skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If it's a common occurrence that independent researchers tend to invent similar things around the same time, then it strikes me as a positive thing for the law to bestow some advantage on whoever was first. That would tend to spur innovation and patent disclosures, which is the whole point of the patent system.

No. The coincidence of timing is a second-order consequence of the fact that smart people when faced with problems with similar requirements will produce similar solutions. In some cases the requirements are so constrained that not only will the abstract ideas be identical but so will the concrete implementations of those ideas (e.g. write me an optimal 8x8 IDCT for machine architecture X). It is absurd that any reasonably smart fellow who happens to tackle a problem first should be granted a government monopoly on his ideas.

If the goal is public disclosure of knowledge then assuming the problem has any wider relevance it will soon enough be revisited by other similarly smart fellows, so there is little incentive for the discoverer who happened to be first to closely guard his secrets. The gain to society for granting the monopoly in this case is that the knowledge might be disclosed a little sooner than otherwise. The cost is that other and sometimes even smarter fellows cannot develop those ideas further without a license, not even in the context of pure research, never mind business.

That hardly spurs innovation. And as for that, it was never the original purpose of the patent system but is rather a latter-day tacked-on justification for it, but let us suppose that is its principal purpose. Do you see that happening? It's certainly not working in the software world. Elsewhere in the thread there was a reference to a paper debunking some of the classic supposed success stories of patents related to Watt's steam engine and Ford's windshield wipers.
Scoble is right on: "One thing is this shows how deep a hole Blackberry, Windows Phone 7, and Palm Pre are in."
1. Social security reform was a core part of the Democratic platform in 2000. "I will keep Social Security in a lockbox, and that pays down the national debt and the interest savings I would put right back into Social Security." (Al Gore, Oct 4, 2000). Put simply, the Democratic policy aim was to divert the surplus into paying off the debt while preventing lower interest rates from spiking government borrowing/spending by also putting interest savings into the trustee account. You can compare this with the Republican plan at your leisure.

2. Your characterization of the "feasibility" of the social security program is wildly inaccurate. Seriously, instead of turning yourself inside out trying to claim that Republicans didn't setup a system that had workers pay MORE into the system than they were taking out for 30 years, why not just roll back the Bush tax cuts and call it a day?
Let "Space Rocker" magically transport you to 1998
I am not sure I agree. The primary difference between pre and post EURO Europe is that, individual EURO countries no longer control their own currency. In times of economic crisis, countries can manipulate their currencies to make their economies more competitive internationally, and/or inflate their way out of a debt crisis. Despite what the media is saying, the U.S. is not in a debt crisis, we have many tools at our disposal to prevent default, including currency manipulation. The EU on the other hand has a handful of countries that are in serious jeopardy of defaulting.
"Maintain important overseas installations such as Japan and Taiwan." - there are no US bases in Taiwan currently. Perhaps this is referring to Korea?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Air_Force...
I think the chances are greater of FB buying Yahoo now.
Super Hot July Magazine Covers
There is a bar at the bottom that says "universal web navigation." It links to 10 search engines, none of them Google.
I think they sending a clear message to the US government to get their financial house in order. The fact this has never happened (to either democratic or republican presidents in the history of the country) is a major issue.

Imagine if we actually passed the balanced budget amendment back in 1997 - things would be a LOT different.
Vivid picture of this so called "coordination" showing that claim is complete B.S.:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/floorsixtyfour/5061246255/

So "does it look coordinated to you?" On the contrary, it's chaos, but Google wanted in, really badly. Well, this isn't their daddy's monopoly, and it's not all about them.

(Also, in general, the newcomer doesn't assert patents against the old guard. It's not a conspiracy -- Google just got here last.)

Google, to fix this, stop whining about a few players amassing more toys at 5x the estimate when you only bid 4x the estimate, and do something about disarming the weapons instead.

Don't like "bogus" patents because they were invented before you thought of making a phone and you didn't get them for pi? Boo hoo.

