skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I get how we all intuitively want the PTO to not issue "stupid patents" but is there an objective, mechanical way to determine what is stupid?

There's a very simple, constant-time, objective, mechanical algorithm to determine whether to grant a patent: "return false". That would work better than the current algorithm, which closely approximates "return true".

At the very least, it should take no less effort or inventiveness to get a patent granted than to get an academic paper published in a reputable journal or conference. But it seems highly unlikely that respected academics will jump at the chance to work in patent examiner's offices the way they do to program committees.

> Do we care more about false positives (as in this case) or false negatives (a hypothetical alternative universe where too few, rather than too many, patents are awarded).

False positives. A denied patent is highly unlikely to suppress a good idea; good ideas (and a fair many bad ones with good execution) will succeed whether granted an artificial monopoly or not. But a granted patent can litigate good ideas to death.

> how are individual supposed to profit from their inventiveness when a larger entity could trivially copy the idea

Many wildly successful companies are built on technologies that could easily be copied, and yet aren't. The sole legitimate measure of the patent system is "how many useful inventions do we have that wouldn't have been invented without patents?". How many ideas (outside of the drug industry, which could potentially use some other solution) wouldn't have been created if not for patents?

Apart from that, why do you believe an inventor should be able to invent once and profit for 20 years off the work of others, without continuing to invent and promote further good ideas? Keep inventing new ideas faster than they can be copied, so that the copy is always last year's technology. Make your customers so happy that they'd never want to consider a competitor. Do any number of things that add value to the world rather than subtracting it.

> Are software inventors just supposed to give away their inventions as open source

Preferably, but copyright still exists for those who want to release proprietary software. Copyright stops others from directly copying code. Patents stop others from creating new software, even if not copied from the patent holder. The former seems far more defensible than the latter.
>Putting aside whether Microsoft’s design was actually new and not obvious in 2006 (when Microsoft filed its application), whether Microsoft needed the patent incentive in order to come up with this design

Abrupt shift from legal argument to meta-legal argument. Seems stylistically wrong.
I don't consider the historical civil rights movement and the black lives matter movement to be deeply linked, they had different goals, and different means of accomplishing those goals
Motörhead frontman Lemmy Kilmister dead at 70
From the gif it can auto-completes commands as well as resource name.
This suit is probably in retaliation for an earlier Corel suit against Microsoft this summer. http://www.fosspatents.com/2015/07/corel-software-sues-micro....

This one reason companies keep a war-chest of patents, so they can fight back when targeted with a dying company's portfolio.
> Watch any React tutorial and the first thing they have you do is set up a Webpack config that gives you a live-reloading build system with ES2015.

To be honest, I prefer learning by reading specs/documentation, tinkering and Google-ing specific bits, not by watching tutorials, so I did not know this. That's not ideal conceptually, but it does mean one less tool in the pipeline, which is not a bad thing for beginners.

> it would be nice for web development to grow out of its "oooh shiny" phase.

Absolutely. Just as long as it doesn't swing to the other extreme, like PHP does, where 12-year-old and deprecated techniques are still entrenched at the top of Google... :)
It hasn't happened.
The Perl Jam 2: The Camel Strikes Back [32c3]
1000s of games have shipped with gc. Every Unreal and Unity game uses gc. Every XNA game used gc. Many of the largest most popular AAA games use gc. So yes we can ask professional game devs if they want a gc. Most will say "yes". Like any tool you know when to use them and when not to
> UI sliders were certainly not novel in 2006.

The patents at issue are design patents, not utility patents (what we know of as inventions).

Sliders as functional UI devices weren't novel, but the particular design at issue was unique to Microsoft when they filed for their design patent.
It's not key-logging, there's a couple of text input areas that have added in search functionality... Ubuntu and Apple added these features a while ago, and it's a pretty big feature in Android (at least with google's toolbar, and ok google).

That said, I disabled it in both areas as I found it incredibly annoying... As for forced updates and some of the other privacy issues, I do give them a bit of a pass on that because I'd rather not have to deal with 3+ year old browsers ever again... once IE9-11 die, I'm hoping that's it... the same goes for the devs at MS, and elsewhere.
Show HN: Time in Loo – Calculate your salary in toilet time
I enjoyed that. I live in the mountains of Central Arizona and am basically addicted to hiking. On hikes I keep an eye out for lichen growths on the side of large rocks, usually in the shade. Really beautiful and very diverse in colors and textures.
Your link appears to be missing a hyphen--the post is available at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2006/11/21/licensing...
Do you believe the litigation to be egregious? The Corel tools go so far as to provide "Microsoft Excel Mode", "Microsoft Word Mode", etc... all which are designed to allow Corel to profit off of a user interface designed by Microsoft. In the case of the slider, it looks exactly the same and is used in the exact same place, in the exact same way, in a competing product.
Two words:

- Neuromorphic.

