skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think we Europeans as a diverse society have far less willingness to give up basic rights than those in the US.

Public sentiment does sway sharply in the aftermath of events like 9/11 (or, in our cases, 7/7 in London and the like). We sometimes tolerate nanny state behaviour and suspending basic rights and freedoms more than I personally would like following such extreme, high-profile events.

However, even then, public sentiment seems to sway back again much faster here. Just look at the level of public concern over a tiny number of high profile deaths in the UK in recent years where police were involved, or look at how sharply Google have been slapped down over privacy in places like Germany. I think this is probably down to having a lot of very different cultures who have come together in their common interest but never merged to the extent that the US is a federation of relatively similar states. Consequently we have a much broader spectrum of political opinions permanently in play here and it's much harder to permanently overrule many years of history and precedent without someone objecting loudly enough to slow things down and force more debate.

There seems to be an inherent tension between recognising that the US is often a useful partner in economic and military matters, and recognising that we must not act as some sort of junior partner to a country that frequently gets big issues spectacularly wrong and that has a demonstrated history of screwing its partners whenever its own interests dictate.

My sense is that the US has been cut a lot of slack in recent years because of its economic strength and 9/11, particularly when we had Blair running the show here in the UK, but that public patience with the one-sided deals and all the silliness we have to put up with as a result is now rapidly running out as we have our own problems to deal with and the US are getting in the way or indeed causing some of them.
I like the idea of showing financial plans. A patent should encourage innovation and nothing more. I've always thought that the inventors (or patent holders) should be entitled to all proceeds that their invention generates until they've been adequately compensated for the opportunity cost and capital they've risked to bring their idea to market. Capital costs are easy to measure, opportunity costs not so much. But that is captured in what the inventors plan to earn off their invention either through selling it or licensing it, so the patent office can figure out how long a patent would need to be valid in order for the inventors to be properly rewarded. Since a dollar value would be attached to it in that case, any purchase of the patent would probably change the time it takes for the inventors to be made whole.

In any case, 20 years of protection no matter who owns the patent is a terribly stupid idea.
I left firefox once and for all this week. its too bad, i like what the they are working with identity built into the browser.
Opez (YC S11) Is Yelp Meets Facebook, For Service Professionals
If you think EPL is the most famous league??thats not true....
I've been using Windows 7 at work for about a year, and I had absolutely no idea that the menu will show up when I hit the alt key until exactly 2 days ago. Every time I needed something from it I'd just rummage around all the visible menus, not find it, curse my head off and open up the command prompt.

I'm not sure which will look dumber as a consequence of this post: me or the Windows 7 UI.
In my humble opinion, software patents are a bad idea and should be eliminated. If this can't be done, then they should be really limited in length, say three to five years, which is a long time in the software world.

As things stand now, the only people I see benefiting from software patents are lawyers and the Patent Office itself, which I sincerely believe is more interested in collecting the filing fees than anything else.
For what it's worth, Google finds more hits for "fearful" than for "afterwards" and more for "ram" than for "corporate". ("Strongly" and "contains" do beat "deceased" and "advent", though. And yes, many of the hits for "ram" are really for "RAM".)
They were dropped for not adhering to the App Store guidelines. They are appealing, but it's unclear which star violated which guideline, so they are probably out of luck.
Propping up the old guard is rarely good for the common man. It can hold off chaos for a short while, but the longer you do it, the worse things get. It should be a means to an end, not an end in itself.

I think our country has forgotten how to think long-term. Our constitution was obviously written by long-thinkers. It's remarkably sound. Unfortunately, they expected people would continue to think long-term, and that hasn't happened. They even put in a ton of checks and balances to make sure things got done, and we've systematically overridden them for short-term gains and 'emergencies' that never go away.
> simply gives a mathematical formula

For a lot of people, 'simple' and 'mathematical formula' is practically an oxymoron. I know, I know, it's a cliche to point it out, but it also illuminates the heart of the problem: The patent examiners are too overworked to pick up on the obviousness, and it doesn't look obvious to most people. It looks densely complex and inscrutable to most people. (The notion of whether we need to allow patents to be densely complex and inscrutable in the first place is another issue.)

Therefore, it's difficult to communicate just how bad the patent is to enough people to convince lawmakers to change the system.
Was about to submit this, and the search revealed this comment that's very relevant: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2857938

This kind of optimization is often very important. Unfortunately what works changes often and it's hard to guess what will work -- which is why it's good to do these micro-benchmarks.
On universalsubtitles.org, we're doing something pretty similar to that.

