skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In your comment below, you're confusing Nortel with Novell. Google was NOT asked to bid for Nortel patents together with Microsoft.

And about the Novell ones - is it still not clear why Google did it? They did it to get defensive patents against Microsoft. How would they have used those patents to counter Microsoft, if Microsoft had them, too?

The whole point of buying patents now is to use them to keep Microsoft and the others from attacking the Android manufacturers. If they buy them together with Microsoft, they can't stop Microsoft's other patents.
Yeah. This might be good for scientific experiments with anti-matter though.
Its fine for you to think that. I'm just discussing the merits of Gruber's post. I think he is trying to spin as whining what Google believes to be a legitimate claim of anticompetitive behavior.
I wonder why the Army doesn’t have stuff like this already, for all the money they spend each year.
> And this is what happens when a judge who does not understand

You're assuming the judge is ignorant and not malevolent.
Annihilating all of it would result in about 1 tenth of a joule.
offt: i do now.
I realize that posting to HN about every little bugfix release is annoying, but this is the first CoffeeScript release in nearly 3 months. To put that into perspective, that's about 15% of the language's lifetime up to this point.

During these last three months, Jeremy gave a talk with Brendan Eich at JSConf; David Heinemeier Hansson plugged the language in his keynote at RailsConf; and my book on it (http://pragprog.com/book/tbcoffee/coffeescript) went into print. The small number of changes between 1.1.1 and 1.1.2 is a testament to how quickly the language has achieved stability, even as it's gaining traction with mainstream programmers.
Funny Apple copied stuff from Palm..hmm did Palm sue Apple though or come up with a better plan to innovate?

And notice folks no Apple sues MS even though there is some UI copying..
Peter Norvig.
Then Gruber's piece can be considered a rebuttal of such PR move.

Oh it's so meta isn't it?

Also the rules haven't changed a bit, Google got in the game knowingly. Though one can argue the patent system is broken and needs urgent adjustment. Nortel IP incident is more of bidding war and Google played its hand spectacularly badly plain and simple. There is nothing illegal and shady about Apple/Microsoft/RIM's win. Last I checked, throwing money at things is a perfect good strategy at owning them.
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If you think about it, it's obvious why we turned down Microsoft’s offer. Microsoft's objective has been to keep from Google and Android device-makers any patents that might be used to defend against their attacks. A joint acquisition of the Novell patents that gave all parties a license would have eliminated any protection these patents could offer to Android against attacks from Microsoft and its bidding partners. Making sure that we would be unable to assert these patents to defend Android — and having us pay for the privilege — must have seemed like an ingenious strategy to them. We didn't fall for it.

From the update to the original google blog post. Maybe you should read the whole thing. It's not that long. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/when-patents-attack-a...
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>And yes, there are some who will argue that there are no “worthy patents”, that the entire U.S. patent system should be simply abolished.

I like how Gruber conflates patents in general with software patents: as if you can't have one without the other.
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Skip 5 minutes in to get to Eric Ries talking. After you do that, this is very worth your time.
That's a good point. I'd say that the minimum to get through mud for a serious vehicle is something around the size of a small ATV, at which point you are talking about a completely different vehicle. This really only works on dry or paved roads.
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5by5.tv podcasts--Back To Work and The Talk Show are among my favorites

This Is My Next Podcast

Jordan, Jesse GO!

Stuff You Should Know

If you're into games, I'd also check out the Giant Bombcast
Ask HN: Would city-controlled cars be safer than autonomous cars?
A city could have its own software system for controlling all cars within its boundary.

Would this be safer than having autonomous cars?
Ask described it to me as "a library for discovering bugs in the multiprocessing library".
One antiproton annihilation will give you about 1 GeV. Annihilate a billion of them, and you've got 10^18 eV. One eV is about 10^(-19) Joules. So, yeah. A tenth of a Joule. Underwhelming.
Perhaps a little bit specific, but definitely worth the read: "Prolog Programming for Artificial Intelligence" by Ivan Bratko (0321417461)
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If you're already using redis, use that for your broker. I agree that configuration can appear overwhelming, but it's pretty straightforward. To say that we've had success with Celery would be a big understatement, it's fantastic.
We use it for historious, it has never had any problems. I would definitely, definitely recommend it.
A class-action suit against the patent office.