- Bye bye Xilinx.
> At some point companies are just going to stop doing business in the United States

The companies being sued tend to be "copycat companies" who take someone else's essential design and sell a shoddy replica of it, maybe with a few superfluous features added on. I won't shed a tear if they get out of town.
Yeah - you're definitely remembering wrong or you have your countries mixed up.

Croatia was actually the only (border-) EU country that allowed passage to all refugees (I'm guessing thats what you're referring to) and there was definitely no anti-muslim sentiment or any sort of call to ban all muslims.

Don't think anybody ever thought about anything like that at all in Croatia - people still remember their own armed conflict a decade or so ago.

You probably mean the countries from the Visegrad group (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) - where some parts of the government (in especially Slovakia) were proposing to only accept Catholic refugees (which is also not the same as saying they'd ban all muslims).
Since this appears to just be a wrapper around the existing aws cli, I believe the command you are looking for is `s3 cp <local directory or file> s3://<full s3 bucket url> --recursive`. Just an educated guess taken from the CLI docs: https://aws.amazon.com/cli
This seems like an entirely reasonable design patent to me. There are lots of ways of drawing such a slider; the patent does not cover any function, merely the ornamental design.

Now, the idea that this should entitle Microsoft to all of Corel's profits for the entire product is clearly absurd; as the article points out, that's the current legal precedent but is being appealed. Lawyers are hardly going to not take advantage of precedents which favour them; nor would it even be good if they did -- the fastest way to overturn bad law is to apply it strictly and make obvious its failings.
I was thinking this originally, but as I read it, it seems the referenced paper is much more narrowly focused. The idea is that the studies involved are easier to do on late-stage patients because mortality is the benchmark and people who are in an advanced stage die sooner. You find out whether it decreases mortality much quicker when the patients are closer to the end. Decreased testing time increases the time when the patent is both active and FDA approved (i.e. years they can make money on it).

The usual reasoning behind "there's no money in a cure" is that you can squeeze a lot more money out by treating patients for years than by selling them a cure once. That's still a reasonable cynicism, but it's not what this paper was looking into.

Edit: another way of thinking about it is that if a company is maximally evil (economically rational), they would want to research early-stage cancer treatments because that would allow them to milk the patient much longer. Even with this incentive, they still don't do it, they research treatments that are faster to verify efficacy for.
Stretching the analogy to the point of breaking is actually a very useful bit of rhetoric when one side insists on using an analogy.

That is, when the copyright industry says "sharing these files is hurting us, we must make it illegal to make copies" (because that is what they lobby for, anti-DRM circumvention and the like), showing that making copies -is not what hurts your business model- is a worthwhile goal, in both courts of law and courts of public opinion.

The initial analogy is not a valid argument; taking it to the breaking point and by doing so showing that the analogy is too simplistic to be accurate, is a valid response.
Ah well that is useful. Maybe I'll give it a spin.
I think revelation was specifically referring to the word "arbitrary" in your post. That makes it sound like FPGAs can speed up any given algorithm, which is obviously not the case.
Keeping aside the stupidity of the patent, it does seems like Coral made their Wordperfect look a lot similar to Microsoft Word.[1][2]

[1] http://www.wordperfect.com/static/img/content/products/wp_ho...

[2] http://www.wordperfect.com/us/product/corel-office-software/
Honestly, I'd just assume 90-95% of patents are outright rejected if they're too similar to existing concepts. Make the application fees cover real research, and leave it at that. Patents no longer protect the little guy, and they've actually been shown to be more harmful to the public lately (the opposite of the intended effect).

Design and process patents are ridiculous... most software patents are absurd. I work in software, and tbh, there's almost nothing I've seen in the past 20 years that doesn't specifically tie to a physical device in software that is deserving of patent protection, and even then not for 20 years.
My words are not enough to express how grateful I am as a Ruby user to you and your work! Amazing results! Hats off and may you have a bright career.

What I wanted to ask is, excluding Rails and big projects which understandably aren't the target yet, is 9.0.4.0 already theoretically able to achieve the said "up to an an order of magnitude" speed increase?

