skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I'll add that my own experience of licensing (my own) IP from a top-25 university TTO has been interesting

In my experience, there's a lot of variance between universities, and even between tech transfer officers within a given university. Another complication: at Harvard/MIT, where professors may have cross-institutional appointments, you need to nail down exactly who you'll be dealing with (for example, the Broad has their own TTO: https://www.broadinstitute.org/osap). There are also other issues, such as IIAs & CRADAs.

> What were your thoughts on the whole "cult of the molecule" thing from the interview?

As you said, it fails to take into account existing attempts to form partnerships by biotech VCs:

- http://lifescivc.com/2014/04/pushing-forward-with-collaborat...

- http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/blog/techflash/2014/01/a-...

This is one of those situations where presumption of stupidity (http://www.aaronkharris.com/presumption-of-stupitidy) can be very tempting, given the magnitude of the problems that remain unsolved in the biosciences. It can also take quite a bit of digging to find this info - it's not splashed all over the front page of TechCrunch, like the latest batch of YC startups are.
Tim Eyman’s 1366 Can Fix Washington State’s Regressive Tax System
Guidelines on writing Puppet modules for Windows
I enjoyed delivery driving while at university. If it suits your personality, and you enjoy listening to music, it's really not a bad part-time job at all. You get really good at priority balancing too!
https://luciding.com - very simple, but promising technology. The team seems to be smart.
Java Remote Code Vulerabilty in Most Major App Servers
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10489499
It is actually fascinating how convinced you are that your worldview must be the prevailing one. Yes, you accept that it is possible for the "specific people" to have different preferences, but no way that these can be anything else but individual quirks of the few, and not embedded in a culture, despite you not knowing anything about the culture in question.

Really, you exhausted all my arguments.
Mattermark
It's possible you saw a different company's web site--Ginkgo Bioworks is a synthetic biology company:
http://ginkgobioworks.com/
The article itself is typical TC: a credulous PR puff-piece, not journalism of any kind. The best way to prove that something works is a demo. This story is about documents that could as well be science fiction, not a live demonstration of working devices. And the specifications they have published don't do much to allay the safety concerns that have been raised based on patent filings; if anything, they confirm them. The only really new piece of data here is that the frequency is much lower than previously speculated, which will reduce attenuation at the cost of being well within domestic animals' hearing ranges.

All UBeam has to do to put a stop to accusations of fraud is have someone independent demo and use the device in public. If it exists. It's that simple.
If you are the victim of a crypto locker, you don't really have a choice. In fact it is true of any hostage situation. Parents of a kidnapped kid only have one solution. It is the authorities role to ensure that the hostage takers end up in a jail or a coffin, otherwise impunity will fuel criminal behavior.
I very much doubt that. Cooking is a part of every culture. It's more than just being about a healthy meal. For many people it defines who you are. The on-demand technophiles are not representative of the majority.
The Impact of Diversity on Everything
A Tesla uses around 300Wh per mile.

Coal power emits about two pounds of CO2 per kWh according to this page: http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=74&t=11

2lbs/kWh * 0.3kWh/mile = 0.6lbs of CO2 per mile. However, that's before transmission losses and inefficiency in the charger and battery. Transmission is about 94% efficient (from http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=105&t=3), charging is about 92% efficient, and the battery is about 90% efficient. That's about 78% efficiency in total, so divide that 0.6lbs by 0.78 to get 0.77lbs of CO2 per mile.

Burning gallon of gasoline emits about 20 pounds of CO2. Dividing by 0.77lbs of CO2 per mile gives us an equivalent of 26MPG, approximately.

Not spectacular, but not bad. The Model S is a big and powerful car, and similar gas cars have similar or worse efficiency. You'd be better off driving a Prius in this contrived situation, but then the "no real-world grid is 100% coal" thing comes in. For example, my local grid is about one-third coal, one-third natural gas, one-third nuclear. That cuts CO2 in about half compared to 100% coal, so now it's more like 52MPG. And coal's share is constantly sliding downwards, so over the lifetime of the car that number will improve.