The main problem today is that the patent office grants too many trivial patents. It isn't surprising that it does so, it is motivated to do that: It gets paid per patent, and the faster a reviewer agrees to a patent, the quicker the work for that patent ends.

The only way to fix that is to reverse or at least balance the incentives. Which means, a big cost for every trivial patent the patent office issues.

It would be good if lawmakers passed legislature that did that. But we can't expect them to. A class-action lawsuit can do the same, though. Everyone that has ever been sued or forced to take a license for a trivial patent has been harmed by the patent office not doing its job properly. All those people have standing to sue. For such a massive amount of people, a class-action lawsuit is the way to go.
I can't remember the exact quote, or even the source, but it was along the lines of "For engineers, the biggest [moral] issue with weapons development is that it is fun".

You can build some really neat things when you have a military R&D budget behind you. The downside is of course
that it actively or passively hurt people.

And then there's the whole calculus-of-death/unintended consequence thing, where in theory, a more accurate missile is better for everyone because it reduces collateral damage. But because it kills less innocents, there are fewer qualms about using it more often. This applies strongly to the current UAV trend - You can politically spin (or just bury in accounting) "Ooops, We lost a $xMM drone", versus actual pilots dying.
Storified: Crisis Managed? AirBnB and the ransackgate
This and plenty of other interesting ideas here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2810689 and in the replies to OP: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2809544
A little more effort and patience to wait for paper made from newsprint. It isn't white, but who cares about that. Otherwise works just as well. Typically thinner, but lasts just as long as any of the other offerings. Watch out for paper thickness as that effects the number of pages in a ream and that effects the number of reams to the carton. Always but as much as you can afford to squeeze yet more discount out of the system.
I noticed this too. I don't read Gruber regularly but he seems to be either very careless or wilfully misleading in the way that he conflates concepts.
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File anyway, for the second reason I gave. Your name on a patent makes your argument against the patent you have that much more effective.

I'm basing this on the assumption that you're not willing to quit over this issue, which I'm not advocating for. Protesting is good, but I prefer effective protesting to protests that make you feel good, and right now sitting on your hands does nothing. If you don't patent it, somebody else will, and you won't have any more control over that patent, either.
No. When they say bankers, they mean bankers. The non-neoconservative Right has been harping on this for some time.

http://www.alternativeright.com/main/the-magazine/the-bankst...
>More of the problem is that it doesn't work room to room, only line of sight like with a remote control.

If you could cheaply make the lights transmit and receive, and if the data were recoverable at very low illumination, you could employ mesh routing -- there's often quite a bit of overlap from lightbulb to lightbulb.

But you're correct -- answering the LoS problem is significant. This could be very useful in many applications, but it's no silver bullet.
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> In the long term, if patents don't get abolished, at least I'd like to see a law that allows companies to opt-out of the patent system[1], so they don't get to sue others, even if they become big companies, but others can't sue them either.

That's the most ridiculous idea for patent reform I've ever read. There are two possibilities.

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. Without this, copiers would get in too fast and reduce the price to where the innovator never makes back the R&D costs.

2. Not #1.

In case #2, we should just get rid of patents.

In case #1, which is most likely the correct case at least for industries where it takes a huge amount of R&D to get a new product to market (e.g., drugs), your suggestion would in effect encourage the formation of more copier companies, and give them free reign to copy.
And sadly, the Obama guy responsible for the current "patent reform" wants the Patent Office to make the filing and acceptance of patents even faster.

They're completely going in the wrong direction, full speed ahead.
It worked like charm for me
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ad hominem is not always a logical fallacy, the judge's age may very well be relevant.
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Too much white space . Why isn't there a dense version for people with a lot of documents ?

also, I had set my folders to have different colors for a reason, which was that it let me see my documents in color-coded fashion. Now everything looks the same. It's visually pretty, but I'm pretty sure the person who came up with this doesn't actually use Google Docs on a regular basis.

Stop trying to be Apple.
I think good resumes are accessible. This one barely fits my screen, and navigation is non-intuitive.
I really doubt the opt out idea would work well. Companies that make cheap knock offs don't produce anything unique, and as such would always opt out. Take the drug industry for instance, all your generics manufactures never do blue sky new drug research. They would always opt out. This makes it useless for companies that do perform blue sky research to opt in.
I bought the game during alpha when it was 13.25$ USD. I'm quite happy with it at that price, but now that it's up to ~21.00 USD I can't say I'd purchase it again.