1) Move all static media to a unique hash (we get that from git's commit id, making it trivial to correlate code & static) to /[static-media]/[static-cache]/[git commit uid]/...path to file

2) Set the MEDIA url accordingly

The nice thing about this is that the generated file names are very readable and you always know what changeset generated it just by looking.
It's open source if someone finds it useful https://github.com/8planes/mirosubs/tree/master/apps/unisubs...
Any narrowing of the search space will most definetely reduce entropy.. by how much is calculatable but I don't have the time nor language statistics right now to do it.
The Neon Genesis Evangelion anime had "mecha" that needed an external power umbilical.

http://www.figures.com/forums/attachments/news/9508d12810229...

In a real-life combat situation, that would be debilitating, but it would be workable in a construction, rescue, or sporting context.
sounds interesting, care to share more of the story? :)
Besides the fact that they're written by lawyers, a major reason software patents use such odd, useless jargon is because algorithms aren't actually meant to be patentable, but the PTO will let them through if they sufficiently submerge the algorithm in a sea of other gunk.
It behaves funny in a very "simple" way. Selections have this little problem where you move your mouse over the visual representation but the selection is in the logical representation.

So say your logical text is this:

ltr LTR.

where the capital letters are RTL chars (whether because they're actually RTL or because of an RLO in the char stream). That is, the above represents the reading order. Visually this would look like this:

ltr RTL.

assuming that this paragraph directionality is left-to-right; a reader reading this text would read the letters in the order 'l', 't', 'r', ' ', n 'L', 'T', 'R' (which if you note matches the logical order, hence the name).

Now say you mouse down between the 't' the 'r' and drag right until your mouse is between the 'R' and the 'T'. Those are your selection endpoints. But the selection happens on the _logical_ text, so what's selected is the 'r', the space, the 'L', and the 'T' (and even in that order). You can see that in the example above; if you mouse down between the two 'o' chars in "elgooG" and drag right to between the two 'o' chars in "Google", then you get exactly this sort of behavior.
I have to agree with this post. Mark is a really smart guy, but I'm not sure his idea is practical from an implementation point of view nor would it have the desired effect.

I would say, given the value of LinkedIn shares right now (P/E over 300), there is more capital available than there are good people and businesses worth funding.

Honestly, I think we're being crushed by regulation or in some cases paralyzed the fear of it. We've gone from a nation of do-ers to a nation of let me check with my lawyer first.

There are laws preventing regular people from investing in non-public companies, laws preventing competition in markets, laws making it difficult to hire/fire employees, etc...
As the article mentions, a lot of the rankings seem to be influenced by the popularity of the service. Twitter and Facebook are going to have more complaints simply due to the fact that more people use them.

Twitter in particular has a very good API, I have never used Digg's, LinkedIn's, or Paypal's, but I doubt very much they are better documented and easier to use than Twitter's. (I have had some problems with Facebook's API, so perhaps it is deserving of its title.)

A better way to run this survey would be to only allow people who have actually used all the API's to vote. It would be difficult in my opinion to vote for an API as the worst with no basis of comparison.
I recently asked a patent lawyer acquaintance of mine the question: "Do you think patents encourage innovation?"

His answer was: "There's absolutely no question at all whatsoever."

Which I was certainly a bit suprised by.

Maybe the truest conclusion I can come to is that, well, because he's a patent lawyer and his livelihood is based on that being true, he has every incentive to believe it.

I think it's worth pointing out that Nilay Patel is a laywer. [EDIT: non-practicing lawyer, never a patent lawyer] It's clear to me when I read his writing on the subject as well as when I hear him talk about it on the podcast that he's so far from my own thinking on this as to be almost incomprehensible.

I've slowly been reading this: http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm

But it seems to be light on data. Seems to me that theoretical arguments are well established and fairly strong on both sides at this point. Does anyone know of any empirical studies that have been done on the subject? Is that even possible? Any strong natural experiments?
Four English words selected randomly from a large dictionary is certainly secure. But it's unwieldy to type 20+ character passwords. I prefer 10-digit random alpha-numeric passwords, although these are hard to remember and type. Best compromise in my opinion is to use a hashing function with a moderately difficult passphrase, e.g., Site_Password = Hash( Domain_Name || Passphrase).
I don't find them appealing at all, I find them dim and uninteresting.
Terrific. The most paranoid country on earth after North Korea, now with direct access to all kinds of social network data. This will certainly pan out well.
What about the pharmaceutical industry? Third parties are likely able to reproduce and sell generic versions of drugs within months of the original version being put on the market.

