skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think there is some divergence of perceptions here. I've worked with a lot of applicants for software patents, and they're not vaguely involved in applying to cover something well-known for which they might want to feel ashamed. Typically they're very clever people with a lot of expertise in a domain and they know what they've come up with is really new and awesome, and they're excited to patent it. I think the perception of software patents as a world of rot are based more on the perception bias of everyone reading and reiterating the daily cycle of polemics like this one that may or not cite any specific examples, at least beyond the same handful like the Amazon one-click, than on the actual state of software patents in general. And while the occasional bad patent is easy to see, it's less easy to see how the promise of patent protection helps steer the management decisions of companies to invest in engineers and computer scientists and research and development, rather than investing scarce resources in easier and more predictable ways to generate return on their investment, like hiring more sales people or buying back stock or spending more on lobbyists.
Microsoft drops dolby support in Windows 8
Patent trove is not a defense against patent troll.

Patent Trolls do not have any product that can be counter-sued.

A powerful weapon against frivolous patent claims whether they are brought up by patent trolls or litigious competitors is simply trying to invalidate such patents, or proving that you in fact does not violate patents in dispute. And it can be done. Smaller developers and individuals may not have the means to fight the battle, which is a serious problem in itself. But it is so not a problem for Google I would assume.
It's more like, the judge runs 1-800-FLOWERS on the side. This 800 number is seized. The "incoming links" are all the advertising and phone books and rapid dial and people's brains and everywhere else this number is stored.

Of course he could set up 1-800-FLORIST instead, but it's going to take a very long time to get back to the same level of business.
This demo looks at a first glance convincing, but it is a one way data stream. The point of using existing infrastructure to fill the room with high speed data reminds me of all the R&D and attempts made by infrared LEDs.
The line of sight (LoS) problem and interference by sunlight turned even simple applications like wireless speaker systems to complicated technologies. The supposedly simple ICs with an AGC (auto-gain-control) turned to complicated over 110dB solutions with all kind of stability problems.
Extracting the datastream from multipoint sources without data corruption, the increased power demand for longer distance communication out of mobile devices were all application problems, which did not allow to get that solution of the ground.
Dr. Haas lab solution looks great, but for me considering the idea form a practical implementation point of view using visible light via LEDs is a far distance.
Is anyone willing to go through what Apple copies, and make a full list with specific items they've copied from others? Because I'm sure like 80% of the technology used in their products is not their own, and most of the other 20% was based on older technology.

Look, I'm not saying Apple is not an innovative company. It is. But what exactly does an innovative company mean? Does it mean their product is 100% based on their own technology? 90% based on their own technology?

I doubt it even comes close to that. Take the iPhone for example. Did Apple re-invent the the 2G tech in it? The 3G one? Did they invent the processor in it? What about the GPU? Did they invent the whole multi-touch panel? Was the invention 100% based on their knowledge and technology if it was? I'm sure the UI can be de-constructed the same way, too, to prove most of it is not "brand new".

If they invented so much in the iPhone, why is it that they can only win against HTC with patents from 1994 and 1996, that aren't even related to smartphones, let alone the iPhone?

It really bothers me to see how everyone treats iPhone as if 100% of its technology was invented by Apple, and 100% of Android's technology was "stolen" and "copied", because that's completely false.

Perhaps, the iPhone has 10% of its technology that is actually new, and perhaps Android only has 5% of it that is brand new, and because of that I suppose you can call Apple more innovative than Google, but let's not pretend that Apple doesn't copy anything, or let's turn a blind eye to the things Apple copies, just because they're a little more innovative than Google.

People need to wake up and see that ALL companies copy and base their technology on something else, but even when they do copy it, it's usually not a 100% carbon copy, but a derivative technology (think iOS 5 notification system), and that's how technology evolves.
Why Facebook and Google's Concept of "Real Names" Is Revolutionary
Are you a Facebook employee?
There's a dense version in the Google Docs options. Also, it's a preview of it, they haven't forced it down anyone's throat yet. That's why it's a preview: so you can give them feedback.

How is this like Apple exactly?
I did confused Nortel and Novell. My mistake. The biggest issue I guess I have is that, in addition to causing a fair bit of confusion, David Drummond didn't do Google any favors by originally writing as if they were also excluded from being included in the Novell buy. It's easy to backtrack once your competition has some illuminating facts to put out into the open.

I'm of the opinion that there aren't really any true winners, at least in the public's eye, in patent bidding wars. But Google has definitely stumbled through the post-bidding PR.
Agreed that a computer can solve that much more easily, but my point was that just looking at a corner square wouldn't be sufficient.
listening to disk drives? Betcha that works great with cloud-based storage...
This is Google’s first self-driving car crash
From an end user point of view this is terrible, I don't understand the point. Don't give me options, just do it!
>"You have to remember that this is still in beta. Does any 1 game really need 3 million beta testers?"