I am constantly nagged with 'This is an unlicensed copy :( or logged in from a different location'; neither nor or true, I've got documentation.

Keys stick all the time.

It's gotten slower in the past updates.

I bought the game because a) works in linux(my only battle station), b) ran fine at lower specs. Now I can't see dumping that much into it. If more work was done to make the game more adaptable/stable/patching exploits(remote code execution) than adding achievements/characters/ect I might reconsider... but I'm glad I got it when it was cheap.
There's probably problems with this, but...

Patents should not be an exclusive license. Instead they should be a limited time income tax benefit. In other words, when you are granted a patent then you get some small percentage break in your income taxes for some number of years. So the only way to benefit from granted patents is to have some actual income! Once an idea is patented, you cannot charge a license fee for the idea as the idea is now public. You can, however, still license implementations of the idea - just like you can with implementations of proprietary ideas covered by trade secret.

The granting of patents would work the same way they do now - first one to file wins. However since you do not get the benefit of owning an idea for the next 20 years and collecting licensing fees on it, the benefit of filing for a patent on new ideas immediately might be a lot lower than it would be to just keep it secret under trade secret and use it yourself as long as possible. The idea here would be to balance the value of an idea in trade with the value of it as an income tax benefit. If you have a bunch of good ideas you've been using for years but are no longer really "secret" you could attempt to patent those old ideas so that the rest of the world can share them and you can get some tax breaks on perhaps the down swing of a product's life cycle. If someone else has already patented the idea ahead of you, well, so be it. The idea is out there already so society hasn't lost anything.

My thinking is that this could be balanced so that the tax benefits are such that companies would want to keep things secret for awhile but then attempt to patent older ideas once products near end of life. It's a race and balance there between keeping something secret and trying to get the tax benefit out of old ideas that might not be very profitable on their own anymore. Any tax benefit would be better than none, so it would seem that old ideas that are no longer used but were being hoarded by the company would suddenly be "valuable" to them, so they'd get the idea out into the public and everybody wins in the long run.
New geo-location service striding out...
a more web savvy judge would have never made such a comment.
Just a point: John Gruber has never allowed comments on Daring Fireball. This is not a new policy nor something he chooses on a per-post basis.

To me, Gruber is being consistent here: he doesn't like software patents (see his commentary on Lodsys and other NPEs), but the fact is that they exist and the way they're used now is as he describes. Google is being disingenuous about Android and patents; Google's lawyer lied about the Novell patents and the lie has been called out by Microsoft. Google may have good reason to have not wanted to go into a co-purchase agreement of the Novell patents (as Gruber outlines in this post), but to complain of unfairness now that you lost a bidding war? That's childish.

Google would actually have a moral high ground if they hadn't even bid for the Novell patents. Not bidding for them would have been a remarkably stupid move given the current patent/legal landscape, even though it meant that Google gave up the moral high ground.

Patents in the U.S. are badly broken, and I despair that software patents were ever granted in the first place. One of the things that I suspect that most people who oppose software patents forget, though, is that even if software patents were taken off the table tomorrow, the existing patents wouldn't go away. The government wouldn't retroactively invalidate any software patent ever granted (it'd be a hard enough fight just to get software patents blocked for the future), and courts examining the patents tend to look at whether the patent was (or could have been) valid at the time of its granting, not whether it makes sense now.
I've added a followup post to yesterday's discussion here and in the comment-thread for the post itself.

http://lenz.unl.edu/2011/08/05/the-man-finger-aftermath.html
1. Cut the patent expiration time. Cut it by 50%.
2. Cut the patent expiration time further of non-original owner patents. Cut it by 75%.
Anything that disrupts the enemy's tactics could probably be considered valuable. Induction loops would be harder to build, transport and disguise vs a spool of piano wire and a friction fuze.

The tricky part is making sure it doesn't lull the people using it into a false sense of security. Once you identify the new tactic, you can adapt to it; once they start using magnetic triggers, you send your little RC car out with a big Neodymium magnet mounted on it or whatever.
Can the organization provide a podcast with a more mobile-friendly format than the 1280x720 provided?