Don't like patents at all? Great, let's go there.
Ask HN: How much should I earn from online freelancing?
Hi..
I am working on freelancer website: http://www.freelancer.com/affiliates/ahmed613/

I am currently making around 1500 to 2000 USD per month, and I am web developer with extensive experience in web APIs.

I feel that this is a too low income, comparing it to the average American developer's income..

So I need to know.. how much should I earn from online freelancing, if I work 40 hrs/week.. so its just like full time.

You can say annual or monthly expected income, or even per hour rate.

Waiting for your answer and thanks,
Ahmed.
May a thousand parody videos bloom in response!
Facial Recognition brings up your FB profile after one glance
It seems to work fine for me in QuickTime X under Snow Leopard.
Features of Sanskrit - Some analogy to OOP.
Thanks. Had to google his name. OK, now I know he's a tea drinker. And manipulator.
Where was this school?
We don't have any such thing in the US.

In 2000, voters thought they picked "humble foreign policy", "deregulation" and "lower spending" in the primary. It turns out they voted for the exact opposite.

About 2 years ago, voters thought they picked "not forcing people to buy insurance they can't afford". They also voted for the exact opposite.
Given the title I was hoping for a wide ranging piece about the transition from phone to exo-brain and the implications for society.
Out of curiosity, what size do you set your TC volume to, and what size is your wallet.dat? Is the possibility of wallet.dat exceeding the size of backup.tc a problem?
I would love to see how others solved these problems as a reward for completing it on my own.
Are Startups Better As Single Gender Affairs?
Well, we could start charging the banks for carrying excess capital. I know, I know, everyone will start screaming about crappy balance sheets and all, but they're just sitting on boatloads of cash.
Because that wasn't so obvious before...
Top Killer Military Girls in the world
If you can't distinguish between a woman deviously driving a vulnerable girl to suicide and a satirist doing cartoons about public scandals, I can't imagine you've put much thought into the subject.
Well, you might be surprised. Japan's market rallied 3% the day after their downgrade.
Blog - ['' Malalis Family '']
I can't imagine anyone's wallet.dat being that large... Plus you can always create new TC volumes. My wallet is under 200K right now. Alternatively, especially for such a small file, plenty of other per-file encryption schemes would be just as applicable.
Human rights and individual freedoms are not just ideals. They are crucial checks which insure that the government doesn't go "rogue" and abuses the power it's been given.
maybe they could buy yahoo, but why would they even want it?
So buy Canadian Bonds or Chilean Bonds or Gold or Silver or Apple stock.
Milk Inc. reminds me of color.com.
And what's up with the "don't mind carrying a pager, because your code is so stable it never goes off" from their jobs page... Trying to be cute? A PAGER? Uuh yeah, I might still have one floating around in my chest of old electronics. There! A SkyTel two-way pager. From 1996. WTF.
But now S&P has provided the others 'cover' for downgrading.

Since part of the reasoning of S&P was that US politicians were willing to play chicken with events of default, I don't see that this is an easy hole for the US to dig out of. The fact that politicians in the US were openly discussing 'how bad would a default really be' sums up why the AAA rating was no longer deserved.

IMHO, 80% likely that the other agencies will follow within a couple of weeks.
Page Composition Service
So Apple and MS are anticompetitive?

Isn't Google being anticompetitive by effectively dumping the Android phones to the world markets (and then boasting how many copies are activated each day?) Google has played this game of offering "free" services and this worked for them well in terms of crushing smaller companies who just did not have resources to fire back. But this is not the case with big guys like Apple and Microsoft. Google was very naive thinking it will flood the market with cheap Android phones and Apple will just sit and watch. Google can expect to make money off ads, but Apple cannot. So they use patents to make it more difficult for Google to do what they want. Very simple.

