skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see huge problems with the current system but in the current capitalistic world we live in there has to be a way to protect money/time spent on researching things. If the results of 10 years of research can be stolen as soon as they're announced no one is going to pay for research anymore.
A Simulacrum for Action
I don't suck at interviewing, people who interview are usually as clueless as interviewee, so you can abuse this game from your side as well. I completely agree that people you hire most of the time have very little with what you need and want and that process is broken.

Suggestion in this post is how I would go about it as well, give people 2 weeks to try it out and see if we work for them as well as they work for us.
The problem isn't whether the patent is in software, it's that that patent office grants patents on trivial things.

Should be patentable: RSA
Should not be patentable: One click

The patent office needs to say "what problem does this claim to solve?" and then "if someone skilled in the art were faced with that problem, would the claimed invention really be novel and non-obvious".

RSA passes this test. Problem: secure encryption without prior secure key exchange. Solution: innovative math that makes that possible.

One click does not. Problem: if customers could avoid logging in multiple times, they'd buy more. Solution: set a cookie, using totally existing technology.

Some are still going to be borderline. Any useful rule is going to have questionable cases.
A Divided Infringement Defense Fights Patent Trolls
What about the people who don't have a computer (much less Netflix or a Kindle) at home? 40% of American households have no broadband, and 18% have no internet access at all. They can take a book home with them, and they don't need a computer or an internet connection to use it.
Ask HN: Would this be a useful automatic scraper-finding algorithm?
hi HNers,<p>I thought I had a decent idea for automatic website scraper removal on a previous story, (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2541853) but I commented quite late so I suspect nobody really saw my clarified comments. Feel free to downvote/flag this submission if it is inappropriate/spammy to submit a comment.<p>What if a content creator could push a content publication notice to Google, and a list of domains think will scrape it (and content creators seem to frequently know their frequent plagiarizers).
Google can then immediately index the scraper sites, and then index again after some interval (maybe a day or a week say).<p>Assuming that with the advantage of having an immediate notification, Google can index the scraper sites before the scraper sites can poll for the original content and duplicate it, proof of scraping occurs if the first index shows no content, and the second index shows a sufficient amount of exact matching content (obviously doesn't catch people who bother to paraphrase original content - but can defeat automated copying; and amount of copied content would have to be large enough to allow for legitimate quoting), and Google could then penalize accordingly (lower ranking, adword ban or whatever).
Job centre: Germany needs two million skilled immigrants - The Local
Actually you can't fire for any reason, but for a lot reasons. For example, you generally can't fire someone due to gender, or race, or testifying in court for the public good, etc...

I'd only take a 1099 if I was getting full benefits and equity, or paid accordingly. Although as a contractor on a one month contract I'd probably still consider my side project looking for a job. Whereas as an employee I will be a lot more vested in the company.
Except it's even worse than that: usually patent trolls haven't even written the code to solve the problem. Working code is not required to be granted a patent.
OP isn't much but a 'emacs is successful despite being bad software engineering in these ways', which isn't all that interesting. What would be more interesting is a discussion why those ways aren't bad for emacs or how emacs overcomes those handicaps.

For example, in an earlier Cook post on Unix philosophy, I linked http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/06/30/where-the-unix-phil... to ESR's discussion of Emacs http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch13s03.html#id... and the followup discussion about the interesting idea of contexts/frameworks http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch13s04.html

That could be more than a blog post, it could be a real contribution.
True(ish), but you don't have to make it text-heavy. Some kind of warning symbol and a brief message ("Are you sure? Only $OBSCURE_COUNTRIES use GMT.") would surely suffice.
> Sometimes, a talented person can't, for whatever reason, commit to a 3 week project.

I would think this applies to pretty much anyone who is in demand.

> Maybe he can take 3 days off his oyher job and work half a week and a weekend with us.

Can someone else explain, why i'd take time off of work to do this job interview? Why not take a day off and interview with Google/Apple/Microsoft instead?
Thanks tene, that's really good info. I was 100% turned around on that - definitely thought SIP had to route the call data through a central server.
> I believe this is the same way with patents in manufacturing. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you need to produce the mechanical process you are patenting and at least show it is viable before patenting it?

Not really.

Oh, you can't patent a perpetual motion machine, but you can patent an improvement to a process without showing that you can implement the whole process.

Suppose that I come up with an improvement in making steel in massive amounts. Do you really think that I shouldn't be allowed to patent it without building a large steel mill? (Two interesting cases are the lone "nut" and a university researcher.)
The PROTECT IP Act (COICA Redux) Is Still a Bad Idea
That's not a patent question.
I think it's highly unlikely the patent office would ever have the sophistication necessary to distinguish a truly new approach to an algorithm or architecture from a derivative one.

