skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Quote: the Supreme Court ruled very narrowly in the Bilski case, without making any explicit statement (as precedent) on overall software or business model patents

I really don't get why so many people say this. The Court ruled narrowly on the particular question before them, but they were 9-0 on what software patent opponents care about. They all, majority and dissent, said not to use State Street as precedent. Further, the majority affirmed the Federal Circuit opinion that said to ignore their earlier State Street and Alappat opinions.

We're back to Benson, Flook, and Diehr. Any patent where the novelty and non-obviousness is entirely contained in software should be invalid right now. Why is this not recognized?
The answer would surely be: Google has far greater access to organized/relevant information than the patent office (or any other entity) has ever had in the past...

I wonder how effective this will be in fending off the patent trolls (e.g. IV), probably not very ...unless... Washington could implement/regulate a streamlined method of invalidating patents with prior art, it could go a long way in protecting valid inventions, while creating a disincentive for firms filing frivolous lawsuits and patents.

I know the patent office is under-staffed/funded but, you've got to believe that far fewer patents would be filed if there was a more effective system for invalidation in place.
> Expect PCs to still own the low-priced market

True. Until the generation who is now about 10 grows up and starts driving the PC buying decisions. They'll have been using tablets for 8 years or so and will think nothing of writing a paper on a tablet (bluetooth keyboards being easily available, although kids who have had smartphones since before puberty may end up being just fine typing everything on touch screens) and consuming all their media on a tablet and their smartphone. No bulky laptop required. What does a laptop add, from the point of view of a consumer? The ability to choose from a wide range of anti-virus software and browser toolbars?

So when they go to college, they will see a bargain basement PC laptop with Windows 10 Home Basic Limited Edition (~$600) or an iPad 11 ($500), or an Android "Vanilla Custard" tablet ($449). Which one will they choose? I don't know, but I know it's not the crappy laptop.

AAPL is positioning themselves in anticipation of that day, I have no doubt about it. They intend the iPad to be the "best" tablet the same way the iPod was the best MP3 player, and by 2007 everyone seemed to own an iPod. Once people are ready to let go of PCs the same way we let go of floppies, CRT monitors, and dial-up modems, they will be positioned as the smart choice.
Number One Plus
I was just rewatching this video and got sad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bY4HDftIllw

Enyo let you write HTML5 apps in Chrome, Firefox or whatever, and essentially (to simplify) add a few WebOS hints and you have a fully functional native app. More than anything else, I hope Enyo becomes completely open source so we can write html5 cross-os apps that are as snappy as those on WebOS with a framework that lets you create reuseable parts.
At least they reached out to you. I kept trying and trying to reach someone at HP regarding an issue with an app I was working on for a company I assume they would have wanted on board, but to this day, TO THIS DAY, I got nowhere with HP.
Interfacing with third-party libraries is an obvious case where you do need to worry about encodings for reasons that are not performance.
Also, WebOS daemons/services were just node.js scripts. How awesome is that.
That is why he said that 80% are invalidated. The ones you heard about probably fall under the 20%.

Mr. Obvious to the rescue!
Real world or no, I doubt many of my non-geek friends are aware of the patent/innovation/whatever discussion that we're pretty saturated by here in HN-land. Perhaps in certain jurisdictions that hear a disproportionate number of IP related cases it would be otherwise, but if judges are of the 'real world' I'm not convinced they'll be across this as you might assume…
Grandparent comment is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the recent "Jonathon's Card" incident which was extensively discussed on HN.

I don't think you should take it at face value. In fact, I don't think it belongs in this thread at all as it adds nothing to the discussion.
I have seen far, far more bloated code generated by Drupal (esp. Using panels module)
Takin’ VC Money
Academic publishing 2.0
Earn 10000 Virgin America miles if you are an awesome Rails hacker
Would a real French teenager claim that BART should be embarrassed because the attacker was French (vs any other nationality)?
That's my post there. It'd be very interesting to compare email confirmation rates. I am running on a private mail server that is configured according to all possible spam filtering guidelines and yet I am still at only 82%. I wonder if these 18% is just people overwhelmed with emails in their Inbox or if there's still some issues with being mis-categorized as a spam.

Anyone else cares to share their numbers?
No corp is going to open source their proprietary technology when they stand to make money from selling it. There won't be an open source mobile OS, the best we can hope for are OSes with browser shells (Boot 2 Gecko) and html5 as the platform.
I gave two examples, you picked out one, and you appear to assume that this is the only time Muller has been right about anything. Somehow, it does not seem to me like you are on a dispassionate quest for truth here.

