skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But people do read the papers, and I'd argue that the papers are only published because the patent has been filed. I'm willing to bet that 80% of the hackers here have read the MapReduce paper (and for anyone that hasn't, you should!), but I agree I'd be surprised if people have read the patent.

Independent invention is a problem, and that's why there's a non-obviousness test for patentability. Of course, that's a very tricky thing to implement in the real world. So what you're really arguing is a higher standard of non-obviousness; I hope you'll be submitting that proposal to the USPTO.

I'd actually argue that Google's performance _does_ come from MapReduce. The trade secrets (that we know of) are around their customized hardware and the weighting factors in their algorithm, but I'd argue that makes a relatively small difference compared to Google's big idea, which was figuring out how to harness together lots of cheap computers, rather than investing in making each computer more efficient (e.g. Altavista, whose original raison-d'etre was to demonstrate how the DEC Alpha computer was powerful enough to support searching the whole Internet of the day)
Worth doing just as a protest.
I've been and to a large extent am one of those in some cases and I can't imagine not using version control, or code sharing, or modularity. I also backup my code in several locations across thousands of miles of earth and ocean.

Look, "Founder only mode" is when the practices of these large corporations with lots of people depending on them are the most valuable, because everything depends on you. There aren't other people who can fill in and do your job. You have to be able to do it all. You can't skimp on any of the areas just because you're just you. Not if you expect anyone to depend on you, including yourself 6 months later when you have no idea what the code you wrote there does anymore.

And you don't want to have to repeat yourself all over the place so you modularize. That's how it's done at the big shops too. It's good practice.
Ugh, reading mainstream articles about cryptography is painful. I like how they claim a brute-force attack would take "hours". I guess you can measure the lifetime of the Unvierse in hours... technically...

Side-channel attacks are nice, but IMO, they are mostly good for breaking things like DRM. You cannot go to your bank's datacenter and measure the voltage the processor consumes while encrypting your transactions. You can, however, do that to your DVD player.

So while real cryptography is not broken, DRM is. Of course, we already knew that.
Ask HN: Why do I get a "Can't display that."
For the past few days, when I try to get to my saved links on HN, I get a webpage saying "Can't display that."
My own death doesn't scare or disturb me. It might happen suddenly tomorrow, or in 50 years, or in a million (if anti-aging succeeds). I'm sufficiently curious about what happens next not to be upset about the concept. (Although death is weird; I've never done it before.)

On the other hand, I'd fight for a child or a (healthy, not doomed to die soon) relative with everything I've got. Which is why it surprises the hell out of me that health insurance companies aren't getting the Joseph Stack treatment all over the place over rescissions and life caps.
One particular example doesn't make for a very compelling argument. The vast majority of software patents (probably above 99% of them) are A) never followed up with scientific papers, B) represent nothing that someone else trying to solve the same problem wouldn't come up with, and C) are written so incomprehensibly that no one could ever derive any intellectual value from reading them.

Throwing out counter-examples of "good" software patents doesn't really attack the thrust of the main argument put forward by the anti-software-patent people, which is that almost all software patents are total trash that should never be granted.

I think you can make one of foudarguments here. 1) You can dispute the assertion that almost all software patents granted should have failed the obviousness/novelty test and/or be invalidated by prior art. 2) You can argue that the patent system should be tightened up so that most patents aren't granted, but to still allow certain types of patents (encryption algorithms, whatever else) and then discuss how to classify what sort of patents really are useful. 3) You can admit that but argue that the good done by the "good" patents outweighs the evil done by the "bad" patents. 4) You can argue that you should ditch all software patents entirely because the harm caused by bad patents vastly outweighs the good done by good patents, and that it's too difficult to legally distinguish between the two, so on balance it's better to just disallow them

Again, keep in mind that copyright and trade secret law cover already cover the theft of the software itself, and that plenty of people online talk about what they do and how they do it without any sort of patent protection.

So I'm not sure which argument this article is trying to make (though it's obviously not #4): are you arguing that software patents aren't, on average, total garbage? That standards should be tightened up to allow only a limited subset of what's currently patentable, and that the Google patents fall under that umbrella? Or that the good done by these few patents somehow outweighs all the harm done by all the garbage patents and associated trolling?

