skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Okay, I'll go further then to say, save up $40,000, then quit your job. Create a company called whateveryouwannacallit.com and start inventing stuff. New algorithms. Optimize compression. Optimize Video streaming.

Then spend $20,000 to have an attorney draw up a patent for you. I know some. I can connect you. Then, market the patent to corporations. Start a bidding war. That's what it all boils down to.

It's hard work to feed yourself and clothe yourself and be an entrepreneur and build a company that solves real problems for people that are willing to pay money for it. Those entrepreneurs should be rewarded by the system just like corporations.

Corporations are people too. They are composed of employees who are their employees and feed beautiful families with children living good lives. Yes, some of them make billions, like Steve Jobs, but some of them live modest lives in an old neighborhood near downtown just like lots of other people.

I think there is a lot of value here. Good value for hard work and innovation and I think there need to be more rewards for innovation that makes the world better. This is just one way it can be done.

It happens genuinely everywhere. Maybe someone gets good at writing music and sells millions of albums. That's just code or could be represented with code, yet if I write an algorithm, how am I going to share that algorithm with the world and also receive the benefits. If you argue copyright, then perhaps I could copyright it, but that means the whole world has it and if the whole world has it, then the inventor gets essentially nothing. It's like open source.

As I see it. Patents are the only protection for open source. When including the source code with the patent, you ensure the idea can be built upon and improved by a community of passionate people who can really do a lot to build on the myriad patents out there.

A copyright doesn't do this. It's not sufficient. My argument is that Monsanto should be able to patent DNA and DNA is no different than the source code behind an algorithm. They are both equal under the law and that is the way it should be.

I mean, in essence, opponents of software patents are arguing for discrimination under the law. I don't understand why computer scientists and computer engineers who build novel software systems that move stuff around and store it on physical disks aren't every bit as patentable as a crane or a type of diesel engine.
Sometimes its worth it: What price do you put on the people you meet, the technology you see, the ideas you may get? I'm heading into my first SXSW this year, I can't wait.

(Funnily enough, my airfares only cost about $600 all up - but then, I'm flying from Sydney, Australia. Thank you Qantas Frequent Flyer!)
> a. Wire fraud. They probably had some type of fake bank accounts set up or something to launder the money because they knew what they were doing was wrong.

If they did that, then I can see the point of this case. But I didn't read the full suit. Anyone?

> b. The tickets were sold at substantially higher prices than on Ticketmaster. They were able to do this by gaming the system/or cracking the schemes in place (captcha's) to prevent people from doing this.

Nothing wrong with this. It happens all the time. When I was in college when course registration opened at 6am, the CS majors always "coincidentally" got their preferred courses more often than other students.

TicketMaster charges an arm and a leg for the "convenience" of buying tickets online. I'm happy someone was taking advantage of them.

> c. On a lighter note, they named their company Wiseguys Tickets. That's like the Mafia naming themselves Mafia, Inc. - "We Handle The Rough Stuff". A name like Wiseguys Tickets is just asking to be investigated.

Haha. I thought the same thing.
I've read (from memory, sorry) that almost all survivors of suicide leaps regret it and want to take it back the instant they commit to gravity.

I don't recall irony being reported.
I can understand how this might be a valid civil matter if the click-thru agreements were violated (as I'm certain they were). However, the criminal charges seem bogus.

What if Subway were to offer subs for a dollar next Tuesday with the stipulation that each customer could only purchase one. And, like Iraqi voting procedures, Subway would mark customers' hands to prevent them from making multiple purchases. Let's say I found some solvent that removed the marking and was therefore able to purchase 50 subs and sold them on the nearest corner for a profit. Is this illegal?
It's hacking in the more general sense. While they may not have gotten root access on an internal server, they still circumvented security measures in the ticket-purchase system in order to do something that was forbidden. They're leveraging a design flaw. I think it's a valid use of the term. I do disagree with the preposition in the phrase "... by hacking into online vendor systems such as..." as that's simply inaccurate.
They do it because its easier and more fun to go to a conf than actually getting shit done.

Its like signing up for a gym thinking that is whats keeping you from getting in shape.

I have been to going to SXSW for years but its actually the only conference that I haven't had anything measurable happen as a result.
Well, perhaps to add more content here w.r.t. the Monsanto case, I mean, the court should have been able to determine if the wind just blew the pollen in to pollinate the plants. IANAL, perhaps an IP attorney who is knows what they are talking about can explain why that case worked out the way it does.

Anyway, it's pretty unfortunate how that one example worked out, but the point I failed to make, was that the engineers who invented that wonderful corn that is immune to disease and predation and grows happily almost anywhere in the world and brings great value to the future of the world are no more or less clever than someone who assembles for loops, encryption functions, and database calls into something just as valuable to the future of computing. In a way, those are even more letters and numbers and perhaps physical systems too, just represented in code, and therefore should be even more patentable than just 4 letters repeating in a sequence.