Additionally, there is so much depth and breadth in CS that innovation happens everywhere and is often hidden in the bowels of universities, garages, and offices. Even an apparently novel invention is unlikely to be invented only in one place, or to be invented first by the entity that files for a patent.
Copyright and trademark law are sufficient to protect coders. Software patents are absurd. It's analogous in my mind to allowing Stephen King to patent a certain kind of plot twist.
However, a move like this could put WinPho on the map, especially in countries where the name Nokia is synonymous with quality.

I think the author overestimates the power of Nokia's brand. In South Africa, the sort of place the author seems to refer, RIM is taking the lower-middle end of the market by storm, and displacing Nokia. Users who used Mxit (a hugely popular chat app) on Nokia are jumping to BBM in droves ("unlimited" data with BIS also helps).

Users in developing countries, which may be seen as the last viable market for Nokia, are more savvy than commonly assumed.

Nokia may be able to hold on to the very basic entry level market though.
If google really has a patent on that home page, I'd suspect it is a design patent, which is an entirely different kind of beast. It's more like trademark rights.
It's quite a warm-up period.. Founded in 2005, first API went public in March 2008.

http://techcrunch.com/2008/03/27/first-machine-listening-api...
> If the patents were created to protect inventors

They weren't, they were created to get inventors to disclose their inventions to the public so inventors wouldn't take their trade secrets to the grave with them.

Giving inventors a limited monopoly was the means to that end; why else would they disclose their secrets?
No support for Google Apps domains yet, but give it time I guess.
> It's technically impossible to know if a user has left a review on the App Store.

You know they've clicked through to your entry in the store. Users don't know they'll still get their coinage if they then don't rate the thing after clicking.
Software should be free, as in FREEDOM of speech!!
yannickmahe, it may be easy to find a job as a developer, but I recommend trying a company out if possible. It gives you a chance to see if it is worth quitting your job for.
Yes, patents infringe on people's rights, to foster innovation. Getting to patent something isn't a right, it's a privilege. As you've illustrated, all patents are inherently undesirable--at least for certain parties. And I agree. They should be abolished.
What If the US Treasury Defaults?
I would add that it also takes out all of the benefits, which employers never mention. No benefits, no unemployment payments. Having hired many people over the years, I always get a kick out of this argument that they are the same. They aren't the same at all! Much easier and cheaper to hire contract employees. Much harder to get good employees. I don't hire contractors unless it really is a short term job. Contract work isn't for finding your long term employee partners. Contract work is for one-time or short term work. If I need a long term employee, I look for a long term employee and I don't pretend that I'm trying people out by using the guise of contract-to-perm.
The librarian isn't a clerk who happens to work at a library. A librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa and a teacher. The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user.

It's really refreshing to read this -- my wife is a librarian, and when she tells people that she has a Masters degree in library science, people will literally scoff and say things like "why do you need a Masters degree for that?" As a whole, it's a disrespected profession, not just because people look down it, but because most people think it's irrelevant. (At least teachers, who are shit on even more than librarians, are relevant in everyone's eyes.)

And to teach them how to use a soldering iron or take apart something with no user servicable parts inside.

He lost me here, is he really suggesting that modern libraries need to become vocational training centers?
Apparently the future of computing is mobile.

With this purchase, along with the Skype purchase, Microsoft owns the hardware the user has, the operating system it uses, the calling software and user base.

All that's missing is a mobile network.
Brick Marketing SEO Newsletter for May 16
Build Microsites with a Marketing Purpose, Not Just SEO
I support patents, but think that for software the current system is seriously broken. Being able to patent things like in store app purchase, etc. IMHO is crazy.
Russ and Max were the two smartest guys I went to college with and were also great friends. Everyone knew that they were both going to be very successful.
Of course there are loop holes in the the suggestion I made, it wasn't meant to be a cure-all solution, but rather to point out there are many many more pragmatic ways to go about software patents. I agree that the original inventor should be protected to an extent, but the current system is broken and needs reform.
The problem with this approach is that the most offensive and problematic software patents are those which are trivial to implement.
No, but it is a intellectual property question. My point was that if you violate a trademark even though you independently came up with it, the same would apply for patents.
For anyone looking for a job immediately (as I am), I don't think s/he has time to do multiple 3-months projects. I do believe current interview process is broken, and interview results are not indicative of job performance. I think that's why referrals work the best. Also, although much shorter, weekend hackathons are good ways to gauge working chemistry.
A few people have asked, what is the point? since trees and associative access can just be implemented with lists.

It is the same basic point as having 'let' or 'case' etc. (which can all just be implemented with 'lambda' and 'if' etc.) -- it is just a bit higher-level to program with.

