skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"One thing I do feel pretty certain of is that if you're against software patents, you're against patents in general."

This is possibly the most important statement in the piece.
250 kw?

If something shorts that's going to make a spark people will notice!
Some BIOSes will, oddly enough, boot USB optical drives but not USB mass storage. No idea why, it may have to do with the fact that way too many USB flash drives have piss-poor SCSI command support (they speak SCSI Block Commands, USB is just used as transport).

Here's a hilarious list of common problems in USB sticks:
http://www2.one-eyed-alien.net/~mdharm/linux-usb/target_offe...
When they start losing all their battles instead of just a few.
It is quite generic. I've been calling my network-writeable folder "dropbox" since before there was a web. I should rename it now because someone wants to name their company after the colloquial expression for the functionality?
It Just Doesn't Work: Why New Tech Products Are Increasingly Unsatisfying
Researchers probe Google's geolocation database
So it follows from your argument that software patents currently promote innovation? If so, can you please make this logic more explicit?
Definitely. Even if you just focus on the economic cost of the human costs (lost income for anyone who dies in early 20s, disinvestment in Iraq/Afghanistan by local people due to fear they'll be robbed or killed, etc.), that's higher than the direct military cost.
Yeah, the "free IQ test" thing made me wonder too. I always thought that intelligent people would not be very likely to click on those ads.
>But I also don't want a wireless internet experience that's as slow as molasses because everyone is walking around streaming Netflix day and night or some cheapskate has decided to use his smartphone as his home internet connection.

Do you have any evidence of how common this behavior is or what impact it actually has on the network?

ISPs claim that the vast majority of their users won't be affected by data caps, but they also claim that heavy users significantly degrade performance for everyone. Those two statements usually seem contradictory to me.
If it's not working out because wsgi.input can't be read twice, then write a middleware that turns it into a StringIO, and write another middleware that rewinds it.

Nothing is going to save you from the fact that you either need to buffer your response, or don't throw an unhandled exception after it's started. Yes it's a problem, but buffering is the only magic that'll help.

If the problem is that middleware authors can't be bothered to implement the whole spec because it's too hard, then submit a patch. I promise you that WSGI is easier to implement than HTTP/1.1 In fact, I would argue that it's as easy as possible. If it were easier, we probably wouldn't be having this discussion, because it wouldn't have been powerful enough to have been adopted.

Or write a middleware container that transforms the WSGI api into something you think is more sane, then implement middleware in thate.

Build the next great thing on top of WSGI, because in the end, the answer is either WSGI, something that's architecturally equivalent, or else each framework has to have its own compression, session, and other libraries. And no answer is going to save you from having to do a little bit of work to put things put together correctly.
Very interesting! Just yesterday started looking at using munin better, most of the OS-level graphs tell me nothing useful (except maybe uptime). Running a simple virtual server with little RAM, this might just be a good solution to do more automation and measuring.
(o) "Money transmission" means any of the following: (1) Selling or issuing payment instruments. (2) Selling or issuing stored value. (3) Receiving money for transmission.

(q) "Payment instrument" means a check, draft, money order, traveler's check, or other instrument for the transmission or payment of money or monetary value, whether or not negotiable. The term does not include a credit card voucher, letter of credit, or any instrument that is redeemable by the issuer for goods or services provided by the issuer or its affiliate.

(v) "Stored value" means monetary value representing a claim against the issuer that is stored on an electronic or digital medium and evidenced by an electronic or digital record, and that is intended and accepted for use as a means of redemption for money or monetary value or payment for goods or services. The term does not include a credit card voucher, letter of credit, or any stored value that is only redeemable by the issuer for goods or services provided by the issuer or its affiliate, except to the extent required by applicable law to be redeemable in cash for its cash value.

(n) "Money" means a medium of exchange that is authorized or adopted by the United States or a foreign government. The term includes a monetary unit of account established by an
intergovernmental organization or by agreement between two or more governments.

