skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm the author... and yes, the 'implication' is exactly what I'm saying. As I said in the post, you can argue that Google would have published in a world without software patents, but the purpose of patents is to incentivize publication where otherwise advances would remain secret, and that's the sequence that we saw. In that sense, we're seeing exactly what the patent system envisages.

Your point of view seems to be that companies would publish their secret sauce freely without IP protection, for the warm fuzzies / indirect benefits that would result. You're free to believe that, but the patent system is based around the idea that corporations don't behave so altruistically - that people with billion dollar ideas don't want to give them away.
I like the “That moron Bush” quote when he can't remember anything but the response to who the president is.
Fake Steve on Yelp's Alleged Extortion (and Zynga)
So you've learned about procrastination, and K.I.S.S.? ;)
Mybe your right. To me intelligence is how one processes information, definitely not how she cracks on problems (this is "smartness"). True intelligence in my view is when one pays attention to what the world tells her and reacts accordingly. It can finally lead to wisdom, probably the absolute intelligence.
Regarding a return of Linda, I couldn't help but note similar themes when first learning about Amazon's Dynamo and later, the Apache Cassandra Project. I'm not saying that there's a perfect match, but when one's imagination has academic roots in the era of Linda, it was easy to see a connection through that lens.

Anyone else see the potential there?

At the very least, it influences how I might use something like Cassandra (or dbm files for that matter), and I've been planting the meme for others to approach their designs that way too.
I think a partial solution to this is to require some small portion of health care costs to be covered by the patient. Would she have spent 5% of $40,000 if he was probably going to die overnight? If if she could afford it she probably wouldn't have. What about the previous two times when there was more hope? Probably so.

Alternatively, she paid higher premiums under the assumption that some extreme end of life dollars would be nearly wasted by some policy members, but that's okay because that's what they chose to pay for so that they would never have to make a cost benefit analysis in their own care. I don't think she needs to wring her hands about it, that's what she bought.
It's a bit disingenuous to say "Good ideas are meant to spread." They're not really meant to do anything, in the same way that the common saying "information wants to be free" is nonsense.

It seems hand-wavy to say "good ideas are meant to spread" without a more in-depth discussion of copyright/trademark law. The information you present is hypothetical and anecdotal. Anthropomorphizing "ideas" is not a substitute for real data and constructive discussion.
What I was saying is that text-links-ads.com don't nofollow their links. They're paid/traded links which are not nofollowed.
TPS led to Lean thinking in general (http://www.lean.org/whatslean/principles.cfm) and the principles can be applied to manufacturing as well as it can product development or indeed software.

I would agree that the implementation as applied to manufacturing is poorly suited to one-off projects, but would consider work in the fields of product dev and software (sometimes called Kanban) to be highly appropriate.

In the case of Kanban there are those that would argue that incremental and iterative approaches are not well suited to large scale projects, though I think that this due these processes still be relatively new to organisations capable of pulling off huge projects, rather than a deficiency in the methodology itself.
HN is an open prairie where conspiracy theories roam wild, free and careless.

People here don't respect science and think they're smarter than they really are.
The Supremes agreed 9-0 in Heller that it's an individual right; I'm reasonably satisfied that the individual vs. collective right issue is settled.

ADDED: Since the "collective right" interpretation was of 20th Century manufacture, the outcome was not surprising.
From 2003 until a few months ago, I hosted my website off of a Pentium 2 in my apartment. Behind slow DSL, no less.

Once my blog posts started reaching hacker news I thought "Oh, I'll just move site out of the apartment and into the cloud!" and bought an account at prgmr.com (which I highly recommend, by the way).

However, I serve WordPress via Apache on a 256 MB VM, which clearly thrashes under load.

Tonight I will purchase an upgrade to 512 MB of RAM and play with nginx.

I'm sorry for the inconvenience.

p.s. I do have WP-Supercache enabled and a PHP bytecode cache. I _could_ just host at wordpress.com, but I might as well learn nginx while I'm at it...
Are there anyone else who are concerned with the lack of tail call optimization in Clojure?
Indeed, this is another benefit, or, rather, a host of benefits, to using cheap, commodity parts.

This may not be the case at a startup outside of a technology hub and is almost certainly not the case where nobody in the company is competent with hardware[1].

Otherwise, a failure isn't just easy to correct but cheap, too. It's so cheap that keeping cold spares around is a no-brainer, unlike with the "gold-plated"[2] products.

The other danger is that the "engineer" who comes out to hand-deliver and install the replacement part gets it wrong. If he pulls the working, rather than failed, part[3], there's not much consequence for him personally or the vendor, unlike with startup founders or even staff.

In fact, even engineering it with enough hot spares to ride out its useful life. 4% AFR for your 88 disks? Just add 8 hot spares. Worried about cables or the controller card? Double up. Both together raises a $9k 1 gigaBYTE/second (4GB/s peak) array to a whopping $10k.