In other industries there are anti-dumping laws and regulations, because dumping is considered an illegal way to kill competition. Google has been doing this for years, because their primary source of revenue is ads. To be honest, I don't have much sympathy to Google, not in this case.
"After two years of iteration (on an Erlang codebase) ...no one on our team is an Erlang expert,"

This sounds a little strange. How is this possible? High turnover on the team?
The entire point here is that letting the kids think in terms of "finishing the list" is wrong. You can't "finish" learning English vocabulary, or mathematical theorems, or really anything worth doing in life.

If the kids use up the pre-researched list, then you go get more. Or tell the kids how to get more.
You're trying to refute a statement saying a trend exists by providing a single example which does not follow the trend.
Ah, but now we're just arguing about what constitutes a non-obvious invention. And I would agree that we need better patent examiners making that decision.
Cool blogging resources & tools
> Basically an infrastructure company in the most elemental and violently grand sense of the word?

(a) I love this sentence, and (b) this is probably why people are so excited about Dropbox, myself included.

But, the potential of a company is not equal to the potential of its product category (unless it's a monopoly that lasts for all time).
Most people are afraid to go against the norm and do what they think is right, children and teens in particular. A pretty high percentage of the very intelligent people I know consider a lot of what they did in school busywork and a waste of time, but most still submitted and completed the pointless assignments. People are weak when faced with societal (or familial) pressures and will adopt all kinds of stupid and counterproductive behaviors if the alternative is lowered prestige or exclusion. It doesn't mean the system has value.
I don't care about karma burn; F&$# those damn ignorant republicans
> Multi-letter options start with two hyphens, and each such argument must be separated with spaces.

That's something that's always annoyed me about screen; commands such as "wipe" are "screen -wipe"
The Streaming Era Has Begun..
I agree with you, for what it's worth.
Freelancer is set up to save the clients money, with developers bidding on mostly small projects - its a race to the bottom.

What you need to do is use resources like LinkedIn to make contacts with business owners and use your development skills to solve pain points and contract with companies that are up against deadlines - that is how you push your rates up.

Network, network, network. When you get a contract that pays $15/hr, use your network to find another that pays $20. When you get that, immediately start selling your services for $30. Once you have that, try for $45. One company may not be willing or able to pay you $2000 a week, but 3 clients may pay you $700 if you solve the right pain points in 15 hours of work.

But you must always be forming new relationships and looking to make connections that could lead to more business. Otherwise, you should probably just take the best job you can find
The existence of hundreds of suits doesn't do anything against the claim that Android and Google are being effectively picked on by Apple and Microsoft and when they go in together to keep Google/Android from having leverage against such suits... Or do you still feel that my description is a mischaracterization of the events surrounding the sale of both the Novell and Nortel patents?

How many arrows are coming out of Google's bubble on that diagram?
Why now?

Well we are living in exponential era, everything that happened in the past has been fast forwarded exponentially. Fast Fast Fast forward, the rate is exponential.

Look at last 10yrs & compare the growth 20-30yrs ago, or rate of global warming, or how fast you travel today or efficiency in communication, or how much time did google take to become threat to Microsoft, or facebook to google, or even youngest billion air!

You name it! This rate can be catastrophic for us.
True Blood Season 4 Episode 7
True Blood Season 4 Episode 7
Sure, that is a huge and endemic part of the problem. But if that were all, I might believe something of the system could be salvaged. Anyway, this thread has grown too deep already, so let's end it here. Thank you for the discussion.
Well, the original statement didn't provide any example at all so I guess we're moving in the right direction.
I have to second a comment on the very article linked -- it is disturbing how you see a theme appear one day, and the next day hundreds of individual commentators are parroting exactly the same line. Maybe two days ago I saw the facetious, thin-as-toilet-paper "Google is using their search engine monopoly to try to undercut these poor [making billions of dollars quarterly with insane profit margins unlike any other industry in the history of mankind] companies". Now it makes a showing, multiple times, in every single discussion.

Android isn't free for anyone.

Android isn't free for Samsung. Android isn't free for Motorola.

