skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Help I think I'm being patent trolled
Throwaway here.

I've been running an online service for a while now, and I just got an e-mail from some guy saying he "just filed a patent similar to what we do and hopes there will be no 'conflict of interest'".

Not once did the idea of trying to file a patent cross my mind, and this really makes me wonder and worry how the patent system works. I haven't been following it at all -- I just want to build cool stuff.

So my question is:

Is it possible for someone to file a patent and then come back and sue me after their patent is granted?

Does this mean I should try to file my own patent?

Am I even in danger or is this just an empty threat?

Thank you for any help shedding light on this.
Now that we have experienced the downside of business over the past few years and have come back from it, it is time to understand that even though we were forced to innovated and adapt to the changing market, we now have to continue these practices in order to keep succeeding.

Consumers have been changed forever and now we need to respect that and change our mindsets.
WebRTC launches (open source JS APIs for videoconferencing)
Anywhere (San Francisco preferred, REMOTE, or H1B considered)

Hi, I'm Amit, the Founder of Photojojo! (http://photojojo.com/). We're on a mission to make photography fun for everyone, and we're looking for two web developers to work on the most FUN online shop ever.

About us:

* Office in Mission district in San Francisco, half of us work remotely

* Profitable and growing quickly. But like being small!

* Our work gets talked about at places like 37 Signals, FOWA, and Hacker News -> http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=764802

* We take the company on a yearly workcation. This year, 3 weeks in India: http://www.flickr.com/photos/photojojolovesyou/sets/72157625...

Looking for:

* One senior web developer to lead our team, and one junior web developer

* Experience in PHP, JavaScript, CSS, and SQL (rather than being front/backend specialists)

* People who love photography and are excited!

* People who love to work, and who others love to work with

* People who thrive on responsibility and want a say in our direction

More info/apply (these listings just went up):

Senior developer: http://photojojo.com/jobs/webdeveloper-senior.html

Junior developer: http://photojojo.com/jobs/webdeveloper-junior.html
I meant the other, customer-centric ideas expressed, but it's true.

In fact, Orlando FL has quite a few food vans that occasionally all park in the same area for a mini food fair and attract a lot of people. They've become quite popular in the last year or 2. (I'm sure it happens other places, but Orlando is what I know.)
It's definitely going to be included in all plans.

To expand on that, we do real real-time. For services that provide real-time updates, like Twitter, you get notification in the exact same moment someone retweeted you or followed you. For custom widgets where you provide your data, it's the same. Your system pushes data to the dashboard and your dashboard shows it instantly. For services you need to repeatedly poll, we're doing as many API requests as their limits allow us.
> They might as well donate all their Java patents to Google

Are you kidding?!

They could donate them to the FSF, ASF or any other non-profit entity dedicated to promote of free and open-source software. Donating them to Google would create a whole lot of temptations the folks in Mountain View really don't need.
Mac malware disguises as Rihanna and Hayden Panettiere lesbian sex video
Agreed, fantastic book.
Twitter CEO: “We’re a remarkably successful business”
Total speculation, but he may have been doing this on his miner. Miners don't need much of anything, except for a powerful video card.
How about that we remain silent.on matters of which we are ignorant? We are not party to this man's innermost thoughts and family conversations indeed such is none of our business and it is more than a touch offensive to offer up judgments. Let's leave the family to mourn their loss, shall we?
Actually, the RSS feed was for zedshaw/mongrel2. It showed up because these trolls were spamming pull requests to a legitimate project.
The term "+1" evokes, to me, RSVPs. It means that I want to go and take someone with me. I assumed it meant that I like this page, and someone I like may like it as well.

But honestly, it's not something I spent more than .1s thinking about until writing this.
It's certainly possible that the deployment of five restaurants are just so that the developers have 100% control over the proving ground for their new software. It certainly sounds like this is a technology company to me anyway.
This guys is an American. The FSB (what the KGB turned into) can't do much to him without an elaborate process (either a diplomatic one, or inserting agents onto American soil.)

The FBI, however, can have him hauled away with a minimal amount of effort.

This is like saying that you shouldn't worry about your neighbor being a peeping tom, since anyone could just buy a gigantic telescope or a surveillance satellite!
I also don't see how it's making him racist.
What is this 'Elopoclypse' you speak of, can you elaborate?
I expect it will work out like this:

1. If you mine a bit coin yourself, there are no tax consequences at that time. Your basis in that bitcoin is $0, or perhaps the cost of generating the bitcoin.

2. If you exchange that bitcoin for dollars, you realize a gain of the difference between the number of dollars received and your basis.

3. If you exchange that bitcoin for goods, you realize the difference between the market value of the goods and your basis, and your basis carries over to the goods.

