skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Provisional Patent
Hey guys. Lately I've been working hard on my distributed social network, and I've come up with a bunch of solutions along the way that don't seem to have been done by anybody.

I want to submit provisional patents for them. I've already submitted the first one in may.

Do you have any advice for someone writing a provisional patent? What should I make sure to put in it, so I can later engage with facebook, google and the like, and confidently be able to talk about the technology -- knowing that they will need to license my patent instead of just implementing it?

I'm not a big fan of 17-year software patents, but I'll admit that this protection is a very attractive option for the next year or two. I have really invented some cool stuff and I will have about 4 provisional patents on it. I'm going to be implementing it myself in my sites -- so I'm not just patent trolling :) I'm pretty sure facebook and google would love to implement it, but I think them being huge companies I'd like to get something from them.

So I'm looking for advice on what should go into my provisional patent, and maybe your opinions on whether I should "feel bad" for patenting my inventions... trust me, they are going to improve the internet for a lot of people, but at the same time I do want to make money from this and have some protection from google and facebook just copying it themselves.
Already provided if you scrolled down. Here it is again:

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year2008_US.html
It's cool. I'm American and it made me lol. Austria and Vienna are at the top of my 'places to see' list, so next chance I get to travel I'll certainly look you up.

One question - how do English-only speakers get along there?
Look at the browser stats (You do have google analytics (or similar) installed). Then make a business decision if you want to exclude x% of yoru customers. It might make business sense
Sometimes people get in this state because they have no savings to speak of and some unexpected large expense comes up. Your car breaks down. The fridge quits. The house needs a new roof. Your job downsized it's medical coverage to a larger deductible and your wife got in a car wreck.

Not everyone with massive credit debt was out there buying iPods and flatscreen TVs. The root cause (no savings) is a different story.
catalog - I must admit I force killed the browser (Firefox) after a while, but it resulted in an unkillable process. Therefore I had to hard reset the Mac.
NASA and Darpa Plan ‘Hundred-Year Starship’: Bringing Humans to Other Worlds
It's interesting that both this lens concern, and the antenna problems, may have been under-appreciated by Apple because much of their practical-use testing was with cases -- either in-house or for camouflage field-testing. Then, the iPhone4 ultimately launched without a broad variety of available cases, so most people used it without a case.
My only guess is that they have so many merchants waiting in the queue that this is an avenue for these merchants to get their deal out.

The only problem is that for the people buying the groupons. I only try to limit myself to 1 a week since that it all that I can afford right now. If more groupons are available, I probably wouldn't buy more unless it was a killer deal.
This reminds me of Craigslist Craig's job in customer service. Absolutely no better way to understand your customer's pain points. As an engineer I'm a fan of spending time in customer support once in a while, especially as a company grows and more layers are added between engineering and the customer.
Visual Studio "Async" CTP freely downloadable:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/async.aspx
Web Accessibility & The Blind
Found this when digging deeper following http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1842289 post
You're correct on "not a public good", sorry. Complete economics brainfart; I was thinking public good = for the common good. I'm not sure who downvoted you or why, but I modded you back to +1.

I do still think that education should be a function of the government, however.

Edit to expand on my position: I had confused the terms public good and common good. I believe that a solid, (to some extent, but not as far as we are now) standardized education system is in the best interest of our nation. I don't think this could be provided privately.
Every organization, private or public, has enormous waste. It seems that at a US-level scale that leads to a crippled government. Canada and Scandinavian governments seem to more or less work & get things done, even in the face of waste.

That said, the main issue is who does the work that is inherently not measurable by profit. Peter Drucker did a lot of writing about this - when you don't have profit to measure your performance, you have the mission. Non-profit hospitals are measured by patients cured, the DHS is measured by threads eliminated, etc. Government isn't a good doer, they are a policy setter. They need to spin out functions to non-profits and measure their performance based on mission-based factors.
+100 for "find yourself a better boss". The recurring theme of this thread seems to be "no one understands (or is willing to admit) what value you bring to this organization", and I couldn't agree more.

It's possible to have a great time working in a language you hate, on hardware that sucks, but only if you have a great team and great boss that appreciate what you contribute.
The Most Shocking Moments in Comic Book History
Many influential characters have been born through comic strips, including a long list of famous superheroes.
People in this situation usually end up there because that's the most debt they can tolerate - they are making payments but the psychological pressure from the debt and it's consequences keeps them from going further into debt (or from fixing the problem)

Every excuse for why people end up in debt is moot if you realize that almost every single one of those people could have had a positive cash savings had they only planned better, and not NEEDED debt.... they used it because they could.
It seems a little ironic that, in an attempt to encourage financial responsibility in the area of debt management, they are effectively asking people to hand their financial information to an unknown party. I got a letter the other day claiming that I'd won the Spanish lottery that (if it were not a classic scam, if it were not postmarked from Texas, and if not for the YC stamp on ReadyForZero) would have been only a little less credible. I mean, they're even hosting the McAfee, TRUSTe, and VeriSign stamps on their server.

