javindo

One of the main arguments for patents is just the fact that some things require a bit of capital to get going and what is to stop some venture capitalist from taking pitches, telling the person it's a rubbish idea then going off and funding the idea himself?

As were the boxes on 9/11, but those were allegedly destroyed in the fire.

Was going to say similar; it's quite ironic how a site advertising a "clear font" has a very blurry graphic right in the middle of the page demonstrating said clear font...

The thing I'm most pissed off about is having this rubbish bundled in with Prime at a non-additional extra cost. As a current Prime customer, I will not be renewing next year.

I generally respect Amazon, Bezos, most of what they do and their business strategy, but this is a real shitbag move towards paying Prime customers.

"Everyone is using this one system" - you're still not fooling anyone Apple.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...

Honestly your best bet for this is bitcoin since almost every other crypto currency measures itself against BTC instead of USD, BTC is sort of a gateway crypto currency.

Ah I actually ended up using that a few months ago when trying to determine cost of living between various European countries. I was pretty shocked and saddened (as a naive university student) when I realised the full extent of taxation in the UK for graduate job salaries but soon realised it was still less than those of Europe, especially the nordic countries.

I have the 3 unlimited plan but also Spotify premium because it's just easier having offline synced playlists, especially for train journeys when signal is always spotty.

It seems cool but I have a couple of concerns. Firstly, how exactly is it detecting when someone is nearby? The iPhone doesn't have NFC for example and GPS isn't exactly the most accurate thing in the world. Secondly, it seems as though the device somehow connects to a front panel with a direct shaft to move the lock mechanism, it seems as though it would be fairly easy to compromise with a bit of brute force. How solid is the front panel? The large size also gives a lot of leverage for breaking off.

Slightly off topic but this line made me chuckle:

    iPhone 5s, the most forward-thinking smartphone in the world 
    and iPhone 5c, the most colorful iPhone yet

I guess that's a PR problem you have to deal with when you release the best of your efforts alongside a lower cost version!

[s]I may have misinterpreted this, but to me it seems as though all this provides is two things: 1) Netflix get some technology for free from which they can profit and 2) Netflix get to boast about using free/open software.

I think instead of a page thanking FreeBSD for software, Netflix, alongside many other large companies who use free software, could make more of an effort to actually contribute to the software proportionally to their use of it.[/s]

I apologise, clearly I had misinterpreted it and was wrong!

Surprised Germany is so resistant, although I suppose there was that WiFi SSID collection scandal which caused tension.

I was talking to my father in law (head of particle research for P&G) about particle simulation for research purposes and he was explaining the complex challenges with behaviour of interactions. It amazes me that even at the mathematical level, a post-doctorate doctor of chemical engineering with a team of physicists/computer scientists/mathematicians/chemists are still facing challenges which Disney seem to have solved - glad to see they are properly releasing this research!

Doesn't necessarily have to be jargon, it's a fairly common phrasing "would you ask that of him?" / "the client had an ask which we fulfilled". I suppose it can sound a bit biz-buzz but nothing specific to SV.

Wow, just like that. This was amazingly sombre, sorry for your loss and thank you for your inspirational words.

Such a shame; an amazing city with wonderful prospects, becoming almost entirely uninhabitable.

Quite poor financial reporting from AJ to be honest. BTC is highly volatile but it has generally stuck around $1,000 for the past couple of weeks, the upward spike to $1,200 was just one of many fluctuations which has once again levelled off at $1,000.

China telling large banks they can't handle BTC will not have any impact on the currency because everyone buying/selling BTC in China weren't using the banks anyway. The "dive" was potentially a slight overreaction to the news from China but it's also a fairly uninteresting fluctuation in a highly volatile resource.

That looks cool and all but please get Swype on board. I find it an indispensable part of mobile use nowadays and any US without it is seriously missing out.

Interesting anecdote: an alumni of my university was chatting with me recently about his work at Google, essentially he replaced what he described as a "large, complex machine learning pipeline" with a "simple bloom filter" for displaying product results at the top of a search page if it determines you have searched for a product.

For example, if you search for "iPhone 5S", the filter determines whether to show something like this http://i.imgur.com/Dp3y1Gi.png (not sure if sponsored makes a difference here, possibly a bad example).

I would make an argument for Bill Gates. I know on HN people might snub this, but I honestly believe that for better or worse, the future was reshaped by his business tenacity.

I know that everyone involved in the entire PC movement equally played a big part, but Windows ended up being the huge unifying factor for Joe White-Collar-Worker. I think the surge in office computing in Windows was what eventually lead to the acceptance and idea of "normal people" owning computers in the home and consequently the drive towards intelligent consumer electronics in general.

Also a mention for Sir. Tim Berners-Lee, of course it was not a one man effort but he is largely attributed to the creation of the WWW which, let's face it, has already hugely reshaped society in many ways.

With all due respect, I really hope HN doesn't end up turning into an Apple fanatic site as was the case on certain tech blogs a few years ago.

Also 2mm thinner warrants the "Air" title? I seriously think Apple are parodying themselves sometimes...

