skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's certainly true -- although I can hardly say that I have a gift for it. More often, I've found that discussing almost any issue results in me making concessions and the other person not doing so; I'm trying to lean the other way and hopefully reach a suitable balance.

This article left me more ticked-off than it should have; I think it's because I got the sense that the author valued consensus and national cohesion more than he valued any ideological question. If the article had said, "we're at war, but remember that chivalry is a good thing," I would have simply agreed; instead, he quoted Lincoln.
Trade secrets are impossible in the case of most patents. The majority of patents are easy to understand by just looking at the product. The supposed revelations of patent filing amount to nothing at all, especially given that almost all patents are effectively obfuscated anyway.
It looks like there has been a version of yacc in the go source tree (that works with go, not c) for at least 11 months.

https://github.com/golang/go/tree/master/src/cmd/yacc
right, if by "many" you mean "a small minority"
What Does It Take to Be a “Bestselling Author”? $3 and 5 Minutes. – Observer
Trade secrets don't protect against reverse engineering or simply copying behavior. Historically, one of the rationalizations of patents was to encourage disclosure, but the exact wording, at least in the US constitution, gives no specific reasons.
It depends entirely on your field. I spent most of my career as an engineer working on R&D for software that would likely sit in a baseband in a production implementation. We spent millions of dollars building it, and nothing comparable is publicly available. The secret sauce in a baseband is definitely the sort of thing that's in short supply. And it's software.

That said, the patent office may not be qualified to distinguish between something that someone whipped together and something that took a team of PhDs years to invent. And maybe that problem is an intractable one.
JTAN, a privacy-minded firm, backed up Silk Road's server in USA
MY REST API serves JSON. Some of us are still innovating.
"Passwords need 10 characters, including an uppercase and lowercase letter, a number, and a special character. They are case-sensitive and cannot include your username or more than two repeat characters in a row."

I'm sorry, how is the the most draconian, falsely-reassuring password requirements you have ever seen? Looks pretty standard to me.
I wonder why it's walking like asimo (1) I thought Boston dynamics was beyond that strategy.

(1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_moment_point
And just plain cash. We get paid a lot of money to develop software on Windows.
The hosting company's site states, “JTAN offers accounts and services without requiring you to tell us your name or physical address. Regardless of the fact that you attempt to remain anonymous, all JTAN account Terms and Conditions remain in effect.”
It really should be illegal for a buyer to use a company's existing cash to pay off the purchase.
you mean restricted. Copyright law is specifically about keeping copyrights reserved. The thing it protects is monopolies, not software.
Food Delivery in Europe Is Playing Out Very Differently Than in the US
Seems like a really blatant ad to me. The author's best guess on why DHL failed happens to be exactly what the author's key selling point is.
This reminds me a lot of the chapter in "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman" where he enlists in the military and walks away with a 4f exemption. Same precision and honesty in his answers and the same misinterpretation by the doctor.

You can find it online, the chapter is titled "Uncle Sam Doesn't Need You!"
It's an amazing example of how well engineered the mass produced food producers are.

Something as silly as a piece of plastic in one bit of their food (common sort of thing in low end producers, like hand made) equals a mass recall.

It's why food these days from McDonalds etc is so safe (from immediate harm)

Mass produced engineering is pretty cool.
"In particular, their HR department is engaging in what is nothing less than race warfare against white people."

This is a total exaggeration. And I'm white.
no, patents restrict the supposedly novel and unique features of an invention in return for campaign donations to politicians who protect the patent-monopoly system. The general public doesn't get anything in return (well, obfuscated and useless patent application stuff, but that's only counterproductive waste, not value).
Everyone is nitpicking bits and pieces of my answers. First the culture, then the sustainability, now health.

Yes, I'm quite aware of the results, and authors of that large scale study, and the paper, the same authors published the all-cause mortality study too (also based on 50 grams), which WHO decided not to reference. There's plenty of evidence, WHO is pretty much years behind that evidence, if not decades.

