skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To add just one additional bit of context to the excerpt we are now freaking out about, did you also build "a processing unit coupled to the input device, the output device, and the memory for controlling the execution of the program routines."? No? Then you aren't even nominally infringing the broadest independent claim of the patent.

The patent we're talking about is here:

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...
good for those learning to code or want to see how other programmers use their tools.
Everyone has something to hide because you never know what they're looking for. Maybe they'll find some long-shot link to terrorism and book you for it. Maybe they'll find something on your Facebook page that doesn't smell right. Maybe they'll think your name is suspicious.

Maher Arar is a Canadian citizen who was arrested and tortured because he inadvertently listed a "suspected terrorist" as a contact on a lease. In other words, he knew someone who was suspected of knowing someone who was allegedly a terrorist. How many degrees away do you have to be to be safe?

This hysteria over security brings about a lot of lapses of judgement with enormous consequences to people with "nothing to hide".

Anything that perpetuates this absurd security theater, especially by introducing an arbitrary double standard, is only going to make things worse.
congratz guys (if you read this)

getting money flowing for dev of Nginx can only benefit the FOSS community. Hopefully some of that money will go into developing more documentation :)
Wow, how is this not the modern day version of patenting the hyperlink? Sounds very close to it.
What if it's an engineering problem? What if it were the case that in order for Twitter to be able to distribute new tweets at the rate and volume that they do, that they can't run the type of analyses required to effectively curb spam?
> I see that my comments in this discussion are being voted down for pointing this out, which is bizarre.

Before posting the above link, You failed to provide quotation supporting your statements, and there were quotes saying otherwise :-)

Let's see, the original ruling went:

Orders GOOGLE to withdraw from all its sites (notably Google news
and "cache" google or any other name) all the articles (...)

(page 9, 2nd paragraph)

However, there is amended ruling listed on page 47 reads:

Orders Google to remove from the Google.be and Google.com sites,
more specifically from the "cached" links on "Google Web"
and from the "Google News" service, all the articles (...)

which confirms your story. Thanks for being persistent!

----

At any rate, this lawsuit is bullshit, and should be called out till they blush. The webserver has been likened to house left with doors wide open and robbed in absence of the owner (page 36.). Seriously?

What The Copiepresse actually did was like having welcome guests for a long time, and then suddenly suing them for enjoying themselves.

The argument of META tags and robots.txt was raised:

In 2006, when the action was filed, the publishers
had not activated these tags, which allowed Google
to inventory all their pages, notably "cached".

but rejected on weird reasoning:

However the parties do not explain how it would be
technically possible to, via these tags, prevent Google
from reproducing ((the content)) in the "Google News" service.

(page 35.)
I say, it's the same as with law or court orders: doesn't technically prevent, just informs what is allowed and what is not.

----

For a wider picture: the newspapers joined (by publishing public websites) a well established space: the Internet. It takes serious incompetence -- or malice -- to move somewhere and not follow well-documented, mutually-benefiting local rules.

Let's be clear: Google is no schoolyard bully here -- even if it was elsewhere the other day -- and newspapers are no victim. If anything, it's newspapers that advanced from large, slowly grinding company to a fast, focused start-up and found: their playbook hopelessly inadequate, their narrow field of view constraining.
Contributing to a Perl module on CPAN (using vim and Github) (screencast)
I don't understand how the politicians who subscribe to never raising taxes can function. Do they not understand how governments work? Would they like to propose how a zero-tax system would work?
I read the patent and it seems that using regex to automate links on a mobile device is exactly what they patented. Can you elaborate why this is not so?

Patent: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...
I understand that it's not single claims that lead to a violation but a match against many of the claims. Still, if the component claims are things like "using regular expressions to create links" and "using an output device to present data" then matching becomes a lot easier.
I think it has something to do with this submission's mentioning it (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2776254)
Are you doing the encoding and performing A/B tests yourself? There are all kinds of things that can hurt audio fidelity a lot worse than bitrate. Some MP3's are poorly encoded by some crappy shareware application. Some are transcoded from an already-lossy source. Some productions will compress better than others (supposedly, some producers actually mix and master with inevitable compression in mind).
I'm not so sure. I think we will continue to create highly skilled jobs, but I just don't see where unskilled labour gets a look-in in the new economy - In the past, it was reasonably easy to see where new jobs might come from, whereas I just don't see anything much coming up. We're even replacing more and more service jobs, which were what took over as farming and industry employment declined.