Even just doubling everything is likely to cost far less than a year of tarnished-bronze support from a big vendor.

[1] By which I mean assembling discrete consumer parts, not soldering or anything lower level.

[2] Personally, I prefer to refer to "enterprise" targeted pricing as "hookers and blow," but it is, admittedly, without a catchy adjective.

[3] Yes, I've had this happen. I've also watched a colleague pull the wrong drive out of an array, against his better judgment, at the insistence of the vendor's phone support.
No offence, but am I supposed to expect a blog post on the Company blog about working with the founder to be unbiased?

Given that and the reverential tone, I am inclined to discount it.

Bonus exercise: Replace "Zuck" with "Chuck Norris" in the entire post and note how it doesn't seem any less ridiculous :)
I love Ruby. It's the first language that's made me happy as a programmer. I don't like special characters, and I can tolerate ruby's occasional =>, |e| and {}, and I tend to avoid the other ones. For the same reason, I like Python.

Languages that introduce characters for the sake of making a compiler happy make me, personally, unhappy. I have a really hard time being comfortable with (){}; all over the place. And it's taken me years to realize why - it slows me down. I don't see very well, and those little things cause me sometimes hours of pain.

So I'm a bit of a language snob. The more clean the syntax, the more I'm going to be drawn to it, and the more I'm gonna be productive in it.

In fact, it's why I like SASS more than LESS (for CSS).

So I guess I'm saying Ruby vs Python? Exactly. Meh. Ruby over Perl or C#? Any day of the week.
Thanks for letting me know. I run them on a site (TLA gives me $100/mo) which ranks #1 for a number of key-phrases. If I drop down the rankings a bit, I might need to ditch TLA.
>> "I think a partial solution to this is to require some small portion of health care costs to be covered by the patient."

What the hell??? Health care should be a right. Something you don't have to ever worry about. If my kid is lying in hospital sick, I'm not going to make a decision based on money, because I'd always say "Yes take all my money", and that puts me in a very vulnerable position indeed. One that could be exploited by evil companies if given the chance.

Health should always be far far far more important than money, but to prevent evil companies making a ton of money out of desperate people, it should be provided by the government.

Why is there such a disconnect in America between socialized war mongering, and socialized health care?
Still doesn't work for me. Are we overloading it?..
clearly change is a big part of the facebook environment, and I guess we can credit Zuck fostering that.

The question I have is, seeing as most users don't come to the computer with fresh-eyes every day, can too much change eventually end up hurting the company.

They clearly do change extraordinarily quickly, and so far it has worked well for them, but is it just a matter of time before they go too far.
The most recent redisign, I don't think added any benefit to the site, I don't think it looks as good, and I don't see where there was an improvement in functionality.
Would she have spent 5% of $40,000 if he was probably going to die overnight?

There are unintended consequences, of course. If a patient had invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in care that ultimately failed, the incentive for his family to sue for malpractice is much greater. This raises the price of malpractice insurance, which makes medical care more expensive for people that aren't at the end of their life; people with routine problems that are easily treatable.

Also, you could agree to pay and just not pay. If I was going to die in an hour, and someone asked, "will you pay us a million dollars to use a new treatment", I would easily answer yes. I won't be needing the money if I die, and if I live, I can just change my name and not pay it. When you're broke, there are ways out. When you're dead, you're dead. That's it. Forever.
I have used them before for customer sites, it works ok but is really a temporary thing until you get that customer to rank better on keywords that they want and increase the pagerank through normal methods. As a temporary shortcut text-link-ads has worked out ok for me. They were at one point penalized but they changed their system around so that won't easily happen again.
ice cold alert.

what was gained by keeping him alive, in a bed, not creating value, for 400k? the family suffered with him while he died.

let him die, grieve, get on with your lives.

and save the rest of us the 400k.
The "disclosure" argument would hold more water if people actually read software patents, or went out of their way to license patents from other companies. But it seems to me that the vast majority of software patent cases are ones where the infringing company has either come up with the invention independently or imitated the external behavior of something else. In which case, the disclosure aspect of software patents is practically worthless.

The article argues that we wouldn't know how Google works without patents, but the truth is that those Google patents alone don't get you Google performance -- most of their system is protected not by patents but trade secrets. And this has not stopped Yahoo, Bing, or others from coming up with viable search engines.
Its not about any particular technology, per se. It was cheap to die in 1600 no matter what killed you simply because there was very little that could be done.

Each year we add more and more expensive interventions from ECMO machines to artificial hearts. Put this together with the "if it can be done, it should be done, damn the cost" attitude we've trained ourselves to expect and we could find ourselves in for a severe reality check.

