skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> To rephrase, what exactly do we lose out if patents didn't exist?

There is a lot of empirical evidence showing patents incentivize investment of resources into innovative efforts, such as R&D expenses in large corporations and VC investment in startups. Of course, it's hard to quantify how much innovation this really drives because it's very hard to measure "innovation" itself. The drawbacks of patents include, amongst other things, the potential to reduce follow-on innovation. Again, this is very hard to measure at any meaningful scale.

> To support this point, we can look at the prevalence and utility of Open Source software projects; which work without patent protection.

Open source projects are driven by people willing to donate their efforts for free. (Well, it's not really free, is it? They are, to a great extent, sponsored directly or indirectly by organizations that typically extract value from something other than the software itself, such as, maybe data.) Do you expect that business model to work for everybody?

Not to mention that the vast majority of open source projects actually don't do anything innovative other than just re-implementing known technologies in a different context. There can be a lot of minor, follow-on innovation in open-source projects, but in my experience, the big advances come from other sources, such as academia, startups or corporate R&D labs.
JavaScript Backdoor
Do you mean decorators? A solution like that exists and has been used for a while. It really is only usable for run-time type-checks. See here: https://github.com/dobarkod/typedecorator

With type annotations you can have static guarantees, which decorators will not be able to provide, as decorator methods will be called and resolved only during runtime. Objects imported from `types` hopefully will not.
Best GitHub stars Organizer
>> Hoping to avoid the need to write the whole compiler myself, I obtained the source code for the Pastel compiler, which was a multi-platform compiler developed at Lawrence Livermore Lab. It supported, and was written in, an extended version of Pascal...

I'm curious if the Pastel source code is available somewhere on the net...
How do i download a video from YouTube?
Thank you!!!! This will make my life easier and more fun.
Often enough, in Haskell, you can boldly make the primary change you want to make, fix all of the ensuing type errors in the rest of the code, and your refactored code will run as expected. The compiler will more or less tell you what you missed.
I second the Hue recommendation. They're a solid product. They aren't as good at rendering arbitrary color, but that's because they optimized for excellent whites.

Their API is also really good: clear, well-documented, REST-y. I wrote my own software to simulate a day/night cycle in my house, and I'm very happy with it. It's a much easier way to wake up, and having the gradual dimming in the evening makes it easier to go to bed on time.
>At which point you're just making the argument for not turning on the Large Hadron Collider. We don't know what would happen. It could create a black hole and destroy the world.

That's unfair. There's a plausible argument that this would be harmful, while there's far less plausibility that the LHC would be harmful.

>There is only one way to find out.

Somehow I don't think you mean "more experiments".
I doubt anybody from the industry tracked him down and made him go away. Headphone AMPs/DACs are typically made by smaller vendors or are low volume for big vendors. The major vendors are selling the "Beats by Dre" brand to people at Best Buy, and that isn't the same crowd NvAvGuy interacted with.

The audiophile community is full of fanatics as extreme as religious fanatics, and probably he valued his sanity and mental health over dealing with those types of people.
Stanford May Have Just Cured Alzheimer’s
This just hard to take seriously. What is:

> A patent that can be infringed using only computer software and a prior art computer.

When is that the case? When is it not? Are medical devices that run software excluded? Are all kinds (read most) imaginable consumer electronics also excluded (they also have some software)?

You are arguing for a policy as if in complete obliviousness that such a policy must be applied in the real world (and said companies will have teams of lawyers to find loopholes, not a random HN poster).
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Many API developers don't see much value in having realtime updates. As deeper backend server developers, they don't face the same level of urgency that frontend/app developers do (where the trendiness of realtime/reactive/etc has gone through the roof). Well, that and lack of tooling. Push servers/frameworks are a dime a dozen but not many are usable in an API context. So even when API developers do want to implement this, they hit a wall pretty quickly.

Shameless plug: our company (https://fanout.io) was created to solve exactly this problem. If you're working with an API that you wish had realtime push, please tell its developers about us. :)
Date: 2013
Auerbach Was Right: A Computational Study of the Odyssey and the Gospels
Weird that nobody has mentioned this yet: The article claims that Prof. Edwards spent $147k from his discretionary research funds and personal funds. He's still a good guy and has probably used a non-trivial amount of his own money, but it's not like he had to pull all of it out of his bank account. Discretionary research funds are given to researchers as money for them to spend on whatever research they find interesting. It's kind of like 3M's 20% time. The article doesn't mention how much of the $147k came from his research money and how much came from his pocket book. Why? Because it's not as sensational to find out that this guy (who is a tenured professor at a big school) put up $125k of research money and $22k of his own. I don't know what the actual numbers are but I wouldn't be surprised if he put up less than $50k of his own money and had the vast majority come from research funds, considering his history (wikipedia claims he received a $450k grant in 2011 from the EPA to study lead and copper in the water).

