skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think I see your point. I'll restate it the other way around, though, because that direction makes more sense to me. Please tell me if I got it wrong.

Suppose I have an algorithm for doing some useful transformation on an input. Suppose we were in an environment in which this algorithm could not be patented. I could instead sit on the algorithm and build a circuit in hardware accordingly, patent the circuit, and sell that while keeping the algorithm secret. Ignore that it could be reverse-engineered.

Is that scenario good for anyone? Probably not. It would be better for everyone if the algorithm were made public, even if it were simply unused for the patent term, than if it were to lie hidden on a disk somewhere. Why does it make sense to grant a patent to the circuit, but not the algorithm?

I admit, that situation is a little inconsistent. This is partly because the whole concept of the patent is inconsistent, but we keep it around because we haven't found a consistent way to fulfill the same purpose. Consider a third option, though:

Suppose that the guy with the useful algorithm is Joseph Fourier. He patents the software techniques to produce Fourier series. Now, anyone making software that relies on Fourier series needs to pay Joseph Fourier, which is fine. Anyone who builds a hard circuit would likewise need to pay for the privilege, due to another patent. What about a person executing the exact same software instructions by hand?

Clearly the person may execute the algorithm by hand without paying. Why should they not need to pay, when the only thing the software author has done is the convenient shortcut of using a computer? In order to be similarly consistent, we'd need to require the manual executor to pay. Unfortunately, the manual executor is every collegiate-level math student.
Yeah, why was it written like that?
Your argument is completely symmetrical -- you can just substitute "django" in place of "rails" and it still makes sense. As such, it does not explain anything.
Clickable http://FeedmailPro.com
wow, simply wow! someone is surely on crack!

"It looked as though Saddam was about to take down massive amounts of infrastructure . . . because we were threatening to bomb him," recalled one former intelligence official. Tensions were building. President Bill Clinton was briefed. Senior officials convened another meeting in the Pentagon's "tank," the Joint Chiefs' conference room. The threat was no longer hypothetical, it seemed.

Then the real culprits were identified: A pair of 16-year-old boys in California and a teenager from Israel who had exploited a known vulnerability in the Solaris (UNIX) operating system.
Very good point about the single textbox limitation.

I've been working a lot in this space, and I think there needs to be a protocol implemented beyond OpenSearch, which is essentially limited to 1 text box, with some nice additions (i.e. you can specify a query suggestion URL as well).

There should be some sort of superset to OpenSearch. I'm suggesting an AbstractForm protocol which would allow websites to export their basic query functionality into an an XML document. Relevant providers (such as Ubiquity, and the thing I'm working on that will be launched soon), would be able to use this protocol to integrate the provider's AbstractForm in a convenient interface.

With Kayak, for example, AbstractForm might specify a "from" field of type "city", a "to" field of type "city", and some other optional fields (date, round trip, etc). You could then have a service which implements this however it chooses... perhaps a program with loads of AbstractForm interfaces loaded, and when you start typing "kayak" it knows to show you "To" and "From" fields, etc. I really believe this type of thing would be a major boon to the internet.
HAKMEM
I would laugh and forget about it. If they are going to really come after you, they will give you plenty of additional chances to comply.
I like Twilio and I'm a customer. It seems they did the best they knew how with this situation. But that was a really terrible apology and seems more insulting than assuaging to anyone affected. It's like there's a rule that once you have more than 10 employees all written communication needs to be jargon filled, passive-aggressive business drivel.

Better would have been:

"Anthony -

We're glad to have you as a customer, sorry we screwed up here. We posted notices to the status API and support email - but if you didn't get it, we didn't do our job! I definitely gained some perspective from reading your post.

We'll work even harder on future product updates to get notice to all our customers. If there's anything I can personally do to make the situation right, email me: jeff@twilio.com.

Again, very sorry. Thanks for being our customer and letting us work to earn back your confidence.

