skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does anyone else think this is less about the patents and more about a boardroom beef between Jobs and Eric Schmidt?

My gut feeling is this is a private argument between two CEOs that has spiraled into the public eye.
I totally agree. I was trying to discern whether or not the author of the original post on jsomers.net was on to something, but it's more a case (it turns out) of a solution looking for a problem. Using the phrase "it turns out" isn't an indicator an author is intentionally trying to "slip one past" the reader in a dishonest way. As with anything a reader has ultimate responsibility of evaluating the credibility of the author and claim - no matter how it's phrased. Let's look at the first PG example: "...I thought one day I’d do some angel investing. Seven years later I still hadn’t started. I put it off because it seemed mysterious and complicated. It turns out to be easier than I expected, and also more interesting." Here the claim is that angel investing, rather than being mysterious and complicated, is easier than the author expected. Well, in this case the author can certainly qualify as a credible expert on the subject, so we can recognize his ability to make that claim no matter what the phrasing. For this particular example, it's even harder to challenge the author's assertion because the claim is relative to his beliefs.

As a side note, I wonder where the colloquialism "it turns out" stems from. My first guess was of the turns of laundry emptying out the pockets of clothing, but I think that's too modern a possibility. I think something more likely might be taking the turns of roads and ending up at a particular destination.
Might be possible with shadow-puppetry... I'll work on it this weekend and publish the RFC on Monday.
Also interesting how Miami33139 uses Ubuntu.
Django Advent, Day 18: Syndication (Rob Hudson)
Doesn't Apple know that one cannot proceed by clinging on the patents and legal protections alone.

They're doing no such thing. They're trying to slow others so that they can stay ahead.

For the longest time I refused to buy new smartphones because I don't agree with Apple's iPhone lockdown (If I buy a product, it's mine. Nowhere does it say I'm leasing an iPhone, Apple should have no say about what I do with it.) and because multi-touch was a make-or-break feature.

By keeping manufacturers afraid of implementing multi-touch Apple keeps consumers like me from going to them because they seem behind on the times.
Then these articles would be flagged as commercials or violating copyright - it's a separate issue.
I realize I have a proof by exhaustion on my hands, so I guess you're right. I wouldn't worry about it too much, my original post will get downvoted into oblivion as soon as the weston price guys wake up.
that's true, but Not just keep repeating the same shit in slightly different forms, but go somewhere else and do something new gave me slightly higher expectations, all the same.
Interesting as Apple clearly copied the look and feel of Wil's application Delicious Library of use in thier iBook store application. Granted I doubt Wil holds a patent on that interface, but it does seem a bit hypocritical.
For sure. I can think of no better traffic for a site's google adsense revenues than the highly tech savvy and ad-wary HN crowd...

To reiterate my point, making sandwiches and cleaning bathrooms is something most hackers do regularly. Lifting weights is not. A better analogy would be a "learning calligraphy for hackers" article that explained how learning calligraphy can be a benefit to hackers and how, given hacker's programming knowledge, one should go about it.
? I've never met a hacker who regularly cleaned a bathroom.
I can't believe this is on HN. Leave this stuff to Yahoo or one of the other pop-news aggregates. Come on Paul, a little more filtering please.
You're clearly missing the point. You don't have to look/act like a geeky girl just to be in CS. What the author looks like makes no difference.
You can't really patent an interface. An interface can be part of a patent, but not a patent by itself.
HTTPS. Firewall that prevents outside network access to servers with HIPPA data. Encryption of data in the db (eg, don't store plaintext social security numbers in a table). All backups are encrypted. Files with PII (patient identifying information) are encrypted. Data access strictly limited to small set of people.

Now that I've blown a bunch of stuff at you, I'll say that my experience is that most of HIPPA (and IRB study stuff, even stricter) is about defining and implementing a coherent policy to minimize risk. It is a colossal pain - where I work, we do medical research and integrate with actual clinical data collected from the hospital. It's not uncommon to find clinical staff keeping excel or word docs full of patient data on non-secured systems. Minimize the places where you get data from people so that you don't have to be accountable for those things - in other words, try not to have people emailing you excel sheets in the clear. We're putting https web apps in front of people to load data that way (parsing files on the fly) and not storing the files at all - during the parsing, we'll put the data into our backend and encrypt that data in our Oracle db. We're wrangling with key management right now - we want to load data automatically, but to not store keys in the db or on the OS in a way that would be easily accessed if the db server was literally loaded onto a truck and taken away.

I'm not a MySQL experienced person, but I'm sure it probably has something similar. You're right to be cautious - I've seen estimates that notifying people when data is leaked and handling the cleanup (providing credit monitoring, etc) is huge, $3K to $5K per client.
Thanks for the Extra Video and read.
The whole book is informative and very depressing at the same time. However, I think we need to face reality and stop denying the wrongness of today's meat processing practices (at least those of factory farming).