Medical technology seems strangely resistant to Moore's law (witness the price of a CT scan over time), but even if it weren't, the improvements in individual areas might not be enough to offset the growth of intervention technology in general.
The drawback, though, is that you can only use this to generate HTML quickly the first time you write it. Changing the code once it's generated is just as painful as it was when you were working with just HTML. This kind of write-only coding is like throwing away your source after every build.
I would argue with the assertion that he doesn't look at other products when evaluating Facebook. Its clear they've been copying from Twitter and FriendFeed for years, so I don't know where the Boz is getting that from.
"American exceptionalism". We are too good to get free stuff that is good for us, and we are too good to not impose our views on the rest of the world. I don't think this, of course, but that's why I am not elected to a public office.

Relevant painting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Progress_of_America,_by_Do...
One sentence that caught my attention was "He doesn't care what he said yesterday, even if he was presented with the same product."
The primary problem with your argument is that (hypothetically) there were not shaved ice scoops (double the size) similar to the ice cream scoop you own previous to the invention you cite.

I don't understand what you're saying.

Microsoft Surface, Jeff Han's touchscreen

Both of these use completely different technology that does not scale down to phone sizes--they're notable because they scale up so well and can sense effectively any number of points, and can sense objects, not because multi-touch was new. FingerWorks, for instance, predates both, and a dozen things predate FingerWorks. See: http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html

There is no one single technology called "multi-touch" and nobody with any sense is claiming that Apple has a patent on the concept as a whole. While they do hold patents on their touch technology (via FingerWorks), those aren't the patents Apple is suing HTC over. The whole angle is a red herring.
While this is very cool for producing HTML, I still like HAML and StaticMatic better because it's reproducible. The Zen Coding plugin and this both look like they are just shortcuts, whereas HAML sticks around and gets expanded when I compile.

#sidebar.grid_4 => <div id="sidebar" class="grid_4></div>

And I don't lose that. I have no problem writing HTML with the shortcuts I already have - it's maintaining what's there that's the real pain, at least for me.
Your Military Science Fiction Isn't Really Military Science Fiction
The strength of Steam lies with the fact that Valve has created a service that people want to connect (and authenticate) with, and tying all your games together makes it a real loss if your account is banned.

Obviously online games are hard to crack on Steam (it was developed for Counterstrike). However, single-player games are as easy to crack on Steam as any other DRM system. All you need is a dummy account and a crack not to have to authenticate online.
Thanks for sharing! I think it's generally a good message. I think there's something to be said about humility as well. I've seen very many intelligent people who are arrogant and will put down great ideas. In fact, I've some very intelligent people put down my ideas and then later implement them as their own.

But ultimately, you're right. It's about not being complacent.

And let's be clear. Not everyone wants to be the CEO of a company. Maybe you want to be the best researcher in field X. I've seen people who are great at X and belittle other work that could potentially teach them something. One can see this a lot in academia, for example. It's ridiculous.
They did pay a small portion... between 3% and 4%

"The entire medical bill for seven years, in fact, was steeply discounted. The $618,616 became $254,176 when the insurers paid their share and imposed their discounts. Of that, Terence and I were responsible for $9,468 -- less than 4 percent."
Well, then it'd probably suck to work for him. Is that supposed to be a hidden message...
Twitter Follow-Back Decision Flowchart
Anybody have good advice for a first year university student who slept through most of high-school, got good grades, and then failed his first calculus exam because he was reading "Practical common lisp", instead of studying? How do i learn to study if i find the subject boring? How do i get disciplined? I know a lot of you have been here, how did you handle it?
I am beginning to wonder if the guy who wrote the post put some of this stuff in intentionally.
That's unlikely to happen. If nanotech and anti-aging succeed, they'll push back the costs. If they don't, there's going to be a lot of scaling back on things that don't work or aren't proven.
That was kind of tangential point to the article, and it was merely inspiration for the name, but I'll ask Dusty for the citation.

This was years ago, so who knows.

[Update: he says he thinks it was on the D mailing list years ago, and was probably related to the fact that every source file in a nontrivial C program includes dozens or hundreds of headers, especially with a naive compiler.]

[Update 2: TinyCC http://bellard.org/tcc/ compiles at 30 MB/s. It's not hard to imagine a dual-core CPU on a conventional drive failing to feed the compiler enough source to be CPU-bound.]
+1 for douchewieners.
Will you be this cold when you are dying? What about when your wife and kids are dying?

Maybe I am just a hopeless optimist, but personally, if my wife/kid is dying, I am probably not going to say "BAI!1!", rip the cord out of the electrical outlet, and grin as I watch his/her eyes close for the last time. Ever. Instead, I am going to spend a lot of money to hopefully avoid ever seeing that. Because while you can always make more money, we can't clone people yet.
This is a particularly valueless comparative assessment of some programming languages, with a focus on Clojure. I'm surprised that it was posted here, and more surprised that it's getting up-voted. But then, people don't really want hard comparisons of the tools they use. Instead, they want warm fuzzy emotional validation that reinforces the time commitments they make to learning those tools.