Again, I'm not saying he's a fraud. He probably still put up a decent chunk himself. He did take out a mortgage on his house, but it doesn't mean that he put 100% of the value of his house towards this crisis. All I'm saying is don't get caught up in all the sensationalism.
Cool. Is it global?
Yeah, that's what I meant to type, thanks.

https://github.com/dobarkod/typedecorator is interesting -- I was imagining type signatures more like haskell's:

addNumber :: Int -> Int -> Int

translating to something like

@TypeSignature([int, int, int])

def add_number(a,b):
....

It's just as possible to have the compile-time program that's doing the checking process the decorators.
Have lived in both New Zealand and US and made regular use of water kettles. I'm not sure if popularity is a function performance (or if there are other cultural reasons) but I can confirm that water kettles connected to 240V are way more awesome... P=IV and all.

This extends to home espresso makers. Some international models of home espresso makers get rave reviews in AU/NZ, but lackluster reviews in the US. Only so many watts you can get on 120V before you exceed amperage constraints.
I'm still skeptical that we know enough to absolutely positively rule out FTL, but I will say this. If you think deeply on it, a universe with FTL is pretty weird. In some respects it would be identical to time or dimensional travel. It would imply that causality is strange or many worlds is literally true or that space time is fragmented or something equally wacky. It would also transform the Fermi paradox from an interesting question into a silently ominous mystery like a minor but devastating early plot point in a good horror flick.

But hey, when we discovered QM the weirdness of the universe went up a notch. As a general principle we can set a hard lower bound for weirdness but not an upper bound.
Yep, I've done these and #1 (all code is PR'd and reviewed) can be a right pain for technical and political reasons, and results in much slower progress and poorer overall code.

PRs are a wonderful mechanism to provide smooth but gated access to the code for people outside the owning team who otherwise would not have it at all; but inside the team, I think: just because you can do it does not mean that you should.
Makes you wish there was a accountability on journalism side for what writers produce. Imagine a information overlay that filters out authors who wrote many propaganda pieces and fear mongerism.
If this sounds interesting to you I suggest also checking out TXAA. It exploits a similar concept to get high quality cheap AA.
What were the highly profitable industries built around expert systems and logic computers in the 1980s?

The fact that AI seems to be proving itself with real-world, commercially interesting results in the fields as disparate as advertising, facial recognition, and self-driving automobiles makes me think the comparisons with the 80s are premature.
Are Venture Capitalists Pushing Entrepreneurs Towards Trendy Ideas?
Polymaths, bumblebees and the 'expert' myth (2012)
Android app pour calculer son Salaire Brut/Net
Seems like a very simple expansion on this technique would be to keep a rolling framebuffer, and blend the last particle draw with the current one. This would remove the flickering, display the fake alpha properly for still screenshots, and work for variable framerate.

Assuming your GPU will let you hold onto a previous frame's draw result (of just the particles) and blend it relatively cheaply with the new one, it wouldn't cost very much to implement. One full framebuffer blend should be much, much cheaper than blending the individual dots.
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Both are true.

My former company (AeroFS) was one of the few I'm aware of that was willing to hire good talent even if it required a visa.

Also, I think that asking someone from India (taking that country as an example) to move to the US for less than market wage to toss the dice on a startup is... a challenge. That startup is less marketable on their resume than BigCorp if they want to return to India and get hired by another company or join an outsourcing company.
> You could have a basic income of $5000/year and it would still work better than $5000/year in means-tested welfare.

But BI of $5000 costs far more, because anyone can get it. You'd need to reduce the amount to keep costs the same, at which the argument that it's better becomes weaker.

>How is it an invalid argument? Passing unenforceable laws is futile and stupid. It fosters disrespect for the law and gives advantage to people willing to break the law when they know they can get away with it.

If it's difficult but possible to break the law and get away with it, then laws and some enforcement deters breaking the law. E.g. it's pretty easy to get alcohol under 21 and cigarettes under 18 , but the age laws make it harder than if there were no laws, which reduces the amount of underage drinking/smoking. If you agree that's a good thing, then the law is good insofar as it encourages that.

Or in the welfare example, it's not easy to scam welfare, it takes time, organization, etc. Many people who would never try to scam welfare would sign up for basic income, because it's official and there's no risk of getting caught.

Of course, it depends on the ease of scamming, the benefit, etc, but the general argument of "unenforcable->make it legal" is invalid unless accompanied by those arguments.
Pleased with yourself?
I don't see how that could possibly work well with all the overhead. Remember that the reference algorithm can be viewed as an exceedingly optimized SAT solver, using exactly one boolean variable to say whether a particular edge is used in the cycle or not.
An interesting introduction to hash maps, with a fairly simple implementation.