Markus had sold somewhere between 800,000 and 850,000 copies before it went into Beta. Does a game really need 800,000 or so Alpha testers? No.

However considering how the game has ultimately developed, it's best to ignore the naming conventions entirely, considering that -- bugs aside -- it's still a very enjoyable playing experience. "Beta" is effectively a discount. "Alpha" was an even larger discount, and the promise that all future updates would forever be free.
But if it was not for the patent law that helped and incentivized the inventor, the cotton mill innovation might not occur in the first place.

I work for a pharma, and I remembered our CEO discussing patent and generic drugs. Making generics that bring affordable medicine to the public is a very important goal of any pharma. But drug discovery (not manufacturing) is very costly and risky, and patent is the only vehicle to financially recover the cost of developing a new product and fund the effort of finding new cures.

I am not taking side in the software patent debate, but am just saying patent has its own value in promoting innovation in making it financially feasible for things that require lots of effort and resources.
A Homemade Drone Snoops on Wireless Networks
Good question, maybe the lesson is to never use manual mode?
"A couple years later, the entire market segment died, because their crappy products couldn't compete with personal computers".

This is wrong in several ways:

A few years later, Convergent was bought by Unisys for $350 million (in 1988 dollars). http://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/11/business/company-news-unis...

The MegaFrame wasn't competing with personal computers, it was competing with engineering workstations (Sun, Apollo, etc.) and departmental minicomputers (HP, DG, others I don't recall at the moment).

Convergent's personal computer products were arguably less crappy than IBM's (they often were a generation ahead in CPUs (80186 vs 8088, then 386 vs 286, etc.), they ran a multitasking message-passing OS instead of DOS, etc.). For a while, they sold quite well in some markets (e.g. every U-Haul office in the country had a B-25 on every desk at one point in the early 90s). They lost anyway, because cheap crappy PC clones were so ubiquitous, and the resulting software and hardware ecosystem could out-evolve any specialized product from a single company.
Can you provide an example of one of the exciting and unique patents you've run across? This would go a long way towards supporting your point.

The specific examples I've seen are ridiculously broad and far from novel.
Totally agreed.

It's very interesting to get ahold of a "best practice" book or an organization's SOP manual just to see what battle-tested advice is given for various situations... you may disagree but they embody wisdom. At the very least you can find out where they're coming from.
Install the VLC app and enjoy the video without re-encoding.
AT&amp;T to Crack Down on Illegal Tethering Users
Video of a Lava lake collapsing in Hawai'i
Oh, and another:

Use your language's command-line option processing libraries.

OptionParser in ruby and argparse in python. There is no reason to eschew these libraries: they're part of the standard library, they require zero coupling to your app logic, and they handle all of the edge cases for free.

"But I can just shift the arguments", you say! Yeah? Great! What if the user pipes input through STDOUT? What if the user passes a flag, a required argument, and then another flag? Will your script read the last flag correctly, or has the naive logic already entered "required argument processing mode"? Just use the library. It's a solved problem!
This technique won't work on a Symmetric NAT firewall.
Guy Kawasaki advises start-up leaders on how to be more likable
Big US ISPs hijack search traffic
A new dawn for music startups?
How LinkedIn leverages Social Media For Investor Relations
The Trivialities and Transcendence of Kickstarter
Giving all the different products is the relatively easy part. Once that is complete I expect that the button styles, interfaces, etc will start being more consistant too. It is after all still early and in preview.
You're quite right. A patent - particularly the kind of broad process patent common to software - is almost a canonical case of a positional good. Like all positional goods, the pursuit of software patents incentivizes a classic arms race in which no one wins. The solution to an arms race, as Hobbes taught us back in 1660, is a rule of law that guarantees mutual safety and hence eliminates the positional advantage.
PHP with Codeigniter framework & jQuery for Sprint.Im
Objective-J is decoupled from Cappuccino. It runs completely independently, and even has a command line utility available built on top of Narwhal (a command line JS environment we built before Node was an option). Objective-J should absolutely be made to run on node, and that's being done as part of our rewrite, Objective-J 2.0.

As far as the other direction is concerned, you can write code on top of the Cappuccino framework in any language you can get running in the browser. The problem with writing in vanilla JavaScript, as opposed to Objective-J, is just that there are missing features which require the use of fairly obnoxious syntax in JavaScript.

A ruby to JavaScript compiler would provide a great language alternative to Objective-J for targeting Cappuccino. In fact, you can build a reasonable subset of ruby on top of Objective-J (see https://github.com/tlrobinson/cappruby, ala MacRuby).
The car not being legally responsible if the truck moves over into the area legally occupied by the car is what absolves it from fault.