I don't know as much about other emissions, but I'm confident the coal version will easily be better there. Big power plants are easier to run cleanly (they're easier to monitor, they don't care about weight nor much about space, and there's a single stationary point to install scrubbers, filters, and whatever else) and they tend to be far away from people.

Edit: I forgot to mention losses in the system from before the act of combustion. For a proper accounting, you need to account for emissions for the whole chain, from getting the stuff out of the ground to moving the car. Coal is much more efficient at getting out of the ground and into the combustion chamber, since it's already in burnable form, and then gets shipped in huge bulk by freight train. Efficiency losses there are single-digit percentages. Gasoline needs to be refined which alone takes something like 15% of the energy in the gasoline, plus transportation involves lots of small quantities being trucked all over the place. Total losses are about 20%.

I also want to say that I'm not really defending coal here, and I'd be quite happy if we could just stop burning it entirely. But the reality is that it's there, and it sucks, but even sucking as much as it does, it's still better than burning gas in hundreds of millions of little motors.
Trouble is, it doesn't prove anything, or even come close to proving anything.
The "uBeam FAQ" document, which is referenced multiple times to show the "cynicism" of the doubters, raises many issues which are not dismissed by this article. http://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/the-ubeam-faq/
I don't think that reporters should feel that they are responsible for the companies they write about having a good PR day.
Agreed, he seems highly critical of it based more on slippery slope fears than actual evidence of mistreatment or unethical behavior.
Exactly. "Dystopian"? Hyperbole much? This person is just ordering delivery, leaving a nice tip and then making a huge assumption about the lives of the cooks and delivery people. It's not like the restaurants have child labor camps making you dim sum for Christ's sake.
I thought his point was that Sprig promotes a more "megacorp" future where if you enjoy cooking and want to do it for a living you must work for Sprig or a similar megacorp as an employee, with little agency in your cooking or career.

On the other hand, he thinks Josephine's model promotes a future where telecommunications helps connect people who are more akin to small-business owners than employees with customers. These people then have more agency in their cooking (in addition to the human connection with customers).

I personally think that eventually AIs will be able to master cooking as well so we won't have human cooks involved at all except as a fashion statement.
why post a footnoted page with a link to the link rather than the direct link itself, e.g.
http://jvns.ca/blog/2013/12/30/questions-im-asking-in-interv...
?
Agreed: with several years and tens of millions in investments, if it was possible, they would have some kind of demo.
What uBeam needs is not "technical details", it's a credible witness reporting that they saw a working prototype. I am confident that will not materialize.
UsenetDHT: A Low-Overhead Design for Usenet
I'd venture to guess that it's illegal in most cities in the US.

Legal codes requiring certain minimum standards exist for good reasons. Home-scale kitchens are impossible to scale to commercial levels of quality and service without cutting corners that can make food dangerous.
There are popular "mirror" sites for apks, I wouldn't expect most users of them to be able to debug a wrong arch package download. Ideally the people taking the apks to mirror wouldn't pull thin apks, but sigh
There's another option in between Sprig and Josephine that's both a bit slower and far more "human" in the way the author wants.

Doordash brings you food from local restaurants (the same ones you eat at when you go out with your friends). It costs a little more than sprig, and it takes a couple more minutes.

But the food is individualized and made to order. It's familiar, made by the human beings you can go talk to the next time you're in there during a night out.