I agree, there will probably be more wealth - I just think the distribution of that wealth may well be societally damaging.
I am aware that natural resources have caused trouble for a lot of countries. Just stating that it isn't an automatic death sentence to have them.
We're on the PowerNerd issue. It's a bit complicated due to the fact the two teams have different members. It will be cleaned up soon, and we'll be opening more spots tonight (see my earlier post).
The never-raise-taxes thing was started by Grover Norquist and has been going since 1985/1986:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_for_Tax_Reform#Taxpay...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover_Norquist#Americans_for_T...
Although it doesn't make much sense, I suspect that licensing is more of a concern than bandwidth or CPU time.
Contrast this with TradeHill which recently announced a two-factor login option powered by DUO Security. I'll take a guess and say that tptacek at least knows who runs DUO :-).

https://www.tradehill.com/

http://www.duosecurity.com/about
The history of Mozilla and Firefox
Pubsub.io - a query based message hub. End of the channel tyranny now
When Did The U.S. Last Default On Treasury Bonds?
This is irrelevant because our economy is currently in the middle of the "retooling" phase (c.f. Luddite, Industrial Revolution). The wealth will be fundamentally unevenly distributed until new skilled work takes hold.
Hah when I read the title of this post I was like Duh, no kidding it would be way worse.
1 Million Domain DNS Zone Transfer Test
MySQL dump w/31 million DNS records in 192509 zones -- including some 'high-profile' zones
The word "comprising†" in a patent claim means "including but not limited to". In this case, the initial independent claim of the patent --- the broadest in the whole document, the one least likely to be at issue --- comprises:

* an input device

* an output device

* an associated memory

* a server

* a UI

* an "action processor", and

* a processing unit coupled to the input device, the output device, and the memory.

Did you build that? No? Then what are you talking about?

And please, please, please: before we open up Pandora's shipping crate full of geeky arguments about how an end table, a sofa cushion, and an abacus could also be construed as this particular claims construct, can we also acknowledge that we don't know exactly which claim in the document was found binding on HTC? The ITC ruling isn't, as far as I can tell, published on the web. The reason patents have broad independent claims followed by strings of specific dependent claims is that the dependent claims are the ones usually found to be enforceable.

† thanks for the correction
James Halliday, Isaac Schlueter and Mikeal Rogers on New Node Logo, Browserify Plugins, Node on Windows, NPM on Windows, HTTP Client Rewrite, Node Knockout, and NodeConf SummerCamp
Dozens (maybe hundreds) of lawyers and bureaucrats have spend about five years arguing about new gTLDs. It's been meticulously documented (i.e. deadly boring) at places like http://www.circleid.com/
This isn't even a single claim! It's one element of the body of a claim extracted without context. Geeks have lacerating ignorance of how patents actually work. And fine, why should they understand them? Except that now we get to have our BiMonPatentFreakoutCon on HN about them.
Nomad : Social Evolution
Farmville, instead of a farm evolve a species
I think you could do something manageable with yield alone (at least with python-style generators). I've been meaning to try something like this with tornado. The general idea is that yielding would either immediately produce a callback or asynchronously "wait" for a previously-generated callback to be run. It would look something like this:

doOneThing(yield Callback("key1"))
andAnother(yield Callback("key2"))
res1 = yield Wait("key1")
res2 = yield Wait("key2")
Entrepreneur Insights: My brother is my co-founder
In order to call it self-inflicted, you have to buy into the collection of people as an entity. It's not clear to me that this will continue to be viewed as the most useful abstraction.
Nothing that gets posted is ever really new, but this article does point out something very important: manufacturing output in the US is at an all-time high in the US, while manufacturing employment is low. While I've been predicting this for quite a while, the actual realization is quite interesting and the societal consequences are enormous.
Have they ever said that subscriptions bring in more revenue that ads? Obviously they're unwilling or unable to give actual numbers, but I have trouble believing that the revenue from subscriptions would be enough to hire a couple of engineers and buy tons of hardware, like the poster hinted.
> this is mainly a comparison to closed source - if it's not in the corporation plan - you won't ever see the change you want.

The thing is, that corporate plan is driven by profitability, and profitability is driven by what people want. It's just basic economics at work.

In contrast, the FOSS approach is to rely on either charity or an alternative business model. When it comes to doing the nasty but necessary hard work to make good software, neither of those has proved as reliable an incentive as being able to pay the rent.
This is the proof of true disruption by Android.
> U.S. Patent No. 5,946,647 on a “system and method for performing an action on a structure in computer-generated data.”

Looks like I'll be closing my doors, too. Software and I: we had a good run...
Do you really think such a turnkey ML service is possible, though?
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2010/08/08/unemployed-21s...