In other words, it will likely be treated like any other barter transaction in which goods that are not like kind goods are traded.

Bitcoin is novel in how they are generated, and how transactions are tracked and verified, but it is not novel outside of those areas. Trading bitcoins for goods is not really any different than trading, say, shares of Apple stock for goods, or trading first edition books of 19th century literature for goods. The tax system knows how to deal with these situations (and to prevent their abuse).
Right. And this idea that spying on international communications is something new is ludicrous.

We pushed to have the first United Nations conference in San Francisco specifically so that we could intercept outbound telegraph messages, and have the upper hand in negotiations.
"1 didn't bother because they were already so profitable" -> anyone an idea which one that was?
My main point is not limited to software patents, it's just more striking in this area because the drawbacks of patents are so clearly demonstrated every day. And contrary to other disciplines, copyright covers a lot of ground when it comes to software.

But to understand what might make software special you have to look no further than the things that are currently not patentable and never have been, like mathematical approaches and business processes.

So, for instance, if you invent some data mining approach based on graph theory and you write your formulas on a piece of paper or into your matlab or R worksheet you cannot patent it. If you express the same ideas in a couple of C functions you can patent it.

Another example. Say you are the first to have the idea of selling coke and sandwiches at gas stations. You cannot patent it. But if you are the first to have the idea of selling avatars from within some computer game, you can patent it. Why is that?

The differentiation between patentable and non patentable types of approaches and ideas is not something that was invented by software patent crusaders. It's right there in the law already.
(Puzzled shrug) Yes, and roofers wear hard hats. Am I missing your point somehow?
Yes, it is, because it's not doing what I expect it to do. It's neat, but it's still hijacking.
Austin, TX

Bazaarvoice is hiring tons of folks this year.

We're almost always rated the Best Place In Austin to work.

We need engineers and product managers.

Natural Language Processing, Big Data, Mobile and more:

https://careers-bazaarvoice.icims.com/jobs/search?ss=1&s...
Raleigh / Durham / RTP , NC

Knowit - http://www.knowitapp.com
Use Knowit to Share your Wealth of Knowledge with the World.

Knowit is looking for fun hackers and interaction designers local to RTP to join our small and smart team. Email jeff@knowitapp.com
He concludes his post with a remark about how he will think twice about doing business with people in other countries.
>Please somebody let me know if I missing something here but this is what happens when a CEO is a totally incompetent.

Which CEO are you talking about?
Jumping to the BIOS is not a reliable reboot method either (method 7). Because the BIOS assumes hardware in a hardware-reset state, and the OS left it in some other state.

Tried to get an OS on a PC to soft-reboot, failed, because it is not actually possible to return all hardware to the reset state in some cases - they have an initial power-on state and once programmed can never return there unless hard-reset.

And why does the BIOS require hardware in the hard-reset state? Because a BIOS is never tested in a soft-reset scenarios, because Windows doesn't require it. And "if you haven't tried it, it doesn't work".
It's not worth the trouble to go through a publisher anymore. You're not going to make any money on a tech book no matter how popular it is. The smart move in the modern age is to work on the book in the open with a blog and then self publish an ebook. If you like you can even sell it or ask for donations.
Sorry, that's YOUR definition, and good for you that you consider altruism more meaningful than courage. But yours is not the only definition, as I'm sure you are perfectly aware.

Now as to Mr. Parsons, don't be suckered into equating his killing an elephant with the question of whether elephants should be culled. Culling an elephant involves game wardens. What he did was murder tourism, big difference.
Currently the request queue for office hours is empty, meaning everyone who wants to meet with us has been able to. We have capacity for more office hours this week and will be adding more. PG added office hours for this afternoon, with more slots than there were requests in the queue. Things seem to be working so far.
Need Help Finding the Perfect Domain Name? Try Panabee
Same situation with Rob Hall in 1996 (a very bad and very famous season on Everest) and his 7 month pregnant wife Jan Arnold. She was also a climber and physician who had submitted Everest with Hall in the past. He called her via sat phone from the summit to say goodbye.
This is pretty awesome; anyone know how many mobile browsers support this? We've been relying on jQuery mobile, but it's a bitch and a half convincing it that we don't really want pretty rounded shade borders around the icons, or that we don't want them on the left-hand side.
Not everyone is specifying remote or not, though. :(
One economist's 'hoarding' is another's 'capital accumulation'. Note that in order to accrue any form of money, some valuable things must be provided in return (assuming voluntary exchange). So while the hoarder may have pleasure from owning digital or physical bills of exchange, everyone else gets to benefit from real goods and services that have been rendered. Of course, those hoarders that really remove money from circulation are a very small exception.
Why the quotes around "donates"? This doesn't seem like a white elephant, or a trojan horse. It's commendable that they gave it up rather than let it rot.
You should turn the "s" in Ducksboard into a duck (logo); if not, people like me will keep forgetting that the letter is there and remember it as "Duckboard".