Jeff Lawson - Twilio CEO

P.S. Task.fm looks really cool. Best of luck!"

Danielle from Twilio wrote a much more sincere and helpful apology in the thread above...she should probably handle the "responding to blog rants" duties from now on.
First of all, you're assuming that the person who writes the theorems is always correct and is able to describe their code accurately. This is not the case. Second, it's way more easy to take a bunch of common sense measures than to deal with this.
Not sure why you're being down voted but I got exactly the same impression. I'm usually a big Zed fan, and Mongrel2 looks great, but I think he's totally misread Cooper's book here.
I have some ideas...

I put a note on my task list to make sure that I email you (from the feedback page) on some of the things I believe might put you apart from others and also better promote your existing features (some of which I just saw for the first time). I need some time to sit down and give it a go for few hours and put down my fragmented ideas in a proper way.

Hopefully tomorrow.
I am skeptical. If they were really going for all websites ending with "bay", I'd think some bigger ones would be on the list... like piratebay.

Unless they think that's a hopeless case.
I'm going to second this, as a Google search for "Edith" "eBay Legal Department" provides several other situations where people are still standing (including a site named 'www.paypalwarning.com' who published the letter they received 8 years ago).

Edit: Additionally, if you really have no return contact, then it's just an attempt to push you over since you can't respond.
As satisfying as it would feel to tell them in no other words to "Go fuck yourselves," you should simply ignore this until there is actual legal action taken against you.

I am not a lawyer, and I'm very spiteful against people telling me what I can and cannot do, so take that into account when considering my advice.
Oh, satellite TV hacks exist - up until about 12 months ago I used to work for one of the companies that provides Content Access systems for satellite, and it was my personal job to reverse engineer competitors' systems, to see how they worked. As with every other DRM scheme out there, they can be cracked. What the manufacturers have managed to do though, is make the systems hard to crack globally - each box has to be cracked individually, you can't crack one and then apply to the whole park. But then, who cares? If one can be cracked, the torrents of the programs being aired will be up on the trackers the next day, and everyone else can just watch on their PC...
LinkedIn. Try asking Google for a list of all the Ruby developers who went to Princeton and live in New York City.
Program Development in Java: Abstraction, Specification, and Object-Oriented Design - Liskov & Guttag

Teaches OO programming, just happens to use Java as the language.
Not everyone would agree with your conclusion.

>Jayne Dallas, a senior studying advertising who was seated across the table, grumbled that the population of male undergraduates was even smaller when you looked at it as a dating pool. “Out of that 40 percent, there are maybe 20 percent that we would consider, and out of those 20, 10 have girlfriends, so all the girls are fighting over that other 10 percent,” she said.

Source: http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/colleges-where...
My guess(1) is that "Edith" is a machine that simply emails this to everyone who registers a domain with 'bay' anywhere in it.

I'd wait for actual contact from a living human.

(1) I'm not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice, yadda, yadda.
GAE: Latency spikes & aborted requests in the last 24 hours. Any options?
Greenspan Says Bush-Era Tax Cuts Should Lapse, Warns on Budget Deficit
The meat of his point is simple, and pretty hard to avoid: when Facebook allows Yelp to render content trusted and secured by Facebook, Yelp assumes the same obligations to get web appsec right that Facebook does. An XSS in personalized Yelp is now, to some extent, an XSS in Facebook.

This is a concept called "transitive trust" and it is as old as the hills.
I treat the deep Web search APIs as essentially commodities of the link graph. I was able to seamlessly switch between BOSS and Bing without anyone noticing. And there are several others I can use as well. So I don't feel much danger here. And now that BOSS is going to charge, I feel even less danger because it is turning into a real product.

My index is not usable in this fashion. I've re-purposed it mainly for 0-click and for spam removal.

Frankly though, I don't see why this comes up so much. Infospace is a public company that relies on other indexes pretty much exclusively. In other verticals, people routinely use more exclusive platforms, e.g. Twitter or Facebook or banking stuff.
Here is why SQL exists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_algebra. Most criticisms of SQL are wrong because the people who write them never bother to read the mathematics or theory behind their construction.

