skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He's referring to the patent system in general. The context is pretty clear:

I’m not opposed to idea of the patent system on general principle (as Stallman, and many others, are). And I think in many fields, the system has and continues to work well.

But for software the system, in practice, is undeniably broken.

At the beginning of the second paragraph he makes a distinction between the system in general and the system as it applies to software. Therefore, in the first paragraph he was referring to the system in general. Maybe that's not what the author meant, but that's what the words say.
What is it with Jobs lately? Having a near-death experience and then deciding to be more of an asshole must be the true embodiment of "Think Different".

Edit: Perhaps he actually died last year and they got him to the pet cemetery before the stock went down.
You say that now, but wait until you get that bucket of puppies I've just fedexed to you.
If you're pretending to be another person, and not just reentering another sotre as Joe Smith then yes, yes it's very illegal hence the criminal charges here. Wiseguys claimed to be thousands of people to game the system, that accounts to a thousand charges of identity fraud.
I have to admit; I find myself agreeing vehemently with Gruber, PG and everyone else Gruber cited. Patents are typically defense weaponry. Your attack weapons are moving fast, innovating and implementing something.

Software patents are broken, and Apple's decision to whip out it's massive portfolio and start smacking people with it stinks of the "We want no phone inspired by the iPhone's design to exist", which (in my mind) isn't what patents are for in the first place - not to mention doing this is just, well, wrong.

The iPhone's concept revolutionized the handheld industry - and sure, if someone blatantly ripped it off, Apple does have a right to go after that company - but the HTC phones are simply "inspired by" - they're not clones, and while they have a lot of "features" which smack of the iphone, they're not replicas.

I'm an avid Mac user, own an iPhone - and I'll probably buy an iPad (still), but I for one want to see this suit fail horribly, or for Apple to withdraw it.
That's what StatusNet is; it supports the OStatus protocol: http://ostatus.org/

Google is also creating a (incompatible) federated microblogging system using Atom+WebFinger+Salmon. http://www.google.com/buzz/dclinton/HeMv1AQTXS8/Envisioning-...
HTML 5 is supported on the iPad, you can install an application that looks pretty native (including local storage) that doesn't have to go through the crazy Apple approval process. Neven Mrgan made a game in HTML5 that illustrates how well this works: http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/257187093/pie-guy
In addition to that, there's no restriction on having something like apt-get for packages that really don't make sense in the "drag-to-install" paradigm. Which is why I installed my own version of ruby, say, out of ports.

I like OS X because, yes, there's a paradigm, but there's a rich underside that you can use as much as you like.
OSX's biggest downside is having a fixed region of the screen that changes according to the context of the selected window on the desktop. That makes it impossible to check what two windows can do or even what program is responsible for them until they are selected. That's terribly inelegant solution that separates the data (what's inside the window) from the menus that act on that data (the menu).

Admit it. That's a draw.
I can put you in touch with his assistant. Email me.
But if you hired twenty people to go through the line three times each with a different mustache each time that would be OK?
Hey, look for Enterprise Design Patterns book, in J2EE, hope it will provide some insight details.. in addition go for ESB Concepts ( OpenESB or Mule) or see Spring Integration.
Yes, that's why only criminals do it.
“We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”

"Good artists copy. Great artists steal." said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO.

You know this whole business of patents, and IP as a whole, is fundamentally flawed in that there is no objective way to decide what is influence and what is blatant copying/theft. The Justice route simply doesn't work. And because patents are public documents, you are basically inviting competitors to modify your inventions.

I can think of two better ways to protect your IP. One is to do what Google does and keep the knowledge of your best stuff to yourself. Up to now nobody can crack their search black box. And two, keep innovating. If you do those 2 things in conjunction, I doubt you'd have to worry about people "stealing" your IP.

I believe that it’s good business, in the long run, for a company’s acts of aggression to take place in the market, not in the courts. My concern regarding this litigation against HTC is that it looks like an act of competitive aggression, not defense.

I completely agree. The sad part is it maybe too late for them to reverse course.
I think you need to really learn what sql is. It's a 4th generation language, higher level than php or other oo/procedural/functional langauges. If you're finding php and a framework to be better you're underestimating the power of sql.
Navigating around a dashboard UI
A Case Study on the Power of Social Media to Change Corporations
The one-package container deal to pack it all sounds very interesting and nice. Could you perhaps have the lyrics be in a Matroska audio container?

I think there's lots of potential for file browsers that can work off on metadata enclosed in containers. I really hope these catch on.
When I sneak my own soda pop into the movie theater, I have violated their rules. I am running the risk of being kicked out of the theater with no refund and probably be very embarrassed in the process. I am not, however, breaking any laws.

What these people did seems analogous. I don't understand how the FBI is involved.
Pretending to be someone else to gain profit, is identity fraud regardless of if you stole a real persons identity or created one.

