skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Have you ever thought that thse companies need you because their code bases are absolute messes?

If their code were 100% intuitive and elegant they probably wouldn't need you.
Usually when you create a patent there's no expert from the government who can verify that your idea is actually novel. Or complex enough to constitute an invention.

So you can easily register something, write it in an unreadable way and sue people for it.

Additionally there's a corrupt area int Texas where judges and lawyers have a very high tendency to rule in favor of patent trolls, because they'd have no jobs without them.

Here's an easy proposal: Let anyone claim patents for everything.
If someone sues you for patent infringement it's their job to proof you infringed on their patent. And it's their job to proof their idea is complex enough to constitute a patent. And it's their job to proof their idea is novel. After the patent holder invested some money to show all these things; They can start to sue you.

This puts the assumption of innocence back in our justice system like it should be. And makes sure less people get patent trolled, since trolling now is a lot more expensive then sending out thousand of spam letters.
> because it's probably a necessity if they want to license the content legally.

For sure the same argument could be applied to fb photos, the point is - it's a slippery slope and I'm not willing to walk it. It is a tradeoff though, the one which means that society is willing to trade their freedom. "The dancing pigs" phenomenon if you wish, the Felten & McGraw quote applies so much to security as it does to freedom and privacy: Given a choice between dancing pigs and security/freedom/privacy, users will pick dancing pigs every time.
The point was that these password were cracked at some point, and those hard to crack were less likely to appear in this database and that skews the analysis.
Of course they are. What kind of question is that?
Fantastic way of putting it!
Compelled by Star Trek.
So, polluting 2 worlds instead of one? Nobody will stop exploiting Earth even once new worlds become accessible.
This is completely wrong. Guy Steele (who is an expert Lisper as opposed to James Gosling) has hinted, numerous times, that Java was a compromise.

Here is a quote of his:

"And you're right: we were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp. Aren't you happy?"

Regarding Java's "success" (which falls in the same category as PHP's success, Python's success, Javascript's "success" and so on) I urge you to consider it as a classic example of "Worse is Better".

Lisp (and Smalltalk and Erlang and Forth and ..) do not have mass-market appeal because they do not easily hand out a feeling of immediate rewards, that a lot of newbie programmers find so attractive. They require more upfront investment from the user before they unveil their secrets, before one "gets it".
It turns out all(?) Intel CPUs in the last decade has a co-CPU that is always running as long as there is electricity available - even when shut down - that is continuously executing a "management engine" bios program, which your main CPU or OS cannot prevent (in fact, if the ME fails to "check in", the main CPU will automatically shutdown in 30 minutes). And, of course, it turns out there is a remote exploit for it. (The co-CPU intercepts network packets on its own, too, apparently)
https://www.spectacleapp.com but whose to say that won't disappear as well...? Software licenses are starting to feel dangerously close to "patenting the wheel".
I do not see that option anywhere.
What's really galling about this particular patent trolling is that Rob Griffiths, principal of Many Tricks which publishes Moom, is one of the original OS X nerd's nerd.

He's done so much for the OS X and the UNIX communities, having run Mac OS X Hints for more than a decade. [0] When pro users were just figuring out best practices for everything from window management to command line AppleScript (osascript) to postfix configuration, Griffiths' tireless and largely selfless (ads were unobtrusive, implemented with a very light touch) support of Mac OS X hints made it the go-to site for how to do all things command line in OS X.

It's a shame this patent troll has chosen to shake down so selfless a member of the OS X community.

[0] http://macosxhints.com (redirects to) http://hints.macworld.com

EDIT: Grammar: add missing direct object to last sentence of second paragraph.
New air filter clears up pollution and generates power
"This video contains content from Sony Music Entertainment (Japan) Inc.. It is not available in your country."
The link to the kindle book is somewhat buried in the article:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07143FXZ5

Looks wonderful, unfortunately not available in my country.
Not if they all was stored in cleartext from the beginning - which, unfortunately, a lot are.
People do not know the history of Assange, so they'll assume there are witting RU ties, whereas in reality he just apparently hates the USA and would like to cause as much damage as possible by publishing content with no journalistic value + posting misleading analysis.
Guess Who Comes Up When You Google the President of the United States?
That does look fantastic. Great docs too. Sadly GOL :(. This can severely restrict where it can be used.
This is hilarious -- I found this exact script and noted the exact same vulnerability last year. Good on you for posting about it.
Forget about human beings. As far as we know, Earth is the only source of life in the galaxy or even universe. There is no guarantee it exists anywhere else, or that it will continue to exist here. In fact it is certain one day life will cease to exist on Earth.