Without patent protection, that's not enough time to come
close to covering the R&D costs, assuming the market for the branded drug shrinks in the face of the much cheaper generics.
It is easy to blame the patent office until you realize that most cases are a single examiner in the office up against multiple law firms who continually ask what is wrong with the patent, told that according to their interpretation of the rules it is ok, refine and re-apply until granted.

You have hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, and the resources of the best patent lawyers in the world and the largest companies in the world up against (usually) a single examiner.
This was how some folks pretended that Google had erased all mentions of "Oracle":

http://giorgiosironi.blogspot.com/2010/08/google-never-remov...

I used this to prank some people on the in-house SEO team at my last job. I'd ask them if they had done anything that might be considered black-hat. Then I sent him a link to a "site:" query on Google indicating that our site had been removed from the index.

e.g. http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...
I have looked through google patents beta just to see how ridiculous many software patents are, and though my sample size was small, most seemed pretty obvious ideas to me. Truly amazing that lawyers can write so much text about so trivial an idea. The core issue is that the patent office does not have "people skilled in the art" to bar these patents from being issued.
I have a friend whose last name is McIntire, and his handle everywhere was xmcintire. I used to have a lot of fun changing my username to xrncintire - exploiting keming to impersonate him on any non-fixed-width-font system.

(name changed to protect him, he was pretty peeved that I did this - though I think he registered a few places as pavellishir to exploit the r/n similarity, too :P)
I find the discussion surrounding the XKCD strip alarming for the superstition it reveals about password generation. The particular theme I am alarmed by is that people seem to think that if a password looks alien, or was difficult for them to come up with, it will be hard for a machine to guess.

Look, we're working with big numbers here. You need to do the math.

In this thread alone, I've seen suggestions to use a common dictionary word translated into another language, or written in l33tsp34k with some permutations. From a probabilistic perspective, these are still dictionary words, even though they look like gibberish. The same is true of the common method of typing a word with ones fingers displaced on the keyboard.

Conversely, I see a lot of argument that these XKCD passphrases would be easy to guess because they are made up of dictionary words. This misunderstands the math behind the situation. Even if an attacker knows that your password was generated via this method, and even if they know the word list you used, the password is still hard to guess. The difficulty grows exponentially with each word in the phrase, and that's pretty fast.

The key with passwords is not to create something that looks random -- something that if you showed it to another human being, they'd have a hard time deciphering. It's to create something that is random; literally a result of a throw of the dice for every new password.

Human beings are really bad at creating randomness. There's a demonstration done in an early statistics class in which the professor divides the class into two groups. He tells one to toss a coin a hundred times and record the sequence of heads and tails, while the others are to write down a sequence they think is random using their imagination. The papers are completed and mixed and then -- magically! -- he is able to sort them into the two types, easily and with high accuracy.

The lesson is this: even when you think you're being random, you probably aren't. You're probably using the same tricks everyone else is, and making the same mistakes.

I would trust passwords that come out of a script like this to be far more secure than passwords anyone (myself included) made up, no matter how random they're trying to be.
The biggest problem I've seen with Israel as a non-Israeli is that it's really difficult to get connected into their tech scene as an outsider. It's especially difficult for non-white people (security will focus on Indian/Pakistani or slightly less on East Asians), making the whole process more painful. (I know a couple people with capital and tech skills who were interested in working with Israeli startups, got a little bit of the way, and then decided to leave due to discrimination and exclusion.)

The best way would probably be to have an Israeli cofounder or high-level employee who comes with his own connections from past IDF service.

The other problem I have with Israeli tech people is they are very Microsoft heavy.
> malicious users using i vs. l to pose as others

It seems like it would be easy to implement a blacklist that automatically updates based on the current crop of registered names such that filters are applied to each registered name to generate a number of lookalike names which are all unavailable for use. This should allow any good-faith user to register any name they want without causing confusion.
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2873190
DANGER: This gives no more entropy than what srand() uses, which (at least for GNU awk) is simply the current UNIX time, which (if we assume that when you generated the password is known to within one year) means only about 25 bits of entropy.
I can understand your doubt. After writing a decent amount of Lua I really started to notice it lacking succinct ways to express things that I've become used to in other languages.

So I wrote the language for myself to use, but I've opened it up for other people because I think there is some potential for it. The use case for MoonScript is the same as the use case for Lua.