-- http://www.dfi.ca.gov/licensees/moneytransmitters/

In essence, "MS Points" are exempt, because they are "only redeemable by the issuer for goods or services provided by the issuer or its affiliate".
TIL grad students who have second thoughts about their PhD program are the new college dropouts.
We're supporting FAT32 because it's the most universally supported (and easiest to support).
Other filesystems will be supported in future updates, for sure. In the meantime, the management software will split the files automagically into .iso.1, .iso.2, and so on (or you can do this yourself).

Hope that helps
- Eric Agan, Elegant Invention
Mapping MAC addresses - samy kamkar
Heyzap (YC 09) hiring. Help build the biggest mobile game discovery network
I dunno. "Hardware" patents allow for people to design something that would require millions of dollars of manufacturing equipment, and still get paid. I think the point of hardware patents is to allow the inventor to license that technology out to companies that have the capability to manufacture the hardware.

Software patents don't have anything like that. All it takes for someone to implement a piece of software is a cheap laptop and time. Everyone can write software (or rather, everyone has the financial capability to do so).
Top 10 20th Century Places to Live
I would think IQ in relation to websites being visited would be a better. Rupert Murdock websites = lower score, that sort of thing.
The bottom line: Supreme Court will never invalidate software patent.

Image this if Supreme Court does invalidate software patent.

A big sticker will be on the US map and shows, “Welcome to take all software inventions you want. All my software inventions are yours. Oh. BTW, yours in your country are still yours!” You see how this affects global competitions in software and finance industries.

However, the current patent system still has room for improvements.

1.	Software innovation changes too fast. The patent length should cut to 5 years (excluding the waiting time to get the patent). I have discussed this previously, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2409917

2.	Patent non-practicing entities (excluding public research institutions and schools) should be banned to sue anyone. However, even so Patent Trolls still know how to get around this. This just increases difficulty, but definitely won’t stop them.

3.	Claim description has many ways to interpret. This is where the money is spent in litigation. If a standard structure and a list of words are allowed to be used in the software claim description, this probably makes easier and faster to find out if a software patent is valid. But I have to admit this is a hard problem to solve.
Is it just me or does it seem like a good 65% of all keystrokes are performed with one's left hand?
Maybe this is the buzz Spotify was banking on to get to 50M users.
Does Cassandra support atomic operations?
Todoist is down due to database corruption
Clearly anyone who is willing to release software under the GPL does not agree with you about the meaninglessness of copyright protection for software. You would be amazed how many smart, and well-educated people have taken that copyright license, and others like it, seriously.
An invite-only ad network startup for sports and outdoor activities
If this continual transmission is only done during periods of network usage, when you're already powering up the CPU and antenna chipset, how much of an additional burden would this be for the client device? I doubt it would be continuously transmitting when the device is in sleep mode, and I have no indication that this is a CPU-intensive task for the client device (the data center device is a different matter).
o_o Really? I've been listening for a mention, did I get one?
- Eric Agan, Elegant Invention
United States of Innovation
Research: The Emotions of Aid
Would we as a culture be so up-in-arms about patents if they lasted ... 3-5 years in the CS industry/any-other-ethereal industry?
it was still a good contribution because it prompted this discussion, this blog post and it might lead to something new again
clickable http://fishtaank.com
Sweden's is an odd hybrid, because it has private schools, but they're heavily regulated: they must charge exactly what every other school charges (which is the value of the school vouchers), and must teach the national curriculum. Schools aren't allowed to charge extra on top of the voucher, so there's no price discrimination at all; in effect they're government subcontractors providing alternate implementations of the standardized product.
I don't hate Java. The language is good and the JVM is great.. but I became increasingly displeased with the fact that the evolution of the language seemed to become slow and aimless. Couple that with where the tools were going, and I felt like it was getting harder and less fun to write applications in Java.. so I kind of bailed.

