skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>"protection against others independently developing a similar algorithm is what the patent system provides, and that's why many people, including myself, are opposed to it"

Flip this around. It is protection against others wasting research on something that has already been invented and [supposedly] enables them to add their research to your own and thus add effort rather than waste it. Is that not a noble cause?

Patents have a double purpose: One is to ensure implementation details of inventions enter the public domain and the second is to provide a limited monopoly as a bribe to ensure that the public domain will ultimately benefit.

In this way patents promote innovation, encouraging the release of new technological developments quickly to other practitioners in the art and so accelerate said development.

The only (large) part I see broken in the current patent system is that the duration of monopolies hasn't reduced to keep pace with the acceleration in the life cycle of new technologies.
The South certainly couldn't have won the Civil War in the sense of invading and subduing the North. I think odds are good they could have "won" a political victory, in the sense of dragging the conflict out with superior generalship (which they had) until people in the North got tired enough of it and the North simply gave up and recognized the Confederacy, which was all they really wanted in the first place.
I'm not trying to defend Leibniz' argument so much as point out the space in which he can make it. I think that you may be confusing the two in responding to me as, let's be clear, Leibniz is writing in an utterly distinct intellectual environment from us. The pragmatism of communication as a standard for assessing representations does not exist in the 17th century as human cognition is still being assessed in relation to a possibility of omniscience that sometimes goes by the name of God. Communication, or inter-subjective experience, only becomes a standard after Kant. So monads or Leibniz' way of talking about substances is a way to negotiate the unique problems of conscious perception in relation to that possibility of omniscience.
Don't just exclude them. Replace them at random with normally rejected companies.
"hand-waving of any kind of personal responsibility"

You have a different mindset. To you, enforcing these patents is evil. But to a company it's not. It's good. In fact they believe they have a personal responsibility to enforce them.

That won't change till congress changes the rules.

And the same is true for probably 99% of investors as well.

It's only a tiny minority of computer programmers that realize the problem.
Of that 10% of deaths, According to Chris Warner (a well known mountaineer) 4 out of 5 of them are due to human error.
Does it make more sense for +1 to be part of the browser, as opposed to the website?
London - Summer INTERN and Permanent hires

OpenMarket

Hiring Software Developers and Systems Developers for mobile messaging and payments, might be your cup of tea....

We're a Java MySQL shop with some C++, Python and Scala around the edges, but really we just want passionate programmers.

questions to neil.johnson at openmarket.com

http://www.mxtelecom.com/uk/careers http://www.mxtelecom.com/uk/careers/roles/sysdev http://www.mxtelecom.com/uk/careers/roles/softdev
"Russians won wars by throwing themselves in front of tanks, which was not the right mindset for a master criminal."
"Accelerated C++" is another good one. A bigger book than K&R, but not outrageously so, and much thinner than Stroustrup's or Lippman's texts. Rather than teaching C and then layering C++ constructs on top, it starts with idiomatic C++, then drills down to the C foundations as needed.
>"everything that can be done in a book has been done already"

Doubtful. But, given that if diversity in movie plots benefits mankind (!) then offering an incentive to develop a new plot could be worth it. If the plot is entirely disclosed so that it can be used for free by anyone in a few years then is this not a benefit?
Ask HN: If a company adopted Bitcoin, how do they convert it into real currency?
A real world company has to pay employees, cover expenses etc. How does a company reliably convert Bitcoin into real currency?
I guess if Warren Buffet were to start again with only a few million USD, like Y Combinator did, he would do really well in terms of percentage return, too.
I find it funny but it makes me not take this company seriously.
Chrome itself can be installed without admin rights, I remember using that on a University pc to view a flash video with the embedded plugin.
Its very easy to get upset at Lodsys for being scummy patent trolls but what about companies like Facebook

see: http://www.seobythesea.com/?p=3365

IMHO they are just as bad because if they filled for these patents then eventually they will decide to enforce them.
I think this is where we differ. You believe that because he took a risk for the goal of something other than his wife or kids, which you believe are his primary priority, and because that risk did not pay off, he is selfish.