For more fun, check out Python's implementation, which uses the remaining bits of the hash instead of linear probing; Robin Hood hashing, that rearranges entries to keep probing chains short; and the security issues caused by easily determined hashing.
Man Frozen Under Snow for Hours Is Brought Back to Life
The SBCL Common Lisp compiler detects some of those type errors at compile time - especially for declared types:

; (> SECRET GUESS)
;
; caught WARNING:
; Derived type of GUESS is
; (VALUES STRING &OPTIONAL),
; conflicting with its asserted type
; REAL.
; See also:
; The SBCL Manual, Node "Handling of Types"
;
; compilation unit finished
; caught 1 WARNING condition
; printed 8 notes

Common Lisp allows optional type declarations. SBCL (this feature it has inherited from CMUCL) uses those as compile time type assertions.
There are tons of studies around patents and the economics thereof, but you will not find such a convenient answer to your question. The reason is that it's very hard to measure the costs and benefits to quantify these incentives and dis-incentives. Furthermore the benefits and costs of patent systems are often orthogonal. If you want to get an idea of the depth of the field, look at all the studies cited by this paper, and look at all the various methods, metrics and datasets that have been considered so far: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2139260
It would be nice to know how this compares to Runscope.
In addition to what the others said, I'd much rather prefer good static typing (i.e. Haskell).

Especially in the prototyping phase, I do a lot of iterating and refactoring - and I mean A LOT, because I've found that this is the best way for a good design to fall out. Sometimes like 20-30% of the code get refactored, replacing core data structures and control flow.

If I ever had to rely on unit tests for this, I'd shoot myself, mainly because it would make me 1/2 times slower (because I'd have to reimplement all unit tests every time) and this would really break my flow.

Also, relying on unit tests for refactoring means that having anything short of 100% code coverage (i.e. 70-80% isn't enough) defeats the purpose of the whole thing anyway - and I've yet to see 100% test coverage in a real-world project. I realize this isn't an argument in the context of your reply (it was either test coverage or static types), but still, something to consider.
>All I'm saying is don't get caught up in all the sensationalism.

I think it's pretty sensational that he did this, regardless of the exact details. It's all money he could have spent on something else, and instead he uncovered something critical to the lives of many.
"The audiophile community is full of fanatics as extreme as religious fanatics.."

No it's not.
Your Smartphone Is Probably Powered by Child Labor at Mines in Africa
Compilation of Scares in the Ellen Show
Horizontal Bar Gymnast Robot
Article never claimed it was all his personal money
AKA, list of locations to send an intelligence agent with binoculars. Seems like there would be a Streisand effect with this sort of thing.
He is essentially using his own money to do what the local and state governments should have done. His discretionary funds could have been used to buy equipment for his lab in order to help him get research grants. Instead, they were spent to do water testing in a different city and in a different state. He isn't going to receive any research grants or meaningful scientific publications out of this, which is essentially the job of a university professor. That's why it is portrayed as such a sacrifice.
Inside the Wall Street Journal's Ethnicity Prediction Calculator
>> The ressurgence of AI is just as hyped as expert systems and logic computers in the 1980.

Yep, for instance see how recent results are advertised as showing that machine
learning algorithms are "better than humans" in various tasks (image
recognition, primarily).

The thing to keep in mind is that all that old tech did not "fail" as is often
assumed. Expert systems worked perfectly fine, as did a host of other GOFAI
techniques. It's all waiting for us just as the researchers left it when they
jumped overboard to fields that still had funding, kind of like a Mary Celeste
of science.

My hope is that rather than going through another AI winter we can find a way to
pick it all up where the 80's and the 90's left it and advance the science
further, absolutely so while keeping the best bits of the current machine
learning explosion. Machine learning is not a new thing anyway- it too goes back
in the early days of AI. We have more data and more computational power today,
but there's practically no really new approaches - Deep learning, SVMs, Decision
Trees... those are not really "new" as such, it's just their popularity that is
a new thing.

So we're at a point where we need to learn our history, before we end up
repeating it unwittingly. And we can- we have theoretical foundation, we have
practical approaches, we can put the two together and win.
> --cherchez-stackoverflow
Treatment X, may contain drug multiple drugs and be treated as a single variable. Further, plenty of statistical tests work with multiple groups not just A vs. B.