As the only life form capable of spreading it off planet, I feel like we have a moral obligation to do so before it is snuffed out.
From a qualitative perspective it's a bullshit patent, full-stop. But yes, the legal process is prohibitive, but if you demonstrate prior art to the USPTO you can request a re-examination that allows them to save face.

If this patent were filed in 1988 it might have a hope of standing. It was remarkably filed in 2008, years after countless grid-based Windows manager had come and gone. It stands no hope, and the EFF will make quick work of this.

The USPTO needs to be held liable for this sort of nonsense, or alternately people who file spurious patents need to be penalized. This is legalized extortion.

And since this always comes up - someone is going to say "read all the claims...this is novel only in its entirety". The claims of a patent, unless specifically cross-referencing, hold independently.
Wait. I can't cast Netflix to my TV from my phone anymore?

What the f* are they expecting us to do? Surely they can't be that stupid?!
I don't buy that he sucks at Photoshop. I think he just used Paint because it's available on all Windows PCs. This looks very nice, but I don't think his skills has a lot to do with Paint only. After all it's just a tool.
Such as what? Going to court?
To be more specific, all samples without killswitch were samples of just the ransomware, not the worm spreading it.
It's worth noting that there are also Visual Studio subscriptions for anyone who doesn't want/need the full MSDN subscription:

https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/pricing/
Sadly, this is just how things are when you're a 3rd party seller on platforms like eBay, Amazon, etsy, etc.

They side with the buyers. Bad behavior, or fraud, on the part of buyers isn't interesting to them when the seller is a 3rd party because they have no skin in the game. They want that buyer more than they want you.

There's no escalation point either. Push back, and the fraudulent buyer will just file a chargeback. The credit card companies are even worse about siding with buyers engaging in return fraud.

For me, it's just the cost of doing business. I have to pad my margin to account for it. Assholes like the buyer depicted in the article just make prices higher for everyone else.

Edit: It might be interesting if some fairly ubiquitous payment processor offered a shared buyer blacklist. I suppose though, nobody wants to expose themselves to the potential lawsuits. If it were managed well, by only allowing fairly established, higher volume sellers, to add to the list, it might work well.
> I think there's a growing stigma in the US against being a parent.

There's a growing stigma against women who choose to stay at home too.

My wife reports that women who don't stay home are (at minimum) condescending about SAHM and often say very nasty things. I won't venture a guess as to why because it doesn't matter. It's not right.

When women at work find out my wife stays home I've heard the most bizarre comments.

I'm pretty disgusted by everyone's desire to politicize my happy little home. It's just gross.
This is not a new kind of story on eBay but I'm not sure what the answer is. The reputation system works to some degree if someone commits systematic fraud but if someone does this as a one-off thing, I'm not sure what reasonable protections are other than using some sort of escrow service.

You can argue whether eBay's policies should default to favoring the buyer or the seller but they pretty much have to do one or the other. Even if their customer service were better than it is, it's not in the position to do a forensic investigation in cases where the facts are in dispute and can't be easily determined.
I guess, just like he did not see the point of Free Software.
When you want to run PowerShell with no console
If they were flying airplanes from the 50's not supported by their constructors anymore, I'd say it'd be pretty good answer.
> polluting 2 worlds

How are you polluting another world if there is no life there in the first place?
except the undisputed mastery of a planet is worth nothing if it leads to the destruction of said planet.
Err, no. You wouldn't require then counter to go up by exactly one each time. You just wouldn't allow it to go backwards.
I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but I don't think it applies here. Specifically, nothing in this summary indicates that you can break other laws to fulfill this one. IANAL, etc.
"This video contains content from Sony Music Entertainment (Japan) Inc., who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds.

Sorry about that."

I live in Japan...
We need more Nobel prize winners in politics. They seem to be more honest, more caring for the greater good, etc., and thus more fit for the job (I know, right now it seems the opposite is true). And in case they lack all these characteristics, at least they pushed the boundary of knowledge.

Perhaps this is unrealistic, but we could increase the admission requirements of politicians. First show that you care about more than just yourself for at least a decade or so, and then you may decide about the fate of millions of citizens, their offspring and planet Earth.
The article is wrong on timing because they choose to ignore the herd of elephant in the room.

The world has been getting hacked since before 2013 by the NSA and related parties. They wanted to keep it hackable (by them, but an open door is open for everyone), not to fix what was wrong (even they asked/forced companies to include backdoors, unsafe encryption and so on). They developed (directly, or hired third party companies) software to hack it even more, and not just systems but people too. They created an entire market of malware/exploit/zero days, where was pretty profitable to find zero days and sell/hoard them instead of warning the world.

Is not amazing that in this scenario of planned/designed insecurity at every level even they get hacked/intruded/disclosed, and not just not to get information but the software weapons they were already using too.

