jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
You're thinking about the invention process backwards.

Edison, according to legend, patented the light bulb. (He actually patented an improved filament, and the screw-in base.) Once the thing exists, it is easy to trace the process back to the origin, just as it is easy to trace from the leaf of a tree back to the trunk at ground level.

Edison did not patent the thousands of experimental filament failures that he tested before reaching a viable consumer product. His task was to climb the tree and find one particular leaf.

The PB & J sandwich seems simple. All you had to do was add two ingredients together!

But you also had to not add any of the other possible sandwich ingredients. No lettuce. No tomato. No mayonnaise. No mustard. No ketchup. No roast beef. No jalapeno slices. No pickles. No cole slaw. You also had to pick the right variety of bread. Pumpernickel doesn't work out quite as well. Sliced bagel favors different sorts of sandwiches. Cornbread doesn't work at all.

You can't just permute every possible combination of sandwich-able foods and expect the good combinations to be obvious. But once identified, they are obvious in retrospect, thanks to a quirk of human psychology. It wouldn't have been obvious that phonograph needles could be made from peanuts, or that light bulb filaments could be made from bamboo until after inventors had done it for the first time. So don't confuse simplicity with obviousness.

The problem with patenting a particular sandwich, or any other type of food recipe, is enforceability. Once the recipe is known, you have no way of knowing whether unlicensed cooks are making your dish.

The fact that Disney is using RFID bracelets, on the other hand, is immediately discoverable and verifiable by anyone who visits their parks. Furthermore, they have pockets deep enough to afford even unreasonable license terms. The problem was not even technical. It has always been human acceptance. Stick an RFID on a hospital-style plastic band, and no one wants to wear it. Embed it in an exclusive park souvenir, and people will even pay extra for the privilege of having one.

The bracelet is how you get the guest to carry the same RFID tag for their entire visit without losing it, breaking it, or shorting it out. Previously, Disney has used paper tickets, hand stamps, biometrics readers, and mobile applications to manage guests, and they still had problems with loopholes, fraud, and innocent accidents.

If someone were able to patent a PB&J sandwich, somewhere like a Disney theme park might be one of the few places on the planet where its licensing could be enforced profitably. They cannot hide what they do, as anyone present could read a menu and watch a sampling of trays exiting the serving line, then figure out the numbers on a napkin.

This is exactly what the patent system was made for; so the little guy could have an incentive to invent without being crushed by a copycat with more clout. So he doesn't have to be the only person to pitch it. He only has to be the first to offer patent licensing terms.
The amount of time people spend on this sort of thing, just like the feet wiki in the article, is just fascinating. I'm all for having odd hobbies, but this is just next level.
That’s like saying that in order for temperature to be a fixed figure which depends on pressure, which is what you need for condensation to be a thing, every molecule needs to be exactly as likely to collide with every other molecule. Therefore liquid/gas can’t be a binary state.

Phase transitions in large scale systems resulting from changes in the average behavior of individual elements are a real thing. An infection is an unstable dynamic system which tends to different states depending on whether the mean R is greater or less than one.
I like him for the storytelling. He reminds me of my primary school teacher, fond memories, who always turned any subject into personal anecdotes, gently opinionated, slightly inflated and imaginative. Rick's generation perhaps among the last who grew up on low bandwidth media and loads of storytelling all day long among everyone.

His music theory approach is useless. It's just a checklist of terms that fit into his particular grid that day. No one wrote any worthwhile pop or rock songs with theoretic emphasis, ever.
Iconv is your friend.

On that issue, infsp6 (the Spanish library for Inform6, akin to the English inform6lib one) still uses iso8859-15 and it's a pain in the ass to convert the encoding to and from utf8 if you don't use neither emacs, joe or vim to edit the source code (I use nvi).
The virus as well.

edit: just look at the numbers
What's your solution to kids that have young parents? Every child of people 50+ years old go back to school, and the others stay behind?
As someone that has finished college in the past 5 years I think this is solid advice.

I would add to this list:

* learn to cook for yourself. Not just frozen food. $50 on groceries can go a long way once you’ve figure out what you enjoy cooking and eating

* stay active. There should be a gym on campus. Use it, set some personal goals and track YOUR improvement, don’t compare yourself to others. Also, play a sport that you like (ex. soccer, basketball) it’s a good way to meet people outside your studies.

* keep yourself and your house clean. It will make for a distraction free environment and will help you stay organized.

* limit your alcohol intake. Don’t drink to excess or just because. It’s common for students to abuse alcohol and it can get in the way of your progress.

* set a bedtime. Develop good sleeping habits. Don’t stay up late watching tv. Put yourself to bed and let your body rest. Staying up late for assignments is also bad.