The reason the FBI is involved heavily is because virtually all identity fraud is related to organized crime and money laundering, the rest are usually linked to insurance frauds. Being the first real case of a major identity fraud online, I wouldn't be surprised if the FBI tries to put their heads on a pike as an example to everyone else.

Immaterial of what they did it for, identity fraud is taken as an exceptionally serious crime and as far as I could tell, they performed a thousand or more 'unlawful identity changes' by operating bots under false names for illicit means. The one exception to this is the use of a pseudonym for anonymity, however it's a colossal stretch to claim your bot army are acting as your pseudonyms for your anonymity reasons.
The British PoW who broke into Auschwitz and survived
A assure you it's not. My Acer Aspire One netbook worked almost flawlessly with Linux right out of the box without any significant effort from the manufacturer (it came with Windows).

The only problem I experience is when I set the desktop to exactly 2048 pixels while using Compiz. It will probably be solved by the next release.

Selling a box with Linux that doesn't work properly with Linux sounds like an excellent way to get a rebate on the OEM prices of Windows licenses.
If you can taste the mercury, you're in trouble.
You can encrypt your records.

Perhaps this is a dumb question: How does that solve the problem? Either its readable by all or by none.

It's hard to take out somebody's nameservers, since there's no single point of failure (unlike with most web setups). But even then there's still (hopefully) some resolvers with cached records :)

I think you may have missed the point. He's not worried about the data being unavailable, quite the opposite.
Glad you liked it. It inspired me too!
No, I meant reality. Unless you give me a means of separating my perceptions from the reality then there is no useful distinction to be drawn here.
Governments could begin programs to create namespaces for citizens who would like a domain. We already have TLDs for countries, and often for smaller divisions as well (i.e. provinces, states, etc), we could just keep adding sub domains for family name, and so on. e.g. I could be sami.samhuri.victoria.bc.ca. Of course, then people will move so we'd have to have everyone involved in a redirect scheme, there are likely other issues with the idea, but I think it's neat.

With ipv6 we could each get a static IP as well.
It's better than nothing. In a bad economy, it's hard to get professional experience before graduation. Doing this probably wouldn't be as good as a paid internship at a company, but it's better than having nothing on the resume.
Microsoft Patents Ones and Zeroes
Am I just the only one who finds it strange that people sell credit card info? I mean, that'd be like if you saw a guy on the street selling dollar bills for 1/100 cent each. Sure, they might be marked bills from the same printing run, but they are still money being sold for less than their value.

You'd think if the harvester has the ability to harvest, he'd be able to work out a better way of monetizing credit cards than selling them at $2 a pop.

Or, maybe I just misunderstand how the people who buy the lists monetize the credit card info.
Were he revealing something important, I might agree with you. He tweeted, basically, "there's some cool new stuff coming soon". There's almost no information in that. Additionally, I've seen similar things from other twitter employees.

This was nothing until Techcrunch put their spin on it.
Due to claiming to be about a thousand people that didn't exist, the FBI is likely investigating them under a major suspicion of being related to organized crime. Incidentally, it's very, very rare that using an unlawfully acquired name isn't related to a serious crime.

If I act like any murderer on the run, the FBI are going to investigate me like any murderer on the run. Similarly if you act like any organized crime money laundering syndicate, you'll be investigated like one!
I really disagree with this.

I'm a developer, I spend 90% of my computing time in Vim and Terminal. I use a Macbook as my primary computer, and tend to bring it to work with me. I try to go to Linux probably twice a year, and have for a long time.

I use a mac because despite the tools I use being written originally for Linux, they work better on OS X. I've never neen unable to connect to a wireless network, I've never had problems with sleep/suspend, I've never even thought about upgrading the kernel. The things I need to do to the system, I can, and everything else works so well that I can forget it's there.

The Mac/Apple fad is all about things actually working. Windows crashes, Linux makes you think too hard about things that you're not doing. When things work, they're sexy, and that's how you can sell it to the masses, but the Zune is sexy too, and see how well pure style sells.
Time Warner Cable - Research Program on Digital Communication
Whoa, nobody said anything about denying that things exist but what I did deny was the fact that it was objective. Objective only makes sense if you know what subjective means and since all I know are subjective states of being it does not make sense for me to say there is something else that I can not make any sense of that is as real as anything I feel. All I can say is that there is a patchwork of things that my brain puts together and that thing is what I call reality but to jump from the patchwork to the existence of a completed whole is in my opinion a mistake.
Well, I think systems and languages are pretty cool. Knowing how they work is good practice even if it only demystifies them for you.