Let me be clear: I do not think this is a scam. I just think there are some mixed signals here. You should be very up front about exactly what's done with the user's information and how it's secured, and give them a reason to think you're for real. An endorsement from someone well-known would do wonders.

Some of your potential customers are likely in debt because they've fallen for scams in the past. Don't let them be scared off.
First, fix McDonalds, then I'll listen to concerns about unrecycled solar panels.
Unpopular Science: Like it or not, life is subject to the laws of physics.
Speakeasy: A new open-source language tool from Typekit
Public Data Sets on Amazon Web Services (AWS)
I don't understand why you can't tell whether or not you need to pay. There are signs to identify where the congestion charge zone is, so if you drive past one between 7a-6p then you owe for that day. You can register to pay online and have it auto-deducted.

I think it's very expensive and maybe not good value, but back when I lived in London I don't recall any difficulty in knowing whether or not I had driven into the downtown area where I was required to pay the traffic fee. Have they removed all the signs or something since then?
Thanks a lot. Does it matter if the company is in Delaware and its corporate bank account is in Florida or in another state? Do I have to pay taxes in Florida if my company is in Delaware?
They do for corporate customers.
What Smartphone Makers Can Learn From the Sewing Machine Patent War
This is all nauseatingly familiar to my current circumstances.. thanks for posting!
I had a few white hairs from time to time in my early 20s. Now I'm 29 and getting perhaps a few percent grey/white hairs on both sides. But men on both sides of my family have gone full-on grey/white from 50 or so so I'm not concerned (I quite like the idea really).

One of the signs of serious stress is going bald or having clumps of hair falling out. If you're not at that level, I wouldn't pay much attention to it. But, as always, see a doctor if you're worried.
I remember looking into whiteboard systems that automatically digitize what people write as a way to conveniently record what was written but the implication that this tech could also be used to help a blind person during a meeting is interesting.
A false dichotomy. The choice isn't between living in a police state and running amok with your slingshot.

Enforcing trademarks another example of a social program for business that I guess you could live without. We could disagree about the need for patents and how the US Patent and Trademark office is configured, but most people here, among them entrepreneurs, would agree that trademarks are a good thing, and that they should be enforced.

But let's see what happens if we were to hijack each other's brands. Maybe we should take over the YCombinator trademark. After all, enforcing trademarks isn't directly concerned with national defense. In the name of limited government, it's OK to suggest affiliations with corporations by using their trademarks without their approval. Especially since we dyed-in-the-wool libertarians don't believe in negative externalities, and that businesses have the right to do whatever they want. Those other companies with their putative concerns about reputation and perception about their brands, trademarks and logos are third parties to the exercise of our God-given libertarian rights. I only hope my militia is stronger than their militia.
I'm only 7hrs+ flight away from you.. Thanks for the invite though! ;)
Good. Embedly is one of the few startups that is actually doing something useful to everyone.
I do actually have a perl script that generates all the obnoxious boilerplate a rails application that does something slightly differen from what DHH likes requires, so I have no doubt that such a mix of languages may come to pass in other places, too.
How can the present state-of-the-art in NLP ML be more than a toy having limited scope if the most interesting, and truly useful real-world applications require impossible amounts of hardware resources, along with algorithmic running times that will take until the heat death of the Universe?

Mainly I'm talking about the topics in and related to the famous paper What Computers Can't Do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Computers_Cant_Do

Before I get nitpicked for generalizing NLP/ML to all out "Hard AI", I would like to note that almost all of the most trivial language processing tasks we meatsacks perform a billion times per day in our daily lives involve the semantic interpretation of abstract representations. It would be trivial to sit down and begin enumerating specific types of word and association problems that a child could perform, but which no supercomputer with a 1,000 engineers toiling it on could solve in the general sense.

By no means am I saying that everyone in the field should not full court press ahead on the state of the art, as we'll never get there unless we try. I am asking about the extent that real-world NLP/ML use is constrained enough so as to be nearly worthless hokum buzzwords. (i.e. analytics, recommendation engines for pre-conditioned, overtrained and context-free representations, behavioral profiling for ads, statistical models of dynamical systems, etc.)

I hope this doesn't come off as being negative, as I'm really more interested in the question of Hard AI and how it relates to computational linguistics problems we can solve today or in the near future without some kind of unforeseen "singularity" level break through in AI. Or is the general state still as bad as when Minksy demolished perceptrons, causing the "nuclear winter decade" in AI?