As Paul McCartney puts it: "If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian."
No, he's making fun of Kanye's response to Colbert's attempt to have his Christmas album beat Kanye's music on iTunes.

http://www.rollingstone.com/blogs/smokingsection/2008/12/ste...
I think Eminem covers a lot of his own, personal issues. Eminem does hooks well too...
Since this is HN I should point out a lack of any alt tag or longdesc. Stevie Wonder will not be reading this.
You might want to look into data blinding, stronger/stricter permissions, and even audit tables (if data changes, insert a duplicate of the row into a separate audit table).

However as long as you have it internally set up (not on the Internet) and make encrypted backups (so stolen backups are worthless) your risk will be much less.
Hmm, maybe I wasn't clear: I'm talking about marketing, too.

For example, in 2006 (when I was getting started with my business), the Internet did not have a really good answer to the question "What are the Dolch sight words for 2nd graders?"

(For those in the room who are not English teachers: Edward Dolch wrote an enormously influential article about English pedagogy back in the day, in which he listed -- a wee bit arbitrarily, imho, but you didn't hear that from me -- the words a beginning reader needs to know, broken down by grade level. English teachers, who are creatures of habit, know they need to teach the Dolch sight words, but they don't necessarily remember the 46 ones for second graders off the top of their head.)

Seeing as how I knew the Dolch sight words and their importance to English teachers, I made a web page about them. And then described an activity for teaching them. Most people here can probably guess the general outline of that activity.

Anyhow, Google soon sent me a trickle of people who were by definition interested in better ways to teach elementary reading skills. That was a win/win for them and for me. (I just checked in Google Analytics: that trickle has been 50k visitors over the years. Not terrible for two hours of work that I haven't really needed to touch since 2006. Bits don't rot.)
This could be less to do with Apple asserting its rights and more to do with protection. Don't forget Nokia is if I remember correctly suing them for patent infringement with Apple counter suing so it could just be for protective purposes as well as legal maneuvering. I guess we'll see where things end up in a couple of years down the line. I doubt this would be cleared up quickly.
Small Things You May Not Know About Javascript
Apple has always been vigorous about protecting its intellectual property. Its UI innovations are what keeps it ahead of the pack and not just another generic hardware manufacturer.

The loss of Apple v. Microsoft only means that they cannot protect UI elements under the copyright regime. Which leaves patents and trying to invoke UI elements as trademark/trade dress.
Absolutely - the dude's not the best rapper, but he's easily the best lyricist of this generation.
"Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" (2005) by
John P. A. Ioannidis

http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal...
You can register ("patent") a design.
Best explanation I've heard so far: NoSQL = "Not Only SQL" Pick the right tool for the job.
indeed

How could you be so Dr. Evil

You're bringing out a side of me that I don't know

I decided we weren't gonna speak so why we up 3 a.m. on the phone

Why does she be so mad at me for, homie I don't know she's hot and cold

I won't stop, won't mess my groove up cause I already know how this thing goes,

You run and tell your friends that you're leavin' me

They say that they don't see what you see in me

You wait a couple months then you gon' see,

You'll never find nobody better than me

It's pure poetry. Never matched or surpassed. He's truly the Bob Dylan of our times.
Spanish police arrest masterminds of 'massive' botnet
Your general point is extremely important and deserves to be underlined in every patent discussion: summaries and abstracts are irrelevant. The patent is the claims.

However, in this case, some of these patents are still quite broad. Almost offensively so.
How about jumbo franks? I can't see a 4 yr old could swallow without chewing first, at which point, it is chewed into smaller bits and thus no choking.

Alternately, an accordion-like zig-zag groove lengthwise (like a line of ketchup/mustard) could ensure a piece that was lodged was not wider than each groove, and thus would be unstable enough to not block the airway.
Design patents are totally different than regular patents though. I have never heard of anyone getting sued because of a design patent.
I feel like this is another attempt of humans to avoid natural selection.
In the humanities it is a bit harder than medicine because you can't even do controlled experiments in most situations, and observational statistics is complicated.
I don't see an obvious way to make this much better than existing industrial touchscreen.

There's some nice demo/sales potential, in that it looks a faux iPad. If it's nice close up, then that is one advantage.

Also, there are plenty of touchscreen kits that don't require taking things apart and figuring out your own operating system.

Part of the fun!