There's nothing to discuss. Yes, the increase is 17%, which given the low chance of colorectal isn't that much of a big deal but the increase is significant, although, cardiovascular disease increase is much bigger, obesity huge.

The moderate "healthy" amount is really vague.

If I were trying to positively influence the developing world, imposing energy/water/resource hungry animal agriculture business wouldn't be a first step. It's irrational to consider it.

> Freedom of Information Act documents reveal that the U.S. Department of Agriculture warned the egg industry that saying eggs are nutritious or safe may violate rules against false and misleading advertising.

When the evidence for meat and dairy ends up documented in 5000 papers, I guess the same will happen with them, same thing happened with cigarettes after thousands of papers. It takes time, but the evidence provided is sufficient now.
Thoroughly infuriating. Enough to make a man go John McAfee, I would imagine.
Bet my team of PhDs would come to the same solution.

And there you have why your situation is no different.

Software is a dish, we are chefs, and techniques are our recipes and principles. You should no sooner be able to patent a chicken casserole than a baseband. We merely discover what is already true and turn it into code.
Pretty mind boggling. How does one spend $1 billion on software and fail? I guess this is a somewhat misleading accounting statement based around maintaining the existing software orgs of the merged companies, not building new software.

It makes me wonder though, with an unlimited budget and willingness to pay a lot, what could one achieve in one year? If you offered 200k base, 100k signing, and 1 mil bonus for completion of goals within 1 year, that should give you access to pretty much all the top tier programmers in the world. Hire 50 of those guys and you're only at 65 mil. Maybe you need a really incredible guy running it so you offer him a 30 mil bonus. Now you let those guys attack the problem and it's hard to imagine they couldn't fix things up at DHL within 1 year.

Any known examples of orgs trying this approach?
The title of this is incredibly confusing - at first I thought it was about Zynga moving to Market Street.
thank you, will check out
To be promptly purchased by Palantir.
You mean like how it works in the U.S. already? Yeah. But what does that have to do with this news about software patents? ;)
I'm not sure the dots would provide more of a visual cue either.

What's wrong with separating the descriptive text from the images, and making people scroll down to read more?
Sure, the kid's not going to die. That doesn't mean that it's harmless for children to take cannabis.

These conversations are really fucking tedious because every single time I forget to say "I am strongly in favour of legalising drugs" someone leaps in to make some ridiculous point - here "no possible harm to children from cannabis".

If you think it's okay to let children take cannabis then I don't even know how to respond.
Former 1k flyer here. The perks used to be nice. I'd show up at Logan and they'd already have me rerouted if my flight was delayed (and of course, upgraded to 1st class).

OK, so that was the one perk. That and the red carpet clubs used to actually be nice. I remember spending some miles on my wife's membership so she could enjoy a drink while waiting for me at the airport... then a month later the security lines being moved in front of the club so she couldn't get in.

All my miles were spent on other people. It's surprising how many people will hit you up when they need to fly somewhere but can't afford it. For the longest time I was saving up for a trip to Asia on one of those lay-flat seats in a private suite. I was close when my wife mentioned to me that she sent her brother, his wife, and their kids to Kansas. Freaking Kansas... oy. They might have said thank you.

In all the years I did it, I had one proper "free" vacation. It included a suite at a crazy nice hotel in Manhattan well above anything I could afford.

All that flying and being a 1k made me bitter. I hate traveling now because of the way they treat the no-ks. I'm bitter with the casual travelers who don't understand how to get through security with any efficiency at all. I'm bitter with security for it's intrusiveness that provides no security at all. I'm bitter with the airlines for putting their most jaded and customer service averse flight attendants on the planes that go wherever you want to vacation. I'm bitter with the guy who puts his bag in the overhead 3 seats back and has to swim upstream when we're departing the plane. The list goes on. Don't even get me started on the "$25 extra for a bag or a seat upgrade" I'm an angry old man in airports.

