skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes. The parent post to which I responded said The date of the patent application is the determining date for a patent. when discussing whether or not he could be sued post-issue and that is not true. There are 2 dates, the date a patent is filed (which determines term) and the date a patent was issued (which determines rights). Infringement taking place between the date of filing and the date of issue cannot be retroactively litigated in spite of the fact that it occurred during the term of the patent.

The main issue is that there are 2 dates for a patent, and the post to which I responded gave an answer with no clarity or regard for the disparity and seemed to indicate that the OP could be liable for retroactive infringement which is untrue.

It is just dangerous when people here on HN give advice on patent law issues. They are very complex. This is similar to if you went to a lawyer forum and they all claimed to be experts on web technologies, dishing out bad advice (ASP is totally the way to go these days, that ruby on rails thing I hear is a virus that breaks email printers. Therefore, always use Microsoft servers.), but the consequences here are more dire. If you saw lawyers saying that, you'd probably have a brain aneurism.
How about browser plugins? "Monitor your balance right in your toolbar!"
Ah, I didn't realize you could use all nine points, my thinking was that it limited your options since there were fewer points and you couldn't repeat... but clearly that was wrong :)
Just get their phone number and call ahead for takeout — it's pretty common here in Seattle even for places that don't deliver or even have a counter to order at.

There are some terrific sit-down restaurants that have tons of excess kitchen capacity.
I don't think that everyone is still used to it.

Many pages have scrolling ticker-style feeds - hitting "back" doesn't rewind that.
My first website, what do you guys think?
San Francisco, CA -- Software Engineeer

EggCartel, www.eggcartel.com
We're building a local mobile commerce platform to make buying and selling of used items as easy as taking picture on the phone. Office in downtown sf, here is the view from the office http://twitter.com/#!/danz/status/73505757181640704

We're looking for mobile engineers, backend engineers and generalists who can wear multiple hats. Please send me an email danz@eggcartel.com
Just imagine what China is doing with the official backdoor gmail is required to have for warrantless searches in the USA.

Unlike TSA gropes, officials cannot legislate themselves out of the backdoor, they might never know when their email is being read, and they did it to themselves.
Yes, it would. But a pragmatic libertarian of the "techno libertarian" cyberpunk influenced mindset, would probably see this as a positive thing... reasoning that "if we have bogus laws on the books, at least we can come up with technological means to try and circumvent them."
Upon rereading I'm not sure what I meant either. My guess is that I was responding to

> The optimal way to use confirmations is often not hitting "Reject" to requests you don't want. Just do nothing.

and didn't read carefully. I was probably pointing out that if trolling is not the common case then that system is not in fact optimal (which I think we agree on), without realizing you didn't claim it was the optimal system but only the optimal system-which-uses-confirmations. Sorry about that.
Oh yes, the HN hiring threads are really a great spamming location. We have to do this to promote our totally unknown site. :P

(You might be being sarcastic, but I don't quite get that vibe from the "please stop it".)
Autodidactism for the chronically lazy and hyperactive
I don't understand how Square can legally force them from making a remake. If it's open source software and not being sold, how can they shut you down? If the code is widely distributed, then there's no central site or repository they can force to shut down.

Wouldn't this fall under the domain of artistic expression? I don't understand how fans can make artwork, music remixes (http://ocremix.org/), or even a miniseries (http://www.therewillbebrawl.com/) representing a particular franchise and not get sued, yet indie game remakes are hit with fire and brimstone. On that note, aren't games now considered art (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/109835-Games-Now-L...)? What gives?

(I've been wanting to make an open source Ocarina of Time remake, but I am fearful of such lawsuits.)
I agree with Andrew on this.
Still, I wonder if this circumvents some of the law. If you can't prove I paid for some drugs, am I less likely to be prosecuted? If a random shipment of drugs showed up at my door with no transaction to match them with, am I even at fault?
Yes, although it's a mixed bag. I've found all of the Asimov stuff to hold up well.

Heinlein is hit or miss. I loved Heinlein's "The Moon is Harsh Mistress" (one of my favorites), but I found "Stranger in a Strange Land" to be utterly full of sexist behaviour that I struggled through it.

I can say for sure: definitely Clarke and definitely Asimov.
37signals use ZenDesk for customer support, so I think this hooks into the ZenDesk API somehow.

I thought we might see this as a product in the future, but I'm not sure how it might happen right now.
Being passenger on a commercial flight is much safer than driving a car. Fooling around in a Cessna is about an order of magnitude more dangerous than driving a car.
I imagine they'd make it illegal to accept bitcoins as payment, which would remove all legitimate users from the market, but illegal drug buyers and sellers may still use it as payment, along with underground bitcoin/cash currency exchanges.