Again, thanks! This will be probably contemplated among the most important milestones ever in the Ruby language history!
This is cool and I've already got a couple of ideas that steal from it. I have one question though. Why would an obviously technically capable person have photos displayed in the wrong orientation on the web page?
>Not OP, but "capitalism" in China isn't like it is in the west. The government literally runs everything, and can demand literally anything they want from companies.

Well, in China the government controls the companies, in the west the companies control the government. Sort of the same end result, with the two being in bed with each other.

>Is it really so hard to believe? Especially when the indirect evidence and logic is so overwhelming?

Well, haven't seen anything "overwhelming" in the list. E.g. the Chinese government had Huawei and ZTE add backdoors to their stuff. But we know that Cisco has done the same in the west -- and the government asked other companies to do the same thing, pressuring Apple etc. So isn't "overwhelming" a kind of a double standard?
"No, not like that. Why are you doing that? What on earth is causing that? What can I do to change it? I'll throw away the ones that don't work - oh, there are none left. Has it stopped working? Why is it eating 100% CPU and not spitting out any results?"

One of the earliest games projects I worked on with learning AI scrapped the learning AI because it had a habit of sometimes, but rarely, causing the characters to run into the corner of a room and stay there until shot. Nobody had the slightest clue how to 'debug' the neural network to solve the intermittent issue.

It's all fun and games when things are going well. But like Jurassic Park, when it comes to paying customers, eventually there will be running, and screaming.
> I'd sooner believe that something's wrong with the closing of the bug report than something's wrong with my understanding of how this is still a bug.

Your credentials and ability in the field have not been established despite enquiries by many folks in this sub-thread. At the moment, I'm far more likely to believe that Mr. Ormandy has a far better understanding of the security issues with the AVG Chrome extension and their implications than you do.

> Perhaps if he'd said "this XSS is not an issue" without explanation, I'd be happy...

He marked the bug as Resolved-Fixed and removed the disclosure embargo. I don't know what more you want.

> Note that nobody yet has given me any explanation of how it might not be a bug...

tptacek and many others gave you a couple of really coherent replies in the subthread attached to your initial comment. None of them provide you with the answer you're looking for, but -frankly- you haven't demonstrated that you understand why it's reasonable the embargo on a security bug for a Chrome extension that AVG has made publicly available in the Chrome Webstore and that its security researcher (and -I suppose- AVG) feels fixes his reported problem was removed. :)

Maybe it'd help to know that the extension is currently not available pending an investigation into whether or not it violates any Webstore policies.
It's indeed a stupid patent. Such thing shouldn't be patentable because it's trivial.
I'm not talking about that.

Ahem, from the terms and services:

> When you acquire, install and use the Program software and services, Microsoft collects information about your use of the software and services as well as about the devices and networks on which they operate. Examples of data we may collect include your name, email address, preferences and interests; location, browsing, search and file history; phone call and SMS data; device configuration and sensor data; voice, text and writing input; and application usage. For example, when you:

> when you input text, handwrite notes, or ink comments, we may collect samples of your input to improve these input features, (e.g., to help improve the accuracy of autocomplete and spellcheck).

Are you ok with your handwritten notes and input text living on Microsoft's servers so they can improve their spellcheck?
These phrases came directly from the context of your arguments, so they are not out of context.

You first point proves what I'm saying. Your second point is doubtful, because large companies are the ones that spend the most time in useless interviewing. The training you're eluding to is tool training, which is essential in a place like Google where the programer has to spend most of his time working on closed technology.

Also, saying that companies filter for experience is not correct. Interviews at most tech companies (especially the large ones) is done to eliminate large numbers of people based on the solution of narrow-minded programming questions. These questions rarely correlate with experience, in fact most people that are just out of college can do so well or better in these questions than an experienced engineer.
http://harpers.org/archive/2015/09/the-neoliberal-arts/
Double Fold, by Nicholson Baker, is a remarkable discussion of what's lost when libraries destroy bound newspapers when they are "replaced" by microfilm.

https://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/15/reviews/010415.15gate...
Sure, the key is not what individuals do, but statistics.

After all affluent kids have also downright bought degrees and college admission, by paying teachers, having their parents give donations to the school, etc.
Jabavu, we are now friends.
It would be reasonable if someone, somewhere, could explain how we, as a society, benefit from granting government-enforced monopolies on things like this.
I don't believe this article addresses the question in a meaningful way. The question is empiric; the answer is not to be found here.
There is a website [0] and book [1] on this topic, "Up until about forty years ago a good percentage of the money in circulation was produced by the Bank of England and the seignorage went to the Treasury. Today 97% of all the money in circulation is created as debt by the banks and the seignorage profit goes to them. The result is that between 2000 and 2009 the state has foregone a trillion pounds. How many public services could that have funded? ... Modernising Money shows how a UK law implemented in 1844 can be updated and combined with reform proposals from the Great Depression, to provide the UK with a stable monetary and banking system, much lower levels of personal and national debt, and a thriving economy."