Perhaps it is another type of discrimination I am addressing. A discrimination against a new kind of intelligence. A discrimination against machine intelligence. The artificial brains and neural nets and perhaps years of training are somehow different than a solar panel that can follow the sun. I don't see a difference and I don't see any reason the law should make such a distinction. That's something that may come up in the future, but it's not really a problem now. Somewhere along the way though, We will probably start talking about giving rights to machines who have claimed their identities. We let corporations have all the rights of humans, why not individual sentient robots? But again I digress.

My argument is this: If we are going to do away with software patents, we should do away with patents all together. I don't know what that world will be like and if that is the solution to these kinds of patent problems, not just for computer science, but for all fields, then I say let's do it, but don't single out software patents and axe just those.
This is Associated Press Style.

Not all news needs to be a sensational narrative.
Just today I was remembering I had a TS1000/ZX81 emulator on my phone a couple years back.
In Australia, I regularly pay AUD30-35/kg for a decent cut of beef. I think that's about USD12/lb or more. I'd love to be able to get good stuff for $4.50/lb!
worrd
Metadata support is ridiculously awful in [Matroska, OGM, FLAC, OGG], in amounts increasing in that order.

If you want metadata to work consistently, use a MP4 / QT container. If you want alternate tracks (for subtitles and audio) to work consistently, use Matroska.
Doubtful. jQuery, CSS, HTML, JS or Flash? Flash is quicker development time hands down.
Hell if I know, I use Python.
For consumer use, I have to imagine that having desktop-on-a-USB-stick (natively booted, or with VirtualBox) is more practical in every way than desktop-in-the-cloud. The only thing you can't do as well is share it with someone else.
One of the most amazing thing about this interview is just how well composed Mike Wallace is.

Wow...I wish there were still people like this on television.
What is and isn't "wire fraud"? If I say, "you may not reply to this comment", and you do, did you hack the system?
> Let me also put my biases right out front: I don't like Java.

You don't need to write Java to write Android apps.
Because the prosecutors have to prove every count, and the sentences would likely be served concurrently.
It's weird. If you went to a store and bought all the apples, the owner of the store would love you. Do the same thing online, and suddenly you are facing federal felony charges.
I know, especially considering how ofter the word synergy appears.
I wouldn't doubt your lawyers! They were probably right in a context that does not generalize exactly.

I am not a lawyer and speak from no authority but curiosity, so I could be completely wrong or misleadingly close to being right, but I think the main point is confirmed by this, from the "Claims" section of the first result for "how to read a patent" (http://www.bpmlegal.com/howtopat5.html): "Each dependent claim must be narrower than the claim upon which it depends." The full example is too long to quote, but I encourage you to read it.

The obvious problem with this is that it is an implicit convention in an otherwise very explicit kind of document. It's no wonder at all that it is not widely understood.
To nit-pick . . . let me repeat . . . to N I T P I C K, I reaallly think the window buttons need to be toned down. That one red button looks sends the whole thing back to something out of KDE 2 (no disrespect to the KDE, I run a KDE 4.3 desktop, it's more of a 90s-still-learning-how-to-design-desktops thing)
Unless you are using something like a laptop and close the lid.
Why even bother with English then? Might as well just make it an RDF file, so it's boring and machine-readable.
Just like "stealing" company secrets isn't stealing? Are you implying that intellectual property can't be stolen?
What happened is the we finally hit "the dream" of building software out of large building blocks instead of having to reinvent screws and bolts for every project.

The lack of fun is, in my opinion, a side effect of using weak languages that force us to write boilerplate and ceremony along with using half-baked non-Turning complete XML languages (don't forget the "L" in "XML" stands for "language").
This isn't exciting on it's own, but if it could opt in to buzz in the future that would be great. I'd love to follow someone and have their stars bias my search experience.
Larry Ellison: The Old Valley Is History (2003)
No writes are asynchronous.
Wow, this is utterly absurd. I'm no lawyer, but couldn't this set a dangerous precedent that could find people being federally indicted for circumventing CAPTCHAs and the like?

As far as I'm concerned, a program which automatically purchases tickets through TicketMaster is more of a feature than a federal crime; the process for a law-abiding citizen is horrendously convoluted and a complete UX disaster. Too bad TM gets away with it, thanks to their monopoly.