Disclaimer: I am not any sort of "fanboy", I own an iPad and an android phone because they seem to be most suitable for me in those areas, I just feel as though HN is getting a bit caught up in the "hype" of Apple today.

Amazon UK used to be no limit but it's now £10 limit. However, this can be bypassed slightly by adding any media item (for example CD/book/DVD).

A lot of people had fun finding the cheapest piece of media, I think someone found a warehouse full of 10p cassette tapes at one point being sold by a company and handled by Amazon, thus giving people 10p shipping for orders under £10.

Regardless, if you have 4 friends you can split the cost of prime up to 5 ways (yourself + 4 friends) for next day. In my experience, at least, this has worked even delivering to different addresses. You have to list them as family members, 3 of my "family" are housemates and a fourth lives down the road.

Echoing what itsboring said; it's hard to describe but sometimes we just have to... be closer. For example, I can sometimes read incredibly small writing if I can just get it right up to my eyes and really squint but I physically can't read a number plate more than a few meters away no matter how much I squint even if, relatively, the size in my vision is the same if not bigger.

Wow it seems we have incredibly similar situations! Here's my current zoom level on HN, sitting upright with my face about 2 feet (rough guess, maybe half a meter?) on a 27" monitor http://i.imgur.com/oCU01L9.png

(Ignore all the noob tabs, I'm currently making a lesson plan to teach children PHP!)

I'll definitely give linux another try, although I'll still have to keep my Windows install for gaming at home, my laptop could benefit from a nice distro.

I also find it funny how people can read my screen from the other side of the room. Somewhat unrelated but funny anecdote is my friends staring in awe at my ability to use Visual Studio on a 14" ultrabook display - huge font size and lots of nice whitespace = not very many columns. A friend noted "your brain must have a huge code buffer"!

I do agree though that of all possible career options, there are far more which could be hindered greatly than development.

Edit: As a side note, I think the last figure I can remember for my vision was 6/36 - although that was years ago. I don't really bother with glasses now because the correction apparently just helps to "not tire my eyes so much from the nystagmus" - not an acuity correction unfortunately.

Whilst my disability isn't as impacting as hers, I thought I'd contribute my own perspective on going through a similar process.

I have very poor vision as a result of occular albinism and because it's retinal it can't be corrected with glasses. This leads to endless frustration and ultimately finding creative solutions to many problems faced at university.

The fact of the matter is there simply isn't support to do things "normally" with a disability, whatever it may be. People make adjustments but it's never quite right. As a computer science student, you might think this could be mitigated because a lot of my work involves using a computer and for the most part this is correct. I have good enough vision that I can tell, however, if a monitor is at a poorly configured resolution so I always prefer to have maximum resolution with zooming tools.

This is going completely off topic but it is one of the reasons I still tend to use Windows a lot instead of a linux distro; they simply don't support ease of access as well. Windows recently introduced a "Win + +/-" zoom tool in Win7 which has honestly been life changing. On the contrary, trying to work out how to increase the font size in SWI-Prolog on a school machine was a fruitless endeavour.

So what's my point? With a disability, there is no escaping it. You have to adapt and not rely on support because frankly it's just too much hassle. I can't read lecturers writing on boards in lectures so I borrow notes from friends, it's not ideal but I don't think it's worth the headache of pissing about with a ridiculously slow and difficult to use camera system provided by a disability support grant. I'm not sure what the solution is for my particular problems but I resonate the sentiments of the article; if you're disabled at university, you're going to have a hard time no matter what support they try to offer.

Thought I'd comment before the typical anti-Chinese-Engineering brigade shows up.

In my opinion, Chinese engineering is a wonder to behold in an era of modern western bureaucracy killing amazing projects. I realise Chinese politics are so far the other way they can be just as bad in different ways, but if China had the same level of bureaucracy as the west their insane Beijing-Shanghai high speed rail link would have never happened. In the process of creating this, they built 3 of the top 5 longest bridges in the world.

China have a lot of wealth, a lot of manpower, a lot of ambition. Sure, there is a high cost, but there was a cost to the pyramids, the great wall, skyscrapers in any top tier city, castles around the world and so on.

I'm not trying to glorify the obvious human rights abuses which lead to such amazing monuments of modern engineering but I find it difficult not to be enthralled by the wonderful creations of China of late and look forward to how they compete with a new space station.

Hate to be the pessimist but surely this is easily abusable? From the way you described the process of sending money from a wallet to another, there is likely some way of using a botnet or something of the sort to run through your site, create a wallet, send to a central wallet, repeat thousands of times?

I had a small video on my channel a while ago which originally procured a few thousand hits but when someone made a much more popular video response (made popular due to virality through reddit/digg) my viewings for that video shot up due to, as you described, "reverse click-through".

This seems pretty cool but is an absolute nightmare for people like myself who require Ctrl + Scroll zoom all the time for accessibility.

Glad to hear they're finally coming over here!

Somewhat unrelated but:

https://stripe.com/jobs#eu_developer_evangelist

This is my absolute dream job description, unfortunately as a CS undegrad I think I'd find myself somewhat under qualified for it.