But this is not the case. If the car is quickly moving through a blind spot as they should be and the truck hits them, that's one thing. If the car is hanging out in the blind spot longer than is necessary they are also usually found to be partially at fault. You are at least partially responsible for your own unsafe driving, even if it is technically legal.

There's an entire industry of ambulance chasers profiting off the truck driver's absolute fault, and a phonebook size book of underhanded procedures the trucking companies try to use to duck that absolute fault.

That industry profits off of absolute faults when people are safely regarding the blind spots and the trucks hit them anyway and off of the primary, although not absolute, fault of the truck when the car is not safely regarding the blind spots. It is unfortunately true that there are trucking companies using underhanded procedures and, although I have no clue how many that is, I also know it's not absolutely universal and that ambulance chasers aren't exactly innocent of underhanded procedures themselves.

That statement is correct on its face, and doesn't raise any argument at all.

Then in what way is hanging out in a truck's blind spot or blocking their trailer's swing out path (which, by the way, often is the fault of cars who move into said path after the truck has initiated its turn) not the wrong place to be, even if the car were 0% at fault?
5 years exclusive ownership - must be available to be licensed and may not be buried. Renewal costs double each time. Don't renew and it becomes available for anyone to use.
They should last anywhere from 1 year to 5 years, depending on the importance of technology. For example, if it's a web related patent, like a "one-click payment system" it should only last a year. If it's a really important technology, in a slower industry, it could last up to 5 years. In the mobile industry, which is very fast paced, it should last only 2-3 years.
No one would be getting paid (by way of tax discount) for a patent unless they're already doing something the market values and therefore generating an income to tax in the first place. It doesn't matter if the income is from use of the idea in the patents or not. Any income generation is a sign the market is rewarding them for something. The government doesn't need to decide anything differently than they do now.

The patent system is already flooded with useless and novel things. The reason is that people are hoping that over the next 20 years (or whatever) that the idea might suddenly become valuable and they can profit off it. With my idea, at least, you cannot profit from a patent unless you're already profiting in the market.
Please make more lessons (html, css, javascript, node, php...). I would pay.
Prior to that update, it was quite interesting. It's inevitable that the computer controlled car will get in an accident, the only question is if they are better or worse than humans?

I can tell you one thing, they aren't driving in snow in Nevada. And while I'd gladly trust a computer on dry roads when the only things to avoid are hard objects (other cars, tress) and soft objects (people/animals), I get wary on wet or snow covered roads where you have to perceive the road surface itself very clearly.
FreeBSD is noticeably faster on every PC I've used it on, compared to Linux. (The downside being the terrible packaging system and not-quite-so-wide variety of packages and device drivers).

So Debian packaging + FreeBSD kernel sounds like a winner to me!

I'm off to try and install it in a VM.
If you switch to Postgres, psql (the commandline client) supports the features you're asking for. :)
This is Google's first self-driving car crash
Because it's something negative related to Google, so it must spread all over the web.
Five Lessons from a Year of Tablet UX Research
Does API Value and Reliability Trump Docs and Code Samples?
Hackers, saving lives without moving their asses away from the PC.
I'm no pilot, but how well do auto-pilots handle storms for planes?

Or does the Captain manually take over control in such a case?
PHP and ASP.NET are not frontend technologies, or at the very least you should be careful about what you call a backend technology. It is quite feasible to have an entire platform built in PHP - early Delicious was built on Symfony, for example - and not have it touch what people would want to consider "real" programming languages.
I suspect that if it was an american website it would be considered more substantial.
That's something you can always suss out (the wise dater/interviewer will always say they do, but subtle cues can clue you into the veracity of that claim).

Regardless, it's still like a sport - if you don't make unforced errors, you will be more likely to succeed.

Consequently practice does help. You're better at dating if you go on more dates. You're better at interviewing if you get more interviews. Practice allows you to "not make silly mistakes" unconsciously, which frees up your more creative side to show the best you.
I think the use of "interface" is sensible, if somewhat ambiguous on the surface. In this context, options & arguments are the interface to the utility, not the "CLI", which is the interface to the command line itself.

Context-aware tab completion is very doable in the unix world, actually; it's just a hassle on the part of the utility-writer. Have you ever noticed that if you add a new file "foo/bar/baz.py" to a mercurial repository and type "hg add fo<TAB>", it will autocomplete all the way to "foo/bar/baz.py", without stopping at each directory? This is because hg has overridden the default tab completion provided by bash and defined its own set of possibilities.