For anybody still putting in the time in the air - look into surfair. Chartered flights out of private airports for a monthly membership fee. No TSA, No lines. No last minute $2500 tickets. It's awesome. Limited range of cities though.
Well, you get two upvotes from me.
Christchurch?
> It's the lingua franca for describing libraries, and tooling (such as Rust's bindgen, or Python's cffi) can consume them to do the setup/create the information necessary to call functions from other languages.

Hence the "not necessarily" in my comment. The parent seemed to be painting this as extra unnecessary work; I was saying that a header file is _not_ necessary except for binding to C/C++.

If you want to write a C API that will be called from many languages; you should have a header file so that bindgen tools can consume it. If you want an API that will only be called by Python .... not so necessary, you may want a header file anyway but it depends on the situation.

> Or... C?

Sure, goes without saying :)
http://www.xkcd.com/169/

Get over yourself.

In particular, your page of drivel goes wrong here:

> "smaller than", "less than" etc. indicate subtraction, as in: 2 less than 10 is 8.

Believe it or not, "smaller than" and "less than" are also used to refer to being smaller or lesser (go figure) in size or amount, as in "2 is less than 10".
Lots of companies. To sue for patent infringement you first have to find out that they are infringing your patent. That's very difficult in many cases (e.g. production methods). In comparison keeping a trade secret may be much more viable.

For many small companies it's often too costly to enforce their patents worldwide, while keeping secrets is easier the smaller the company is.
IBM's supercomputer will power an online, anime VR game
I too left GitHub for the same reasons two weeks ago. This kind of bigotry won't stop unless there is pushback.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11049067
Slightly off-topic, but not too off-topic question: Does GCE have a text format for its configuration?

My pet peeve with cloud services and their web-based admin GUIs is that you have to use the GUI or the APIs to do anything. You can't capture the current configuration and then replay it if anything is misconfigured. You can't save or restore the config. You can't diff the config across versions. Most SaaSes don't even have audit logs, or if they do, they're too minimalistic to provide the ability to get a lot of detail or roll back anything.

My wish list item is a kind of "Puppet for GCE". I write my manifest, push them to the cloud, and stuff happens. If something isn't mentioned in my manifest, it gets deleted. Truthfully, I don't want to use a web GUI at all.

At the very least there should be a way to do an inventory of an account. Recently I needed to take over an older AWS account, and I wanted to find out what was in it — instances, load balancers, buckets, and so on. It's virtually impossible to do this with the management console since the ontology of possibly configurable objects is so huge and complicated, and pretty much everything has a computer-generated hash instead of a human name, so I was surprised when I couldn't find anything.
Honest request:! Please enlighten me..
THE DARK SIDE,VERY UPSETTING SPOKEN VIDEO,
This is much better than I expected. Nice work!
How would a graphical representation on a screen be considered hardware?
I work at Zynga... The office building is awesome. The amenities at Zynga are still some of the best in the Bay Area. Awesome gym, large basement arcade, and snacks everywhere.
The thing about black and white is that there are different shades of each. One thing I've learned in life is that most people are just trying to have a decent life and make it so that their lives and the lives of people they care about can remain decent. I have a lot of respect for people I firmly disagree with on philosophical, moral, and religious grounds, because they're trying to make the world a better place, even though they may be wrong about how to do just that.
Or, if you have docked installed on a system anyway why not just use docker-py (docker's python bindings) directly to run stuff in containers?
Wonderful response!!! Thank you, I'm not trying to be obtuse, I do want to understand who is doing what and where.

I also want to understand the cost doffs as a
Well.
Hey guys it's Tino. When will you contribute to our Big Data blog with your excellent ideas? :)

https://cloud.google.com/blog/big-data/
I can see it being useful for building up a testing environment/framework
If I had to guess what they were thinking: "Hey, let's blame the engineers if anyone finds out."
We should trust doctors - or any expert - while accepting that they are fallible humans, some of whom chose the profession for the wrong reasons and graduated at the bottom of their class. Still beats a layperson.