In short, it's the perfect in-between. And given the tone of the article, not all that surprising the author totally ignored it.
It's not that simple at all - for example the recent finding that even using your own mailservers, half your mail would be going through google. As networking increases, data is becoming little more compartmentalised than the air we breathe - and we reasonably require pollution safeguards which everyone needs to adhere to
Manage rsyslog with Puppet
You're right that it's a huge mess. As you point out, it's only larger companies who have the resources to make a complete and ongoing attempt to comply with every little rule. Therefore a market has been created for tools to let small businesses carry on doing what they were previously doing quite happily anyway. Perhaps the most damning indictment of all is that this market will probably be served by... the same kinds of large multinationals that were rearranging their accounts to reduce their tax burdens in the first place, and that will now also be able to cream off a significant margin from many small businesses' transactions as well.

Incidentally, you missed one of my favourite points that the authorities still seem to have overlooked: they apparently continue to assume that those small businesses who do trade on-line are all selling something via some marketplace site, which can therefore take on much of the burden of compliance, record-keeping, and the like. I guess we'd all better start shorting Stripe, GoCardless, and friends, because presumably according to the EU they have no small business customers. ::facepalm::
Do they have any third party customer reviews? Their video claims 80% success on the first try, but since it isn't sold on eBay or Amazon I can't find any trustworthy reviews.
No it's not. Two words, Em drive. Seriously, we are infants in our scientific understanding of the universe and physics. You speak as if we have a clue. If we had proven unified theory of everything, then your argument wouldn't be nearly as ignorant. But we don't. We don't even know what accounts for the majority of the universe. To assume we already have the answers is literally stupid.
But are they just cogs in a machine? The author betrays his own thoughts on the subject by discussing it that way. I order delivery all the time and have never though of the cooks and delivery people as "cogs in a machine." They're people with jobs, with their own complex lives. It's not my responsibility to worry if the delivery boy who's a Sophomore is having trouble doing his homework because he's working part time for Sprig. I tip well and always smile and don't feel guilty that it's convenient.
I would try digg reader. Adina.com is an interesting entry.
If at any point a CryptoLocker locked a person files up, and they didn't give up the key and it got out, no-one will ever pay them again. It's in their best interest to actually unlock the files.
This is where it gets tricky. They said they had a working demo (and this is corroborated by a number of investors) on which proper DD was performed prior to investing. I'm really not sure what to make of this. On the one hand it has me very skeptical on the other hand the number of reputations that will be tarnished forever if this turns out to be vapourware is substantial. You'd hope that those people putting their money and reputations on the line really did do their homework, uBeam would not deserve to get out of the gate let alone raise capital like that if their prototype never worked in the first place, it's not that easy to rig a demo for a savvy tech DD team (though I can assure you it has been tried).

What bugs me is that uBeam is on the defensive all the time they should just show their tech or be very quiet. No need to tell the world it works if you can't show it, who is the intended audience of all this 'good news'? Or do they have a bunch of unruly investors to keep quiet who are getting antsy and are starting to pick up on the skepticism? That might actually explain all this attention diversion, attention that might be better used elsewhere (assuming this thing can work at all).
> > If uBeam can deliver that amount of power to a phone with
reasonable efficiency, reception, and electronic management, then their system does not violate the laws of physics.

> While he can’t vouch that the technology does work, he concludes that given the specs, it’s not infeasible. It will just be very tough to execute.

No, he concluded that he cannot rule out that it's feasible, not that it is feasible and is now just a matter of time. Works if you could just do "X" applies to a whole lot of ultimately infeasible technologies.

edit: formatting
RTFA, it's actually quite interesting and comprehensible.
Are fire codes really enforced in this way? Obviously the closet wasn't built to sleep in. It's one thing to force building owners and landlords to build and maintain rooms a certain way, but using a law to force people not to sleep in a closet seems counterproductive.
Apple's not Hitler.

A check from Hitler wouldn't clear.
Well, IBM did buy them, so that was to be expected.
wow, nice find. I've never come across any of jwz's actual academic/LISP work in the wild. very cool.
That's almost straight from Douglas Adams. 'If it is virtually impossible that means it must be possible...' or something to that effect.
There are two Androids: the quirky but generally usable Android described in Google's documentation and occasionally found on Nexus devices, and then the Android actually found in the wild after manufacturers, carriers, 3rd party app stores, users and general neglect have their way with it.
Perhaps they read hn?
Let's give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they can somehow overcome the focusing of sound problem and get it to work... what remains are other issues with this technology.