I wish it were easier to set up; I think if that were the case, we'd see a lot more utilities with spot-on tab completion.
Brilliant, very impressed. Though I'm not sure I understand it even after reading how he did it. ;)
I choose not to discuss implementation in that article, but you should never reinvent the wheel (poorly).
The Joel Test isn't really intended for individuals, though. It's more of a "how to fix stupid shit" on an institutional level. I think what people are looking for here are ways to fix stupid shit on an individual level.
NodeSocket a node.js hosting platform is now accepting beta requests
This may actually end up being a positive spin for Google. "The car didn't crash when it was self-driven, but it crashed when it was in manual mode! Google technology better than humans at driving"
SEEKING FREELANCER -- Looking for someone to build a web client for our existing backend, which was developed for iOS and Android apps. We're in Chicago but remote is okay too.

Ruby preferred. The timeline would be around four weeks. There are relatively few screens that need to be built, but some slick JavaScript animations will be required.

A UX specialist who can also code the web client is doubly preferred, and additional work polishing the UIs of the existing mobile apps is available.

Please contact hnfreelance811 at gmail dot com. Links to past work are helpful.
I imagine a computer would be able to react a lot better than a human would to a hydroplaning / icing condition since the human element of reaction times are no longer a factor, and can measure the car's dynamic forces with much greater precision. I would, however, question whether the car in its current form could get itself out of a small ditch.
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hah, thats funny. literally the exact same setup for me. Im on lion, for what thats worth.
One of these is easy, and two of these are hard.

A lambda is basically a function literal. Just like you have string literals ("string"), number literals (3), and array literals ({1, 2, 3}), you can have function literals (function(x, y){x+y}). C++ does not have these, so I used JavaScript syntax as it is the most similar.

A closure is a dynamic binding of parameters to a function in the scope of its definition. This is not a valid concept in C, because there is only one scope for function definitions. In C++, there are namespaces and classes, but these are static, so it still isn't quite right.

You'll need to imagine that you can define a function inside another function. Then, suppose you have something like this:

int f1(int x, int y) {
int f2(int z) {
return x+z;
}
return f2(y);
}

What should f1(1, 2) return? If C++ is extended with only the feature to define functions within functions, this will result in a compiler error: x is used undeclared in f2. If it is extended with static or lexical scoping, it will return 3. Lexical scoping is generally what you want; the alternative (dynamic scoping) is useful in a few cases but generally more confusing and less powerful.

Then, suppose you want to return a reference to f2 instead. We need to keep the x value around in order to be able to actually make use of the reference, so we store the reference along with that x value. The data structure containing the function reference and any values needed to use it is called a "closure". You can think of it as a function object containing a function pointer and some extra values, plus some behind-the-scenes magic to initialize it.

A monad is something entirely different. The most analogous thing in C is if you had the ability to define an extra computation that is applied at every semicolon. That computation might be for maintaining state, or for propagating errors, or for deciding which lines are actually run, or really anything.
What you are saying applies to all tactics, which always lead to counter-tactics, etc. It's always more advantageous for everyone to have their own home-brewed methods, because it's harder to counter. It's like in evolution; successful methods become victims of their own success in that there is now more selection pressure on countermeasures. It is, after all, called an arms-race for a reason.
The difference is that with eminent domain you must be compensated at a fair market rate. In this case, the property is simply seized.
Startups: Give Your Family Stock In Your Company
Why Build Your Web Startup in Asia
That's an interesting idea, but I'm not familiar with its mechanics/limits. Who would be a representative provider?

Now, for this goal, cumbersome and/or irreversible is somewhat the point, to prevent throwaway accounts. But an occasional SMS-chargeback would be OK, as long as the source phone number can be blacklisted against reuse in the future, forcing mischief-makers to burn one phone number each registration.
Twitter Adds Preview Of iTunes & Amazon Content To Tweets
Jim Simons on Fixing American Math Education
> [Possibility #1:] Patents in fact do encourage innovation (at least in some industries) by allowing innovators to recoup their R&D costs before the copiers can jump in.

One problem is that patent law reflects a one-size-fits-all philosophy: It takes years, and lots of money, to get a patent, but if you do you've got it for 20 years from the filing date, regardless whether you want or need it for that long. I once argued that the Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) could change this, without congressional action, but nothing ever came of it. [1]

[1] http://www.ontechnologylaw.com/docs/JPTOS-Reenginering-the-P...
There's the old joke: a decent software engineer would never write a destroyLisbon() procedure - he would write a destroyCity() procedure and pass the city as an argument.
- Also, computers can't get drunk...

They can have bugs or get viruses though.
And if you use C++ and are willing to use Boost, program_options: http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_47_0/doc/html/program_option...

I recognize that many people are not willing to use C++, and among those that are, many are still unwilling to use Boost, but I find the program_options library to be great. An example use that I think is reasonable and a big win over doing it myself: https://github.com/scotts/cellgen/blob/master/src/main.cpp#L...
Paper Clips Are Back. As USB Drives.