It's totally valid to point out that not all patents are a joke, and that some good can come of them, but that in and of itself doesn't really address the real meat of the debate.
Obligatory emacs link: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ZenCoding
I'm reading The Gulag Archipelago now -- I'm around 530 pages in, so I just read the part about the common criminals beating up and robbing the political prisoners. It undoubtedly helped the thieves a lot that the political prisoners wouldn't stand up for each other, but if for some reason one did stand up to a criminal, his friends would take revenge later. The criminals were effectively united; the political prisoners could not have been more divided.

It's a heavy book, both in weight (1800 pages) and ideas, but everyone should read it.
Chat World - Blog
Some people are different. If I was that dude, I would have hoped my wife would have just pulled the plug and saved everyone the money.

Living in a hospital bed is not living.
Ways to Search Twitter for Marketing
Finally an effective way to end the patent troll:

You are using my patented method for patent trolling. I'm suing you!
quite - real_life++, and, yes, probably with a much lower poly-count.
No, I do not have any good advice to give you. I had the same problem, and never figured out the answer.

Instead, I was able to squeak by with C-minuses in all of the subjects I found horrendously dull, and make it up with A's in my senior and grad level computer science and psychology courses.

I graduated a month after I turned 21; I think my final GPA was 3.02/4.00. Microsoft hired me a few months later to work on Visual Studio. They never asked about my GPA. In fact, my first manager was a college dropout.

I hope you figure it out because I absolutely do not recommend this path, but it is workable.
Reading mainstream articles about X is painful.

Only enjoyable if you are almost totally ignorant about X. Works for all X. Tells you something about the target audience of the mainstream media.

How about a "Metajournalist" site? A Wikipedia-style site where we can collect all of these technical bloopers, listed by author?
I think people are missing the point of this article. The author isn't saying that people without math degrees should go out and try to be statisticians. What he's really saying is that anyone with the right mindset can do statistical analysis. I believe this to be 100% true. If you are in the type of position that looks at a lot of data, you will naturally develop an eye for trends and outliers. Then if you are curious enough, you might draft up some conclusions which you then bring to attention to others. They will say, so how does this compare to the population as a whole? So you go back and look through the numbers. Even if you don't have a background in math, you're lucky that you've got Google. You type in "how to handle outliers" or "how to analyze trends in data". You learn about the basics (ie normalization, standard deviation, means, percentages etc). Then you go back and look at your data again. It's a continual process of discovery and one that you can learn through application.

For the record, I really like FlowingData.com. There have been some awesome posts, particularly the one about creating a U.S County thematic map.
Yeah sorry, the choice of words wasn't correct. It's not a right to demand every treatment under the sun etc.

But I believe it is a right to have some level of basic healthcare provided by government. I simply couldn't live in a country without it :/

I guess the issue is that you can spin that as "Death panels" if you wish - the government/NHS/etc get to decide who gets treatment, and who doesn't. It's a great shame it's been spun that way though.
There are absolute and relative rights. Absolute rights are based on absolute ethical frameworks, while relative rights are constrained by the resources available.

For example, I don't have the absolute right to life, but only a relative one. No one can provide for that. In fact, I am guaranteed to die someday. I do have the absolute right not to be murdered (and to expect society to punish those who deprive that right).

People in a society have a relative right to food, shelther, and medical care. If the resources exist, they have a right to them. If they don't, then that "right" is meaningless. Every American has the right to adequate medical care without the life-destroying mess of individual medical billing (as opposed to the taxpayer-funded system that First World countries use) but not every American has the right to a liver transplant, because livers are scarce.
After reading so many patents in the past week, I've learned a few things such as: "the title is meaningless", and "patents are densely worded and difficult to comprehend for somebody not versed in legalese"

So, are there any patent lawyers in our midst who can attest to the meaning of this patent application? Is this actually what it appears to be?
How MySpace test with 1 Million concurrent users
He had the same idea as Twitter, some time before it launched. His version involved aggregating AOL Instant Messenger away messages--and that's the closest thing to Twitter, before Twitter.
It makes no difference what the meaning of the amendment is. None of the Bill of Rights actually amends the Constitution. There is no clause in the original document that gives Congress the authority to make any law regarding individual criminal acts occurring within a state.
I think I'd rather pay taxes on $100 than taxes on $50 if I were Ticketmaster.
You make that sound like such an easy and sure thing.
I cheated and just asked him. :-D

If you're interested, his response is here:

http://newlispfanclub.alh.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=...
If you know enough to take the logarithm of something, you will undoubtedly know what its doing to your errors as well.
You're fighting a battle you can't win. Ideas want to be anthropomorphized.
I'm arguing simply that Google's papers were IMHO the most influential Computer Science papers of the past decade, and they wouldn't necessarily have been published without patents. The patent system is designed to encourage exactly the sort of disclosure we saw here, in this particularly important case.