There really is not much you can do to Java at this point

Because it's basically perfect? Okay.

At any rate, really my point was not "Java sucks, I'm over it"... my point was that I think the community of programmers that surround a language are for better or worse stewards of the direction, best-practices, idioms, and common ideologies that affect my experience developing in it. Jim's arguing that he's not like that.. fine, but most of the rest of us are. We use libraries written by other developers, work with other developers... the community matters and shapes our experiences as a [Insert Language] Programmer. I'm just saying that for me, that community was thriving at one point, and then around when Java 5 came out fragments started showing.. things got worse, and now I don't really see much to get excited about. The frameworks are ridiculously heavy, I hope I never accidentally figure out what an Enterprise Service Bus is for, and generally I just feel like the direction of the language (and probably the platform) seems rather driftless.
"The Office" losing it's funk and charm...?
When I traveled away from my home, google always asked me for extra information such as phone number or secondary email verification. I found that's very useful and at time, very annoying. Not sure if i want to type in 2 passwords every time.
You don't think that $8 gas and $16 congestion charges created market pressure? If $8 gas in the UK doesn't make everyone switch to electric, how will $5 in the US do the trick?
Sounds great-- are you going to reimburse the advanced children for doing the teacher's job?

I also think that, unfortunately, America kids have an anti-geek attitude that could make tutoring difficult. The statement that "this kid is better than you, and now you have to listen to him/her" might not be taken well by some of the poorer performers.
Uh, no. It wasn't snarky, despite your downvoting. And no, it wasn't a "hand-chosen" definition. It's the commonly accepted definition, which is why it's listed first in any dictionary you can find. Everyone knows that a statement made in good faith about something like this, which later turns out (perhaps temporarily) to not come true, is not a "lie". A lie necessarily includes intent to lie, in this situation. Once again, you are being intellectually dishonest by not accepting this. It's difficult to debate with those who won't debate honestly.

Do you have any evidence, of any kind, that Jobs did not intend, in good faith, to follow through on his idea of making FaceTime an open standard? No, you don't. If you did, you would post it. Just who is being snarky here?

Let's try another tack: do you even have any made-up theory as to why Jobs would make such an announcement, if he had no intention to follow through? Apparently not, or you would post that, which you haven't.

Lose the ad hominem and participate in the discussion. And no, downvoting is not participation.
I don't think that physical locks are much more secure than a reasonably secured apache instance, which is definitely still exploitable, just like the locks on my door are, which I guess is part of why I think saying the analogy to papers on my kitchen table doesn't work rubs me the wrong way. It's _totally_ analagous.

There wouldn't be any rebuttal or arguing that LulzSec's work is actually good because it's going to increase security if we were talking about physical break ins to real buildings, even though there are many well known attack vectors on most modern locks.
I don't mean their performance - I mean that relatively speaking I have found Boston VCs to be bigger assholes than CA or NY VCs.

For example, one Boston VC said our company was too soon and if there was any way to help let him know. So I did some research, found a co-investment he did with an angel I wanted to talk to, asked for intro, no response. The only other firm to do that ("can we help?" then no response) was a Seattle firm.

All CA firms have helped. Foundry Group (Boulder) has been the most helpful and set me up some meetings with some high profile CEOs even though they knew they wouldn't be investing.
FUD. They're pretty much the same code base. Also "Moving to OpenJDK as the official Java SE 7 Reference Implementation": http://blogs.oracle.com/henrik/entry/moving_to_openjdk_as_th...
I'm sure no one is disagreeing with the importance of knowing how to read code. I'm just saying that Java makes it harder than it needs to be. If your argument is that that's a good thing, then where does that argument end?

(Probably with Perl, I guess...)

...sorry Perl guys. Couldn't resist.
"In college, there’s far less social pressure to maintain popularity, and you’re actually valued for your intelligence. [...] The major difference to me in high school vs. college is the work in college–for me at least–is actually challenging and intellectually interesting."