I will bet a pretty $100 bill that each of them are spending more equipping their handsets with Android than they ever spent on Windows Mobile licenses. As software developers we should all appreciate the fact that each of those makers has had to man up with large teams of mobile software development experts, and each has made significant (although debatable) contributions to the field. Quite a difference from the days when Motorola had a couple of hardware devs run a vanilla development kit build of Windows Mobile, customizing a couple of stdefs, and that was it -- they had their MotoQ software.

My Galaxy S II cost me $700 of cold, hard cash. Where's my free product?

The free thing is, failing to find a better term, dumb. Motorola, HTC and others didn't adopt Android because it was free (which, as I mentioned, is hardly free anyways. Go ahead and sell computers with Ubuntu, undercutting Microsoft. See how that works out for you). They adopted it because it was a concerted response to the overwhelming dominance of Apple.

"flood the market with cheap Android phones "

Everyone who parrots this talking point is an idiot.

The top selling Android devices, by far, are on par with iPhone 4 costs (you know the device that you can now get for $0 at many telcos). Android has never been about "cheap", no matter how many times people like you repeat that trope.

Apple is desperately trying to keep the Galaxy S II from achieving wide availability. I guess they really want to stop those $700 "cheap" phones.
The Hayekian view here seems patently false according to Moody's research firm, which determined in 2008 that the most cost effective stimulus was food stamps and the least effective was business incentives such as tax breaks for buying new equipment.

http://money.cnn.com/2008/01/29/news/economy/stimulus_analys...
By "sometimes" you mean, "nearly all the damn time".

As an incrementalist coder, it frustrates me to see how non-incremental the approach to solving social problems often is. Decouple, solve one thing at a time, etc.
We couldn't even pass New Deal 0.3b today, man. Can dream, though...
What if someone else offered a free plan for a service that works just as well as DropBox? Would you still pay $5.00/month for DropBox?
Google doesn't ship phones, phones aren't free (there's always some cost, contracts, etc), and how is a freemium model anticompetitive?

You're justifying Apple suing Samsung for proceeds from Android sales by saying, effectively, it's hard to compete with open source software? Or am I mistaken?
Call me crazy, but at the rates data costs are decreasing, it seems like Amazon could create this service as a loss leader and give it away for free. What does the future look like? Everyone paying $10 month to have data in the cloud? I doubt it.

This doesn't mean I don't adore Dropbox and recommend it to everyone I know, because I do (and I pay for it), but it seems like the reality is that this type of service must evolve very quickly in order to stay in front of the curve.
As a former TA... there needs to be a clear distinction in discussions of students. Not everyone is good.

Some students are 'bad'. Incompetent. Lousy. Shouldn't be there.

Many students are just banging out what they need for that degree. Why are they wanting the degree? Money. Stability. Cause dad said so. Cause it's what ya do. Do they care? No.

And then there are the bright students/hackers. They were so interested - it was so very fun working with them.

I reckon the breakdown was 10/80/10 or thereabouts.

Good teachers work for all those students. There are different strategies to try to get/maintain interest/excellence. Some try fear, others lots of homework, some general disinterest (sink or swim).

(Un)fortunately, we want to have ratings on people who we hire. "Is this guy any good? Yeah? How good?"

So... like any project, we have a metric, and like humans we are optimizing for the metric instead of success. This last hundred years, the metric is GPA.

And, for what its worth, my recollection of the grades we gave is that it was a rough correlation with the student's ability.

Anyway, my 2c.
... and guess who got the task to re-write the server?

...an intern...
This requires allowing the government to consider tax income as a revenue stream, which isn't playing well politically right now. We're supposed to think of taxes as money the government had no right to collect in the first place, and which the only right thing for it to do with is give it back.
The SEC should criminally prosecute S&P, Fitch and Moody's for their corrupt participation in the financial meltdown. It should have been done sooner (the case was already made). To do so now would look like vengeance. But if vengeance is required then vengeance should be served.