I just want to point out that this is a very slippery slope. Does this mean that fathers in the army are being selfish for going to war rather than staying at home with their kids?

What about businessmen who work long hours and neglect their families?

There are many ways to live your life. This man chose a risky path, and sadly was killed before he could watch his children grow up. In his mind, perhaps, the risk was outweighed by the benefits of being able to tell his kids that he had fulfilled his dreams.

> I would hope that at least the wife realizes the moral
> implications of her husband's decision at this point.

That to me sums up why I disagree with your comment. I hope his wife all the best in recovering from her loss, and raising her kids. The moralizing of some uninformed person on the internet are completely irrelevant to her at this point.
fsync() is a blocking call, which requires confirmation from the disk before your process continues. roughly, this means that redis can't do anything while the fsync() happens. while this isn't any more work (cpu) it is significantly slower because of all of the time spent waiting.
If the other guys are attacking, you wait them out. Defence was cheaper than attack in those days.

IF the other guys are also defending, you can think about, maybe, peace?
These are nice advice and all....but do they work? Anybody done any studies on them?
A JavaScript Puzzler
The answer is "it IS real currency". How do you tell "real" currency from fake? If people accept it as a store of value, it's real.

Actually, it is real to the extent that people accept it. So Bitcoins aren't AS real as dollars, but they're still real. And hypothetical bitcoin company will have the same problems as a company that uses some obscure third-world currency.
Relax. They're not issuing stock yet.
CappCon: Sold Out Get on the waiting list
Ask HN: How is teaching Visual Basic limiting?
English teenagers are taught Visual Basic disguised as general event-driven programming. This limits their view of what event-driven programming is. But, how much? Is it really an issue?

http://www.edexcel.com/migrationdocuments/BTEC%20Nationals%20from%202010/Unit-14-Event-Driven-Programming.pdf
> I was diving at sea last weekend. I don't dive air at 40m.

Good for you. In France, you're allowed breathe air down to 60m. Most people commonly breathe air down to 40/50m, or did so recently enough.

> Your other comments about narcosis are sheer nonsense, completely off base. Don't breathe narcotic mixes.

My oh so numerous comments about narcosis? What are you talking about? Instead of giving condescending lessons, would mind explain what you mean?
Its absolutely true. The exact same effect occurs in restaurants and floral arrangements.

There is a fixed cost, we'll call it X, to get the {book/meal/arrangement) made, the marginal cost of {paper/food/flowers) is small relative to the fixed cost and yet is the dominant factor in perceived value.

Understanding this you can use it to your advantage. You can boost the percieved value of a book or meal or floral arrangement by boosting its pages, vegetables, or flowers. The recipient will feel better about getting and the buyer will feel better about paying for something with a higher perceived value.
Palo Alto, CA - Comprehend Systems (YC W11) - Senior Software Engineer

http://www.comprehend.com/senior_software_engineer.html
Forcing bitcoins into the black market may have the opposite effect on their value. Since no national border can stop a digital currency, it wouldn't be a problem to convert a bitcoin into a "legal" currency as needed.
I got an invite but $499 is a little steep :\
The Crux Of HTML
How about 2-factor authentication, as discussed in the article?
I imagine you aren't saying one must use vim, so asking for clarity (not that I'm looking, just saw that as odd).
How long will it last?

For one thing, it's pretty clear that the initial batch of WP7 phones were more or less half-assed efforts - no distinguishing characteristics or designs, nor features either.

And, as the Nokia+MS partnership grows closer, and you start seeing some very tight software-hardware integration (a la Apple), HTC and Samsung aren't likely to stick around and play second-fiddle.

Why would they throw their weight behind the WP7 platform if the "officially blessed" version is always more tightly integrated with a better experience?
"My profile on StackOverflow careers was viewed by employers a whopping 1 time and had 3 search hits."