Also I have done a lot of mitigate the pains of compiling and debugging. It's actually pretty seamless, I've done stuff like automatic code compilation on require, and error line number rewriting. I urge you to check out the documentation: <http://moonscript.org/reference/#moonscript_api>;
I thought this post from Nilay Patel today was a much better summation of a similar argument:

http://thisismynext.com/2011/08/11/broken-patent-system/

Also more substantial and less nieve (ie. not from somebody who listened to the TIL episode, read wikipedia for 15 minutes, and then decided to write a blog post)
Evan Williams (@ev) on Heello
I am a fan of both and decide from case to case which one to use. Both are under heavy development. I am often surprised about new features when checking the newest versions.
Yes, but the site has to link to the server. So either the user has accounts on every DSSID server - losing the SSO advantages - or everyone uses the same server.

If you let the users choose their own server (by putting its URL), then you've just reinvented OpenID.
It's awesome to see one shitty thing in life being used to get rid of another shitty thing in life.
#1 rule: Never trust the client. You're sending the client data that it doesn't need (the invisible characters.) Instead of having it tattle when the client can see things it shouldn't, you should just not let it have that information in the first place.

Because there's still a way to cheat: Packet sniffing. Sure, they won't get as much info as they used to, but because it doesn't interact with the client at all, they can't get caught. Then they just write an overlay for the client so they can visually see the invisible characters, and poof... They're undetectable again.
tl;dr Wage subsidy in the form of credit extended to established companies. No benefit to you, HNers.

Remember green jobs? They aren't happening. So here's an alternative. Cut sales and income tax. Impose heavy carbon tax (enough to get gas to $10 gallon in 7 years). Impose carbon-linked tariff on imports. No subsidies to energy research, only to verifiable carbon sequestration. The realignment needed to adjust to that will be very US-labor intensive. And people will feel great about meeting the challenge of fixing the world's biggest externality. Some of us will anyway.
Apple went super-nova on that galaxy!
My experience is completely different. I find it a useful source of material from people I don't know directly, but respect, and a great way to interact daily with people I know, respect, and don't get to see often enough.

I don't understand people who complain in this sort of manner - the experience they describe is completely alien to me. I've carefully curated who I follow, and benefit enormously.

So yes, maybe "it's just you."
Thanks.

Too bad though discussions like this aren't more common here, Ironically though, by not having a discussion like this invites more government interference into the internet. Kind of like the finance industry.
Making metrics work with Google App Engine + Geckoboard
If all browsers adopt the auto-updating model, that becomes less of a problem.
I like how instead of "how can we make cheating technologically impossible", you instead went "how can we make cheating completely undesirable."

I'd also imagine that most (maybe all) of your cheaters had a reaction more along the lines "finally!" rather than "aww, shucks."

I remember in the game NetStorm (wasn't a big hit), everyone basically used a "money cheat." Why? Because you had to, since everyone else used it.
I think it being difficult to read is entirely subjective. I don't know Haskell, and if I were to look at the code for a Haskell project I wouldn't understand it, but that doesn't mean that those who use it find it difficult to read.

After writing the majority of the compiler in MoonScript itself, and some other scripts, I've actually grown to like it and I find it perfectly readable. More readable than Lua in fact, because half of the text on my screen isn't the keyword `local` :). Try it out, if you code Lua then I think you might like it.
To be honest, it was a waste of 30 seconds while I tried to work out what it was for. Nothing moves, nothign reacts, I've clicked on it nearly everywhere.

Nothing.

Firefox 3.6.18 on Ubuntu.
Sarcos corporation has had high quality haptic feedback mechanisms for decades now.

http://www.sarcos.com/teleop_videos.html

Take a look at the "Large Dextrous Arm" video. The operator has an arm in a haptic-feedback harness, which means he is virtually feeling what it's like to have a giant-sized arm that can pick up an anvil like a coffee cup.

Sarcos corporation actually knows how to build a full-body haptic feedback harness. Build one of those into the center of gravity of a 50 foot tall hydraulically actuated mechanical body, and add mechanisms ensuring that the orientation of the harness homunculus is always the same as the orientation of the giant mech homunculus. Since the orientation of both the giant and harness forms are the same, the human pilot's inner ear can become the gyroscopic mechanism for the whole mechanism.

In other words, you'd have a Japanese style "Giant Robot" with scaled-up human-like coordination and agility. (There would be an expansion in time for movements, but a human pilot should be able to compensate.)
I think the Microsoft heavy part is changing a bit. Starting with the IDF programming units mentioned in the article switching over to new languages that have gained traction. As well when start-ups pivoting into the consumer web. Avner Amit from Taykey was telling me they switched over to open source once they got to the US because they saw how popular it was. Israel has strong MS developers because MS has a strong presence. Historically its made sense to work in .NET