It's probably the easiest character to draw as a duck, so it's not going to be a big problem. :)
Here is the direct link to Facebook's visualization:
https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150187460703920
As expected Oracle didn't donate it to The Document Foundation. There will be more calls to merge the OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice projects now. That is really what needs to be done, both office suites are still almost identical.

The Apache Software Foundation and The Document Foundation have to overcome their egos and do the right thing. Then we could credit TDF with 'liberating' OOO and ASF with closing the deal.

If they don't merge OOO and LO this 'donation' could create a new division in the Open Source community.
Efficient transactions schemes are not necessarily good stores of value

Yes, but universally accepted scarce tokens are good stores of values. And currently dollars and euro, and almost every other currency are just that. Universally accepted scarce tokens.

And bitcoins are both an efficient transaction scheme and a scarce tokens. And, by design, a lot more scarce. Of course, it has not yet bootstrapped itself, but I see that as a possibility. And damn convenient possibility, too.
Bitcoin is an Achilles Centipede; that may be one of its many heels.

Another: is its conflation of efficient transaction medium and store of value, as if the simple "scarcity" of cryptographic random numbers would allow it to hold value once people decide it's no longer a competitive way to conduct business.

You see this in message board debates all the time, where bitcoin supporters, having been talked down from the notion that particularly idiosyncratic bit patterns in SHA256 hashes can ever have intrinsic value, resort to talking up bitcoin's utility as an cheap and anonymous Paypal; then, when confronted by bitcoin's manifest liabilities as a transaction media (for instance, the fact that it's so thinly traded that its price can jump double digit percentage points during the time it takes to clear a transaction), they revert back to the intrinsic value of mathematical scarcity compared to the oogie-boogie Federal Reserve.
San Francisco, CA

Boundary is building a platform for real-time network operations, visualization, and exploration. We have exciting challenges in high-speed data collection, large-scale data processing, user experience, and interface design. We work with a variety of languages, including Scala, Erlang, C/C++, and Javascript. We're venture-backed and our small, talented team is growing fast. Our jobs page is at https://boundary.com/jobs or you can email us at jobs@boundary.com. If you are great at what you do and want to make a real impact, we'd love to hear from you!
Ask HN: Who is Looking for a Co-Founder? (June 2011)
Please describe:

- your expertise (startup and/or prior work)

- desired skillsets of a co-founder

- whether you have an idea that you are committed to or you are willing to explore other ideas

- areas of interest

This is based on: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2607052
The last post on this topic was nearly year ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1662512
Count yourself lucky. Amongst our enterprise-level customers, IE6 (yes, 6, you read that right) is still the majority of page hits.
Finding a Laptop in the Trash is Not Hacking
> Google is trying to throw it's weight at something it's competitors already do better.

I don't quite understand how you can do a like button "better". If by that you mean the number of current users, I disagree that Google should stop competing just because there are more people on FB.
This guys is an American. The FSB (what the KGB turned into) can't do much to him without an elaborate process (either a diplomatic one, or inserting agents onto American soil.)

For the actual circumstances he's talking about (international phone calls and transfers) there's always at least one other country involved, so their secret service is at least as likely as the US's to be monitoring it.

The FBI, however, can have him hauled away with a minimal amount of effort.

Uhh, the FBI has always been able to haul you away with a minimal amount of effort. All they have to do is suspect you of a crime. That's got nothing to do with the Patriot act or with the War on Terror... that's what the FBI is designed to do.
Anywhere - Automattic has quite a few openings: http://automattic.com/jobs/
> "Any government could be spying on you."

How many governments have a direct line to his local network exchange and an automated data gathering system that operates on that data?

> "convincing a judge that you need a warrant is surely no more effort than convincing your superiors at the CIA that it's worth devoting effort to spying on this random dude."

If the CIA's data mining project went through bureaucratic layers to enable the tracing, if that step was proactive and required effort, you would have a point. But all accounts suggest it's 100% automated.

He may well be inconsistent in his paranoia. But you seem to be judging that based on an either overly generous/naive faith in official government statements, or an ignorance of what the CIA and the Patriot Act really do.
Scale the pixel art up to 1920x1200 and run the modern version at the same resolution, and you'll see why.
Why SMSified could revolutionize the bulk SMS space | TruVoIPBuzz
So the new captain of the sinking ship is to blame if the ship sinks further a little time after he took over?