Put their controlling officers in jail and shut down the companies forever.

http://www.housingwire.com/2011/04/14/credit-ratings-agencie...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/13/credit-rating-agenc...
> It's fairly widely understood (though I guess not by Professor Krugman) that Medicare offloads some of its own costs onto the private sector by the below-market rates it pays providers.

This is fairly widely claimed, but it's a pretty weak claim. Doctors are not required to accept Medicare. They choose to do so. They choose to accept the rates Medicare offers. When one party offers an amount for a second party's services, and the second party accepts, they have just established the market rate for that transaction.

This claim also conveniently ignores the fact that insurance companies do the same thing. Check over a medical statement from your insurance company some time. You'll see where the doctor billed $300 for "nasal deconfrabulation", your copay was $25, and the insurance paid $125. Total due: $0.

> He's also neglecting to make a real comparison of the services that private health care provides vs. Medicare. Sure, private insurance premiums may have risen faster than Medicare spending during the '90s, but Medicare wasn't even paying for prescription drugs (a huge cost driver) until Part D was implemented in 2006.

The status of Medicare in 2006 seems to have little relevance to Medicare today. The first question is how much Medicare spends today per client vs how much private insurance spends per client, on average. The second question is how coverage differs in these scenarios. How does Medicare compare to the average insurance policy? I don't know the real answer to these questions, but I know Medicare's coverage or lack of coverage for prescription drugs in 2006 isn't relevant.
Digital democracy, Plato, and web 2.0
Can you point to some examples of Google suing other mobile device manufacturers? If so, how many of them are offensive suits, and how many are defensive moves in response to being sued first?
Thanks for the info on it, it is a common colloquialism in my region, the US south east. I was using it, in what is described as the modern usage in the link that was provided in one of the other posts. I did not know that it was used as a term to describe a logical fallacy. It's usage in my region could be inferred to mean: It is an important question that should be asked and not that it assets that the sentence to follow is true.
Phones are not free, but Google offers Android licenses to phone makers for cheap. This leads to lower prices for phones. Yes, it's dumping because many of these phones are sold below what they actually cost to make if you take software development costs into account. This is classic definition of dumping.

I have to admit I don't know much about Apple vs Samsung lawsuit. But some Samsung Android phones sure look just like copies of iPhone to me. I am not surprised Apple has been irritated by this.
There isn't even a comparison on the graph between Erlang and Python versions!
thematt says

"so they rely on companies like S&P and Moody's to give them guidance."

And those companies fabricate data and sell it to them.

Perhaps not everyone should invest in areas where they have no possibility of understanding the risks.
This is a very odd article to say the least.

Why is it disturbing that Google is unable to buy these patents? These patents were sold to the highest bidder and the bidders were approved by the gov't.

How are MS, Apple & Oracle unpatriotic in bidding against Google for patents? Last time I checked Google, Apple & MS all have their cash in tax havens overseas. That, to me, sounds unpatriotic.

Why are these three companies specifically to blame for the bogus patents that are thrown out in court? This seems to put the blame squarely on the shoulders of the USPTO for even validating them. There are also the claims that were found valid in the courts. Are they bogus as well?

Has Apple or MS sued OHA members with these purchased patents? I realize the situation with Oracle is far more in the gray but it seems Apple has sued with patents they applied for and used in their products. Why should Google have the benefit of purchasing patents to leverage against Apple & Microsoft's own patents?
If I could get a credit card that charged 1.5% interest, I would start borrowing to make my own damn roads.
I love my iPhone, but I realize how much of what I love about it is due to lock-in. Personally, I'm happier to be locked into Apple's ecosystem than in any of the other competing ones, but the switching cost, even setting aside app purchases -- stuff like where my calendar data lives, and who stores the canonical copy of my contacts -- means that I'm basically Apple for life.

Full disclosure: I'm an alumni of Apple, so take the above with the appropriate amount of salt.
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