I guess overall I would say try to learn how to live in a way that helps you achieve your goals easier and sets up your day in the best way possible. Make good habits, be consistent and after a while it won’t be as effortful. But remind yourself what you are doing and why and refrain from backsliding.
Haven't seen anybody here criticize science... rather, they're upset about the deviation from science that modern academia represents.
That's a terrible analogy. CO2 is a totally fungible substance. If you add it on the left and subtract it on the right, all that matters is the final balance.

Your moral accounting is only useful for deciding who is more or less righteous.

The physical world doesn't give a damn for human morality, it only understands net changes in greenhouse gases.
What qualifies as plant-based? I always use peanut oil because I heard it has a high smoke point.
Yes. This can cause sinus issues.
Yes they cause a number of problems. I experience nasty sinus headaches after prolonged use in loud environments (where the speaker driver is having to match the high amplitude of external noise).
> Without wading in too far here, I want to point out that picking a slightly different "master race" is no better.

Except that there's nothing there to imply that we should ever do anything the Nazis did, even if you substitute one group for another, because racism is still stupid even if you can find a statistical correlation between some set of phenotypes and some arbitrarily defined racial group.

Remember "the differences within a race are larger than the differences between races"? Still true.

All it does is provide a possible explanation for aggregate statistical measurements. It tells you nothing about any individual of any race and it justifies no policy of taking race into account when evaluating merit.

Just because a thing correlates with another thing doesn't mean the first thing is the second thing. The real problem was that if you measure "race" instead of intelligence, and consequently did not hire a black person who was just as intelligent, that's not fair. It's racism. If you're measuring intelligence directly and not using race for anything at all, that's completely different. It doesn't discriminate against all of the black people who are intelligent, which was the original problem with using race.
> hardly ecological havens

Ecologically the harshest environments are also the most vulnerable to small changes. Plants and insects at the edges of survivability only need what we might consider a minor change to push them to extinction. Slow, low, small growth is often boring and ignored by us. Individual mountains often have unique ecologies and species because they are “islands”. And sometimes the harshest environments are the most biologically pristine because there are not many humans around (farming is probably our most ecologically destructive activity).

I don’t know anything particular about the Himalayas, but I am just asking you take care before jumping to conclusions.
> Tinnitus is always there, its permanent. But it just may be noticeable under certain conditions or circumstances.

I don't get this. Tinnitus is a ringing in my ears. When I don't notice it, it's not there.

Maybe you're saying that if it's being caused by some physical damage in the ear then that damage is still there. Sure, but it doesn't seem like that's always a component. From your link:

> Although we hear tinnitus in our ears, its source is really in the networks of brain cells (what scientists call neural circuits) that make sense of the sounds our ears hear. A way to think about tinnitus is that it often begins in the ear, but it continues in the brain.

Personally, I develop tinnitus any time I take a vacation, or if I'm consistent with meditation practice. But when my brain is instead constantly active, it's totally absent.
and why not ?
Why do you insist everything should be encrypted ?
So is sugar...
> That's an interesting point to bring up. Maybe if you raise hell to the members of Parliament, they'll act to ban that stuff too?

Of course they won't, wide dissemination of that stuff suits them just fine. Think of it like a partnership.
"Those who say that any well-formed, non-dup question of interest should be let in and those who think it's a stop of last-resort after checking all conceivable documentation and scouring the internet."

This is wrong in multiple dimensions and [edit: the next sentence which i didn't quote is] flamebait.

One camp believes in following these guidelines to a fault. The other camp thinks some of the rules are counterproductive to SO's principles.

Source: http://stackoverflow.com/help, the guidelines are clearly outlined.
Still baffling, that violence and murder you see on TV almost non-stop is not considered a big problem. Probably because it is not.
Everyone is going to deal with sex. Only a few will have to deal with murder. Go figure.
As a counterpoint to most of the comments, let me just say: this is fantastic.

(Nothing wrong with constructive criticism, which most comments are, but it's also nice to just say thanks as well.)
fourth solution would be naming the function with the iterator (as in my example below) and calling indexOf(iterator) when the function is invoked
The consequences of failing to secure my hardware wallet are that I lose all my money.

The consequences of failing to secure a merchant system are that I have to get a new credit card and maybe click the "dispute" button on my bank website a couple times.
> 2. Here you go, the data on kefka. Thanks for asking.

is this really happening? can you give some evidence that google is willy nilly giving private data away like that?
Wow I had a similar experience at university. I only joined Facebook because my course had a Facebook group where we all communicated. Now this same hook exists in WhatsApp. It’s pretty crazy
In Germany I get paid around 3.500 Euro brutto per Month for pursuing my PhD at my university. Same conditions as the parent post: expected duration 5 years, 20% work time dedicated to university,...