Also, every program is either an interpreter or a compiler if you squint just right.
Oh god, it's like reading about LDAP all over again...
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Interesting that he pointed out how Google suggests searches like "seobook torrent". I've often thought that if I were selling things likely to be pirated, I'd plant lots of broken copies my products out there. But you could also SEO those terms and try to steer people to a different landing page instead.
> Javaschools, PHBs, and other failed attempts at the commoditization/regularization of the software engineer brought this about.

Personally I am glad the same thing happened to other industries like shoemakers and car builders. They have been commoditized: so what? It's good for people who buy their product. The same is true of typical software engineering work.

Although I disagree about the extent to which our work has been commoditized. I don't think we're anything like factory workers yet, although it may someday come to that.
Cute idea, but I don't see it gaining real traction. There's been many attempts at vanity TLDs that were arguably more useful/intuitive (e.g., .jobs, .me) and they've yet to see any real adoption. For that matter, even .net's are hard to sell.

I also think that not allowing you to host a website at .tel is a fatal mistake. The group of people who'd prefer to look up their friend's phone number from console is tragically small. The hope I suppose is that Google indexes my .tel, and people then find my number through Google, but then why do I need the .tel?

Finally, what's with the registrar ballot screen that doesn't list prices? For anyone who's wondering, name.com looks the cheapest ($10).
Ya, let me cover my eyes and ears and tie my hands behind my back as well since I disagree with some persons view of what things are. Grow up.
Would this even be a problem if tickets were auctioned?
Are users really that incompetent? With all the millions of copies of Microsoft word, photoshop, winamp, etc that require knowledge of files and folders can the concept be that inscrutable to everyone? I mean, most people who are under the age of 50 these days are more likely than not to grasp the concept of a file, I'd bet.
Misused, because why should the client care about your routing? SIP already provides a way to drop the router from the path after relaying the first packet - why put the same exact capability onto DNS then? There are caching issues, routing delays caused by 3 resolver queries (NAPTR -> SRV -> A), etc. etc. Imho enum should be available only explicitly - not as the base routing mechanism.

Complicated - because of regexes and usage of prefixes such as E2U which don't make sense here. Someone created a service based on a custom TLD and marks the entries as E2U even though they don't use E.164 numbers at all. If they cannot get it right, how can users understand it?
Thanks, but at first glance, I don't see any touchscreens...
Yeah, it definitely can't be broken by default like that. And I don't really see a need for the "applications, places, & system" menu if they can be reduced to one button to make room.

Makes me wonder if there may be an auto-hide dock or panel at the bottom? I'm curious to see how this shakes out.
2006 was before Amazon's download store even launched.
"As it is, 5 different things want to update practically every day."

Ubuntu is essentially the same in that; some weeks I come home from work to see the "Update Manager" floating in the background two or three times. :)
How does that make any sense whatsoever as a response to the OP?
Well, just for Illmatic I'd put Nas above Kanye. Nice call on Talib Kweli, though.

(Admitting to knowing and liking hip-hop is probably instant disqualification for any future YC application. :)
What about the very common cases where you need to do very simple things, like common CRUD operations? Abstracting the SQL required for these simple queries makes a lot of sense to me.
I think part of the problem is having too many options. When all you had was moveto and lineto, simple programs with simple graphics was enough.

Now, such programs seem so lame and pale in comparison to the state of the art, while the amount you need to know and learn to match that standard is daunting, there must be a cost in terms of programmers lost to the profession at an early age.
Liability.

"The four men resold 1.5 million tickets for performances by Bruce Springsteen, Bon Jovi, Barbra Streisand, Billy Joel, Kenny Chesney and Hannah Montana, the popular teen character played by Miley Cyrus, federal prosecutors said" asserts that federal prosecutors stated something. Remove the attribution and suddenly you are the one doing the stating. Since newspapers are supposed to print facts, this creates a problem in the event that the perpetrators are acquitted. Easy libel case.

This is also why TV newscasters always say so-and-so is alleged to have committed a crime, even if there are like 43 eyewitnesses and the guy turned himself in.
By that example, I meant to highlight the DRY aspect of programming and how I realized, as an early beginner at the age of 15, that frameworks and libraries provide a good foundation so you can focus on more complex issues.

The SQL I kept repeating in that application was simple CRUD functions on MySQL tables. I know that SQL is so much more than that.
Because it's a dumb comparison. Ubuntu provides at most 3 or 4 different default themes to choose from. If you want more, you can go explicitly looking for them on the web, but otherwise there's not choice overload.
>why would they buy a .tel when there's other namespaces with more freedoms?

What freedoms are you referring to?

>I'm not sure that this is as practical a benefit as it sounds. If you were to ask me what my ".tel" is and I responded, just use "andrew.tj.id.au" you'd plug it in and use it.

Fair enough, it would be great to reach that point!

>I'm not clear on what benefit this outlines?