I don't have a PhD, just a pure math undergrad with a high motivation to have kept going at it, and this topic itself is so obscure & difficult that it's not often one has the chance to ask someone who knows, so I am very interested in the perspective of present day researchers.
Pretty sure we have a fair amount of these:

http://timetric.com

Ping us an email if there's things we can help you out with.
IMoby: the hunt for the great white iPhone
Excellent. Will use that now.
And vice versa.

I believe there is space for both.
You should move your monitor around or get a second one and place it to the right of your head. Also, check the Feng Shui of your office.

If an unusually high-power CRT were to blame, you would have no hair on the left of your head instead of just white hair. Asymmetric UV exposure could bleach parts of your hair.
Would also love to see how you folks are unit testing MVC at DocumentCloud
The punchline is...."So about six weeks ago I picked up Cloure" - If you're linkbaiting your article, you should always spellcheck.
From my research, gray hair is genetic, but stress can trigger changes.

I've been a computer geek since I was 7 or 8. I started graying at 16. I'm 41 and my hair is completely white now. I wouldn't worry about it. Your only problem will be how first impressions go. But if you accept yourself as you are, it won't hold you back.

I just cut it really short now.

It's like baldness, it is better to accept it with some dignity than look like an insecure dope with a toupee or a comb-over.
I am in complete agreement with you. The lucky majority have hot water on tap, we have access to thousands of songs instantaneously (people forget how miraculous this is), we have many creature comforts that would put us out of reach of most royalty going back not even two hundred years. One of the most uplifting Ted Talks* I ever watched was this economist who argued that in one hundred years time poor Africa would still be poor but that their standard of living would surpass anybody alive today. (I find it hard to imagine it now but he had lots of statistics and graphs I tell ya!)

* http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/hans_rosling_asia_s_rise_h...
Definitely, if you're almost ready for release you've made it over the initial hump.

Once it gains traction you'll have a better idea on when to quit your 'day' job or perhaps reduce your hours at your day job.

Checkout the interviews on mixegy.com particularly with Todd Garland he was working a full time job while building buysellads.

http://mixergy.com/buysellads-todd-garland-interview/

I work full time as an engineer and run a web design firm as well as working on a start-up so I'm very busy as well. It's hard work but it pays off.
Ask HN: Looking for feedback on my weekend project - Pitch A Journalist
After the great feedback I received, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1777841 , I decided to go ahead and put a UI around the weekend long project for finding and managing press contacts.

I came out with this: http://pitchajournalist.com

I am trying to solve the problem of finding reporters and journalists who would be interested in covering broad startups, niche startups, and micro-niche startups.

Right now if you asked for a list of journalists that cover web 2.0 technology startups, I would send you this: http://pitchajournalist.com/lists/1

I am solving this problem by scraping news websites for emails and doing reverse lookups for information about the emails for the purpose of creating lists of relevant reporters and journalists.

I can then manually email a journalist or send an email to a list of journalists (distributing a press release, or pitching a new startup). If the email is sent through the website, it is tracked so it can be referenced later by the user who sent it.

What do you guys think? Do you have any advice?

Do you see value in the time this type of a service saves if you commit to using it?

As for business models, I envision one of the following:
1) Sell a monthly subscription giving full access to every feature.
2) Sell credits for emailing journalists, distributing press releases to lists, and credits to download lists that you create.
3) Freemium model allowing people to send a limited number of emails, perform a limited number of searches, and create 1 list. Subscription to full featured site.
4) Give full access to everything, limit the display of lists to 20% of the list, and sell access to the full list. Give 30% commission to the user who created the list.

Let me know what you guys think.

I am also interested in opinions on how to prevent people from abusing a site that contains tens of thousands of emails. Right now I converted all emails to images to deter people from being malicious.

You can use most of the site without registering, but if you do register, let me know and I will approve your account.

Thanks!
Fair enough, the medical one has always sounded scary and inhumane to me for low-income/low-coverage USians.

Fridge, roof, etc. seem somewhat more self-inflicted.
https://asc.llnl.gov/computing_resources/sequoia/

Lawrence Livermore is already planning the next "World's Fastest Computer"
This is a huge, huge deal for services businesses. Just making it dead simple to collect revenue online is a win for them. "Send out an email to your mailing list about $10 off massages, get $500 in your bank account almost immediately, service the customers who come in with printed coupons."

Back of envelope math: $60 massage, $50 with coupon, $45 revenue for merchant. Works outstandingly well -- even before you account for the inevitable breakage.
Another way to phrase this: read other people's code.