Is like the department of health has been developing all the latest years new flu strains, are weaponizing them, and somewhat, you get sick, they get sick, everybody else get sick and some of the people you know dies. Would you complain about the last person that transmitted you the disease, the vaccine makers that run behind the (designed) diseases and even are forbidden/delayed to make a cure for them, or the root cause of it all?

Instead of asking why we don't do more to stop it, ask yourself why we did (and keep doing) so much to make it happen.
I don't agree that these tendencies are what makes humanity great.

First, you seem to think that humans are somehow special and above other species at who's expense "we became the masters". Would truly superior being not care about less superior ones, at the very least (not to mention intentionally killing them, often for fun).

Second, fighting these tendencies will make everyone's lives better. These are basic things: less wars, crimes, better air quality, increase in happiness. I believe greed and corruption and related qualities are what prevents that from happening now.

I guess what I'm saying is that we got caught up with technology so much that we put all out hopes and dreams into it. But it cannot (in any near future) make us morally and spiritually superior. And why even bother? There are other ways to go about doing that. Education. It's a much longer and harder route, but it seems to be the proper one. Otherwise we are just waiting for a tech product what would fix all our problems at the push of a button - ridiculous.
I thought that until I started checking it once a week or so, then I really liked it
That's all well and good, but if you get sued you still have to pay quite a lot of money to a lawyer to prove you're right, and even if you win you're still stuck with the bill.
At least part of this is on the seller for not keeping track of the serial number. Whenever you deal in used Apple products either as a buyer or a seller you should always check the serial number, always make sure you keep the original packaging, and always make sure the serial numbers on the unit and the packaging match. This is by far your best protection against all manner of shady dealings.
The results are approximate (but that's always true), and, IIUC, the quality of the approximation depends on how well the matrix can be factored into a local component (with values inversely proportional to |(i - j)|) and a sparse global component.

Like petters writes above, "matrices of the form s^2 I + B, where B(i, j) depends on the distance between points i, j." The GMRES + FMM approach is more general, but FMM is less and less Fast as we move away from the structure above towards general matrices.

This structure makes sense because it reflects physical reality… useful in when solving physics problems (: Less so when the matrix corresponds to logical/business constraints over 0/1 variables which may not be so local anymore.
The problem with that in the USA is that you are burdened to prove that in court as a defendant, and you also have to pay your legal costs (lawyers etc.) even if you win the case. The costs are huge, so only the big guys have to afford defending themselves!
>licensed under the GNL GPU.

The what?
Does this environment extend to the full stack of Redis and Postgres?
You say that as if it would have compelled eBay to decide the matter differently. It really doesn't work that way with eBay, Amazon, or similar. They just don't care about return fraud, especially when it's a 3rd party seller. The buyer can return a box of rocks and it works out the same way.

Edit: My classic example was one case where the buyer claimed "item not received". It was a one-off, custom item, and quite expensive. So, I was pissed off enough to hire a private investigator to go to the place of business. The item was there. The PI took pictures of the item, with the buyer's business (including signage) in the background. I submitted them in the counter dispute. I also had one of his employee's signature on a UPS delivery slip. Still lost. Their reasoning was that the signature was not the buyer's signature (no matter that it was the buyer's employee's signature). They didn't mention the incriminating pictures at all in the final outcome.
Maybe the seller could've recorded as many serial numbers of parts of the Mac as possible? Ive not bought or sold stuff on eBay in years so I don't know if this would've helped.
> think about what happens when the military strikes a hospital and calls it "collateral damage."

Old news. The more recent and much more insidious variant is calling the hospitals simply "valid targets".

Or in case of an unexpectedly intense media backlash, "a mistake".[0]

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunduz_hospital_airstrike
I've sold one thing on eBay ever and I'll never do it again. My buyer tried to do the same thing mentioned in this article to me; luckily I made the item non returnable and I didn't let the buyer's threats of getting a lawyer scare me into giving in, I knew it would have to go through eBay's dispute system first. It's really a terrible system for sellers, it really sucks that eBay et al. are all guilty.
Good question. Perhaps. However, my point still remains that it will not stop the pollution on Earth - which will remain much cheaper to do.
> it cannot not alone bring humanity into the bright future

and

> Look at how we are (mis)treating the environment

It took the realization that we are living on something that's not flat, and actually sharing the same sphere, to make people conscious that we are at risk when damaging the environment. This is linked to everything we have learnt through our exploration of space and the fact that we could NOT find find life so far on any other planet in the solar system.

Not sure why you think it's no so important. Actually, it's the other way around. In order to better protect our environment, we need to do more research to better understand the climate models of other worlds and make correct assumptions on ours in the end. If we only study a system with n=1, we can never be sure about our predictions.
It belongs there because it effectively prevents needless human suffering. Fluoridated water is one of the public health triumphs of the last hundred years. It reduces cavities by 40%.