I think Andrew's view of college is overly shaped by the fact that he went to an elite college at age 12. Had he matriculated at 18 he probably would have been bored as fuck. Especially if he was at a real college, i.e. one where the education and social dynamics were actually representative of the experience of the vast majority of college students.

Also, does he have any actual knowledge of the research that's been done on education? If he does, this interview certainly doesn't hint at it. Not to be overly critical, but I'm really not sold based on this interview.
What if I was the first person to write a murder mystery in which the butler did it? Could I patent that plot device so no one else could use it?

The point of copywriting code is not because people care so much about great coding style or variable names - it's to prevent the laziest forms of copying. If someone wants to invest the time and effort to reverse-engineer and rewrite a piece of software without copying any of the original code, the cost of doing so is sufficiently prohibitive that it might be easier just to rewrite it from scratch.
Email Intervention (by Google)
Direct link: http://www.google.com/hotelfinder/
Patents are for actual technical implementation, not ideas for things which would be nice if they could actually be built. I don't get a patent for imagining how great it would be to have pizza delivered by slingshot even if no one has thought of it before, and even if it delivering pizza by slingshot turns out to revolutionize the world. I have to actually invent the slingshot capable of delivering a pizza accurately. And if that invention is obvious for a semi-competent engineer ("Put pizza on big pannk stuck in the ground. Pull back plank and release.") I won't be awarded a patent.

Now, I can agree that it's conceivable that there could be a benefit for allowing such ideas to be patented. For instance, I've always thought that it would be convenient to have a foot-pedal to turn on your kitchen sink so you didn't have to use your hands to turn on and off the water while you washed dishes. In my imagination, the everyone would immediately realize how great these pedals were if a single company started to produce them. And, in that case, everyone would enjoy a huge boost in utility.

However, there's no way for me to capture any of that surplus because I can't patent a foot pedal for a sink under the current definition of a patent. If I started a company to sell these foot pedal installation, and it became popular, a million other companies could enter the market and sink me. And, all things considered, it's probably better that way.
Price is price...
"They have not been charged yet, but the house was the source of 3,678 packets in about two-and-a-half hours."

really? were they mounting a DDOS attack using a pocket calculator attached to 4800 baud modem?
Signs of life from GNU Hurd
Woobox Offer
Designing a big news site is about more than beauty
I see what you're saying here. The notion that this would be more analagous to a corporate office break-in makes more sense, but it still seems like a poor argument for why what LulzSec is doing, though seemingly negative, is actually beneficial.

I mean, if we were talking about LulzSec exploiting the locks on the corporate office doors or socially engineering their way past security to get at physical files, scanning them and then posting them on the internet, I don't think many people would say that what LulzSec is doing is for the good of humankind, you know?
Breaking RAID arrays (aka: testing nerves)
I recently had the great displeasure of working on a 20,000 odd line class. You cannot keep 20,000 lines in your head, it's an extreme challenge.

Each method only had tiny differences but spotting them, as pivo's original comment argues, is a total nightmare.

Refactoring brought it in at 1,500 lines. Now you can glance at any method and see the actual difference to the default that they do.

Are you seriously suggesting there's little difference between a programming language that encourages 20,000 line behemoths filled with dross compared to a concise 1,500 line program. That there's not a massive mental overhead to reading through what is essentially a book compared to a short essay?

As that's what's being discussed, but you don't seem to get it.

There's reading code, and there's reading pointless code.
Mac Geek Gab 344: An Appetizer of Tips with an Entrée of Answers
The closest equivalent to a voluntary, publicized DDoS is a sit-in. While those do lead to arrests, they don't lead to wholesale confiscation of (expensive!) property, and even the organizers don't get more than a few months in jail. Furthermore, the computer-use ban you can get for "hacking" is incomparable to any punishment for a sit-in or occupation.