Any language with similar power will be just as complex.

If you just have a limited use case that you want optimized, that's what most ORMs try to do.
Ok. What you can't do is buy an H card off eBay anymore. The cryptography and ASIC-level systems design that goes into preventing that is pretty sophisticated.

Incidentally, when one compromise ends up costing a lot of money, the economics start to work for watermarking.
NZBMatrix.com
No doubt, I mean any kind of coding can be tedious. I feel that way about virtually anything in Java. SQL while far from perfect in many ways is at least extremely terse and flexible. Sounds like maybe he just needs an ORM for his day-to-day stuff so he can focus on only the interesting queries.
Oh wow, thx so much. Looking forward to it!
Interesting. The test they linked to is long and not so great, however :)
Standard search engines can only help you find results to a search query you can put into keywords. Often I want to ask the question "Am I missing something important about X?" and that cannot be translated into an effective search query.

We've built resourcey.com trying to tackle this problem. That is, http://resourcey.com/site_details/2/news.ycombinator.com/ is the answer to "Am I missing something important about Hacker News?".

This is a different form of search queries we couldn't find a way to get results for via standard search engines. If you think this functionality can be somehow produced by a standard search query, do tell.
Gotta do something with that legacy X.com domain...
I wholeheartedly agree that DoD isn't running the show on anything infosec related. There's a reason General Alexander is DIRNSA AND COMUSCYBERCOM. That's also the same reason LTG Pollett (head of the Defense Information Systems Agency) isn't COMUSCYBERCOM.

With that said, until USCC realizes that you can't buy security, and that operational units need to be held responsible for their security on the network to the same level that they are in the kinetic space, this is going to just continue to be a money-burning cluster.

There are SMART, talented people working in information security for the government - they're (in general) NOT the ones running the show, or even advising the ones running the show. Most of the ones I've met are working for intelligence agencies - and there is a large amount of rice-bowling and animosity between the services and agencies (such as DISA, NSA and now USCC).

Until someone upstairs (STRATCOM, CYBERCOM, Joint Chiefs, etc.) starts firing people, I don't think anything is going to change though.
Stanford has materials for a good Intro to Java course online: see http://j.mp/cSpFgw

I think it's a great course for learning the basics. Its exercises and assignments are gratifying, it holds your hand through early environment setup, and it gets you writing actual, satisfying code in short order.
The services haven't had Infosec personnel long enough to really have many senior people with that background. So they pick from the pool of people who need desk jobs - like grounded pilots.

The vast majority of infosec leadership in the services that I've encountered has been grounded pilots.

It goes as well as it sounds like it would.
eBay lawyers have to find some way to justify their billings...
The reason we still need 'queries' or maybe 'handmade data access' is because you dont know all the questions your systems will have to answer upfront.
The Inside Story of the Facebook Movie
Even if your domain "theplayersbay.com" represents an online auction site, I fail to see how it can be seen as intrinsically associated with eBay.

It's like Microsoft trying to prevent all software compnies from using the "soft" suffix or the "Micro" prefix.

I suspect that your domain was flagged by a poorly written pattern analysis bot and nobody at eBay has bothered to do any due diligence before firing off this "cease & desist".

My advice - send them an email stating your objection and requesting evidence that it has been construed to have an association with their brand. That should get a human being to actually look into the matter.
Google's search engine is good, but not necessarily the best. For small datasets, I am using Apache's solr. Google's custom search doesn't produce as great results. solr is also highly scalable. read about it here: http://lucene.apache.org/solr/
> (a) to command the attention of the public

> (b) send a message that the government is taking the issue seriously

are you serious? the whole article seems to be written by, for and about 5 year olds. Did you get to the part where they talk about planning to bomb Iraq when it turns out they were hacked by some teenagers? how much attention and seriousness is that inserting into US population?

