skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Microsoft tweets seem to (probably intentionally) ignore the obvious reason why Google would want the patents — to create a mutually-assured destruction scenario that convinces Apple and Microsoft to get off its back. Sharing the patents with Apple and Microsoft would keep Google at a disadvantage just like not having them would.
This misses the point of the article, which is that many in the top 0.1% got there from some form of self-dealing. His argument is that they are profiting from their position in the economy rather than from the value they add.

And by position, he doesn't mean nearness to the money press. I think he means nearness to the center of wealth and power, which at the moment happens to be the financial industry.

> This is where the wealth of the top 0.1% comes from. Freshly printed money.

I'm sorry but this statement is very wrong. Newly printed money enters the economy through interbank loans. If I borrow $100 my net worth is exactly the same as before. I'm not any wealthier.

To set the record straight: the ability to expand or contract the money supply is an essential tool in managing the economy: the Fed can cool things down in a bubble (by raising rates and contracting the money supply) or heat things up in a downturn (by lowering rates and expanding the money supply). Otherwise, inflation or deflation can spiral out of control.

> Creating new money, i.e. counterfeiting, i.e. inflation, does not create new wealth.

Ok, but creating new money in an effort to grow the economy while managing inflation does create new wealth-- or more accurately, creates an environment in which wealth can more easily be created. Especially in comparison to the alternative: an unmanaged economy that is completely at the mercy of panics and bubbles. Think the last crash was bad? The unemployment rate rose to 14% during the six years following the panic of 1873, which was largely caused and substantially prolonged by the inflexibility of the money supply (which was still tied to silver and gold).

I'm getting a little tired of the anti-fiat currency crowd. You say you learned about economics; you might want to get your money back. I'm sure you're a very smart person, astrohacker, but your perspective here is unsupported and stands in direct contradiction to the last 80 years of economic thought. And no, the bitcoin crowd do not count as economists.
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Sure. The example I was thinking of in particular was an internal project from about 5 years ago where their CSS2 layout completely blew up on IE6. However rather than get down-n-dirty to fix it, they demanded additional budget for a rewrite using tables.

But just last week, another subcontractor apparently didn't realize that our government client was stuck on Flash v9 and spent the next two weeks trying to sort it out.

And it hasn't happened in a few months, but we used to get occasional complaints from clients stuck on Safari v4.
...but that's Windows, this is not. I don't see why Microsoft's mistakes should carry over.

On my keyboard, it's not even physically labeled as the "windows" key anway, it says "option" (or, if I didn't have things re-mapped, "command").
It was in a rented apartment, so it could soon be someone else's kitchen. Currently he had small amounts of radioactive matter, but what what if had gotten hold of more? Radiation goes through walls, no matter who owns them.
Perhaps some people do value it that highly, but let's be honest, as with almost every class action lawsuit, this is about a couple of lawyers who saw an opportunity to make a lot of money by acting like a white knight for a lot of people who don't know they are or want to be a part of a lawsuit. The vast majority of those people that they're championing don't care one whit about being tracked for the purposes of anonymized analytics (which is what KissMetrics is all about).

Most of their arguments are a joke (with the exception of the browser controls circumvention, which I would say is Adobe's fault, and KissMetrics' use of the Adobe cookie to revive deleted cookies). All in all, I think this is a pure abuse of the justice system with a thin veneer of plausibility.
I agree with you, but it's a better argument to say Intel, Facebook, etc. created huge consumer surpluses, so the real beneficiaries of VC investment were the consumers of the products which were created due to VC investments in companies, more so than employees and founders.

Hundreds of millions of people have benefitted from Intel CPUs; far more than have every worked for Intel or owned Intel stock.
> We’re encouraged that the Department of Justice forced the group I mentioned earlier to license the former Novell patents on fair terms

This also reads to me like Google wants the same thing with this new portfolio. "We figured we could get it cheaper if we let you buy it first, then complain to the DOJ afterwards and get cheaper licensing".
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Indeed, but still, you gotta give him some credit. Not sure that I would take a shot at entrepreneurship given a comfy six figure salary.
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I think its overreacting in general. Fortunately he didn't realize that by saving his urine he could start making ammonium nitrate and a 55 gallon drum of the same could have leveled the apartment where he was doing his experiments. I sarcastically suggested once that portable toilets should be outlawed as they can collect huge amounts of bomb pre-cursor materials in a very short amount of time at a Rolling Stones concert.