One thing that is not discussed enough when talking about uBeam are health effects of high-energy ultrasound. The kinds of energies that uBeam is talking about can destroy or seriously damage human hearing. [1]

I don't even know if there is any research out there on what effects high-energy ultrasound can have on animals and pets (many of whom have sensitive hearing; much more sensitive than humans).

In any case, uBeam has a lot of problems ahead and I don't think they have raised nearly enough money to meet all these challenges.

[1]: http://www.hse.gov.uk/research/crr_pdf/2001/crr01343.pdf
No, profiting in any way off blackmailers looks really bad...

Reminds me of when Uber had that surge pricing scandal during the Sydney hostage crisis.
No, but they should at least gather basic facts.
>In 2007, FBI agents carried out so-called morning raids at the homes of people who worked or had worked at the NSA, and had tried to blow the whistle on a mass surveillance program they felt had gotten out of control. One man was dragged out of the shower in his home, a gun to his head, in front of his family. Another man opened his door and soon had the house full of black-clad agents in Kevlar vests searching his home until late at night. The home of Thomas Drake, a senior executive at the NSA, was searched, his passport was cancelled and he lived under the threat of 35 years imprisonment for four years, prosecuted under the Espionage Act. He lost his job, his pension and spent everything he owned on his defense lawyer. Today he works at an Apple store in Maryland and has been able to establish that the only person, who was investigated and prosecuted, after trying to talk to his superiors about the mass surveillance, was himself.

I remember the first time I read 1984, in middle school. To my young mind it was extremely frightening, and every time I would put it down I would have the same feeling one has when they wake up from a nightmare: relief that it was just a fiction. That it was unlikely to ever happen in real life. Snowden's revelations made me feel like that relief is gone forever.

Right after the revelations came out, I discussed it with a former journalist in Silicon Valley, who was also Jewish American. I could not believe it when he used the, "I'm-not-worried-because-I-have-nothing-to-hide" argument. I guess he never heard the reason why the Nazis were so successful in killing and imprisoning Amsterdam's Jewish population, at a rate that far exceeded other European countries.

The Dutch, you see, are meticulous record keepers. Even today you can find property records that date back to 1600s and earlier. And, at some point along the way, someone thought it would be a good idea to record people's religion, in addition to the more typical things like address and date of birth. Oh, they had been doing it long before Adolf Hitler conceived of his final solution. It must've seemed like a good idea at the time. They probably never thought those records would be used the way they were after the Germans took over the country....
"It is actually fascinating how convinced you are that your worldview must be the prevailing one."

Look, you have admitted that rich people (i.e., the people who actually have a choice) prefer country dwellings.

This was true in Ancient Rome. It was true in Victorian England. It was true in the Soviet Union. And it is true wherever it is that you live.

"Really, you exhausted all my arguments."

No, the facts on the ground have exhausted your arguments.
Nope. Same hucksters. Not worth visiting. Do you get a cut?
Some napkin math - they claim a device could get (at least) a 1.5W delivered.

They vary from 360W/m2 to 3kW/m2 (by the article). We could fit 83 galaxy notes 2 in one square meter (it is 0.012 m2).

360/83 = 4.3 watts that reach said device. 30% efficiency seems fine.

The problem is that the extra energy must heat something. And it will become worse with increasing of the power transmitted.
In fact backups is not enough. It has to be offline backups, which raises the bar quite a bit. Backing up to a network drive doesn't even help, and I am not aware of any wildly used "write once-only" network drive capabilities.
Pi is wrong
FBI Returns Seized Devices to EFF Client
1) Eyeballs = attention = what advertising is all about. Relevancy is a way to target to make best use of that attention but it's not required.

