Postgres, Hi5 is a decent sized social net that uses Postgres. NTT uses postgres, and I think the coming simple replication and hot-standby features are based on code they developed for in-house use.
Ma.gnolia back for a week already being forced to change name
Ok, 2 questions from someone who uses jQuery and Prototype:

1. Should YUI be considered over the above?

2. Does it play well with Rails apps?
Alternative Energy Projects Stumble on a Need for Water
Flash only supports hardware accelerated display when you're running full-screen in "kiosk" mode. That is not too useful.

What we've done is sacrifice some quality and encode using one of the mobile h264 profiles (I forget which profile off the top of my head). It essentially outputs h264 in a form that is easier to decode on the client side. It helped us eke out a few extra fps that helped quell an initial user revolt.
I'm not sure which Apps they are talking about as exclusives- in the Android Market, when I search for "Google, Inc.", I see Maps, Voice, Sky Map, My Maps Editor, Scoreboard, Listen, and Finance. What's left? GMail itself? It seems pretty dumb if they're saying they give away all that other stuff and not GMail... or maybe they're just asserting their rights, should they choose not to give away the apps at some point in the future. Doesn't seem to make much sense, given free, useful applications are their bread and butter on the web...
"... patent troll fails at attempted extortion ..."

when you mention patent troll I think Nathan Myhrvold (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Myhrvold) not Ric Richardson. Ric actually builds stuff and to characterise him as an extortionist is opinion only.

"... To me, the money is important only in so far as it allows me to further my ideas. ..." (http://www.theage.com.au/news/home/technology/how-the-man-in...)

To me a patent troll is someone who buys patents then threatens the alleged infringer with profit in mind. That describes Nathan Myhrvold (http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/09/08/1731257/Intellectual-...) and Intellectual Ventures. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures) The fact that Nathan is a former Microsoft CTO also hints at the culture of Microsoft.

Where does that leave Uniloc? Just how do companies who create strategic technology with an entrepreneurial eye approach potential buyers without being ripped off? Microsoft has prior form ripping off competitors (http://www.google.com/search?q=%22microsoft+ripped+off++*%22) and Uniloc another victim. Ric Richardson has form for building stuff. Lets see who continues to be the troll?
The "little aussie battla" (he aint little) nationalism is embarrassing, doubly so coming from ppl wouldn't even know what a software patent is... or how stupid they are... or that we are stuck fuskin things in exchange for selling wheat under the USA-AussieLand free (preferential) trade agreement... blood boils
My favorite teacher sometimes lets us discover stuff for ourself just by repeatedly asking us questions about it, so it spoils the surprise to read ahead.
I don't know really. Mibbit usage is growing really well, I don't particularly think Campfire is bad, I just think it's minimalist, and that I can do better than campfire (for my definition of better).
In the Facebook scale or similar scales if one relies only on OS instead of extra cache layers what would be the numbers? With this pace we would be talking about power efficient SRAM based caches in 10 years.
I think, this is really the most important writing lesson:

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for October 1, 1997: How Users Read on the Web
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9710a.html
No, sorry. His patent is ridiculous. It's trolling – cast a wide net and set the cruise control. Sue and hope you get lucky. You might make a buck off the broken system! Blatant example of why software patents should be abolished in general.
The Zune software is pretty awesome. Can't sync ipods though. Try Winamp for that. (assuming you're on windows)
The fact that a company responds when their reputation is at stake is little more than a confirmation that the company exists :-)

I fail to see what's so difficult about designing an online store for software. It appears to me that all the problems arise because they go to great lengths to take away as many freedoms and responsibilities from users and developers as they possibly can.
Blackboard is one of the worst offenders.

edit:
correct link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_Inc.
The patent would certainly be considered obvious nowadays, but that's not the point. The guy did show his work to Microsoft, they said "Nice idea, yoink". He did indeed have a patent on the idea. He won an appeal based on the fact that the judge did not listen to a jury's opinion on the case. So they got a jury, and the jury voted in favour of Richardson.

And the judge again ignores the jury. What the hell, man?
From the article:

Federal investigators also found many owners were not aware that it takes three seconds to turn off the electronic ignition button that comes standard on that model [Lexus ES350] and the Prius.

Many owners also complained that it was not obvious how to put a runaway vehicle in neutral because of the design of the Toyota gear panel.
OnLive raises big round from AT&T and others for on-demand gaming
Announcing the Self Handbook
can you explain what happened to me: the only story I read is that he showed MS his patented tech in 1993 and they turned it down and re-implemented it themselves.

Im guessing that is in no way the full unbiased story from what your saying; got any good links?
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Wow! A great lesson in software testing, cleverly disguised as a rant. Bravo! BRAVO!
I read it was partially destroyed with the coming and subsequent political machinations of Julius Caesar which resulted in an invasion of Alexandria by Roman soldiers. They started a fire at the docs that spread and burned something like thousands of scrolls. Part of the library (and the attached museum) remained intact and that is the part we do not know much about.
He had a patent granted in 1996 that covers: product activation, shareware, and machine ID locking. There's not really much else to say, it's idiotic. The Age has no idea of how much damage this would have done to an already battered set of affairs, had the ruling been let to stand. It's shameful they're propping this moron up onto a pedestal.
So many statistics.