The crusade however may be futile. The fear of the stupid is motivating the ignorant to bind the hands of the curious.
Google seems to have one foot in the water and the other out. They lose their credibility either way. They bid a high amount ($3.14bil) in the Nortel bid and went alone by their choosing in the Novell bid. Their press is just spinning the story AND their strategy based on unforeseen outcomes. I get it that they are using patents just as leverage to keep Android free or as cheap as possible. In the end however, they are competing with other mobile platforms for market share based on the best combination of price, quality, and user experience. It's anyone's game and as long as it's legal, there are no rules.

Edited the Nortel and Novell discrepancy.
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There must be a special place in Hell just for that piece of fuck.
At the same time, there are tens of thousands of child prostitutes and sex slaves in the U.S. that the government is ignoring while they go after a handful of these guys. I'd like to think that this is about protecting children, but I'm more inclined to believe that it's really about raising support for their plan to monitor and record all Internet users.
His ambition was to split an atom in his kitchen, not to build a nuclear facility. Nothing about this story suggests he had the ambition to get a hold of "a lot more material".
I don't remember exactly if at their last bid they were alone, but one thing I recall to have read is that at least at one point they did bid teaming along with Intel.
Also, fore a more robust and extensible Markdown parser, see the perl's Markdent: http://search.cpan.org/dist/Markdent/
For all startups in general, probably not much, for kiss clients? Probably a lot. If I used kiss the first thing I'd be doing is removing their service from my site
According to you, truckers are already safer than non-truckers. Isn't that safe enough?

Depends on the marginal cost of saving a life by increasing safety standards. Typically if it's $5 to $10 million/life or less, I'm in favor of it, which is typical for policy decisions in the States.

And if truckers begin to quit, the equilibrium will shift. Do you have any evidence that it will not?

I feel like we're talking past one another. Yes, drivers could quit en masse, which would change prices. But they don't, which is a revealed preference--they prefer driving unsafely and feeding their families to not driving and not feeding their families. The current equilibrium is the reality; what you're looking for is an exogenous shock, while a single person entering or leaving the market is endogenous.

According to a quick google search, there are about 500,000 trucking companies, 96% of which operate 28 or fewer trucks and 82% of which operate 6 or fewer trucks.

From that same site: "It is an estimated over 3.5 million truck drivers in the U.S. Of that one in nine are independent, a majority of which are owner operators."

Just under 400,000 of those 500,000 companies are single truckers who are contractors.

Sheer number of companies isn't a good measure of competitiveness. You've got to look at the full set of and characteristics of employers in a given region. Check out, for instance, Boise, Idaho. http://www.quicktransportsolutions.com/carrier/idaho/boise.p...

It has many companies, but if you look at the distribution of number of trucks operated, there's a very long tail. The median number of trucks operated is 1, but you see a couple that are > 100. Just like you might have hundreds of OSes but an effective monopoly by Microsoft, you've got to look at the actual share of the marketplace.

As you note, the search and switching costs are also lower, which makes the market for truckers closer to an ideal free market than the market for programmers. So why do you believe prices will not respond to a shift in the supply curve for truckers?

It is closer to an efficient market than that for programmers, notwithstanding the caveats I mentioned above. So, yes, prices will respond in a shift in the supply curve for truckers. But you are under the impression that a single person entering or leaving the market shifts the supply curve. That choice is an endogenous in the model--people choose to join or leave the market based on the prevailing price--whereas a shift in the supply curve is exogenous (e.g. related to automation, increased education, mass slaughter of truckers, whatever).
I think the analogy is tenuous but nevertheless valid. i saw where the article was going from the start. and of course, it's not about forcibly doing the wrong thing but the point at which u realise and what you then do. hopefully this is only done once.

when some friends, relatively new to unix, asked me various questions, I asked them what would happen if they did:

cd /;
rm -fr /

I then suggested that, just to make sure they understood the consequences, they do this on basic Linux virtual machine so they could break the machine as much as they needed. illustrative, useful and they never felt they needed to do it again. bruises and cuts have their place :)
I'm not worried. Good programmers read SICP on their spare time if they don't have to do it in school. If they haven't heard of SICP, they will once they'll join the company of other good programmers and probably find it interesting. On the other hand you can't force material on people who reject it because they don't understand it.

It's just the question of where do we need universities at all when everything valuable is replaced with ever-easier material? Of course, the marginal number of people who actually want to become academics in CS will be needing universities, but that would amount to 1/10th or likely less of current CS student population.
At this point now, based on your replies, I can only assume you are trolling so I will ignore the first 2 responses and reply the to third and fourth.