The people who harp on about this are equivalent to anti-vaxxers. NYC has been fluoridating since 1965, as have other cities. If there were evidence of health problems, surely there would be credible evidence by now.
Also don't sign away all the IP you create off hours.

Those clauses read like the even own your love letters and emails.
I think there is a fundamental assymetry in buyers and sellers for eBay. A random buyer is much more likely to be a repeat user than a random seller. An individual might sell a few items, but would buy many more items. In addition, a bad experience as a seller where eBay took the buyer's side, is actually more likely to make them have confidence in being a buyer. On the other hand, a buyer that feels cheated is likely to never use the service again. As for businesses that sell on eBay, they assume a certain rate of these kind of things and price in the risk accordingly, so they don't really care as long as it is not too frequent. Given the above, it absolutely makes sense for eBay to be heavily biased in favor of the buyer in a dispute.
It's an obvious software patent, therefore bullshit.
> has hinted, numerous times, that Java was a compromise.

How does that make what I wrote completely wrong? Good design is a compromise. Gosling presented Java's design as a wolf in sheep's clothing. They figured that the features most important in Lisp and Smalltalk are memory safety, GC, dynamic linking and reflection, shoved all of them into the JVM, and wrapped them in a non-threatening language that could actually gain significant traction. That's what good design looks like.

> Regarding Java's "success" (which falls in the same category as PHP's success, Python's success, Javascript's "success" and so on) I urge you to consider it as a classic example of "Worse is Better".

Eh. Unlike PHP (and maybe Javascript and Python, too), more useful good software has been written in Java than in any other language in the history of computing, with the possible exception of C. I don't know by what metric -- other than personal aesthetic preference -- you'd consider it "worse" (or, conversely, what your metric for success is). Remember that Java was designed to be a conservative language for industry use. In his article outlining Java's design[1], Gosling writes: "Java is a blue collar language. It’s not PhD thesis material but a language for a job. Java feels very familiar to many different programmers because I had a very strong tendency to prefer things that had been used a lot over things that just sounded like a good idea." I think it is funny to doubt Java's success considering its stated mission, goals and non-goals. Smalltalk also tried to become a commercially successful language. I think it is equally funny not to see it as a failure in that regard, which was certainly among its goals. The extensive work done on Smalltalk (Self, really) at Sun and elsewhere was quickly absorbed by Java, and so Smalltalk has certainly achieved success in enabling Java.

[1]: http://www.win.tue.nl/~evink/education/avp/pdf/feel-of-java....
I haven't sold on eBay for a very long time but that's good advice. It may even make sense (unless there are downsides I'm not thinking of) to put the serial number in the listing. Though I suppose the buyer can still just say that's not what they received.
That's precisely the point. Watch the talks I linked to. Gosling presents Java's design as a wolf in sheep's clothing. They figured that the features most important in Lisp and Smalltalk are memory safety, GC, dynamic linking and reflection, shoved all of them into the JVM, and wrapped them in a non-threatening language that could actually gain significant traction. They did that because they realized that the linguistic features are not where most of the power lies. That's what good design looks like: you hide the power in a palatable package.
Nobel Prize winners are notoriously kooky when operating out of their narrow areas of expertise, Cf. Linus Pauling, Kary Mullis, Luc Montagnier.
If the context is widespread ransomware infection, provable decryption is unlikely to make a difference. Attackers are unlikely to make money from people who know what Ethereum, or a smart contract is. Even taking those who know the meaning, very few could actually verify the application.

The attacks work on those who didn't have protection and lost valuable data. Just sticking a "decryption guaranteed by Ethereum contract" will likely have the same effect on them.
you've created a false dichotomy. the question isn't whether patents could create net public good... depending on the implementation they could.

but the current system in the US, which it forces on the rest of us via trade agreements, is completely bonkers.

this is the fact: the public in countries where copyrights and patents are granted have voluntarily given up their prerogative to copy or implement a work or an invention in return for the public good of dissemination of those ideas (which might otherwise be "locked up").

As with everything else in the US, big corporations have co-opted the system using lobbyists, and public good is harmed by actions such as this.

And in the era of the internet, is dissemination and publication as valuable as it was in the past? I would argue that it is not.

it would be fascinating to hit the reset switch: delete all IP, patent, and copyright code from the legal system, and see the real effects it's having on the economy. having said that, it's probably too drastic of an action to take all at once given the far-reaching effects it would have. but it's the right direction to move in, for sure.
Or the tunneling machines are for building habitats on Mars. Well, it's a fun hypothesis at least. Anything that could improve traffic in major cities gets my vote of approval regardless of what other applications it has.
But not doing space travel does not fix the environment. Fixing the environment is an orthogonal issue.