Reading code is important. Programmers should read code all the time.
I bought a small netbook Acer one, but couldn't really do anything with it because typing suffered on the too small keyboard, so I gave it to my daughter. Really looking forward to getting a 11" macbook air to have as the computer to bring when going away for weekends or travelling. Hate lugging the 15" MBP everywhere, it takes too much space and is heavy (although it's a pretty powerful machine).
Learn How to Pass (or Beat) a Polygraph Test
They may not be more valuable in an "all men are created equal" Orwellian sense. In practice however they are given benefits, chances and advantages denied to others and so find their path through life eased. It is of course still up to them to exploit these advantages.
I think of them as silver. And silver hair is cool. Aged, wisened.
This list and China's place on it are both irrelevant for the following reasons:

1. Any entrant that extensively relies on GPU's for its performance should not even be on the list or at least appear with an asterisk. The "G" in GPU does not stand for general. Consequently this machine is principally applicable to specific problem sets that are designed to take advantage of the processing power provided by the GPU.

2. Primary attention in the supercomputing space has shifted focus from using pure flops as a metric to flops per watt as the primary concern. Beyond that, focus has also shifted towards interconnect technology to keep all those flops well fed with data.

Just like the Chinese to be a few steps behind the thought leaders but front and center for biggest and most easily duplicated.
http://www.couchsurfing.org/people/nraynaud/
Same kind of offer here.
Microsoft profit jumps 51 percent with record Q1 revenue
Can you please spell check city names.
s/Bangaluru/Bengaluru/g.
Great post - love it
Some of our affiliates at work have like 95% conversion. I am not sure what do they promise to give the people if they buy our stuff but it has to be pretty good
I work for a small shop, so I know very little about how big players work, but I was under the impression, that every company takes data in account, while making product decisions.
Yeah, you're right, it is about me. But what do you want me to say? That it works for everyone?

A lot of my good friends are photographers so most of my portraits are taken from them. Thus, I think my photos are well executed compared to self portraits taken via mirrors/cellphones.

My profile is pretty genuine. I don't aim to be pretentious or egotistical.

When I contact people, I usually start up with something that's related to their profile or something that's in common as to help talk about something interesting. Thus, no disrespectful pick-up lines or gratuitous photos.

Contacted about... 21 people over six months (people of different levels of attractiveness)? Received like... 1 reply.

So, congratulations on the site working very well for you. Really. But, not everyone has such fortunate results despite doing things that are civil and respectful. So when people say, "so if you actually read their profile and send intelligent messages selectively, you'll get responses" well I can say it doesn't always work.
Unfortunately, unrestricted searches generate way more hits than you can process by hand. I worked around this by applying subsets of search criteria at a time. For instance, instead of searching for an Atheist/Agnostic 25-35 making over $50k with an Average or Athletic body type who likes backpacking, exercises 3-4 times per week, and has a graduate degree, I would search for athletic Atheist/Agnostics making over $50k, then search for women with graduate degrees who like backpacking, then maybe widen the age range to 20-40 but apply the rest of the criteria, and so on. The challenge was to be as inclusive as possible without generating more hits than I wanted to process in one sitting.

It was also an interesting odyssey into my own preferences, prejudices, and thought processes. Sometimes I wasn't interested in getting a lot of results. Instead, I'd sit down with a desire to explore a very specific search, which often resulted in zero hits. I'd fiddle with the search until I got a few hits. One day I met a really pretty girl (not available, unfortunately) who was Indian and kept thinking about how great it would be if she was going on my upcoming backpacking trip with me. So I did a search for South Asian women who listed backpacking as an interest, and got zero results, none at all in my area, even after I removed all other criteria (18-60+, 4'0"-8'11", all body types, etc.) I was intrigued by the result, so I tried other ethnic groups (no black women into backpacking, either, IIRC) and found that East Asian + backpacking produced a set of results that I could process in a reasonable amount of time. Voila, I found a few interesting profiles and ended up getting a date with one of them.

Small result sets always intrigued me. Searching for women making over $150k turned up a very small set for my area, with a couple of interesting and surprisingly approachable-sounding profiles. When I broadened my search radius, I found one girl I would have messaged in a heartbeat if she lived closer. It was strange how often a small result set had a higher density of interesting and compatible profiles, even if the parameters I chose to create it seemed unrelated to my preferences. The >$150k search surprised the heck out of me; I assumed it would turn up a bunch of women I had no chance with and nothing in common with. But that was pretty typical for small result sets, at least the ones I tended to produce. Large result sets contained lots of interesting people, too, but the payoff of interesting profiles per time spent slogging through results was much lower.
close. Suppose the answer is 99? How many drops would it take to figure that out? Could you do it in less?
For us, it certainly does. Our product's success depends on it working "for everyone". If you invite your structural engineer to the project and they can't use Woobius, you'll revert back to email or some other method, and Woobius will have failed. Therefore, if 5.6% use IE6, given that those 5.6% include some of the largest engineering firms in the UK, we have to support IE6.