I'm really hoping some of the people I knew who got into med school will go into research.
I had this experience in undergrad. And I had to stay for several days because I had no therapist for the staff psychologist to call. Being surrounded by genuinely crazy people for three days almost made me crazy.

Coming from a music, then music theory, then philosophy, then technology background, it's an understatement to say that being precise in my language is extremely important.

Most people just don't care that much about the exact meanings of what the say or the chain of logical implications implied by certain types of careless wording.

It's a constant challenge for me to interact with people in a casual social way, so I mostly just don't.

I probably come across as a pedant in many cases, but that's not my intent. I just have a hard time intuiting what people mean when it's something other than what they say.
Yes, you can use the kernel from the command line:

https://reference.wolfram.com/language/tutorial/UsingATextBa...

https://reference.wolfram.com/language/tutorial/WolframLangu...
I am talking about an Intel/AMD branded laptop.
No meat, milk, or eggs at all means leaving a lot of potential nutrition on the table. Chickens (and goats) can eat vegetable waste and the like; cows can eat waste from harvesting, and of course can graze -- an activity that doesn't require significant human labor or expenditure on fuel and tools.
Hi, I'm one of the devs.

That's totally true, but it means the python app can only run in the same container as the process.
I thought there were essentially 2 really cool features of this: you don't have to clean up after your (sub)processes and your docker daemon could be running remotely. (e.g., you could distribute tasks to a bunch of servers running your containers)
Unless we didn't take the big bang as the first year, negative dates will exist. From an archaeological stance, 12.000 or maybe 15.000 years would be better, but 10.000 has an advantage: for anni domini we stay in the same millennium, i.e. 2016 becomes 12016, which is easier to parse at a glance than 14016.

I really wonder which +12.000 yrs old sites you're referring to (no rhetoric intended, I'm really curious).
NYC Free and Open Source Software Laws
What on Earth has that got to do with Bayes' theorem? What's your prior? All you did was re-state the anthropic principle.
> Bet my team of PhDs would come to the same solution.

Maybe they would, but they didn't.

The point of the patent system is to incentivize people to publish their inventions. The secondary purpose is to encourage invention. Giving a temporary monopoly is not the greatest solution, but try coming up with a better one.
It seems like medical research would probably grind to halt.
> We spent millions of dollars building it, and nothing comparable is publicly available. The secret sauce in say Qualcomm's baseband is definitely the sort of thing that's in short supply.

There's certainly short supply of the secret sauce in Qualcomm's baseband.

Your team spent millions building it, and, in order to give a sufficient incentive for teams to do similar things to that, the law should probably give some protection so that Qualcomm can make a profit from it. But you're conflating a bunch of things here:

1. Qualcomm knows the product and has the engineers. Qualcomm is uniquely positioned to build usable reference implementations, chips, etc, and to charge for this service and for support. This requires no legal protection whatsoever.

2. Qualcomm holds copyright on the code base. This has nothing to do with patent law, and I think that very few people would dispute that copyright makes sense in this context. (Whether long-term copyright makes sense is a different story altogether. I tend to think that a decade or two would be more than enough to make Qualcomm's investment worthwhile enough that they would do it.)

3. Qualcomm holds lots of patents that prevent other people from spending the same millions of dollars to develop a competing product without taking significant risk of being sued. I, and many others, think that the law should not offer Qualcomm this protection.

4. As you said, the sauce is secret. I think the question of whether Qualcomm should be permitted to keep the sauce secret and how much the law should help or hinder this secrecy is worthy of at lease some debate.
Going one step further, using http://CommonWL.org you can wrap Dockerized command line tools into callable Python functions, and abstracting all the details of stdin/stdout redirection and getting files into and out of the container.
> You're badly mistaken.