In any case, if entire systems this capable are end-consumer commodity items for only $129 now, that fact alone is interesting. It's only a matter of time before someone has a platform at this price point capable of supporting a browser-centric system. For $129, I think a lot of DIY folks would be willing to forgo multitouch and be tethered by a thin power cord while on the couch.
Microsoft Exec Suggests Internet Tax To Pay For 'Computer Health Care' Program
Also, no one uses Ogg.
They also made a fun puzzle/teaser when they rolled out the first Portal game:

http://www.facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=199757
The first portion of the article entirely focuses on multiple testing. If you don't perform alpha spending or Bonferroni-type correction despite looking multiple times at your data, you will - of course! - find spurious associations. This is simply bad science and/or lazy refereeing on the part of the journals.

In human genetics we have Mark Daly, David Altshuler, and Eric Lander to thank for doing the thoughtful theoretical work beforehand to identify the alpha for identifying genomewide significance for any study: 5E-8. To my knowledge, GWAS results are much less commonly found to be invalid in a later study.

The message is this: everyone knows at least one method of correction for multiple testing, and virtually everyone knows that they should be doing this. No journal should publish papers that merely show nominal, instead of corrected, P values.
Black Wood Lingerie Chest: We Appreciate Comfort
While each of these robots are far behind the capabilities of a human instructor, they showcase the potential for advanced automation in education. Give these guys some time, and you could see robot teachers become a staple of the classroom.

All you need to know from this lecture along with a nice metal-flake paint job and some tinted glass.
This is what I was afraid of. The company I work for has never had to handle this sort of data before, and were VERY close to just dropping all the client info into a standard, non-encrypted database.

Thanks for your insight. I have a feeling we may hand this project off to someone that is experienced with HIPAA development so nobody gets screwed.
Rob's been a hero of mine for a long time, but I think what sets him apart is his eagerness to test, analyze, and iterate on news and media concepts, something sadly lacking throughout much of the industry but a familiar formula around here.

His play-by-play through a day at the Vegas Sun is a great example.
Bounce rates are also ridiculously sensitive to traffic source. You can do things which are screamingly net-beneficial for the business and impact bounce rates in a negative or counter intuitive manner.

If your company blog gets picked up on Reddit or CNN, your bounce rate just went through the roof.

If your ongoing SEO triples the number of visitors you get from Google every month and double revenues, you probably now rank for at least a few phrases which you are not a good fit for, causing bounces

If you make changes to your site's design which clearly suggest to people that this is not the Facebook login they are looking for, your bounce rate will increase as your blood pressure decreases.

All of the above suggests ditching bounce rates and concentrating on metrics which actually matter to the business. Conversions and revenues are two excellent choices -- most of the scenarios where one says "Our revenues are up by 100%... DANG IT ALL" are fairly contrived. The only reason bounce rate persists is because it is very easy to measure without getting buy-in from anyone else in the organization -- sort of like hits.

I think we've successfully embarrassed anyone who would quote hits as a meaningful metric out of the industry. Bounce rate should probably be next. (Full disclosure: at least one guy who knows what he is doing about metrics -- Avinash Kaushik -- disagrees with me violently on this one.)
I was reading through the HIPAA guidelines and it mentioned something about auditing almost everything that happens on the system. Is that standard practice when doing HIPAA development?
I personally can't see why any article should be deleted unless it's obviously erroneous, its not like they're short of disk space. Obscure articles will likely remain as such, due to lack of references to them; deletion seems rather draconian.

As an aside I wonder if Wikipedia will ever be forked due to this apparent increasing bureaucracy.
The "real hack" here is organizing the event in the first place. I can attest as an "also introvert" that I've gotten a lot of mileage out of, say, hosting a conference rather than trying to attend them. I have guesses as to why this is (control of the environment, the role as gatekeeper, having talked with folks ahead of time), but I'd suggest trying something similar if you're an introvert and you need to network.
But if one of the purported values of many NoSQL technologies is their benefit to scalability, and you are using this tech in your application because the app needs to scale, then does it make sense to deploy this ultra-scalable app on shared web hosting (regardless of whether they support NoSQL tech)?
The Cloud is a Lie
> How many Googles are there?

There's tens of thousands of alternative search engines out there, see this for a sample from '07:

http://www.altsearchengines.com/2007/10/29/the-top-10-list-o...

Most of them fail, but there's a lot of people trying to solve Big Data problems on a shoe string budget. That's part of the disconnect, us NoSQL folks are excited by having cheap solutions to problems we wouldn't be able to afford to tackle otherwise, whilst SQL folks are are shaking their heads at the mess we'll have to clean up if our prototypes do become successful.
Which is just as well (I hope you agree) - if people care enough about those cartoon characters, however obscure, let them have a wikipedia entry.
I can't help but feel the ffmpeg guys, despite providing a great service to the world, have got a real chip on their shoulder when it comes to all things Ogg and Xiph.