>Nope. It very much is because bankers wanted to get rich. The Federal Reserve was designed by bankers. Other central banks are designed by bankers. Governments go along with it because they get to benefit from the inflation just like the bankers.

Are you a techie? Do you understand the web? Who would you want writing legislation to govern the web? Lawyers who are clueless about the web and think that the internet is a series of tubes, or people that are VERY web savvy - like Tim Berners-Lee, et. al? The same thing applies to finance, banking and everything else. Makes no sense to have people writing legislation or creating systems that don't understand what they are doing.

>The Fed does not produce wealth. Any profits they give to the government, thus saving taxpayers a little money, are more than offset by the loss in purchasing power the taxpayers suffer through inflation.

If that's the case, why has inflation been so low in the US in the last two years, when the Fed undertook the largest expansion of it's balance sheet in modern history? i.e. it has printed more money recently, than at any other time in it's mandate - but inflation AND inflation expectations are still low.
Watched your intro video. That seems like a pretty useful service. For the diffs, do you actually convert block elements to text and run the diff(1) algorithm, or do you compare element trees directly? I imagine either way the comparison is fuzzy / heuristic.
Officially 40 (slightly more if reading HN at work counts) until the end of tomorrow. After that, 0 until I've moved and found a new job etc.
So has Microsoft broken the modifier function too?

My memory of Windows was that the Win key worked as global system modifier key. But it's been a while now...
I agree that hundreds of millions of people have benefited from Intel CPUs, McDonald's burgers and everything else by those companies.

But I was talking in strictly financial terms. The founders, employees and early shareholders benefited the most from those companies in financial terms. The economy did benefit significantly, indirectly, no doubt....just trying to bring it back to his argument about 'bankers milking the fractional reserve system for their profit'.
Do Microsoft employees read HN or are people going to explain their downvotes to this logic?
I apologize but I was referring to the OP's article about Google getting the offer to team up with MS but choosing to go alone at it, for the Novell deal. I combined the $3.14bil Nortel bid with the info in the article about the Novell bid. My mistake. Will update my previous post. Novell and Nortel, this patent stuff is already confusing and these names don't help! jk
Adobe InDesign hiked in price once it was clear that Quark was no longer a real threat. That said, InDesign was a better product almost right from the start. But just sayin'
He has credits of people who helped him at the bottom of his website. We live in the same city and I have a similar website out as well www[dot]hiremeaccenture[dot]com
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Google is saying Microsoft et al bought the Novell patents to keep Google from having access to them. Google is trying to imply that this is so the patents can be used against Google.

Microsoft is pointing out that Google was offered a chance to be part of the buying group. That would have given Google access to them and precluded them being used against Google. This makes it very likely that the buying group was in fact buying the patents for defensive purposes, rather than to go after Google.
I don't understand how this makes their case weaker. They're saying they're opposed to the collusion apparent in the novell and nortel deals. By turning down microsoft, they're showing how they're not willing to be party to collusion. Sounds pretty consistent to me.
Seriously. Front page news. A few people exchange emails. Then a deal isn't done. pah.
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Honestly, reading it the reason for the downvotes seem obvious. And unlike most people who ask "why the downvotes?" in this case they seem justified.

Your original post was almost completely unrelated to the story at hand. It would be more appropriate in the original Google blog post thread, but even there not really appropriate. It's more fitting a story about the future of Microsoft.

I think the downvotes were meant to say, "you're off topic". Post about how MS's response wasn't credible or legit or whatever. But talking about their OS position over the past 2 decades is really kind of left field.
I've tried one from retailmenot in the past week or so which failed, but I think you're right, it's bugmenot that rarely works.
Also, for the technical guy, if you're going to be building a prototype by yourself for no present financial consideration - you can do that already on the weekend, and possibly are.

"I have an idea, build it for me" almost never works. The value proposition is too asymmetric. There has to be something more to it than that if you want to attract people.
This is an interesting way to put it, but I must admit I am not sure.

The issue I have with this definition is that wealth can be generated even without new money being created - we are seeing it in Silicon Valley at the moment, where vast amounts of wealth are created largely on the back of old money being recycled.

Strictly speaking, inflation occurs when more money chases the same assets - so the prices of those assets rise to accomodate the new money. So in theory, by having the prices for those assets rising, wealth is created. i.e. if $100B in new money is injected into the economy, and half of that goes into residential real estate, then the average house prices will increase by no other reason than more money is chasing fixed supply.