No, I'm not; you're just mistaken about which classical results I was referring to. I meant the results of classical EM that predicted that atoms could not exist--because the electrons would radiate until they fell into the nucleus. And what classical formula tells you how much the electrons will radiate because of their acceleration due to responding to the electric field of the nucleus? Larmor's formula.

In other words, Larmor's formula was not a "theory"--it was a particular result derived within a theory. The particular result happened to be correct, within a particular limited domain; but the underlying theory that was used to derive it could not explain why it was correct--because the same theory, and indeed the same particular result--the same formula--made other predictions that were obviously egregiously wrong (like predicting that atoms would collapse).

> nobody succeeded in obtaining the emission line frequencies of gases out of the classical EM theory

You're drastically understating the failure of classical EM here. It's not that classical EM couldn't predict the particular frequencies of emission lines. It's that classical EM couldn't predict the existence of emission lines at all. Classical EM predicted that atoms would emit a continuous spectrum of radiation--not radiation sharply peaked at particular frequencies.

> The classical formula is taught to this day both in macroscopic EM theory and quantum optics courses

Sure, because within its domain of validity, it works fine as an approximation. But that's all it is--an approximation. And we explain why the approximation works, and why it works only within a particular domain of validity, by reference to the more complete underlying theory--quantum electrodynamics.

> I do not know what you mean by "correct".

I mean "makes predictions that match the results of experiments".
Reactive Machine Learning Systems Book
I'm writing a book on reactive machine learning: https://www.manning.com/books/reactive-machine-learning-systems

It's focused on the needs of data engineers building real world machine learning systems that need to stay responsive in the face of errors and changes in load. It uses some awesome tech like Scala, Spark, and Akka.

I'd love for you all to check it out, and provide me with feedback. You can use the discount code "mlsmith2" for 50% off.

You can find the first chapter here: https://manning-content.s3.amazonaws.com/download/9/f0caa1d-069c-4f84-94a4-af0070b04160/Smith2_RMLS_MEAP_V01_ch1.pdf

I've also written a longer introduction to the book on Medium: https://medium.com/data-engineering/the-reactive-machine-learning-book-is-live-2eb5ff3d36ff

Here are several other resources that you could check out for more info on what I'm trying to do in writing about reactive machine learning.
My site on this overall project: http://www.reactivemachinelearning.com/
Some materials from recent talks I've given on reactive machine learning: https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/7038-lightning-talks-2
http://www.slideshare.net/jsmith54/collecting-ucertain-data-the-reactive-way
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBr34dTDQ88
http://www.slideshare.net/jsmith54/reactive-machine-learning-and-functional-programming

I'll be answering any questions you might have here on HN, and in the Manning forums, if you end up buying the book.
I get you now - do they exist outside of CES and the Intel employees toting around prototypes?
Thousands of apps running Baidu code collect, leak personal data
>The same problems affecting software continually affect every other industry

Software has it worse than traditional engineering because the field of software engineering is only about two patent life lengths old, and both development times and product life cycles are incredibly short for most things. It makes little sense that a new algorithm gets the same protection length as a better brake system for trains. Shorter life cycles also makes defering to courts comparatively less effective and more expensive, encouraging misuse of the system.

Of course software engineering isn't the only field with this problem, but it's one of few.
I know it does not currently exist. The point is that it would be a better idea than what we have now.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11163698
Is this a US thing? Getting programmatic access to my UK bank accounts is still a nightmare. I must use a manual download process involving two factor auth each time.

A company exists that scrapes the bank sites of all major banks but obv cannot defeat two factor auth so for my accounts package I used to give them my username and then have to enter the two factor each time anyway.

I conclude its too dangerous to give other companies my RW login details

Basically programmatic access to my accounts - forget it. Differentiated access (RO, RW, fine grained), don't make me laugh.

Is this just UK? Is there a better bank Inshoukd move to?
Ethereum: Bitcoin Plus Everything