I've had similar experience with StackOverflow Careers. Even though my skills listed and location are in the top 5 for each, I have 31 views of my profile and 6 inquiries. And I've been on the site for over 6 months.

I get the feeling that while SO Careers has the right idea it's really a matter of where the recruiters are.
Very new worldy to find it strange that a search for a city returns the original one and not the copy. They should have named it New Camebridge.
I'm not so sure about that. If the license prohibits reverse engineering and someone still does it, that's clearly a violation of the law. If a commercial company does it, it's going to be difficult for them to keep secret as some employees will surely know about it.

I agree that part of what patents intend to do, protecting original invention from copycats, is legitimate. But if it's done in a way that punishes original invention that seems counter productive to me.
Free fan games are largely ignored by game companies and sometimes actively supported, but once the game starts to look like something that competes with or damages the company's output they have to take legal action to protect their IP. This is what happened with the Chrono Trigger remake and more recently with the Unity Sonic demo that looked and played better than Sonic 4.

What I don't understand is why certain talented people don't develop original IP for these sorts of things. This happens occasionally but more often than not the projects just die after getting a cease and desist. Nostalgia is a powerful thing but its easy enough to make a game that is similar to Chrono Trigger, Ocarina of Time, Sonic, etc. using original concepts inspired by them.
$11,000 fine for pointing a laser at a plane
Very glad to see them dropping the older browsers. Hopefully more web companies will follow giving legacy companies impetus to upgrade.

Narrowing their list of modern browsers so tightly is a little worrying though, any standards supporting browser (opera?) should be considered, otherwise they could be enforcing a cartel of current browsers.
Wrong.

A law from 1986 that is being heavily abused ala Patriot Act, allows government to read your email and any other stored data online that is more than 180 days old without any judicial review (aka warrant).

This is fact, not speculation. To be fair it's not just gmail but yahoo, etc.
Why inc in DE?
What happens to the 8999 remaining bitcoins? Does a server somewhere think they are allocated to a person (although it doesn't have any name attached to them), effectively taking them out of the pool forever? Or are the bitcoins forgotten and free to be mined again or allocated to somebody else?

Or is this just a question that's so bad it's not even wrong?
> Additionally, and importantly, I had indicated that I would be willing to relocate.

IME recruiters pay absolutely no attention to this field.
There's also the prize of a free game at the end that I won't ever play and don't even particularly like. But that gives it a perceived value of the retail cost of that game.
Not the guy who stole. Instead, the story that is told.
Yeah, it bothers someone:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13614125

Just today it is widely reported the Pentagon is setting a new policy that cyber attacks can be considered acts of war which lets the Pentagon retaliate with conventional weapons. Hack my email, get an ICBM.
Talking to Machines - Radiolab
Ask HN: Anyone have experience with Amazon's Flexible Payments Service (FPS)?
I often read threads here on HN where people compare the various online payment services, and I never seem to hear anything about Amazon's Flexible Payments Service (FPS). They claim to be 'the first payments service designed from the ground up for developers', but I figured if that is the case people around here might recommend it more often.

Anyone have experience with it or stories to share?

The Amazon FPS web site: http://aws.amazon.com/fps/
All My Code is Now in Git
Mt. Gox?
I'm sure its no accident that the Pentagon stated they may treat cyber attacks as "acts of war" - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13614125
I don't think their cutoff date is as important as the browsers they cut off. IE6/7 are a pain to support and test. Maybe Google figures that people that far behind are going to stay with what they have/know (e.g, Microsoft Office), and that may not be a bad bet.
Did I just read a massive blog entry that can be summarized as "I don't read everything people tweet, just some of the newer tweets when I'm bored"
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. 20 years is 5 generations for many types of hardware too.
I'm sorry, but $30/mo is a little bit ridiculous, isn't it?