I chose this 'one particular example' because it's the inventions where the papers are published that are important; not the 'bad' patents which should never have been granted and where the USPTO overturns the patent on re-examination (as I suspect many bad patents, like the linked-list patent, would be.)

I like the idea of a standardized patent argument list! I'll take argument #3 please.
You might like http://stevenf.com/pages/shutup/
He fought cancer over the course of 7 years, and it sounds like his quality of life was reasonable for most of that time.

I think pretty much everyone would rather die than linger on in a hospital bed without hope. At a certain point, utility of future life becomes negative and returning to a positive state is not possible. The problem is that it's not so clear cut and obvious at the time that this is the case. A big part of this is that doctors often want to save the patient at all costs, and often deceive themselves as to the patient's prospects. So often even the patient has no idea how bad the situation is.
I'm really not "buying" anything. I just don't think they banned those apps on technical grounds. What the hell does that even mean - "private frameworks" ? Isn't this exactly the kind of thing that got Microsoft into trouble ? They are just abusing a market position if you ask me. And hiding behind all sort of most absurd excuses (when they bother to give some at all).
Reverse engineering? You know the code is open sourced, right?
Fault attacks on crypto are not new; but it's always interesting to see new variations. The world is not ending, but people who do crypto in hostile environments have another reason to be careful.
How MySpace Tested Their Live Site with 1 Million Concurrent Users
I'm sure we can find ways to view the US healthcare issue as "Hacker News," but please let me have some sanctuary.
My favorite are still the perpetual motion machine articles that seem to hit Reuters and AP on a regular basis:

"This black box, in Joe Shmoe's Nowheresville, Kentucky basement is going to solve all the world's energy problems. It's been powering his house for X months, and Joe says it can be adapted to power the whole world, while consuming absolutely nothing!"
You can also add:

-khtml-border-radius <- Konqueror

-o-border-radius <- Opera
Because you're still erecting a pay-wall, which carries all the same traffic problems as any other pay-wall.

And to the user who first sees the pay-wall, you're asking them to make a non-micro-transaction commitment. Maybe the page view only costs two cents, but they've got to create and charge some sort of account for, say, $10. So they never sees that "It's two cents!" pitch. Their eyes lock on that $10, they laugh/curse, and go get the content elsewhere.

Unless consumers are ready to spend all $10 that-visit (as at a GameWorks or similar) the buy-in on that sort of 'charged account' just doesn't happen.
Of course. By reading a blog post, I have no idea what the situation was truly like. I should have probably qualified my response with that.
You know, I studied math in school for the same reason. When I was in middle school taking geometry, I blurted out to my teacher, pft, I will never use this crap anyway. She pulled me aside and said, no, not this specifically, but as you grow it will help you develop your mind and your critical thinking. I took it to heart, and years later I am a math major.

I'm not especially bright. But I majored in math because I've always felt like the benefits of a math major are beyond the obvious. Like you stated, it gives you a framework for problem solving. More importantly, it forces you to reason your way through long solutions. It forces you to approach problems from different angles and also, in my opinion, increases the size of your buffer (?). In other words, you hold a lot of info in your head as you work through problems and that helps too. It stretches your brain.

Thinking critically, like anything, is just another skill. What better way to get at it than using it everyday for 4 years? No, I've never used my math background to balance my checkbook. Hell, even as an analyst now I use my ppt skills more than anything putting decks together for clients. Getting through the math dept at my school was a bitch. I have very little natural talent.

Even then, I wouldn't have it any other way.
MyRichUncle attempted this at scale a few years back.

They built a cool algorithm to predict your future earnings, nd let people invest in you in exchange for a portion of your future earnings.

They quickly realized that this doesn't scale, and while they garnered a lot of attention thanks to the novelty of the idea, the business failed.

In a stroke of brilliance they leveraged their brand value into using MyRichUncle as a student-loan portal, and then after growing astoundingly fast, were nearly jailed for fraud and collusion with a handful of other scumbag student loan predators, and ultimately crashed and burned.
EDIT: the below was based on a misunderstanding of what naturalethic was saying, it is "no longer operative".