Sure, but now you've gotta participate in two illegal operations instead of only one. Instead of exchanging cash for drugs you're now exchanging cash for bitcoins and bitcoins for drugs. You've doubled your chances of getting caught. And unlike the drug dealer, the cash-to-bitcoin converter doesn't have much of a profit margin, so what the hell is his incentive for staying in this illegal business?

What would an underground bitcoin/cash currency exchange look like anyway? A smoky room? There's no way to anonymously and untraceably recieve cash on the internet, is there?
like there's not a hundred sites where you can do that with US dollars...
How would you suggest using my cash to generate linkbait?

Should I look for freelancer writers that write for other blogs in my industry?
Attacking the methods of conversion might be the most expedient route.

For instance, for those in the US, the most sane method of exchange for US currency is setting up an account with Dwolla tied to your bank account, then use that to transact thru MtGox. Dwolla is US based. Your financial institution is US based. If you have difficulty getting money in/out, or that becomes strictly a black market activity, well it will likely sink the value of bitcoin.
> This is also bollocks, the mongols successfully ruled a vast area from China to Europe, the silk road was again revived, you could travel from Poland to Peking and not get robbed. The mongols collected all the taxes from such a vast region, even after Djenghis Khan died, thats some hell of organization right there.

They successfully ruled.. for a very short period of time even by empire standards, before splitting up into various dynasties and going native and whatnot.

Why did Subutai stop in Eastern Europe, after destroying all opponents and units on par with the best Western Europe could offer, and with every prospect of conquering the Holy Roman Empire and extending the Mongolian empire to the Atlantic? Because Ghengis Khan's successor, Ogedei, had died and the succession process was so ill-defined and chaotic that Subutai had to stop everything and travel a continent back to Mongolia.

Succession and peaceful transfers of power, among other things, was never something the Mongols managed to deal with competently. We can admire them for their military prowess, we can admire individuals like the sinicized Kublai Khan for being good peace-time rulers, but we can't admire them for ruling competently 'from China to Europe' because they didn't.
Libertarian dream? What? How about druggie dream?

Every Libertarian I know is in favor of decriminalizing most drugs but not a single one is a drug user himself.
I would love to know how many job postings and recruiter calls there are per actual job. I seem to see a number of suspiciously similar job descriptions anytime I look.

I've had to completely obliterate sections of my resume because keyword-searching recruiters would glom onto them like flies on a turd.

Oh, and one tip: never, ever go to a recruiters office because they "might have some positions for you". I relented and did this once. It's a phenomenal waste of time where they try to pump you for information and contacts.
Easy.

They go after Mt. Gox.

They go after the very small number of payment networks that let you trade Bitcoin for coin.

This may push the trade of bitcoin underground, or more likely push both of the drug dealers using bitcoin to use actual dollars.
You could fix this by randomizing the orientation of the lock.
I would argue that entries to the history should be added when user interaction was involved and when a significant amount of the content has changed.
It's actually impossible to provision such a big army when essentially every adult man is in a trench.

World superpowers would have gone bankrupt had they used this tactic.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2609457
Congratulations, I'm sure you've already felt it, but I just wanted to say you've built something truly amazing that helps so many other people realize their dreams. And as an added bonus it validates your assertions on what a startup needs to do.

Visionary indeed!
EDIT: Duh! His email is at the bottom of the article. Oof.

How can I get in touch with Andrew Binstock? (The author of this wonderful article.)
Google must consider the 'current' major version of Firefox 5, which will be released soon (maybe in time for the enforcing of this new plan?).
Climbing Everest is not cheap -- on the order of $50k. It's possible he couldn't afford it during that "season of life".
I was not clear. They only expire if YOU don't spend them.

Once you exchange your 10 BTC, the expiry date is reset.
That was Chrome Frame, the Internet Explorer plugin that enables chrome rendering in IE.
I guess that going out of the patent business in the US will be a battle as big as the one that we are currently fighting in Europe in order to keep software patents out of the EU.
But security is the whole point isn't it? Seems to me that having them hunt for the correct digits is the right thing to do.
To my knowledge we're currently only looking for candidates based locally (or willing to relocate.)
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them
"How the world will use the internet" is not the same as "how much data will people consume". "What kind of data?" is the obvious million dollar question. 30 gigs a month worth of porn and torrents makes for a vastly different future than 30 gigs of iTunes and e-commerce. Or 30 gigs worth of DMCA takedown notices and DHS redirects.
How about adding in another factor of authentication and make the passphrase a hash of data from a biometric scan (e.g. retina scan)?
I can't judge. Everyone dies, but not many die awesome. The sad fact is that even though he died tragically young, he still probably provided far more both in money and example for his kids than I will be able to manage with a lifetime of cautious mediocrity.
I was not even aware this was an ongoing battle in Europe. Going to have to go do some reading. It's a real problem here in the US.
As I understand, patents are supposed to encourage innovation... but software patents in the US have gotten so out of hand that I think they actually sniffle innovation and productivity.
That's nice, but where's the Bat-Shark-Repellent-Spray?
Except all the maths here has only accounted for the top 10%. Those top 10% are fairly unlikely to be sold off at scrap value.
If a government makes it illegal to use bitcoins, it'll reduce their use for legal things, and the value will go down.
Portfolio Theory is about keeping a set expected return but reducing risk (volitation) through diversification. Diversification is about choosing investments which aren't positively correlated. Are web startups positively correlated?