Geez, I get your MS hate but this is stretching things.
KDE Releases Second Alpha of Necessitas (Qt for Android)
Yes, it has:

> 3.3.2	An Application may not download or install executable code. Interpreted code may only be used in an Application if all scripts, code and interpreters are packaged in the Application and not downloaded.
Hmm... the user could potentially benefit from better search results. This is, of course, being positioned as a social "like"-type button, but it definitely could have benefits individually, as well.

Imagine if Google looked at the history of your +1's, compared it to other users', etc, and improved your search results that way.
I would like to work with Front-end Developer/Designer on a project. I am a back-end developer but also can do front-end work. I have my own ideas but would be willing to listen to yours. Email is in my profile.
Limited goto good, short syntax for arrays bad? What the hell is happening....?
TSPL4 covers RSR6 which didn't go over very well with the community. TSPL3 is probably the better bet there.
You are an interesting thing.

I read your post and pretty much all I hear is a vaguely undirected bitterness and some jealous whining, and I DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHY.

Seriously, Dont worry yourself on their behalf.

If Github didn't want to implement that feature, they wouldn't have done it.

Zed has about as much power over them as I do over you.

Whatever other characteristics he may have, Zed certainly has a knack for bringing forth the shrieking sister in a certain type of personality.
Interesting. These aren't really what most people would consider older browsers.

It looks like two years is their support cutoff, based on when FF 3.5 came out.
Washington, DC - Python!

Hey HN, we at neworganizing.com are seeking Python developers to work on an exciting civic engagement project during the next election cycle. We are a non-profit and not a startup, but I think many people here would appreciate our culture. Please shoot me an email at stefan@neworganizing.com if you would like to discuss our work and employment.
Will Y Combinator invest in my grilled cheese van? :)
Not even http://www.bankoftheislands.com/ ?
"despite Oracle's talk of 'donation', a lengthy process precedes the ASF's acceptance of candidates"
I would call it xenophobic rather than racist.

Because xenophobic is a better word.
Free business consulting
What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I think the word he meant to use was "xenophobe"
Ah, our quest for a logo was truly epic. One day we'll write a blog post about 99designs...

Anyway, I hope that this exact conversation will make you remember it's duckSboard.com ;)
While this is clearly not the most ethical behavior, how many of us wouldn't do the exact same? You gotta do what you gotta do.
Yes, and no. Yes, because, the taxes are not the magic wand that your paint them to be. No, because, I will not recommend anyone to put all their savings in bitcoins.

Also, define valuable, and we'll talk. I can easily foresee situations (even now) when bitcoins are valuable to me than dollars.
HTML5: The Once & Future King (A Big Brand Agency's Perspective)
Dollars are backed by the full faith and credit of the United States Government, which is why they are universally accepted, and which is why US Treasuries establish the risk-free rate.

Bitcoins are accepted by online gamblers in much the same fashion as casino chips, by ideologues offering marginal services as political statements, and (allegedly) by criminal enterprises.

If bitcoins are mostly interesting to you as a way of reasoning through how economies would work in a world without established governments and economies, that's fine, but could you just say that? Because it's hard to pick out which of your arguments are pie-eyed what-if's.
thanks for sharing the link. i'll admit i'm not nearly familiar enough with the federal labor laws, but from my undergrad experience, i know it's common practice around here for many of the opportunities to be unpaid.

" Interns generally must be paid if the value of their work to the employer exceeds the value of the training program to the intern--which certainly appears to be the case described in the original post here."
How would that be determined? All of the interns choose to work with us over other opportunities because of the hands-on real world experience.

"Anyway, interns who work without pay while possessing computer skills are chumps. In the job market in my town, anyone with serious programming skill can get a paid internship readily at a company with a genuine future--whether that is a start-up or an established big corporation."
Athens, GA is a different breed. We are one of the only places in town where these students can get real world ruby experience. It's said, but essentially true.
Never knew this existed. Using "site:news.ycombinator.com" in Google works perfectly fine for me.
If you still want to do business, move to another state and allow as many of your current employees to work remotely as possible.
Bitmunchies probably pays its suppliers using usual currency.
I'd guess its is just a way to trade money for bitcoins and that they don't really convert those bitcoins to dollars to pay their suppliers. Just a guess.
Cool, so instead of spending money on fighting spam, we have to also spend money on enforcing this.

On the plus side, it is a proven solution, since nobody pirates music, movies or games ever since it was made illegal.
Not in Germany. The finance office has made billions recently because nearby tax havens like Luxembourg and Switzerland were betrayed by bank employees. If this lobby organization says bitcoin might be abused for tax evasion, money laundering and illegal transactions, you can be sure many people in Germany will avoid it. Besides, I think the whole project is pretty naive ..