2) Why don't you actually read some of the BuzzFeed news: http://www.buzzfeed.com/news

They have writers from NYT and WSJ amongst others on their staff. Put aside your prejudice and actually see for yourself.

3) Wikipedia isn't a business, but their business arm Wikia makes all their money on advertising. StackExchange makes all their money on advertising (those job postings are ads and other banners on their site). However both companies are not in the content business because all their content is user generated. That's why they have no costs other than technical upkeep.

A real content business requires people to actually create that content so your examples aren't relevant. Sure we can replace everything with direct subscriptions but that doesn't scale and severely limits the access to and quantity of content available. Those are the facts in the industry, there's no denying that, no matter how much you hate ads.
Why couldn't they put it on Cloudflare?
I'm not sure how this is a 'world first'. Gene therapy has from time to time been used to treat childhood leukemias for a long time, e.g.:

http://www.uphs.upenn.edu/news/News_Releases/2012/12/tcell/
I suspect, sadly, this is why Gmail and sites like it will continue to win. Secure email always sounds like a good thing, but it's less important in practice than accessible email. If you have to make a choice between confidentiality, integrity, and availability, for day-to-day email, very few people will choose anything other than availability.

(The email deliverability problem doesn't help matters, of course.)
CISA Doesn’t Include Senator Whitehouse's Dangerous CFAA Amendment
Let's say that uBeam's claims are true. Is it still viable from a commercial standpoint?

Wireless phone charging cases? There are already battery charging cases which would likely be the same price and provide power everywhere.

IoT? Not with the line-of-sight restrictions.

Large power consumers such as TVs? As noted in the eevblog forum post, the amount of energy required would make it impossible to provide constant power over a large distance...and having the device at a small distance mostly defeats the point.

When uBeam did demos, they did it to prove that wireless power is possible in controlled situations.
I don't see anything new here on top of what the skeptics have postulated.

In particular the 145-155db number does not look 100% safe for me. This is not going to burn your skin but you might end up hearing it anyway, feeling uncomfortable or who knows what. Various opinions about the safe level for ultrasound are in the 100db-120db range so you are talking like 300x the intensity.

Looks like Theranos 2.0.
Emulate Inc, a biotech startup that designed organs-on-chips, a technology that could potentially stop animal testing.[1]

I also follow Beyond Meat. Google's Sergey Brin invested in them.[2] They are working on cruelty-free "cultured meat".

[1]http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/medical-technology...

[2]http://www.grubstreet.com/2015/06/silicon-valley-fake-meat-b...
> We don’t know. We don’t get to know. We’re just here to press the button.

I mean, I'm sure you could find out.
They put their customers in charge of the company? This gets weirder all the time. The problem is that they asked their customers in the first place. They should have simply communicated the fact that they would be under attack shortly and indicate that they would never ever pay a red cent.

That would give their customers time to batten the hatches and/or migrate off the system for the time being while sending a clear signal that they would not pay anyway.

This is a tough situation to be in but putting your customers in control of the company (and in a democratic way no less) is not the solution. What about those customers that decided (rightly imo) against paying?

Companies such as these should have an up-front item in their terms of service indicating that they would never pay a ransom, that way they would be clear to both their customers and their potential attackers.
> Because this "choice" restricts freedom of other people.

It restricts the freedom of your employees to sell/give your company's private information to other people, and the freedom of competitors to use them to obtain it or take it for themselves. If you come up with the same technology through legitimate means, then the fact that someone else holds it as a trade secret doesn't matter. It's not like patents; if someone gets there on their own effort, they're not encumbered by trade secret laws.

It's also important to note that trade secret protection laws do not generally cover reverse-engineering. Protection from that (if any) comes from copyright/patent law.

Asking people to honest does restrict their economic choices, but so does asking them to not rob banks.
> What is the practical scenario that this legislation aims to cover?

Newspapers want Google to give them money