With something that makes programming a little easier (maybe), probably the question ought really be, why shouldn't we have it?
I feel like when people are comparing languages, they are exaggerating.. For instance:

public boolean hasUpperCase(String word) {
if (word == null) {
return false;
}
int len = word.length();
for (int i = 0; i < len; i++) {
if (Character.isUpperCase(word.charAt(i))) {
return true;
}
}
return false;
}

or

public boolean hasUpperCase(String word) {
if (null != word)
return any(charactersOf(word), new Predicate() {
public boolean apply(Character c) {
return isUpperCase(c);
}
})
else
return false;
}
I'm somewhat surprised that the vast majority of people here are against all software patents. I agree that many software patents are absurd, but I think of things like H.264 and MPEG where true innovation was required on the part of the people who developed it, and it seems clear to me that those people have a right to patent that work.

I'm curious though: what do people see as being the alternative?
This would make the skype acquisition a great deal more interesting; from the synergies point of view, but also from the antitrust angle, too.
It's not just a time issue for the interviewee; the interviewer then needs to spend extra time checking the quality of the work, requiring extra technical expertise.

Awesome idea; just not feasible in many situations.
Doesn't work on iOS Safari.

Nuts; that's my primary personal content creation platform now.
I may be a spectacularly inconsiderate communicator, but for me the answer is multitasking.

I can and do do a wide range of tasks while having an audio phone call with people. At home I can do basic housework, prepare meals, wander round for all sorts of things with the phone jammed between by head and my shoulder. It works well. I never have had video chat facilities for work (or needed them really) but I can think of any number of times gesticulating at colleagues for private communications while on an audio call, which is far from easy on video. Do you simply turn off the video briefly? If so, how do you explain this to the person you're communicating with?

Give me video chat and I'm tied to the screen. I can't easily do another job in parallel because it's on show and the other party can see that I'm not looking at them. They can see if I look around the screen to a TV, they can (indirectly) see if I open a second window on my computer to try a parallel task because the light to my face from the computer screen suddenly changes. This is quite visible most of the time.

For the times when video is a benefit it's a real benefit in my experience; being able to see the other person's expression, be shown objects or spaces in real time, generally use more communication methods. The bulk of the time though its benefits in my experience are small, and come at the expense of a significant extra burden on the communicators. Video, IMHO, will remain a niche in this area because the costs outweigh benefits to participants.
Apparently Jason lives in a world that's much like a giant cocktail party, where everyone is just milling about in one room looking for someone to work with.
@swombat Gotcha. That makes sense. I originally wrote the post in 20 minutes after watching "The Inside Job" so that's probably why it seems like I'm one of the "reddit-style omg banking is evil" type."

Yes, I wrote such a broad generalization, which I will definitely not include in future posts. So, thanks for the clarification. Learn something new everyday.

Will look into the CSS. Have no idea why it didn't load for you?

Have had a couple of posts get upvoted before so this isn't the first one:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2503064
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2250554
The problem in fact is too much enthusiasm. I wanted to hear some guidance on how to find balance in business vs technology.

Anyway, I appreciate your comment.
Gary Vaynerchuk expands on his "social media experts are clowns" comment
> people will learn to keep their money in a safe place.

Like a bank!
Governments stifle competition and promote monopolies. Don't believe what they tell you.
Its a slippery slope. Who gets to define what is ridiculous? You can say 'the courts', but one judge may differ from another and therein lies a deeper issue.
I think you need to produce the mechanical process you are patenting and at least show it is viable before patenting it?

That requirement was abolished (in the US, at least) in 1880. I've been told that the USPTO still asks for working models when people try to patent perpetual motion machines, but I don't know if this is true.
> Can someone else explain, why i'd take time off of work to do this job interview? Why not take a day off and interview with Google/Apple/Microsoft instead?

Surely it depends on the job. Maybe it's paying twice as much as Google/Apple/Microsoft for the same role.
Might as well buy Facebook and Google while you're at it. It will make it easier for Apple to acquire all three.
Well, the solution isn't upgrading for the sake of upgrading either. 1.9.2 buys me absolutely nothing and has some major costs associated with it. REE is chugging along like a champ.

I don't really understand why the release of 1.9.2 meant all else had to be dropped. Most other communities continue to support their stable releases. It's not as if 1.9.2 has even displaced 1.8.7 with virtually any of the linux distros either. If your policy is to use security-audited / supported packages, as is the case in many environments, moving to 1.9.2 is a dealbreaker.

Anyway, supporting 1.8.7 and 1.9.2 is trivial in most cases. I'm not demanding support for my environment, which I prefer to think of more as stable and battle-tested than "outdated." But I don't understand actively dropping support for it either.
I call B.S.