My problem with this isn't that they're reporting participants; it's that the participants and organizers are going to be dealt with an order of magnitude more harshly than if they'd done the same thing minus a computer.
Putting "Search" into Google yields a surprising result
Since it is an act of political protest, I wonder how this plays out. Seems it is a lot like the cyber version of picketing/marching/protesting at a business, government building or any physical location like that.
Where would you peaceably assemble online, in such a way it makes a statement? If everyone joins a chat room so what? Only they notice it, where if you protest in public, you get noticed, for disrupting the day to day flow of things. This seems like one of the few ways to accomplish that same effect online.
You again, eh?

No, they aren't. Lets review the definition.

"An activist is a rigidly-defined term meaning an entity which acts to further some idea and bring it to public perception."

If you agree that PETA's red paint stunts are counter-productive, how can you then turn around and argue that the same red paint stunt is furthering (is productive) to the cause?
Yes, but it's expensive. I pay $89 + $10 for static IPs per month. The data rates I get: 50+Mbps/6Mbps. I torrent tv shows and I've never noticed any problems seeding. My downloads usually start out at 3-5MB/s, and drop down to 2MB/s. Clearly they are throttling the downstream, but I can live with that rate.

EDIT: I don't know what the advertised rates were, but they were less (20/5?).
Screenshots from mail.google.com:

http://cl.ly/1x2a3s0x303b2R432S1b

http://cl.ly/0K1m0c331X1N1Z440n2H
the code i ported was originally matlab. if you can write the operations without explicit loops (using matlab's builtins) then it should be able to translate things fairly well to multiple processors. i don't know much about matlab's gpu support (when i looked, you needed third party libs - looks like that has changed?) but again, if it's standard transforms and matrix operations they should be able to make it fairly efficient.

in our case the matlab code had explicit loops (in a sense i was lucky - the inner kernel operations were messy enough to need explicit coding, but regular enough to be handled efficiently on a gpu) and that's what really kills you (because you're bouncing out of optimised c code into their interpreter). just moving from matlab to c (on the cpu) also gave us a significant speedup.

what i'm saying, in a slow rambling way, is that calculating a bunch of sines should be as fast in matlab as in hand-coded c or opencl (on gpu and cpu respectively). because that can be expressed as a vector operation and matlab will have invested a lot of time and effort into making that code fast.
It's more like $8.15-$8.30. I've heard various outlandish figures quoted, but in fact $8.15-$8.30 is a better approximation. I bought some normal unleaded petrol on Monday from Texaco, and it was £1.34/L. 1.34 (British pounds per litre) = 8.28686449 U.S. dollars per US gallon.

Perhaps if you visit a Texaco in the middle of nowhere, or a petrol station in central London, and you buy some 99 RON super unleaded, you could make it to $9/gal(US). Maybe diesel briefly touched $9/gal(US) earlier this year. It's possible. That's definitely the upper end of the price range, though!

...well, so far.
Privately, Investors Admit There's Big Bubble In Tech Startups
Kee Hinckley On Google+ Anonymity: Good Or Bad?
Those Who Can't Build, Talk
By that rationale, any physical object that is produced by a specified process is pure math. Ergo, no patents for physical products either. That might be your position, can you clarify?
OK, this guy sounds very impressive, but his educational experiences were so very atypical that I'm concerned whether he'd have any real grasp of how normal people learn.

I get the feeling that going to his classes would be like getting swimming lessons from a mermaid.
Ah, appreciate you saying that. There was a part of me that was hesitant to post it as I'm not a female, but just going on what I see with siblings/friends. Glad to know I'm not totally off base.
Its great to keep in touch with family when travelling. I use it a lot that way.
FTA: "Rearden has built a test system with several access points in Pflugerville, Lake Austin, and Austin — all cities in Texas."

Great. Show us the data.
Intellectual Ventures fancies itself "disruptive"
Feds Will Pay Doctors For Using Medical Records iPad App
Much discussion from yesterday's submission:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2813903