So the $200,000 house is now worth $300,000 - therefore $100K has been 'created'.

But the way the economy is so complex and intertwined, that increase in wealth could beget another increase in wealth - i.e. the owner of that house could take out say $50K of that to start a business which increases his wealth even more (PG has a fabulous essay about creating wealth from nothing) out of his sweat (i.e. not related to inflation other than the fact that he used the rise in the price of his house to start the process but everything else was his own doing).

The truth is that I don't think modern economics truly understands inflation yet. For instance, America pumped a TON of new money into the economy (both fiscally and monetarily) and inflation has been subdued in America.

China pumped in a moderate amount of money, and inflation has been out of control recently. i.e. much more than the money they have pumped in, so they have been having to tighten the reins.

Suffice it to say, I don't know. I wish I could condense it to a nice nugget like that, but I can't.

If anyone else can, please chime in and do.

That would be interesting to me too.
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I don't think you understand what collusion means.

Simply going in together on patents isn't collusion. Intel and Google were together on the final run for the Nortel patents. Google bought 1,000 patents from IBM just a week or so later. Google has no problem sharing patents.

The "implied" collusion was that the patents would be used against Google. This clearly isn't the case if they were asked to be part of the fold.
Tell that to the people living in adjacent apartments. Tell that to the kids who unknowingly live in the apartment afterwards. He's a dangerous fool.
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Maybe you missed this 300+ point, 260+ comment thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2842683

When there's a reply this pointed to a story that popular -- I'd expect it to make front page.
Not really. Google needs these patents to protect themselves from suits by MS and Apple, how could they make a cross-licensing deal if they co-owned these patents with the very companies they are trying to protect themselves against?
Yeah, the rewriting goes a bit far for my taste as well... but it is a valid solution, and a purely functional one at that. Yours is valid as well, but introduces local state (which in this case probably doesn't matter, but it's worth noting nonetheless). You could write it this way in Scheme too, using a "let loop" for example, or even using a more imperative style.
I work 27 hours a week, at home. I usually make a full day when I go grab some coffee at the office and talk to my colleagues, because otherwise I wouldn't get anything done on those days. So effectively that's about 4 hours a day. Of course I can just squeeze in more hours if I have an interesting task at hand; then I can just keep the following day off (except checking email occasionally, that's no problem).
It makes a lot more sense to contact the organization before you start conducting potentially-dangerous experiments.
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I agree. I think a double-super (that's two super presses in a row) would have been much better, but would be less discoverable.
Not really. It's smooth PR by Microsoft which is apparently working, but the reality is Google is looking for these patents to create cross-licensing deals to protect themselves from current and future patent suits from companies like Microsoft and Apple - cross-licensing deals that Google could not do if they co-owned these patents with said companies.
It would actually be kind of cool if you could use (relatively) long content in promo fields. It might be an interesting problem to teach your site to recognize it, but it seems like there's a lot of potential.
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There has been a few of these lately, mostly centering around trophies and github, but here is one I have been working on that I hope is a little more flexible.

http://codefamous.com

The basic idea is very specific advertising on skills and experience but flexible enough for anyone to add whatever they like to it.

You can create groups and tags or take tags and groups that you like from other user's profiles and then add them to yours. There are a few tag groups that are set (in yellow background), to maintain some continuity, but the blue ones are a free for all. There of course is the social networking aspect with colleagues but you can vouch for each others tags which I am hoping will add some value.

So its a stripped down linked in, crossed with stack overflow (once I put the tag discussion in), crossed with a wiki and a side order of craigslist that hopefully will make it easy to find people to work with.

Interested in questions or comments on the idea (yes I know it needs auth api support and the design sucks) as I continue to kick it around and see if anything interesting emerges from it.

Cheers,
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Cheers,
Brad
"to get Tomcat to produce good performance under load"

Tomcat is a servlet reference implementation, and is good as a development application server. But for anything serious in production, get JBoss or something. I know the Tomcat team has been working hard on making it more robust, but still!

I think some people/companies and some languages are just meant for each other. Looks like these folks just got into Java through the wrong door. The switch to Python could only make a lot of sense to them. And I'm glad they did.
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Yet another instance where, someday, people will discover and embrace diff. The legal and tax codes are another. Reading through legislation on thomas.gov is like reading through a pile of bad patches with no unified diff context.
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