Does he think the ranty tone really helps get his message across? At least it's all written down in one place instead of sniped from the comments every time it could be vaguely thought relevant.

See this recent argument (between DonDiego and Monty) in the comment section of a blog about Google and VP8, which I assume prompted this article:

http://blog.gingertech.net/2010/02/20/googles-challenges-of-...
The real question is, does lying help lead one into positions of power? Or, as the study more strongly suggests, does power encourage lying?
Usually "it turns out that x" = x + an indication of surprise that x, or that work was required to determine that x. So you couldn't quite replace it with x without losing meaning.
Android app brings in $13K a month
When was the last time Apple offensively sued for IP?
In other words, leave it to the lawyers.

Perhaps I really shouldn't discuss patents, intellectual property law, or lawsuits here. Even if I read the whole thing, I'm not a lawyer and I don't understand the specialized language being used. I don't know the specifics of the law in different jurisdictions. I really shouldn't have said anything.

What it amounts to is this: The text of an article is insufficient information for discussion, you need expertise to comment on it.

Now that I put it that way, why are any of these articles discussed here on HN? Who is actually qualified to come to conclusions or espouse an opinion about economics, politics, or law? Why do we tolerate discussion about intellectual property law, anti-terrorism laws, or economics by unqualified persons?

It's quite disturbing how little any of us know about things that affect our livelihood.
Comfortable Life Women | Home Improvement & Health Care
Nominate Your Top Start-Up Companies Outside Silicon Valley
I assumed this is licensed from Shipley or they had Shipley do it for them. Apple is good at covert acquisitions and partnerships.

Edit - Looks like i'm wrong. (easier to edit than respond to 4 other posts)
It's also because as the host you have both a large built-in boost to your social status and a reason to talk to anyone.
Yeah, just a bunch of bull.
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

What is creativity? Where does it come from?
Well said! Thanks for the comments!
Perhaps you can easily wrap your head around the idea of killing 10 billion living creatures a year. I have a really hard time even imagining we're capable of being that efficient at killing. It's almost all from factory farming which you agreed in an earlier comment is "terrible". Maybe you wouldn't go so far as to say it's evil. I will.

Everyday, science learns that humans aren't all that special in our capacity to feel pain, plan for the future, find enjoyment out of life, care for our offspring, etc. This is one of those issues where eventually we will all be horrified at what we allowed to happen.

But any time that we make a judgement call that some being's suffering and untimely death is okay because it's lesser than us, that says more about us than it does about those beings. As a species, we've certainly been wrong about these things before.
Sometimes I do this when I tell people that I don't watch TV. I really don't watch much TV, but I rarely say so without feeling a little smug, and thus a little asinine.
Apple's patent's are software patents which we all as software people know should never exist.

Nokia's patents are hardware patents, actual inventions related to wireless.

In other words, a light bulb is genuinely patentable but some software code which does (for example only) if(switch=on)light=true shouldn't be patentable and much less enforceable.
Most medical studies have a small sample size because it is difficult and often prohibitively expensive to do studies with large numbers of subjects. Small sample size increases the likelihood of spurious results.

The other problem is that mainstream journalism does an abyssmal job of reporting science. How many times have your read a newspaper article or seen a segment on the evening news that tells you that X is good for your health or X is bad for your health as if it was an absolute truth, a law of nature on par with V=IR or F=ma? Then, out of curiosity, you look up the actual journal article published by the scientists and find their claims to be considerably more modest.
That's probably true of Brazil, but not of Argentina and Uruguay which never had any rainforests to start with :) (and Argentina is HUGE).
NoSQL is primarily a reaction to the ubiquitousness of relational DBs. It's providing another tool aside from a hammer.
Thanks, I use the Greasemonkey script but forgot about this. This works well enough (for now) although I'd really prefer an RSS feed that would push the articles to me.
There's a good article on stats.org that examines the statistics and concludes that this whole thing, as with many public health stories, is overblown:
http://stats.org/stories/2010/choking_hot_dog_feb23_10.html

The key finding:
"it is reasonable to assume, based on this data, that the number of children who die from choking on hot dogs is somewhere between 1.5 and 5 per year in the United States. The risk is overwhelmingly to children aged three and under, based on the natural tendency of infants to put stuff in their mouths. While each death is a terrible tragedy, it is not clear that this is something that this amounts to a “significant and unacceptable choking hazard” to the public warranting recall procedures, product changes and more warnings than already exist.
The problem with the American Academy of Pediatrics paper is that it uses percentages without the context of frequency, so that you end up comparing percentage fatalities for widely different time periods without any indication of the actual number of deaths."
inmygarage and i know a couple of entrepreneurial types... :P
That cost probably includes some externalities of eating something detrimental to the environment and your health. It sounds smart to me.