A survey [2] was done as part of a master's thesis at Zurich University, which found that, "Only 13 percent know that private commercial banks provide the majority of the money in circulation. However, 78 percent of the Swiss population would like money to be produced and distributed solely by a public organisation working for the common good, such as the National Bank. Only 4 percent preferred the system we actually have today – that money is mostly created by private, for-profit companies such as commercial banks."

[0] http://positivemoney.org

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Modernising-Money-Monetary-System-Brok...

[2] http://positivemoney.org/2015/09/survey-confirms-people-have...
I am fully aware of these historical facts and I'm also aware of racist people (I used to live in Texas for 7 years). But how are these related to a US govt. issued legal immigrant visa i.e. H1B?

Did you arrive in the US in a clunky boat fearing for your life and running away from a despot on an H1B?

Please don't compare the challenges of H1B workers to events in which people were actually murdered or lived in fear of their death. It's ridiculous.

If your premonition of being sacrificed is true, oh my, what would I do if I lose my job? I would be so lost...lol!
I have the confidence (not arrogance) in my abilities to find another one :)
And BTW, I was laid off my first job in late 2008 (during the recession) and I found another job. And this confidence comes from the fact that I take my career goals seriously and don't hide behind the veil of a fake victim.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtRRy9dxCsg
You do make a valid point, but to the reverse, don't use your logic to think you can't do something. That's not good either.
The Corel tools literally have a "Microsoft <product> mode" which changes the UI to look almost identical to the equivalent Microsoft product. They aren't hiding the fact that the design is taken from Microsoft. Take a look at the screenshots from the complaint and if you hide the name title bar, you'll have a hard time picking out which one is from Microsoft and which is from Corel.

https://www.eff.org/files/2015/12/28/microsoft_v_corel_-_com...
The Problem with Female Superheroes
This is a commit to the Android code base, what does this have to do with HotSpot, WebAssembly or even the JVM?
Fast cores take exponentially more energy than slow ones. So the solution is to use more slow and simple cores instead. We get more performance per watt that way. On PCs we can use GPU's to make computations in parallel. I guess this is like that, but for servers.
Patents don't protect small companies anyways. If you are sued by a giant, the lawsuit will probably bankrupt you alone. Plus, that giant will come at you with multiple infringing patents, because chances are you are in fact infringing multiple patents.

The only use of patents for a small company is to make the company more valuable in an acquisition, and also as a marketing tool.

The way you profit from inventiveness is keeping trade secrets, and building things that are difficult for a competitor to easily copy.
370k is pretty good change. What do you do?
A platform to pay for OpenSource Support to finance OS work?
Is it that hard to understand that a middle/upper middle class kid with two educated supporting parents, encouragement since it was small, a college fund, etc has it EASIER than a poor kid from the projects?

And that this holds regardless of "hard work" and "intelligent decisions for the future"?

E.g. even if both make the exact same good decisions, the poor kid has to work harder to overcome what it lacked in encouragement, financial ease to just study, parental support, the need to get a job to pay the rent even while at college, etc.
Many (most?) successful business like this come from people who live and work in the industry for several years noticing the inefficiencies along the way. If you're a technical person, networking at professional events is a GREAT way to find someone that's identified one of these problems who needs someone to bring it to life.
Quoting a post I recently came across on reddit:

> The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution clearly states: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated unless a dog barks."
Why stop at one key? Personally I'd generate separate keys for all sites, just like I generate separate SSH keys. Apart from the obvious security benefit, it also means that your identities on different sites can't be tied together solely by your public keys, which companies could plausibly be convinced to share with governments, other organizations, or even individuals. (They're "public" after all, right?)
That isn't always true[1]. The student loan is only discharged if it's a federal loan[2].

Also, neither federal nor private loans can be discharged in the event of bankruptcy, which means that student loans are effectively secured by a person's career (since loan payments can be garnished from someone's wages).

1. http://abcnews.go.com/Business/student-loans-die/story?id=19...

2. http://trends.collegeboard.org/student-aid/figures-tables/to...
I was trying to answer a technical question; perhaps I misinterpreted it? Anyway, if you can get a new CPU architecture through at all, you can probably get new calling conventions at the same time. Make sure your reference C compiler generates compatible code on all platforms, or something.