This comment doesn't cite any firsthand experience, doesn't cite even any secondhand experience, and makes frequent generalizations and assumptions about where, how, and why respective languages are designed and used. It also makes the all-too-frequently-made, blithe, and baseless assumption that languages are necessarily in competition, or that if they are in competition, that competition is zero-sum. This is a bar conversation in comment form. It's hand-waving.

Look: comparing programming languages is hard. You can't do it in a blog comment. You can't really even do it in a blog post. Researchers have a hard time doing it in lengthy academic papers. Hardly anyone has attempted to do it in book form.

Don't think that someone summarizing the bullet points from the feature lists of two languages and then extrapolating them out over their particular view of the industry is anything other than opinion. If that opinion validates your choice of language, great; you'll sleep better tonight. But this is just talk. Experience and metrics are what counts.
Similar protection schemes existed with old dongle protected programs as well. Some were made nearly uncrackable because of how many checks were littered throughout the app. Most crackers wouldn't bother with patching every single location within the application and gave up on it.
DIY Flying Hovercraft
It's not really about defensiveness (which, no doubt, sounds defensive) -- it's about philosophy. If I were a delicate flower, I wouldn't be able to bear posting my own articles on HN.

Spreading my philosophy, on the other hand, is something I find worth doing. Also, it made me chuckle. ;)
I don't understand how this commenting
system works
lol - thanks, fixed.

But this illustrates, of course, one of the greatest (and most dangerous?) qualities of digital -- trivial updates / iterations.
Why do startup incubators fail?
Excellent discussion here with participation from people from across the world who are involved with incubators, including some who run them.
I believe that's what http://www.kachingle.com/ is trying to do.
Were you using them as a publisher (hosting ads) or as an advertiser (trying to get traffic from them)?

FWIW, I am using them as a publisher.
Contest: Design buttons for “I disagree but I recommend”
Google Wave now has email notifications
What if a new technology had come online in 2006 that would have given him 20 or 30 years?
http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...
this one works for me
The 17 months he lived could have taken him 17 months closer to a breakthrough cure - holding on to hope is often times what people attribute this insane struggle to, and I dont blame them.
The author brings up a very good point, particularly in this day and age 'the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed'.

However, the focus of all the discussion surrounding this issue is clearly on guns. The citizens of the US (I'm Canadian), I suspect don't provide the same right to those who would like to own a ballistic missile, bomb, etc. Though the arguments regarding the case for protection of liberties could probably be equally raised when talking about any sort of 'arms'.

Would changes to the Second Amendment have an effect on violence or crime in the US? I suspect not, as in Canada, registered weapons are rarely used in crimes, it is the unregistered ones that are the issues.
Therefore, why do Americans and particularly the media keep harping on the Amendement which along with being out of date, may not be the actual root of the issues?
Researchers find a side channel attack on RSA.....
Shopify from scratch
In general, large companies don't bring software patent lawsuits against competitors to prevent competition. Large companies bring software patent suits against competitors to win cross-licensing agreements; to get something their competitor has. (And counter-suits are typically about trying to block such a forced cross-licensing)

The exceptions to this process are notable as being exceptions.

So I'm not sure why everyone automatically assumes Apple has the 'evil'[1] motive for patent prosecution.

What I wonder, is whether the license HTC has to Nokia's GSM patents is transferable. That is: could Apple be forcing a cross-licensing agreement with HTC, to end-run Nokia's lawsuit against them?

[1] that is: suing to strangle competition. e.g. Amazon
Free speech is a right. When I speak freely, I don't diminish your ability to do so. Healthcare can never be a "right" in the same way because it is bounded by scarcity. There is some point at which when I consume more, it leaves less for everyone else.

We can decide to ration what we have fairly. (How to do this is a matter of great debate). I'd argue that facing this problem in a clear-eyed, rational manner is almost a rite of passage for civilization, but calling it a "right" clouds the issue considerably.
I am getting very close to writing a Firefox extension called "CommentBlock". If people want to comment on blog posts and newspaper articles, fine, but I don't want to see them. They just make me mad.
Thank you.

I still feel like my life was saved. :)

If you'd met me before, you would have seen what I meant. I was utterly miserable, in the way that you can only be when you are trapped by your own great success and therefore don't even think escape is a rational option. Plus I always believed I was too much of a lazy asshole to ever be able to work for myself, really.

Making my own thing was absolutely a life-saving event for me.
I hope not, or at least that they make things for us keyboard folks. I can type at ~120wpm, and while I don't always think that fast, I can't imagine communicate at a much slower pace..
why not? It's not like they take prior art into a account.