As a industry, probably/maybe. Was certainly the case in the dotcom crash.

Performance-wise, not really. Most startups fail, some make it big. Why? Low investment costs and high possible leverage with internet technology (to little marginal cost). This could change in the future.

In this case the second way is probably more fruitful to think about, since one big winner will even out all the losers. I'm sure this is possible to "prove" by some Black-Swan-ish statistic model theory.

NOTE: I could be wrong.

EDIT: I agree that web startups today aren't one industry. Social web startups is a candidate though.
Introducing Groupon Getaways
Ah, sorry for not stating that more clearly. What I meant by 'everyone at Facebook' was not the stuff on your wall etc., but where you see an article with the Facebook icon and 2,000 'likes' next to it. I don't expect that number to be reflective of my social graph in any way; it tells me only that 2000 Facebook users have expressed a liking for it. Likewise, a high number of votes for or against something on YouTube holds little personal interest for me, since so many people visit YouTube. But if there is a strong positive or negative bias among the peple I am in frequent contact with for particular google results, that's useful to me in the same way that the social graph is useful to you.

Arguably Google's results ecosystem is just a larger and less-structured social silo than Facebook or any other social networking service, but then the web itself is a subset of the internet and the internet is a subset of the whole dataverse. I'm not saying those other products/services are bad, just that this one will deliver more obvious utility to me, given my existing way of working.
This is also mostly wrong.

You are right in that the date of invention in the U.S. is a useful date, but it only means that in the event of a conflict either during patent prosecution or on a challenge to validity later, he who can show they had an earlier date of invention will "win". In the rest of the world, it is the date of application that determines who ends up with the patent rights in the event of such a dispute. But it is not a priority date.

This is like calling a router a switch and claiming they are the same thing. Quite different in fact.

The date of invention is not determinative for things like infringement (again, short of patent invalidity), and the date of invention is never written down anywhere. It only comes out in the case of a conflict.

The date of filing IS a determining date for the term of the patent - it last for 20 years from the date of filing.

Further, the date of invention is not a "priority date", that is the earliest date for which an application can claim priority. An application cannot claim priority from an arbitrary date of invention, it can only claim priority from an earlier filed application here or abroad. Basically, you can never say, "Patent office, I invented this widget on this day" and have them say, "Ah yes, your patent term starts then." Your earliest priority date is your earliest filing date either here or abroad.
Africa is still Green
Anybody interested in igniting the tech fire in Africa?
Can you select languages other than Java in the web interface?
Other than the current obvious UX deficiencies of installing and using them, a client certificate might help people like your mother-in-law. But one would ideally have a passphrase on their private key.

If you can't remember a passphrase, the "something you know" portion of "something you know and something you have" is kind of out.
If so, I imagine politicians, police chiefs, judges, etc., will begin receiving gifts in the mail on a regular basis. Anyone with enemies, of any sort and for any reason, could be targeted.

People have been raided based on where a package was shipped, in absence of proof of payment (I recall reading a story, I believe linked from HN, about a family whose dog ended up getting killed in the resulting raid, following a box of drugs being delivered to the wrong house as part of a sting). Anonymity just makes it really easy to get away with setting people up.
Except he doesn't have the keys, because the transaction generated a new keypair for the remainder left post-transaction. The new key didn't get backed up because it didn't exist at the time of the last backup.
I wouldn't mind having an agent. Looking for work is annoying.
Really? It's a Libertarian's dream to have a site where you can buy drugs with a virtual currency? Please, troll, take your childish political insults to digg or reddit.
To answer my own post: I think everyone has misunderstood my point. Bitcoin valuation is unstable due to constant deflation (at best, you're only losing them to people dying or systems crashing or the basic fact that more and more actually valuable things are created, say a fusion engine, oh and the fact that as more and more people are born, you have fewer and fewer bitcoins spread amongst them). Given that the future is unknowable and it's unlikely that I'm going to submit to having my employer renegotiate my contract day to day, how am I going to be paid a salary in bitcoins?