> The immense role of military contractors in securing DHS/DOD networks.

The immense role of contractors in DoD budget is not exactly news

> The large, contractor-run malware research groups set up around the country.

any evidence?
The top 6 results shown on the right side when I did the trend search were:

- Django Bustamante wins duel vs Deuel
- Sukiyaki Western Django
- Paris pays homage to gypsy jazz great Django
- Bata, Django face tough competition in Japan Open
- The Modern Jazz Quartet and John Lewis's Django
- Bata, Django crash out of World Cup of Pool

There's a lot of noise in the result set. More often than not, I find it's really hard to do accurate search comparisons using Google trends. You'd probably get better results walking into an SV bar and doing a straw poll.
RE: The size.

The Cyber Command is a combatant command (like CENTCOM or AFRICOM) - just a staff/HQ organization. It directs the service components (US Navy Cyber Command, US Air Force Cyber Command, etc.) to actually DO things for it.

It won't typically staff actual workerbees - only planning and coordination type personnel, not hackers and firewall geeks.
Are you sure this is actually from eBay? I can send an email with a from address of "x@ebay.com" but that doesn't mean I actually sent it from an eBay server.
just wanted to point out that this is not a website but a tool to implement for your own website...
"flight to LA", "hotel room in New York next weekend", "metallica san jose tickets" etc. will return structured results, in both Google and Bing, soon I feel.

Google bought ITA and Bing bought Farecast for the purpose of getting direct access to this data. Since they can't web crawl this type of data, I would expect more acquisitions and/or licensing deals - such as the deal with Twitter.

Google has a decent foundation already with queries such as 'population of london' '<movie name>' (which shows local theatre times) and 'weather 94000' etc. Full list here:

http://www.google.com/landing/searchtips/#helpcenter
Did you get the part where that was over 12 years ago?
>The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.

What a beautiful thought for the entrepreneur in all of us.
I don't think you're catching my subtext. The goal of planting this story certainly isn't to make the public more clueful about how infosec actually works.

No, I'm not going to offer you evidence.
Software Smartbomb Aimed at Iran
You're probably thinking of SLS, which is nylon based, but can have stuff sprinkled in. The metal printers that ProMetal makes bind steel powder together, and then infuse it with bronze. It's quite strong, and I've heard that the grain structure is actually better than casting.

Don't even get me started on EBM. ;)
parody != satire nor does parody => satire

parody: an imitation of the style of a particular writer, artist, or genre with deliberate exaggeration for comic effect.

Thus, self-parody.
There is no similarity between those two names. Beware however, that court decisions are completely arbitrary in these matters.

Look here for the tragicomedy of MobiliX vs. Obelix:

http://tuxmobil.org/mobilix_asterix.html
Actually that part was the only one of interest. I didn't know Clinton was planning to bomb Iraq in 1998.
essentially, everyone here is right.. all they are doing is making an informal request. if they sue you, consider that their formal request.

for the time being though, might i suggest throwing up some content.. maybe something similar to this post is a good start?

edit: sorry.. i should have been clearer. do not reply.
It's a .org, so it's worthless.
Where do we report bugs?

Seems I can reply to myself, but not to the commenter.
Thank you. We tried. It's really unfortunate that even among people who know about printing, they know about the top two or three processes, generally. There's so much cool stuff happening in this space, the industry really has an image problem.
You don't go searching for the right thing to build with a tool. You look for the right tool to build a thing.

Now if you just got yourself a shiny new tool, it's natural that you will go looking for a silly thing to do. I remember one day I bought a Dremel and spent about two hours drilling holes in coins and whatnot.