I would do it myself, but the RSS does not provide enough information to generate the video URL and I am not in the mood to do screen-scraping. Besides that, in order to be able to play it on my iPod (I like to watch them at the gym) I'd have to re-encode the videos with a lower resolution and that's a big no-no for me (not to consider the rights problem).
With respect to investing it means "Stop losing money." One big mistake is to risk too much of your capital on any one position. To avoid that, you might check out the Kelley criterion for optimal bet sizing: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Kelly_criteri... .

Another mistake is to put on a position and then watch it drop without limit, insisting that you're "right" all along and the market just hasn't seen it yet. Better to have a stop-loss and bug out of the position the minute the market judges you wrong. You can always put on the trade again later.

I really didn't even have to mention that second point, since it's already implied by the Kelley criterion. If you're trading without a stop loss, then quite simply you're risking the entire amount of that position and you can calculate Kelley accordingly.

"Stop losing money" is rule number one. Remember, if you lose 50% of your capital, you have to double your money just to break even again. Better to lose only a percent here and a percent there, and occasionally hit a 10% gain.

You can also consider trailing stop losses, which also fit under the Kelly criterion if you count unrealized gains as part of your overall capital.
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The purpose of the domain seizures was to disrupt -- ideally, to shut down -- websites that the US copyright industries didn't like. Causing them substantial hardship was the entire purpose of the seizure, and to argue that the seizure didn't cause that is purely dishonest.
Additionally, for interactive CLI programs or suites of programs, consistency is key. Offer the same way to select options, confirm or deny information, input data etc.

I'm also working on a project where by entering "?" at any interactive section you're taken to an interactive help menu. From here you can query (amongst other things) the state of the program, something that isn't always clear when you're using command line software, as you can't have extra info somewhere in the corner or whatever.
I realise that the term Security Through Obscurity™ has a specific meaning (in the field of cryptography) which isn't the one I intended.

However, you can crack any encryption scheme eventually. Encryption doesn't guarantee security—it simply makes the information harder to get at.
And what's so wrong about copying? Do companies really start a business thinking they won't get copied? Getting copied by more companies means you'll have to innovate faster, and the end result will be higher quality products for customers, and lower prices. I don't think a little higher competition across the board will stop companies from being built.
Yes, that's generally what smart people do when they're losing an argument: deny all terms and definitions. That's my point: once you render it all meaningless, it's easy to argue whatever you want, as Gruber demonstrates.

For example: But the bottom line is that they wanted to use these patents competitively.

Why is that the bottom line? That's in fact clearly not the bottom line, since it completely elides the distinction that Google is making. And calling it the bottom line is misdirection.

Some people seem to think that Android doesn’t really violate any existing worthy patents. That’s all just a bunch of bogus patents that never should have been granted, and companies like Microsoft and Apple are just tying up Android handset makers in court out of dishonest competitive spite. If that’s the case, then I suppose you can argue that Google’s pursuit of these patents was out of the goodness of their corporate heart.

But if Android does violate worthy patents, Google’s actions here are just as competitive as any other companies. You can guess which side I’m on, I suppose.

This is maybe the most disingenous part. The same could be said of anyone afraid of getting sued by patent trolls like Lodsys/Intellectual Vultures. 'If you're not really violating any "existing worthy" patents, then you have nothing to worry about.'

"But these are the laws we have." Indeed.
One of Google’s Self-Driving Cars Gets into an Accident
I'm no military historian, but there are terrible failure stories for products pushed out before they're ready to the frontlines too. Beauacracy is a waste, but some of those steps seen as wasteful in the DoD procurement process are "scar tissue" from where things went wrong either in the battlefield or, as often, protection against incapable, or worse, fraudulent contractors.

You're right, my post wasn't a list of requirements, just an illustration of some of the things one might end up having to care about when packaging up a military product used in dangerous situations. There's a balance to be made, it should be made on a case by case basis.
I think the problem here is that there is no universally agreed upon definition of trivial. Many things are trivial in hindsight, there is prior art for almost anything, and your trivial is my innovation where there was none.

The change has got to come from legislation, not litigation.
So the summary is... Google comes across as whining...?

The thing is, with a title like "More of Google and Patents", I can't quickly tell that a link in my RSS feed is headed to daringfireball.

There is a nice Chrome plugin I just found called "Blocker", however, so that just put a final end to that.
There are a couple of ways around this -- all of which fall under "be careful". :-)
Oops, didn't see page 2.