So little statistical significance testing.

This tells me much about this service.
I'm not sure it's valid to infer that their entire service is poor from these series of rather niche blog posts.

(Although saying that, I wonder if this series of theirs is to attract press attention? If so, then it would be nice to see some significance data.)
This was clearly inspired by a previous MetaFilter / YouTube comment mashup: http://comments.thatsaspicymeatball.com/

There were two MetaTalk (backchannel about site-related stuff) threads about Lukas's rating experiment:

I posted one when I discovered it: http://metatalk.metafilter.com/18264/Do-we-have-a-minute-to-...

There was a follow-up after he made this blog post with his conclusions: http://metatalk.metafilter.com/18275/Metafilter-comments-rat...
Nope; the differences on the zodiac graph are.

Differences on the race graph want to tell us something. Not necessarily something relevant, but something, anyway.
Lundin Crast said, "And where is the analysis?"

"That," replied Hardin, "is the interesting thing. The analysis was the most difficult of the three by all odds. When Holk, after two days of steady work, succeeded in eliminating meaningless statements, vague gibberish, useless qualifications - in short, all the goo and dribble - he found he had nothing left. Everything canceled out."

"Lord Dorwin, gentlemen, in five days of discussion didn’t say one damned thing, and said it so you never noticed. There are the assurances you had from your precious Empire."

- Isaac Asimov, "Foundation"
Nice article. It seems a sad reflection of the baseline statistical knowledge that he had to write an entire paragraph distancing his readers from inferring a causal relationship though.
MetaFilter's closest equivalent: http://www.metafilter.com/favorites/all
Cool thanks.

I totally agree with you. Though I wonder if there is the argument that he is using this patent right... if he did show his specific work to Microsoft and they subsequently implemented it themselves would you not agree he was ripped off by them?

Now, if he had this patent and was suing any old company left right and centre I would join you in calling him a moron (he could well take that approach in the future - then he would be a moron). Right now I am seeing a tiny sliver of validity in his claim (if what appears to have happened is true).

I'd argue in this case the patent is doing what it is supposed too (though the outcome didn't go quite right).
This sould be nuanced. Screaming Monkey and the Canvas plugin are drop-in replacements. The Chrome frame is optional, and could possibly interfere with cookies or history handling (although I'm not sure it's the case). The problem raised by Mitchell Baker is that it would make it very hard to "manage information across websites". Did I hear XSS and tracking cookies?
Depends on where you are. They got bad for Australia about 10 years ago.
It's free (unlike iDisk), and in my experience Dropbox sync on the desktop is a hell of a lot faster and smoother.

Obviously it doesn't provide the other features MobileMe does, like syncing Preferences, KeyChains etc. But I'd be a very happy customer of MobileMe if iDisk worked as well as Dropbox does.
As pointless as this post is, I have to say that Dropbox is one of my favourite applications around. It's truly the epitome of "Just Works".

That said, I'd love it if they introduced a lower price plan—I want to give them money, but I don't need the big plan (I'm thinking more in the realm of $2/month for 5GB or something).
But, there's no way that PHP is nearly 100 times slower

I too am confused that it's only 100x slower. Consider the operation "2 + 2". In Java with JIT on, this eventually becomes a single instruction, "add". (Ideally 2 and 2 are already in registers from previous manipulation in the function, and you don't even need a "load".)

In PHP, this operation is hundreds of instructions. You start with the AST node. Then you look up the variable names. Then you look up their bindings (fast because PHP has no scope, in Real Languages this is at least a linked-list traversal). Then you finally get the object representing the value. Now it needs to be coerced into the right type for +. Once that is done, we can finally run the add operation. Then the result needs to be boxed.

You are surprised that that is 100x slower than a native CPU instruction?
This intermediate array is a space leak. Database results can be iterated over in constant space; your technique requires linear space.
The AGPL is a completely unenforceable EULA, both practically and legally. It attempts to restrict your ability to run the software -- freedom 0

The AGPL will never ever succeed. It will only ever be used by egotistical idiots and dying companies that wish to sear a scarlet letter into their code -- noone but I may profit from this work
BTW I did a test, and it seems that $array[] is a faster way to append.

Classic PHP-style micro-optimization. If you can't use the right algorithm, you can at least make the wrong one run 0.34% faster.
I dropped out of high school and went to jr. college. At that time (and probably still) California Community colleges had agreements with the UC system such that if you fulfilled your general ed requirements with a specific GPA you were guaranteed entrance as a junior transfer. For me this worked out great.
You can insert hidden anchor tags into the DOM and then use an a:visited selector to detect visited URLs.
YUI is pretty heavy weight (the API is complicated and it's big) - at least as of about 6 months ago.

But I love DataTable and AsynchQueue, and haven't found comparable plugins for jQuery.

When I need a real editable table, DataTable is my first choice.
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It doesn't matter who he targets with it, it's completely wrong. It sets the wrong precedent in every way. Why should it be "ok" for him to target Microsoft with it, but not some smaller developer?