Let's take what I often here cited as one of the best software patents (personally, I think it is the worst.. but that's another story), RSA. Did that patent really prevent others from using/profiting on it? Hardly (although in most cases the "profiting off of" thing is a stretch, unless the explicit purpose of their product was cryptographic in nature.

Now, what if they had kept it a trade secret? Just look at their RC4. They kept it a secret and got a few years of exclusivity but eventually we all got the algorithm, because that's just how software works.

20 year exclusivity contracts are waaaay too long. I think the trade secrets route where "you have it until others figure it out" is far more fair and workable.
Sorry to all, I specifically meant software patents. Hardware patents are different as they often rely on physical creation of objects and a non-trivial investment in materials/development.

Conversely a software idea can be thought up in a few minutes and implemented in the same. In app purchases isn't exactly a clever idea or something that was revelatory. It was simple software evolution.
"Technology companies should take the joint infringement defense into account when drafting patent claims, defending against infringement charges, and planning claim construction arguments. From a patent applicant's perspective, companies should draft claims to describe the actions of a single actor or controlled by a single actor. Conversely, companies should assert a divided infringement defense when defending against charges of infringement that require multiple independent actors to commit the allegedly infringing acts."
A quick study exploring the power language has on clickthrough rates.
There's always Finland.

As far as I know, Nokia is still pretty strong in Europe (?).
Many seem to be under the mistaken impression that the acquisition had something to do with the (rather commonplace) technology Skype uses, and not the bazillion people who use it routinely and treat it as if were synonymous with VoIP.
New Version of Alureon Ups the Ante on Encryption
You're missing a critical difference. Patents are supposed to be "unobvious". A normal person just working in their shop should not just accidentally stumble across a patented thing, because by definition the patented thing should not be obvious to one skilled in the art.

Programmers on the other hand can indeed pop open an editor, spend a few minutes with Ruby on Rails implementing "a standard business procedure, but on the Internet!", and violate a patent. Or multiple patents. In fact, the very fact that we have patent trolls that can run around and sue business after business after business for the same patent, while the businesses have no evidence that shows they have communicated with each other about the patented subject, ought to be proof positive that the patent is obvious and shouldn't be patentable.

An amazing number of patents that actually are being litigated really are "X, but on a computer!" or some variant thereof ("X, but on a network device!" is one the company I work for has gotten hit with). I'm not exaggerating, for all the verbiage and diagrams this really is a reasonable summary of many of them.

Your metaphor fails, because what is not a realistic risk for people working in shops or labs is a perfectly reasonable risk for a hobby programmer, let alone a pro.

Perhaps programmers are overreacting because of all the bad ones and there is a core of goodness deep down in there, but I'm willing to find out the hard way.
My suggestion is to cut the period to 12 months and invalidate patents that have been issued so far. I have absolutely no hope there will be a cleanup of the patent house. There are many reasons why regulators fail to match the industry they are regulating in spend and effort. Same goes for finance, medical, software ...
Yeah, I really felt like that was a 'hey, this is in Vanity Fair, so we have to write something with deep literary thoughts and connect this bio piece to something more bohemian'

I think it's just part of the writing style required in VF.
Improving CAPTCHAs with Unicode Visual Spoofing
Full of factual errors and bombastic opinion masquerading as truth. British air-to-air kills during the Battle of Britain were heavily weighted in favour of the slower, older Hurricane (which was more numerous in service, and perfectly capable of mixing it with the majority of Lufwaffe aircraft in 1940). The RAF, which began re-arming in late 1937/38, actually had newer aircraft than the Luftwaffe, and a home mover's advantage in that pilots who were shot down ended up landing in the UK (able to go back into battle if British, but destined for a PoW camp if German). Finally, unlike the Lufwaffe, the RAF had the world's first integrated air defense network, with radar pickets to detect inbound bombers, control centres to direct the interceptors, and radio-directed fighters.

The myth of the Spitfire is over-hyped because it's a lot simpler than the reality of the situation.
I think the answer is we should have it, but it's just a library.
David Foster Wallace predicted in Infinite Jest that people wouldn't want to do video calling and went into great, albeit ridiculous, detail as to why.
40% off at PragProg on Ruby and Rails titles
Interesting. I wonder if REE is really the savior for the article author then.
That's what I was implying with my comment above, i.e. that the selector should mention the region rather than the abstract timezone. By "almost nobody" I meant the people who need to use the abstract timezone rather than refer to some specific area.
I think you've hit the nail on the head; my niece and nephews, teenagers and slightly younger, will hang out for hours with multiple video chat windows open.
For the beef, of course.
From the guidelines:

"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html