That's around ~44.000 Euros per year (including perks).

I interviewed in 4 companies before deciding to go for the PhD (all engineering jobs). The salaries varied from 45.000 to 55.000 Euros brutto per year, with one offer at 60.000 Euros.

Friends working in industry make around 50.000 Euros which matches with my experience. Making a bit less for working in _your_ PhD is a really good deal here. If you find the right PhD for you it can be very gratifying (plus you are working for yourself). OTOH my friends in industry work way less hours than I do, so if I had a family I would probably had never gone the PhD way.
yes – HN limits the length of the title
Not Fairy tales. There is a least two major schools with a throughput of 1000 students / year each that do it this way in Paris : Epitech.net (7000$/year) and 42.fr (no fees).
rgrinberg is right. If you want a good web framework built on cohttp that is NOT as challenging as ocsigen/eliom then I'd definitely point you to opium.

NOT using cohttp/lwt/core/batteries fills a niche on its own - i.e. owebl is very lightweight.

There is also currently no major reason (read: production users or interest) for me to stop using owebl as an educational tool to grok HTTP, concurrent/distributed computing, etc.
I'm 25 and I have no understanding of human, sexuality, rich people, old people etc... How do I catch up?
Is there much research being done on alternate polymers or binders which can be produced to be used as an alternative on a large scale to sand? I remember reading about mushrooms/fungi being grown for use in a cement-like material.

Its troubling to see these issues across every resource we have and need in the world. Off the coast of florida here we have sandmines dredging in the gulfstream. They look like wider versions of oil rigs.
Most interesting comment to that article:

Thankfully all DMCA requests are filed under penalty of
perjury. If he claims that he owns the copyright to
material he doesn’t own, he has now opened himself up
to civil litigation.

Really. Seems so:
http://www.aaronkellylaw.com/Internet-Law-and-Intellectual-P...
A lot of words that can be boiled down to this: Cloud service providers are going to be forced to compete on operational excellence, uptime, and SLAs, not on nifty features, because no one wants to be stuck with an app that's locked into a single cloud services provider post AWS meltdown.

That said, some companies, by competently designing their AWS-hosted systems managed to stay up, so the above conclusion isn't necessarily warranted.
I consider this a positive.
This is Arash from Dropbox. We removed the ability to share the project source code because it enables communications with our servers in a manner that is a violation of our Terms of Service. By our TOS, we reserve the right to terminate the account of users in this case.
However, we chose to remove access to the file instead of terminating the account of the user.

We recently built a tool that allows us to ban links across the sytem (as of a few weeks ago) and I wasn't aware that a DMCA takedown email would be auto-generated and sent. This was a tool built for our support team and I'd never personally used it. That said, we feel strongly that the code is a violation of our TOS and don't believe the removal of the content from our site is censorship.

I'd also like to clarify that nobody's accounts were threatened: in every case my phrasing was as follows: 'I hope you can understand our position and can agree to remove the Dropship code'.
Why not just use a PDF?
The very fact that All Things Digital reposted this press release led to the story surfacing on the HN front page sooner than it might have otherwise.

Now, aside from the pure information brokering role, they aren't adding much in this case. The HN guidelines are right to suggest a submitter post the original source if at all possible.
To say it all, in the past few years a number of alternative have emerged. I never bothered looking into it because I am so happy with Dropbox anyway but I bet I would find another to be happy with.

This said: I stand with dropbox on this issue. Abusing their service to fake a p2p is definitely not the way to go and not that clever hack if you ask me.
If it's self reported (which seems to be the case from the article, I could imagine that people reporting under 11 hours might be using different criteria for what they really consider sedentary activity compared to those that report over 23 hours a week. I fall closer to the 11 hours a week (standing desk, bike to work, bar height dining table at home) but agree that even with all of that it'd be rare that I'd be sitting for less than 1.5 hours a day (especially factoring in weekends).
I don't think it was a symptom of routing synchronization specifically, but I'd be curious to know if it was a case of unexpected and undesired synchronization. (E.G. An independent and random cluster of blocks suddenly updated; the network was saturated; it pulled in more updates; ...)

And yes, the paper talked about randomization. It also pointed out the magnitude of randomization required was larger than expected.
This looks so great: I've been looking for a martial art to supplement my daily workout and give me some strength and agility - and some fun - this seems a lot more exciting than the Krav Maga classes I was looking at. Anyone know if there's a good place in the UK to do this?
Since people are sharing their setup, I have to use big fonts and Zoom because of bad eye. So all my Windows have to be maximized to fit the content. So I have 7 Virtual desktops and I have apps organized on this 7 VD.