I've spent enough time in the ticketing industry to know that it's right up there with "accai berry" and the like in terms of shadiness. Anybody who thinks StubHub et. al. are "fan marketplaces" is severely delusional; 99% of all tickets are listed by brokers who do it for a living (most of whom use less-efficient ways to circumvent TM security, however. That 25MM number is the only reason this is being prosecuted so vigorously.)
Is the matroska project active? Their website seems to have bitrotted. Their SVN links don't work, the right hand side menu links to take you to the 'Project' are 404's.
How to think about competitors in an immature market
Ask HN: How to automatically mirror your own sites?
As my business grows, I want to rely less on one hosting service. Ideally I want to set up a failover system for my VPS so that if one host goes down, the other seamlessly gets traffic redirected to it.

I'm not sure this is actually possible--even if I get servers to stay roughly in sync, what happens when the primary server goes down but the DNS servers pointing at it are fine?

The first problem is actually mirroring everything automatically. How can I keep copies of the files and database in sync across disparate hosting services?

The second problem is how I set up the DNS to fail over to the mirror site.

Is this feasible?
So why hasn't IB gotten the same amount of improvements and attention as the rest of the toolchain? XCode has come a long way, as have the compilers and instruments.
A patent also takes 8 years to come to fruition. There is a huge backup. Startups can be invented and sold in that amount of time or fail completely, so if it's just one person in a garage, there are bigger issues, but still, some of those people are saving up a lot of money right now selling iPhones. Even kids in malls and hackers in their basements.

Perhaps I am being too egalitarian in my stance.
Chile quake may have tipped Earth's axis
I want LINUX support! Hear me Valve?!? You're obviously running source on OpenGL...
Nice, thanks.

I'll have to look around the site a bit more.
Just to be clear, you're arguing software needs to license patents to simulate patented objects?
Implying? No.
My understanding of "hacking" follows that of Wikipedia's:

"Hacking refers to the re-configuring or re-programming of a system to function in ways not facilitated by the owner, administrator, or designer."

I'd say they came up with a pretty good hack. Mimicking live people, beating captcha's, etc.
Despite Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead being amongst my favorite books, Ayn Rand always has me so polarized. Her moral philosophies and ability to write characters earns my unmatched admiration. But her blinding hatred for socialism (as conveyed from her very first book) keep her economic views from ever being realistic or even interesting. For the same reason communism fails, her free market would fail, because it only takes one (inevitable) company to ruin the party for everybody. Man is too easily corrupted to live at the economic extremes of communism or completely free markets.

I always like to think Ayn Rand's selfish desires and socialism could work together. Just think of taxes going to reasonable causes (such as infrastructure or health care) as forced self-interest :)
Cool stuff isn't operating systems and compilers, cool stuff is getting your computer to do your job for you.

Why don't you use the knowledge you gained of prolog and lisp and metaprogram the tasks you're given to get your work done even faster.

This talk about crud is boring, libraries are boring, is almost ludicrous. There are 200 million jobs in the united states alone that can be automated by software. Try to automate those jobs - that's cool and lucrative stuff.
I live with Windows 7 on two monitors, combined pixel area approximately 3600x1200, and it's still not enough even with Windows's more condensed by default tree views, list views, menu bars, toolbars etc. I have e.g. my desktop icons dialed down to 32x32px. I like my toolbar buttons 16x16px. I like my buttons approximately 75x25px. Information density.

When running XP, as I still do on my non-Linux laptops, the total vertical space wastage at the top of Windows Explorer is 65 pixels, including title bar, toolbar, menu bar and location textbox. This is possible because on XP the toolbars and menu bars have customizable locations, unlike Vista and above - I have screenshots in my blog here:

http://blog.barrkel.com/2008/08/venting-on-vista.html

Unless you are talking about a pixel area somewhere in the region of 8000x3000 on high dpi screens, the Ubuntu proportions are nowhere near acceptable.
I stopped watching after she said something about the existence of objective reality.
At face value definitely seems like it should be civil, not criminal although I know that components of the "ticketing" business, like scalping tickets on event sites, can be criminal offenses set state-by-state.
While we are on the topic of mothers :-)
I recently moved my moms PC from Windows to Ubuntu. I stay in a different city and it was too much of a pain to support Windows. Its been a real relief.

She is 66 years of age and doesn't know know much about computers. She started learning to use it a few years back to keep in touch with me over email. Her use case is primarily email, google, bank accounts and sometimes facebook.