Now on to the topic of gathering and disseminating information via cellphones, I think you can do some great things even if you only have SMS to work with. Here are two related projects I stumbled upon recently:

http://www.ushahidi.com/

http://www.nokia.com/corporate-responsibility/society/nokia-...
stackoverflow is useful? they have one of the worst search engines I've ever seen. If you are looking for anything more specific than "Javascript" you are going to have a hard time finding good results.

if I need to find something on stackoverflow, I just go to google and do a site:stackoverflow.com
This was a great comment, but we might be talking about different things; you're talking about the government securing its own systems (a task it has largely outsourced, much to the detriment of mankind) and I'm talking about the government doing... other things.
Emails aren't a legitimate form of legal correspondence are they? I would just ignore it.
Just in case the OP is using PHP, there are libraries that support Active Record without necessarily resorting to a PHP framework. (Same as you can AR outside of Rails [caveat emptor, might have changed in Rails3].) Adodb has one. Not a personal recommendation, just saying it's there if you need it.
It might explain the trend. Just because you can substitute nouns doesn't mean that the conclusion I'm drawing is wrong.

I don't think my explanation is correct, FWIW, but I'm not sure there's much you can draw just using a google trends chart anyway. It's not measuring usage (which is what the OP was presumably looking for information on), only searches.
Atom exists because everything Dave Winer touches becomes a clusterfuck, overwhelmed with problems both technical (http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/04/incompatible-rss) and social (http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/04/21/whats_your_winer...). The rest of us needed a format free from his influence or control, one with comprehensive specifications that he couldn't silently edit ('frozen' doesn't apply to him).

Please stop producing any flavor of RSS. Absolutely stop producing the same content in multiple formats, that's just inane. I am not not aware of any software not written by and for Dave that cannot parse Atom (iTunes does handle Atom podcast feeds, but they must be valid to work). If you really care about ancient clients, run your Atom feeds through Feedburner, they can take care of it for you: http://www.google.com/support/feedburner/bin/answer.py?hl=en...
anyone can open a new wikipedia clone, they're not all centrally controlled
You think anyone was capable of securing any system plugged into any network in 1998? 1998 is the late Cretacious period for software security.
Try to sell it on Flippa: http://flippa.com
Slime moulds can solve some complex problems in some surprising ways
Not a fan of the stick figure.
Uh... Clinton did bomb Iraq in 1998.
I think it's transcript style.
I didn't find it annoying. I think it added a subtle intensity and captivation which added to my experience.
This is most probably a scam aimed at forcing you to relinquish the ownership of the domain.
Ping Now Works With Your Actual iTunes Library. This Is A Thousand Times Better
Rather than looking for the next big thing, try to look for what the next big thing is dependent on. There could be ten companies trying to build a better electric vehicle battery, but they're all going to have to get their lithium from somewhere.
apart from what dkarl said, the geeks tend to take the moral high ground (at least the good onces). They cannot and will not be able to have that military approach towards this.

I am just saying if you were told that your algorithm will be used to kill a few hundred people, most of the geeks will be caught in a moral jam b/w their patriotic duties and there self righteousness.
Combine 1, 2, and 3, and you can make the function name just the content hash (of its AST, not its string representation)—the name becomes metadata. Every function call, then, just refers to another hash, which the loader (or the linker, if you want to inline for performance) just Googles and uses the first result that hashes right. Basically, all libraries become one library—called the Internet. Or, to put it alternately, every function, protocol, and data structure would be versioned inividually, as if they were all files stored on a Git repository.
They said it couldn't be built...
As it turns out, you're probably wrong; Microsoft probably could target Microfoot and Megasoft and win a case. Read the comments on this thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1633106

I agree that in this case, "theplayersbay.com" probably doesn't have much to worry about.
I have, I have actually worked with financial systems using Oracle, Forms etc, but even with that it's hell. I don't HATE "SQL" the language itself, I think it's very clever, beautiful etc. What I don't like is the whole part of actually creating the queries.

I understand that obviously for some applications a simple model is impossible, but for a lot of things, probably 80% of the work I currently do, webapps/simple listings, etc it would be very possible that a tool could solve the query writing part for the less complex type of things.