1 Thunderbird and Firefox(I mostly use it for developement, I prefer
Ff dev tools, look to me easy to read)

2 File Manager and Kate (a plain text editor, I mostly use it to write temp notes or paste temp stuff there)

3 Slack and Skype

4 Vivaldi(a web browser I setup with JS off by default , I use it to read stuff or listen to things not work), Konsole (a terminal app with tabs)

5 Intellij

6 Play on Linux, Steam, video games that I start to use in my free time

7 is mostly empty

I quickly switch with keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+F1,F2,F3... but I used KDE global shortcuts to remap the Alt button into Ctrl, Meta (Win) into Alt, I remap all my shortcuts to use Ctrl instead of Alt , or Ctrl+Shift . My key shortcuts are designed to be used with only left hand , especially because most of the time I have the Desktop Zoomed in so I have Zoom follows mouse and I might keep my hand of the mouse a lot more then a regular user.

So global shortcuts in KDE is a 10 of 10 for me.
I bet you that if the car has better performance and reliability, people won't give a rat's ass how pretty the car looks.
I think people would really buy something along that line. I mean if they can buy a application to make fart noises[1], they why not this?

[1]http://ifartmobile.com/
I think it would depend on where you're working. If you're at a startup, you must be a generalist because there is a need to do as much as possible with the least amount of resources. A generalist who can perform 3 functions reasonably well is therefor much better for a startup than 3 people who perform these functions to perfection (at least in most cases). In a large corporation, there is often an inherent degree of specialization (whether or not it's efficient).
The most fantastical aspects of the story seem to be coming from (the imagination of) the interviewed thief/con man, without further corroboration. The author seems quite pleased to have a movie scenario thrown in his lap, and doesn't place any question marks. Most other articles on the net relating to this person seem to take this article as their source.

It's been a long time since I read this story, but there is a lot in there which has the feeling of being a tall tale. Like parachuting onto a roof in the dead of night, when he may just as well have bought a ticket and hidden behind a curtain somewhere in those 1000 rooms.
The Erlang thing didn't get replaced, it got removed.

YouTube itself is an interesting project from the inside, though perhaps not that much different from any multi-featured website. Everyone has their own favorite features, their own favorite parts of the site, which they think will become "the next big thing", despite having a few orders of magnitude to go in order to reach the top 5 (which is 99.9% of the traffic).

The chat/individual playlist thing was a cute feature, but it had maybe a few hundred concurrent users at any one time. If you consider that the recent Lonely Island video pulled about 3 million views in a 24 hour period, and was less than 1/333rd of YouTube's video views (using the publicly released 1 billion views/day number), you come to the realization that any code that isn't being used heavily, is effectively an unused feature that offers you nothing, and even worse, can't earn the site any money in ad revenue.

Heck, I saw micro-communities as "the next big thing" on YouTube, and saw how poorly the original YouTube Groups fulfilled that. I envisioned small-medium sized forums where people would post, rate, and watch videos. I pushed and pushed and pushed until I got a little under a year to work on it, releasing Groups 2.0 in August/September of 2009. I watched how it was being used, got rid of some superfluous features, and pushed out an optional new version for people to use, which became the default on my birthday as my parting gift. Turns out that some code that I was relying on working from another part of the site had broken by another engineer, so they manually made it the default and only version a week or two after I left.

Sadly, YouTube Groups is no more, having been turned down on December 1, 2010, code deleted a couple weeks later. A friend and former coworker who had maintained Groups after I left had pointed me off to a WWE fan group with over 100k video posts and a few hundred thousand members (which would be a huge success anywhere else). Since no one was really willing to truly maintain and improve it (I can't blame them, there were some nasty hacks in there), and it wasn't driving as much traffic as even one Lonely Island video, they tossed it. It probably didn't help that I'd ruffled some feathers with the ways I'd pushed for Groups; I'm surprised it lasted even that long. Ah well, many lessons learned, many good memories.
It's not fair to blame the small Austin startup community on UT. Austin doesn't have angel investors and VCs tripping over themselves looking to fund the next Twitter killer in the same way that the bay area does. It makes for a smaller startup community, but also one that is more focused on building real products.

Full disclosure: I graduated from UTEE and have worked at some really great small companies in Austin.
Call it shit, but in my opinion iTunes is what made the iPod the hit that it is today.

You have to think back to the MP3 player market back in 2001 to see what a pile of shit the entire world was. Every player, from MpMAN to Rio, was saddled with a last-minute-afterthought of a PC interface for loading songs. iTunes might not have been that much better, but it worked seamlessly with the iPod.
If you use an exchange/"bank" like Coinbase, then yeah. What do you mean with online wallet? It's either only you have the keys, or you don't/someone else also does.