To make it less about me also: How instead would you say to your employer (just accept this as part of the hypothetical question, you work for someone in a fundamentally permanent salaried employ), this is how I want my salary in bitcoins to be set. Or if you are completely incapable of imagining working for someone else, how would you frame a salaried employment for an employee in bitcoins?
1. Paypal does not work in almost all African states, the region needs a local solution.
2. ..
Collaborative Book Writing using Git
Analysis of bad RSA SecurID breach (originally via Cringely)
I'm thinking that he/she was meaning that she can't remember a passphrase so would end up only using a weak password.
An intermediate solution are land mobile launch platforms:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT-2UTTKh_Topol_M

They have randomized patrol routes, so it is hard to track them, but they can launch thermonuclear MIRV warheads.

Yeah subs are a lot better but also a lot more expensive...
No, he meant backup your bitcoins wallet.

I don't know any bank that understands or will deal with 'bitcoins'. LOL!
YES. This.

I cannot even begin to describe how many times I've heard commenters here spout advice like they are experts in patent law when they simply don't have the most basic grasp about them. It's terribly frustrating and scary to see people taking this often horribly wrong advice.

Sure, some people here are right, you probably don't have much to fear, they're probably just bullying you, but please, please, please don't take legal advice from a random forum. That's like taking advice on rails development from a forum full of lawyers. They just won't know what they're talking about much of the time and it can be very dangerous.
> How would you launch a thousand anti-ship missiles?

With a hundred small boats

> And how would you get that launch platform within range of a US aircraft carrier?

With civilians on board

> Bear in mind that anything capable of launching a thouand anti-ship missiles will be one of the things the USAF will destroy within the first few hours of the war.

Yep, nothing better to start a war on the right foot than civilian massacre.
Google Apps provides a government edition: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/government/index.html
I agree that anonymity can be a pragmatic way to foster a temporary sense of autonomy
Eric Schmidt says Microsoft isn't a leader anymore
> Nobody will see [your upvotes]

If I understood the article correctly, that isn't true. According to Google, your friends/contacts will see your +1s in their search results, meaning they'll have an additional hint at choosing the best result for them.
Especially if they mainly turn out to be URLs I could have read in plain English

And what good is reading a URL in plain English?

"Find this device online: {QR Code}" is better than "Visit http://www.example.com/cms/products/industrial?product=09278...
The same "being beat down at math again" reaction can be turned around into "OMG I'm getting better at math" with some empathy and debugging. It's a wonderful thing to see.

It really is.

I have students who can't do exponents and have trouble answering 3 x 5. We're trying to teach them symbolic and linear algebra. Dur. No wonder they can't keep up.

I think the thing to keep in mind is symbolic math and 3 x 5 are almost completely different tasks.

We lump them together under "math" but I've met many teachers who are excessively attached to these false dependencies.

I'd love to bring back Euclid himself and sit him down in one of these third grade classrooms and see how he does on the Mad Minute. It's not like he knew how to do long division or anything. :-P

I can debug the exponents deficits (integer exponents) in about 3 hours with a small group. Perhaps another session for radicals and fractional exponents.

It's somewhat addictive, to see them realize "I don't have to suck at math".

Thank you for what you're doing.
All these differing opinions really highlights what you hear a lot of mountain climbers say about how people either "get it", or the sport is a complete enigma to them.
stay tuned, 2 more batman-esque devices coming tomorrow...
A rotary dial lock seems like it would be a good idea... Especially if the set number of digits was variable. All you'd see is a round smudge.
That would be a usability nightmare if I am picturing what you are saying correctly.
If I used bitcoins, it would be for otherwise legal transactions. I might sell my software for bitcoins and pay for hosting, advertising, and development in bitcoins. It bitcoins become illegal, I wouldn't consider using them for any of those purposes. I have too much to lose and very little to gain by accepting and trading in bitcoins. The underground economy is huge, but it's not an economy I participate in. I look to bitcoin as just another means of exchanging value with people, not as a way to buy drugs or launder money.
Hands Off Our Houses (follow up on the $300 house idea)
It's not like people had previously been paying for drugs with credit cards, personal checks and/or direct deposit
slower loading pages

Strongly agree in that respect. Using the browser on my (android) phone has become increasingly unpleasant in recent months, because the address bar flashes up with every little data packet that comes in. Don't want to single out any particular firm or group of firms, but the signal:noise ratio seems to be in freefall lately.
"How to shut down a PC" no mention of Linux, but apparently that is the topic.

But since it's not mentioned in the topic, it's going to come up. Personally I use a batch file and SysInternals to shutdown (after forcing bad-behavior apps to exit).

Sounds like you need a SysInternals for Linux??
That was my first thought too. What a selfish waste of human life.
Did you factor in the amount of work Paul Graham and friends put into ycombinator?
Big Media Tramples On Constitutional Rights to Protect Antiquated Business Model