I think Ubuntu UI is nice and clean. It doesn't confuses someone like her. Updates also work very well.
It also work quite well for a command line user like me :-)
I agree. The patent system is too slow. I'm not sure what your point is, because that only seems to support the argument that the current system of software patents is absurd. Despite the slowness and expense of the review process, crap like this gets through all the time, then requiring an even slower and even more expensive legal challenge.
More likely, lawyers with higher success rates cost more.
How is this different from automated trading by investment banks? I've written really basic articles on cracking captchas and this has me considering removing that content and code.
It's the same thing with XFCE as the default window manager.
It's not really the online part, it's the tickets part. If you went to the box office in person and tried to buy all the tickets, they wouldn't let you more than online.
Monsanto can patent dna, because they got those atoms in a particular sequence. I'm willing to stipulate DNA is no different than the soruce code behind a program, but no way is that the same as an algorithm.

an algorithm is a set of rules for solving the problem. i can follow those rules, i can pay someone to follow them for me. i could have a computer follow those rules, i could embed those rules in dna, do some chemistry i don't understand then extract the sequence that followed the rules i care about. The algorithm is independent of the medium.

You can patent an engine. Heck, you can patent a few. You can't patent the idea of engine.
I'm just wondering, if we don't get contacted and we applied early, is that a bad sign?
An interesting example of how writing style can affect perception. Regardless of who's "right" or not (though it's usually a bit of both in situations like these), Forbes' piece was very easy to read and digest, whereas this comes off as an unedited tirade.
I'll grant that Droid has a number of typographical problems outlined nicely in that article (although I suspect his complains about kerning and colour might well be addressed by careful choice of GNOME's font-rendering options), but nevertheless I find Droid to be the most pleasant-to-read Free-as-in-speech font I know of. It's certainly slicker than the slow-moving and clumsy Vera/DejaVu, and the less said about the Liberation the better.

You could probably tempt me with Lucida Sans, if B&H ever released outline versions to go with the X11 bitmap fonts, but until another giant corporation shells out for a new custom typeface or FontForge becomes usable by designers, Droid is where it's at.
At least on the surface, it would seem that the CC companies themselves have the most motivation to put a stop to this. Why are their anti-fraud departments not forwarding these sites to the FBI, getting court orders to shut down the domains (at least those hosted in the USA) working with big ISPs to get them blacklisted...?

Is there some non-obvious reason that it's in the interest of the CC companies to let this go? Is there a lot of low-level fraud that customers never notice, and just keep making those monthly minimum payments?
It is completely unfair to dismiss Rand for any one thing she says or believes. Like any philosophy, the good come with the bad, and Rand has some very thought provoking, if not indisputable, good.

And objective reality is not so unintelligent or undebatable to be dismissed at the whim of one sentance.
Don't be distracted by political arguments - the most important parts of Objectivism are is its metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. Objectivists do have political views, but they are merely conclusions drawn from more fundamental elements of the philosophy. As things stand now, we expect no great change by political means; it is our more fundamental ideas that we want to see adopted in the culture.
We need an Apple that peddles Linux systems is what it boils down to. Someone needs to swoop in, add sexy branding, make it attractive to hipsters/teenagers/some other trend-setting crowd, and everything would work out just fine. The Mac/Apple fad is all about style and message. We need a company that will add style and message, that will make simple choices available to consumers (Apple has only a few different consumer-level computers, all with preset configurations), and something that has the withal to market it like crazy.

Consumers don't know or care about advanced functionality or technical considerations -- if your device can run the few applications that are relevant to their niche, then all systems are go; the company that performs those relatively basic technical requirements in the way that is most attractive to the end user is going to come out on top. That means sleek design and branding (probably above everything else), simplicity in choices, and high usability.

If you want your platform to succeed, you need to do the same kind of thing. Shuttleworth's investment in Canonical is good and has helped technically, but now, if he really wants to bring Linux mainstream, he needs to make a computer company that follows in Apple's footsteps. That's the way to make a dent in the market these days. Microsoft would be nothing if they were a startup now, their strategies wouldn't pay off in this environment.
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2009/03/ephemera-2009-7.html
Suspend and hibernation pretty much entirely depend on what hardware you have. I used Ubuntu 9.04 on an Apple MacBook with all-Intel hardware, and suspend/resume was bullet-proof.

If you've got hardware that isn't well supported by open drivers (nVidia and ATi graphics are the usual culprits), well, good luck.
Backtest Fallacy
Would you be interested in elaborating on that last sentence?
Many common compiler optimizations are subsumed by ordinary reduction rules for lambda calculus. See: [Shrinking reductions in SML. NET](http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/akenn/sml/Shri...).

That said, you can always transform an imperative program into lambda calculus (sequential imperative IL -> SSA -> Administrative Normal Form) and vice versa (arbitrary lambda calculus -> closure conversion -> Administrative Normal Form -> sequential imperative IL).
I never understood why people were so keen on Ayn Rand. Seems like a philosophy built to justify being a jerk.
Why is it a good thing to have hundreds of layouts to choose from? The paradox of choice is real: http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_ch...
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000038.html