Here's the free plugins for Munin and Cacti:

http://exchange.munin-monitoring.org/plugins/redis/details
http://code.google.com/p/mysql-cacti-templates/wiki/RedisTem...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_education_system
The Book Depository - Live purchase tracking.
Google +1, Twitter Follow and Facebook Likes
I've heard it independently from people working at my economics and finance department. Are you sure it applies to all textbooks?

I've never ordered or written a book myself, so I could very well be wrong.
It's not classic, but it is a diversified portfolio. YC invests in startups across all industries--automotive, mobile, health, financial, entertainment, etc.--which presumably is less risky (lower variance in returns) vis-a-vis just investing in one sector.
...What do you have in mind?
Someone else mentioned Anatoli Boukreev in relation to the 1996 season on Everest.

If you want to understand more how high-altitude climbers think, this makes for a perfect read: http://www.amazon.com/Above-Clouds-Diaries-High-Altitude-Mou...
Yep. You would need a) an iPhone app that you would use to place your order (it would send updated coordinates as you move around, and provide a perimeter within which you would have to stay) b) an army of quadcopters so that a subset of them could be charging while the others were making deliveries c) the quadcopters would have to be equipped with parachutes in case they malfunctioned so they wouldn't kill someone on the way down. d) The quadcopters would have to keep a persistent connection with the central server through wireless networks to keep in sync with your latest position and to send back their coordinates for you to see on your phone. e) there would have to be a mechanism in place to prevent mid-air collisions (buildings you could pre-encode, birds and other quadcopters you couldn`t) for bonus points, you generalize the whole thing and make it like an airbnb where people can exchange arbitrary goods and you just broker the deal and execute the deliveries for a fee that would be dynamically calculated based on distance and weight. DO IT. DO IT NOW.
Google WebRTC browser voice/video chat released to take on Skype and FaceTime
There is no way other than a gray market mechanism. To extract cash from Mtgox, you can move it through Liberty Reserve and try to get it into a bank (it may not work). Alternatively, you may be able to find someone willing to trade larger volumes. It's possible to exchange small sums via paypal, though that's not very relevant to a business.

Right now there is too much hype and too little time to establish a stable valuation. Bitcoin is moved by the speculators and not investors or savers.
And aren't there such things as female ninjas?
I believe the idea is that a small transaction fee will be expected by the majority of miners, which will make a flood of transactions costly.

Miners are free to include/exclude your transaction in their block regardless of whether a transaction fee was included. If the majority rejects transactions without a fee then it will take a longer time for the transaction to be included in a block.
Sequent Calculus Greater Than Lambda Calculus?
I wrote them and can only speak for myself since I'm a developer not a researcher. Though, I do spend a lot of time trying to learn new things, and in an unstructured settings this is not that easy to do effectively. The points I make I have either read elsewhere [1] [2] [3] or common sense and experience have lead me to believe them -- main idea is just to stay occupied and engaged by difficult tasks: I think being overly structured or 'pushing through' isn't necessarily a good idea if it stops the former. That's just my opinion though. I love to hear what others do themselves. :)

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2562632

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1754281

[3] http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2009/02/goals-into-habits/
I wonder the same thing. I stumbled on Bitcoin from at tweet about a week before it hit parity with USD. I managed to earn 100+ BTC that week, and now it's worth almost $1000. If I came two weeks later, I wouldn't have been as lucky. If I came two months earlier, I would have been ten times as lucky.
Well, Chuck E Cheese was founded by Nolan Bushnell who before that founded Atari, so it might just work!
> Does that mean that he should give up on his dreams, due to bad timing?