There's no validity to his claim, this "news report" is totally biased. He patented stuff that had been going on since the 80s and then immediately turned to sue the biggest company he could find, hoping to win a payout. The jury sided with the "little guy" and the judge threw out the verdict based on their bias. (I think that's what happened, anyway.) I'm assuming he can appeal, but I hope it he doesn't fare any better this time.
Absolutely. I'm so tired of the "within 5-10 years" technologies that never materialize. From now on I only want articles about things are being shipped to stores right frakking now.
"If I Had More Time I Would Write a Shorter Letter"
-- Mark Twain
His example of biking around India was stupid, but his logic wasn't. Raising a child is not something that only women do. His counter-example should have been that: a man raising a child.
> Wave is designed to facilitate real-time concurrent messaging, meaning that content appears to all users immediately and multiple users can edit and submit content at the same time.

One of the things I like about email is that it is not real-time.
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Lol, "within 5 days". Some people are so very unreasonable... nor does it massively sound like they know what they're talking about. 5 days appears to be a little too short imo, wouldn't most of these kind of things be measured by the week/month or is this just scare tactics.

Can I send a cease and desist that says minus 10 seconds? (meaning they've already failed to comply with it :D )
Big surprise: Ma.gnolia guy continues to be an idiot.

At least this time around he's blogging about the uninformed idiocy he's about to do before he does it...
10 New Points About The New Apple Tablet: To Be Announced in January 2010
Explaining meta-programming by analogy
> noone but I may profit from this work

With a strict definition of "profit" this seems more a criticism of dual-licensed GPL works than the AGPL; software published under the AGPL does not grant any sort of monopoly to the person publishing it -- even if they were selling a proprietary version of the same code, it doesn't restrict third parties making money from it.

And if we weaken our definition of "profit" to mean some sort of benefit, then the argument is even weaker.
I hope you remembered to use referral links! 8x250mb = 2GB of extra space :)
Yup, tried it once at low speed, same effect. Technically if you only cut the power but don't turn the key all the way down, it won't lock. But the chances of being that careful in this situation are null.

I'm surprised simply braking doesn't work. AFAIK, break power should be (much?) greater then engine power.
So what about demanding a minimum amount of characters? In reference to a certain well-known internet service i'd propose to accept only comments with more than 140 characters.
Would you care to expand? You mean that changing Magnolia's name is idiotic? Or keeping it intact is?

I think he should be able to get away with renaming the site Ma.gnolia (with a dot).
Hydrogen fuel cell to charge your mobile phone
What Happens in The Planet,
Online community to make real friends over the world. Our Social Network to meet friends is growing on a daily basis with more than one hundred people joining
So true. What I find confusing about Singularity-type dreamers is not that they dream, but that they're so arrogant about trivializing everything. "All you have to do is transfer your memory". Right. If the concept of Singularity allows you to call any imaginable technology trivial, I call BS.
> The flash demo jerked and jumped around in bandwidth a lot.

Not only that it was taking 90% of my CPU to display something that did not look even close to 720p in size. And how can they get away with calling that looks more like 360p HD, anyway? I am not impressed.
Warning! Entering the fact-free zone.

Seriously, it's impolite to publish articles that are angry accusations without (a) consulting the accused and (b) limiting one's accusations to the evidence at hand.

Your article makes it sound like they collect confidential data from their apps and sell it for money. Can't understand why so many people would upvote this.
I haven't been following the Wave hype, but by the end of the rather verbose first page I still had no real idea what Wave is supposed to be or why I'd want to use it.

Best I can tell it's some mish-mash of email/IM/docs - which frankly sounds horrifying.
I really like that quote! Ever since I first read that book I always think of that quote when I read similar press releases. I didn't realize that I wasn't the only one!
Im confused; dont you think he has a right to feel cross Microsoft screwed him (if that is what happened)?

The rest of what your saying is irrelevant (I agree: patents used in a broad way are evil) because it appears he has a specific complaint against a specific company :) not a general attempt to enforce his/a patent?

I get the impression you haven't read the background? It does appear MS might well have done an injustice by him in '93. If that is what he is trying to right; then I guess I support him. If he is, as you suggesting, just trying to sue his patent all over the place (which I see no evidence for yet) then I am with you totally.

I worry that the patent trolling leaves cases like this, where there seems the makings of a reasonable complaint, out high and dry :(
Well, it's aging that kills us. Whatever drug they finally find will most likely work by stopping and/or reversing aging.
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Chetan Bhagat latest book '2 States' is about a boy and girl from two different states of India, who fall in love and want to get married. Of course, their parents don't agree. What happens next is what the book is about.
Frankly I thought the tone of "hey, we need to ask you to stop" was a refreshing and reasonable change from the usual threats and bluster to be found in most C&D letters.

Whether they have a valid claim or not would be for a lawyer to decide, but if they do have a registered trademark for Magnolia that relates to computer/internet services they're in pretty good shape.
I think the auther is unncessarily hung up on Clicker, which doesn't even seem to be out of private beta yet. His real competitor is SideReel, a television stream aggregator with huge penetration right now.
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