> “there was a type of employee at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution whose job and livelihood largely vanished in the early twentieth century. This was the horse. The population of working horses actually peaked in England long after the Industrial Revolution, in 1901, when 3.25 million were at work. Though they had been replaced by rail for long-distance haulage and by steam engines for driving machinery, they still plowed fields, hauled wagons and carriages short distances, pulled boats on the canals, toiled in the pits, and carried armies into battle. But the arrival of the internal combustion engine in the late nineteenth century rapidly displaced these workers, so that by 1924 there were fewer than two million. There was always a wage at which all these horses could have remained employed. But that wage was so low that it did not pay for their feed.”
I've written some spam filters for twitter and frankly, it's pretty easy to spot in most cases. The bigger question is why are you following them? If it's popping up in search that's a different problem I suppose. I have noticed that they do shutdown a lot of spam accounts when I look back at accounts that I found were spamming in my spam filter at a later date. I see the results of them tackling spam, I guess there is a slippery slope problem of - what is or isn't spam? A lot of stuff is borderline like RSS feeds to twitter accounts? Bots that message people (twitter seems to have setup their own recommendation bot) for various reasons?
"Twitter needs a far more aggressive, automated, proactive, heuristic-based anti-spam system. And if someone has trouble legitimately tweeting a link with no text to 100 people in a row who don’t follow them at precise 1-minute intervals, that’s just the price we’ll have to pay."

Actually, Twitter already has similar measures. If you try to send out a link too many times in a row, your account is disabled. And too many is not 100s of tweets, but around 10.

This is just anecdotal evidence, but there are clearly some measures in place to prevent spam. Why Twitter only targets some spam-posting methods and not others would be interesting to know.
All that lawyer jargon means is that it's running on a device with input, output, and "processing unit" (CPU) with a program that can scan text and automate the linking to different actions. While he may not infringe this patent exactly, it's silly that he's ALMOST infringing it because he parses text and turns it into actionable items.

Edit: True, I realize he can't get in trouble for "almost" infringing. I was just trying to point out that the core part of the patent is not a input/output/cpu but the processing and converting of text into links. This is trivial and it's embarrassing that our system allows such time and money to be wasted.
a processing unit coupled to the input device, the output device, and the memory.

So in other words... a computer?

A huge amount of modern software patent language is simply generic, copy-paste babble to say, in long and drawn-out terms, "on a computer". This doesn't make the patent any less stupid.
Even if they don't raise the debt limit ever, there's no reason for us to default. Our tax revenues can pay for much more than our debt service.
If this does become a larger issue, and US sales of Android are temporarily halted, it could be the high profile patent dispute needed to implement much needed reform, including limiting or eliminating software patents and process patents. So in the long run, this could be a fantastic catalyst and make us better for it. Right now every tech company has the incentive to patent everything they can, regardless of merit, in order to fight each other.
This seems neat, but after reading through it twice I can't seem to understand how this provides any advantage over just using Deferreds. Someone care to enlighten me?
The irony is that real Japanese company websites look nothing like Heroku. :-)

http://www.rakuten.co.jp/
http://www.biccamera.com/
http://www.sony.co.jp/
So, don't use regex on an arduino board.
So looking at this article - http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/census/2011-01-06-us-pop... - my quick calculation shows that the US population is growing at about 1.3% annually. Which means there's somewhat more than 7 million new Americans since 2008 (back of the envelope produces a number of 8 million).

Which, combined with the fact that GDP has barely recovered since 2008, kind of invalidates the article - i.e its reasonable to assume that the number of jobs has not actually decreased, but has stayed static, and that that is most likely due to the depression.
Real wages may have decreased, but total compensation has been increasing steadily, at least on a per worker basis instead of a per-household one. A lot of that has been increases in the cost of health insurance paid for by employers, but some has been more vacation time, 401K matching, etc.
The lawsuit was over the use of copyrighted excerpts from articles in the Google News aggregator and cache, such as lead paragraphs.

Google is trying to pretend that the court ruled all hyperlinks to be illegal. Google was defiant before over this ruling when it ignored an order to publish the results of the verdict on its website, so it's not far-fetched to believe Google is once again throwing its weight around and reminding people of the power it wields over the livelihoods of content creators.
He's not almost infringing the patent. There is no such thing as "almost infringing" a patent. And unlike a lot of legal language, patent claims language isn't simply "legal jargon"; it is a programming language of its own, interpreted in a specific and strict fashion by the legal system.
The MP3 stream is taking forever to load.
You understand incorrectly. Infringing a single claim is an infringement. However, you must have all the elements of that claim to infringe. The claims are not things like "using an output device to present data".
I expect we will also be seeing more cloud-based ebooks in the future, such as those the bottom of the article indicates McGraw Hill has introduced. The same way that gaming companies increasingly push a subscription-based service over a singular single-player experience, a continual subscription to a cloud-based ebook service would help avoid the inevitable mass piracy of the materials.
A Historical Perspective on U.S. Debt
The participating entry-nodes (proxies?) could be systematically determined with a scanner

How, exactly? Measuring the run-time of packets and comparing to the expected run-time? I suspect this could be masked by the proxy, but I'm not sure.