I don't know about giving up on dreams in the abstract, but yes, having kids should change the priorities in your life and that will most likely mean giving up some of your own wants, big and small, in order to care of your kids. If you aren't comfortable with that change, then you shouldn't make the choice to have kids.
Well he joined the crowd. Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1978295

How about running a marathon instead. Or is that not expensive enough?
I upvoted you for the 'never a good time...' line lolz, but your last statement is truly absurd. I assume you don't have kids. Nothing replaces a parent, even a flawed one.
As Twitter continues to evolve into a distributed real time news feed. Suggestions like those by Mr. Tenner will help encourage a better set of expectations for tweeters and followers. I personally am most impressed with Twitter's real time emergency response capabilities.
I think it's a mistake to categorize all web startups as belonging to the "web startup" industry.

Even though we (CarWoo! YCS09) are a web startup, we see ourselves primarily as a company that plays in the automotive industry. All of our key metrics are highly-correlated with the automotive industry, not with what Techcrunch writes on any given day.

While a lot of YC startups' metrics ebb and flow with the goings on of the echo chamber, many do not.
or just use etherpad.
Possibly prompted by PG's interview with Charlie Rose last week on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt.

I was present, and a two things were clear from the interview:

1. Charlie Rose had a few wildly incorrect assumptions about YC. (e.g. "so, to date, you've invested, what, $100M?")

2. Paul Graham had not given a lot of thought to aggregate numbers. When asked, he about total the total value of the YC portfolio, he could only guess.

Edit: interview link http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/14928956
Oh boy. I suggest you google a little bit before making accusations such as this one. DeviantART is a well known site, they definitely don't need to spam comment threads to get attention.
And no, I'm not in any way affiliated with deviantART, apart from being an occasional visitor.
I was using Opera extensively for the past year - then recently it started nagging me to turn on Turbo (which allows Opera to track your traffic), so when I switched systems I didn't install it on the new one - just FireFox and IE9. Although there are features of Opera I miss, I like the various privacy plugins available on Firefox a hell of a lot more than what passes for an equivalent on Opera. Although there a lots of Opera features I like, it just seemed that suck was increasingly creeping into it. I kept feeling like Opera had begun presenting popups to get me to change my settings.
I'd expect the US to be doing the exact same thing to China. I'd be surprised if they weren't.
Whilst this looks like a well-polished and usable product I think $30 as the cheapest price plan is maybe slightly too much considering the current feature set.

I don't know how server-intensive and costly this is to run, but as Redis is free software I think your prices are maybe 25-50% too much. For $30 I'd expect maybe email or SMS notifications when spikes occur, for just one example.
Posturing.
Copyright is provided for the expression of a work. So if I tell the story of a girl who wears a red cloak and visits her ailing grandmother who lives in a remote estate, only to find her grandmother has been eaten by an anthromorphized wolf. I run the risk of violating the copyright on the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Except that it was a folk tale before 1900 and yet even though its 'out of copyright' there is a pall over whether or not Google can show you their scanned copy from 1909 of the story illustrated by artists at the time.

My thesis is quite simple;

1) There must be a doctrine for protecting the origination and implementation of complex systems, whether their components are manufactured from solid materials or are simply algorithmic components.

You'll recall that software patents came to be when it was shown that implementation via software was indistinguishable from implementation in hardware for some classes of problem. Your "first mover' advantage is worthless if someone else controls all the distribution.

Further, not all software efforts are 'trivial' and while we see those stories all the time I don't believe you could make a similar argument for the implementation of assymetric cryptography as a 'trivial' software patent.

2) The current system is clearly flawed in many ways, but the concept is not.

3) Pushing otherwise technologically illiterate but 'wanting to help' policy makers toward the concept that all software is more like creating 'art' than it like creating 'machines.' Would have the un-intended side effect of having those policy makers moving the necessary protection doctrine to the only other set of laws we have which are copyright.

Copyright, being even more easily argued than software, has been completely corrupted by media 'barons' and their efforts around the world. Which is why the question of whether or not I could legally copy a book printed in 1900 about a story that was 'old' even then, is currently 'questionable' whereas building a steam engine and selling it for profit is not.
Microsoft Rolling Out Windows 8 for Tablets