Search. That's what I'm working on :)

>Agreed on both accounts. The later is part of the reason for my lack of enthusiasm for it.

But it works :) And from a developers perspective it's easy - there's a bunch of apps you can play with (iPhone, Blackberry, softphones, etc).
Where does mathematics come into play in your evaluation? I just spent last quarter on discrete mathematics and digital design and it has given me a different perspective on programming in my learning experience.

I wouldn't call myself a programmer yet ( Joe Hewitt has made that apparent to me: http://twitter.com/joehewitt/status/9813494038 ), but it seems like modern software engineering is a form of alchemy now. I thought a software product is a combination of different mathematical techniques, but translating that into code seems so cumbersome (taken into consideration that I've learned and had experience in my choice of programming language and framework, which is also a major task on its own).
Confusing the map and territory needs to be classified as a psychological disorder, where sanity is below a minimum threshold.

This kind of thinking is too easy.

This is basic stuff, and you call it "obviously wrong." That's an indication that you haven't thought about it enough; there is very little which is "obviously" this or that. You must examine an idea and it's surrounding evidences, or established ideas.

If you're going to state something as "obvious" in the sense that it's axiomatic, that's fine if you are treating it as a temporary variable and examining its implications and drawing it out to conclusions.

The mistake at this point is noticing that, after treating objective reality as axiomatic, the world you see is congruent with your internalized map and therefore that is "how it is." This is a functional facade. An illusion, and you've been tricked.

The world is not very colorful in an objective reality.

\/@greenlblue: Sorry, I have a bad habit of submitting comments then editing the rest into it, so I don't know where into my editing you read. Anyway, from my experience, there's no use in carrying a conversation about "objective reality." I just had to say a little bit since I wouldn't feel right not giving some direction.
I've been feeling like this lately, every now and then there are some interesting problems to solve but more often than not it's all just plumbing...
The problem is not that libraries exist, but the incredible mental investment required to use them. Early libraries were just bundles of functions, but modern libraries are vast, complicated beasts that require years of experience to fully grok. But don't take too long, because they all exist in a state of perpetual churn, and hitching yourself to the wrong train could well destroy your career.
What are you talking about? OSX's menu bar is useless when you have huge monitors or multiple screens, and the menu bar and other behaviors makes focus-follow-mouse impossible.
Interestingly, I think this is a big part of why patents were invented in the first place. The idea was to give companies incentive for publishing their methods in detail because doing so benefited the industry as a whole. You show the world how you are doing what you do and you get to control that process for a while but in the end it becomes part of the common practice.
"Most likely, you will end up with five different bugs scattered throughout your system with many different libraries that really should be just one."

Actually, I prefer the five. When you have a shared library, and bugs are fixed, applications that use the library might well break. Shared libraries mean that either applications are at risk of completely failing to work, or that the library developers have to flag the bugfix as a new version to avoid that. Either way, incompatible bugfixes require application updates anyway, so you might as well avoid the breakage and use static libraries.

It seems to me that the only good non-mirage reason for shared libraries was disk space usage, and that's just not a problem any more. Down with shared libraries and dependency hell, I say! ;)
And if the shortener disappears, the content it is 301'd to likely will disappear, too.
Sql is designed exactly for CRUD. Almost by definition there's no better way to do CRUD than sql. And about CRUD - most software should rightly be CRUD, because CRUD represents the highest level of abstraction in programming that you can get (below natural language interface of course). Sql CRUD abstracts away all hardware and software layers of the computer (the only hardware/software efficiency decision you have to make is where to declare indexes).
When did anyone bring up inventors? It would be nice if they had rights, under the current system there is no inventor protection. Any idiot who can imagine something can get a patent, and then turn around and sue the hard working engineer who puts together a practical product.
Any whether they're going to be using the rel="shorturl", rev="canonical" or some other standard?
Perhaps they don't have enough of an incentive to make it bullet proof. That or they aren't given enough time to do so. Let's admit it, we all make mistakes, and if you aren't given enough time to analyze your code, security issues might very well make it into production.
Honestly, if I owned a store I really wouldn't care if you felt like wearing a different disguise every day as long as you were buying stuff.
My kids have all grown up with linux and we homeschool. Their only windows experience has been seeing me run a VM occasionally. My wife is a converted linux user as well. She can't stand windows the few times she's had it on a laptop. I always got pestered until I installed ubuntu on it.

I sometimes wonder about all the Geeks and hackers out there running Linux/BSD whatever and their kids/wives. Is there a waiting boom of non-windows educated kids about to break on the scene?
ah. seems like they're going the youtu.be and amzn.com route of just modifying the arguments on existing urls.
Late to the party, but...
Just found out about the funding cycle so, here goes...
What's the Capital of Turkey? (Hint: Don't Bother Checking Google Maps)
55 Open Source Apps Transforming Education