You have to trust the people running the entry nodes

You can encrypt the payload independently and then re-encrypt it for the HTTPS tunnel. But as with any proxy, they know the ultimate destination for your traffic, even if they can't get at the data itself.
On the U.S. Dollar, Diamonds and Gold
Once again I read the patent and it's safe to say that any mobile device (input/output) with a CPU ("action processor") that uses regex to parse text and automatically turn it into actionable links is infringing this patent.
> How is that this software do not predicts USA default too?

Because it's working for the USG, of course. Smart contractors don't bite the hand that feeds.
The End of Free Will
You don't have to build the processing unit to infringe. You can buy it from a supplier, such as Dell.

A patent conveys the exclusive rights to make, use, offer for sale, sell, and import the patented invention inside the US. To be deemed to "make" the patented invention, it is not necessary that you separately make each of the elements of a claim; it is sufficient to buy them each from a supplier and combine them yourself.

But, in any case, HTC is not being accused of making the patented invention inside the US. They are being accused of importing it (and presumably selling it and offering it for sale).

This is very basic patent law. It is difficult for me to imagine that your ignorance of patent law is so deep that you posted your incorrect assertion out of incompetence, which leaves me with the alternative of malice.

Thomas, why are you attempting to derail discussions of the dangers of software patents by maliciously posting false information?
At the end of the day though all software patents are bogus, trivial, and stupid. (And I'm listed as inventor on a dozen).

We should spend energy abolishing them rather than debating how they work.

just my 2c
Sync Google Plus to Twitter, Facebook & Identi.ca with Agent G
Even if Zaarly takes time to establish it's grounds in the UK, a clone is a clone. You have to have a better idea than whats out in the market, you can't create a Groupon clone and expect for it to rocket (unless you have an amazing deal that offers $100 of Food for $2) but in reality, that is impossible.

Zaarly already uses Geolocation. I'm here to help, if you can provide us with mockups, or designs of what your start-up will offer to it's users, we can improve the stability, and provide harsh feedback for it to succeed, and take on those competitors.
"I know you want to be hired full time by me. And I want to be doing my part. But please understand: I’m running a business. I want to make profits. And these tools are letting me make more profits by employing people only when I need them rather than carrying them on my payroll."

This is why every time I hear a politician talk about "creating jobs," I grimace. A business will hire someone if and only if they think that person's output will make more money than it will cost to employ them. Period.

Government cannot create jobs. It can make the cost of doing business less expensive by lowering taxes, or it can make the profits of a business higher by providing incentives. But for your average small business, those kinds of changes add up to much less than one person's salary, so it makes very little difference.

Government can create a good climate for businesses to exist, with laws, infrastructure and education. But those are long-term investments. Short-term, anything the government does to affect the economy is a shell game. You can't sign a law and magically make workers productive.
"a processing unit coupled to the input device, the output device, and the memory for controlling the execution of the program routines."

That sounds like you have just described pretty much any user facing computer ever built. Can you explain how this narrows the claims of the patent in any significant way?
The same. I don't think that dispute has been resolved yet, has it?
If they have no skills, they never had very good prospects. Even "simple" farmhands need to have some skill at tending to the farm. It's not like you could just stand by a conveyor belt with a dumb look on your face and call yourself a factory worker for very long.
If you've written a line of code you've violated several software patents. The question is will anyone come after you.

That's why the system is so ridiculous and broken.
I love the "an output device for presenting the data" item.
That seems to be the consensus, but I am not really sure.

The problem is that the Tea party people can't afford to compromise their position at all and even many who are not members of it are still under their influence.
Terrafugia Transition flying car cleared for landing in US, next stop - Europe
Spam can show up in your @mentions feed if you tweet some keyword that a spambot is searching for.
Tool to cluster your Facebook network into groups
While electronic textbooks do let you skip randomly between pages, it would end up being a mixture of memorizing page numbers and looking at the table of contents.

Have you ever actually used a Kindle textbook? There's a bookmark feature that allows you to immediately jump to preselected pages in the book. It's infinitely more useful than having a bunch of stupid physical placeholders in a textbook that you need to jump around with. Also, I can search my textbook. Can you?
An out-and-out default is extremely unlikely, but a massive devaluation in the US dollar would be just about the perfect treatment for America's economic woes. Devaluation of debt, and massive increase in export competitiveness...
> It’s official: Greece is going to default, and there’s nothing anybody can do about it.

> That is, if you believe the word of a predictive software program

So that's how we define official now?