As to a cancer cure, we gotten ridiculous progress. The problem is cancer is effectively evolution and lacks a single cause.
A comment on that article references http://www.i-programmer.info/news/105-artificial-intelligenc...,

"Early in 2014 a paper "Intriguing properties of neural networks" by ...a team that includes authors from Google's deep learning research, showed that neural networks aren't quite like us - and perhaps we aren't quite like us, as well.
What was found was that with a little optimization algorithm you could find examples of images that were very close to the original image that the network would misclassify. This was shocking ... some how complex classifiers such as neural networks create classification regions which are more complex, more folded perhaps, and this allows pockets of adversarial images to exist."
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Nils are a problem in languages like C and Java, but more powerful type systems completely eradicate the issue. You might enjoy taking a look at Crystal. It has Ruby-like syntax and a type system that makes nil-checks completely unnecessary.
My friends did this http://www.artofthebrain.com They sell brain art but they can also produce one with custom data from MRI.
Aren't type annotations in python just documentation that's designed to look like it's not? Seems like it would make more sense to just create a documentation standard than develop a brand new syntax for documentation. Another idea that makes more sense to me is to use @decorators. I really don't understand why this syntactic hack is supposed to be a good idea.
Motion with Meaning: Semantic Animation in Interface Design
Swift Synth: Full-Featured iPad Synthesizer Written in Swift
Reputable newspapers in the 20th century employed armies of professional editors. Holding reporters accountable for their claims, keeping them from overstating, etc was their daily grind. Corporate culture deliberately separated them from the business side of the organization. They called it "Church and State."

When the Internet decimated newspapers, owners realized they could could lay off all the editors (QA) without any short term financial downside. So they did. Church and State is now a relic, except to some degree at a few bastions of old-school journalism like NYTimes.

A high quality newsroom is an expensive thing. Internet ad revenues alone generally do not support them.
Yes, a type system is very much going to help you, even if you have that skill of "capturing implicit state". Because then a function you call, written by somebody else without that skill, may rely on global state in unexpected ways and still blow up in production.

A good type system doesn't allow you to call impure code from a pure function. It just won't compile. So your skill becomes useless because it's automatically verified by the compiler.
The guy you're thinking of wasn't a Monsanto lobbyist.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2015/03/27/no-its-...
You should try and see how easy (as in NOT at all) it is for a researcher to get research funds. Once (s)he gets them it is like new lease on life. Without such funds you have very slim chances on progressing.

So, I would say it is a big deal that he committed his research funds to do this.

It is curious as in why only his personal money would make his effort valiant!
There are plenty of things that are safe to eat/drink that I wouldn't personally eat/drink. Hell, I order my pizzas without tomato sauce.

I'm not versed on RoundUp's safety, so I'll leave that for others to discuss. I'm just saying that sort of stunt doesn't provide any evidence in either direction.

For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley,_Jr.

> On October 30, 1924, Midgley participated in a press conference to demonstrate the apparent safety of TEL. In this demonstration, he poured TEL over his hands, then placed a bottle of the chemical under his nose and inhaled its vapor for sixty seconds, declaring that he could do this every day without succumbing to any problems whatsoever. However, the State of New Jersey ordered the Bayway plant to be closed a few days later, and Jersey Standard was forbidden to manufacture TEL there again without state permission. Midgley would later have to take leave of absence from work after being diagnosed with lead poisoning.
The restriction on scripting says you cannot download and run code, unless it's executed through WebKit or JavascriptCore. So other languages seem to be fine as long as the code to run is bundled with the application.
re language

Ahh. I believe it was VisualWorks mentioned when I last looked at it. The impression I had from that description was that it was the ultimate, component language. They said you don't have a main function and directives like most languages. You really just have a pile of objects that you glue together with the glue being the main application. And that this was highly integrated into the IDE's to make that easy to manage.

Was that the experience you had?

re VM primitives in assembly

I'm actually fine with that. I'm not like other people that think language X's runtime must always be written in X. Maybe a version of that for testing and reference implementation. People can understand it. Yet, I'll throw the best ASM coder I can at a VM or even its critical paths if I have to get highest performance that way. Can't let C++ win so easily over the dynamic languages. ;)
Could do, but you'd still have to validate it.
Google "bargos islands"
A big problem are the perverse incentives researchers are facing. The only thing that matters is publishing in prestigious journals, otherwise your career is pretty much over (no real chance to get tenure). Universities often don't even check the publications, and researchers usually omit the actual title of the publication and only keep the name of the journal. Moreover, if you want to get tenure you need to work on "hot" topics (as in CRISPR at the moment or cancer in general), meaning you don't necessarily spend too much time on one subject. I'm sure researchers are often aware that the research results are not ready for publication yet, but it's either publish or perish, and you usually get away with publishing sub-par results because no one really follows up on them either. Cancer and Alzheimer are two fields were billions have been wasted by research grants and pharma companies because the initially promising drug targets for example could not really be validated. I'm afraid this will stay that way as long as the career dilemma researchers are facing does not change.
I think Dooku was a terrible character in a terrible movie.
So by "skeptic community" you actually mean "reddit skeptic community?"