You seem to ignoring the amendment process as detailed in Article V:

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

And the 14th Amendment, which enforces various parts of the Constitution and its Amendments on the states (and therefore has been used WRT "individual criminal acts occurring within a state"), which is the subject of McDonald v. Chicago for which the oral arguments were held earlier this week.
Unfortunately these shady advertising campaigns aren't just limited to internet advertising networks anymore. I live in Nebraska and listen to a lot of radio (unfortunately) while on the road, in turns out these kind of ads are taking over the airwaves as well.

There are credit collectors running ads that sound like a PSA from the government regarding a 'bailout for consumers struggling from credit card debt. If your last name begins with A through M call today, or N - Z call tomorrow' There are no less than ten variations of this ad running on 3-4 radio stations in Nebraska.

I also hear a ton of shady commercials for weight loss supplements that end if with "WARNING: IF YOU LOSE 10 POUNDS IN 10 DAYS DISCONTINUE USE" Really?! That happens?! Doubt it, but for a lot of unsophisticated listeners that could be a value proposition rather than a warning. I heard 2-4 Acai Berry ads last night alone.

It's not like these radio commercials are being launched on some self ad network, where no body checks it before airing. Hell some of them are even read by the DJs at the radio station as part of the ad buy.
Androids Will Challenge the iPad
Vivek Kundra seeks to streamline fed computing
I see that he is including Amazon affiliate ads on the review pages; I assume that must not be working very well for him, which surprises me a bit, as I rent movies all the time through Amazon (it's one of a very small handful of places I actually shell out money for entertainment on the web). You'd think the most famous movie reviewer of all time would have pretty good results with movie referrals...

I wonder whether part of that might not be the placement and format of the ads? At least for movies with online rentals and purchases available, I'd think that a plain old hypertext "Watch [insert movie name] online at Amazon" link right at the end of the review with his affiliate code embedded would probably perform pretty well, as opposed to a clearly separated block style ad up near the top that only links to the DVD purchase page.

He could at least have both...I can't for the life of me understand why you wouldn't have an ad right at the end of the review, where people are most likely to be moving on to another page rather than sticking around and reading more...
Popular Science puts 137 years of archives online for free
From the article it seems he was teaching for a lot of the time after the initial diagnosis... Also, he took the chance to complete some of his lifelong dreams (visiting Pompeii). And the bill was actually 250k after negotiations.
commenting because its too late to delete and this was a particularly stupid observation--all interested search engines will stumble on the feeds and subscribe.
First world European countries use a quality-of-life-year or disability-adjusted life-year metric. If resource X will give patient A an expected 20 years of life as a vegetable (Q = 0.1) vs. patient B 10 fully-healthy years (Q = 1), patient B gets it. The goal is to maximize total life-years. Obviously, these numbers are estimates, the quality multiplier is subjective, and the optimization problem is very difficult, but the goal is fair and noble, and I think most people would agree with it. When I'm 90, if we haven't made any anti-aging progress, I would want the 20-year-old to get the heart transplant instead of me.
A cover view of all the issues: http://books.google.com/books/serial/wzsEAAAAMBAJ?rview=1
Google AI Challenge: Winner post-mortem and source code
Coby $85 Smartbook Feels Like a Hundred Bucks
In my case, it was the reverse. Loved Mathematics, shunned everything else. They had something called a "Distinguished Scholar's Program," which meant I was basically able to design my own curriculum. By the end of the first year, when I'd figured out just how much latitude that afforded me, I was taking only Math classes. Now, I think that left me with a somewhat unbalanced view of the world, and I paid for it later. But if you go and talk to your professors about how much flexibility there is in the degree requirements, you might be pleasantly surprised.

You'll be sorry if you don't learn calculus, though!
No, the USPTO is imploding.
I've thought about a similar idea, but a college.

What if someone founded a college that instead of making people go deep into debt, took, less than 1% of their earnings forever.

It could end up attracting a lot of people planning to be homemakers, or at least those planning to get lower-paying jobs like teaching, but it definitely has potential.

An added bonus would be differentiation/branding. Colleges that aren't near the upper echelon go to a lot of effort just to seem special and get potential students to remember who they are because really they're all more-or-less the same. Having something as unique and appealing-sounding as "we're free! ... in a sense" would make sure that people remember them.