However, just in case you are: Apple and Nokia were both suing each other over various patents, and had various defenses. Often such cases end in a cross-licensing deal with little or no money changing hands. He correctly assessed that in this case Nokia had the upper hand and that Apple would end up paying. That conclusion was not obvious to casual observers at the time.
Nintendo has disregarded non-gaming software, especially software aimed at connectivity, or at software as a service, pretty consistently. The WiiU and the 3DS don't seem to have made any advances in that department. While the WiiU won't use the insane friend code system, 2010's 3DS still does. Ever since the Wii debuted with an integrated (but simple) OS, I have hoped that Nintendo will get on board with that stuff.

Microsoft really pushed having an integrated console dashboard and operating system, and Sony has slowly caught up with the big pieces over the life of the PlayStation 3, but whenever it's mentioned to Nitnendo, they seem to take pity on the questioner for seeing any importance in it, giving online, connectivity, and software as service a grimace-ridden "that's nice, dear," before going back to putting more gyroscopes and polarized displays in their disconnected, single player peripherals.

I just don't think it's in their culture, and they don't seem ready to make a shift.
I have no doubt the article is correct (and it gives some compelling examples to support its argument): Americans suffer innumeracy. But I think a bigger problem is the degree to which Americans seem to have a poor grasp of real value. If you can't tie a convenient dollar value to it, many people seem incapable of grasping what has real value and what doesn't. Many people seem to think the current recession is some numbers game and is about "money" rather than about actual underlying problems. Money has one real inherent value: It is a lubricant for trade. But many people seem to not understand that.
> wonder if WebOS will be attractive to any of the handset makers

As much as I hate Android and am friendly toward WebOS, and would like to see it make inroads, there's still the problem to solve of getting third party developers. Asking all the companies that make the apps that sell devices to develop for more than one or two dissimilar platforms is very hard. Sure, you can get a few, like Facebook and the others who have WebOS apps already, or you can count on an enthusiastic developer base to write grassroots replacement apps when the "big guys" snub your small platform. But you're not going to sell John Q Public with "We have dozens of apps and more are added every month!" Now, though you can't SELL them when you have few apps, you CAN bribe, and that's how Android clawed its way out of last place and into the lead. The only way to get those WebOS phones into enough hands to get developers to take notice and see it as a must-support platform is to give away the phones. Free with contract. That's the ONLY way. And this late in the game, it'd have to be free plus heavy marketing support.
this must be why you have such a unique empathy for the user. you've truly put yourself in the user's shoes instead of lecturing.

its obvious something is great when you instantly think why the hell hasn't everything been like this all along.
Why Accenture’s CTO made the move to NoSQL startup CEO
HP is not developing hardware for WebOS. They will probably try and license the software. Spinning off the PC division might actually allow their consumer products to get the right focus and agility to compete against Apple on something other than price. Trying to fight Apple and IBM (and Cisco, and Dell, etc.) as one giant company is bad for HP's shareholders and HP's customers.
Simple way might be to just use overrepresented[1] error correction code like Reed-Solomon where it'd only take half the parties to reconstruct the full message. Should be fairly easy to set up using par2 utilities right now actually.

[1] I'm fairly certain there's a real word for this, but I cannot think of it, anyone else know?
Here's the source: https://www.userscripts.org/scripts/review/110318
Thank you for the encouraging words and tips. I'll track down Jonathan on Thursday and see what happens.
Glad to see MG switching things up from his usual screencaps of Gladiator. If you're going to frame every tech story as a battle, Mike Tyson's Punch-Out seems more appropriate.
Pretty good resume. But I noticed a typo: "Strong experience with the Java"
No, they would have to sell the steak on Ebay and then donate the proceeds to a charity that feeds children.
I agree that's going out on a limb, a bold move. It seems to me the adoption curve and history of Apple dropping fringe technologies they grow bored with after significant investment by a few firms will keep adoption far below FW rates. USB 3 has supplanted USB 2 for high speed disk access already. That battle is over and done with before Apple has even entered the race. Very high speed external disk access uses eSATA.

For video cameras, it will be USB 3 for everything other than Sony which has its own special precious non-compatible variation Thunderbolt that only works on VAIOs since Sony loves to play the special precious protocol game with their little princess friend Apple.

In 5 years no one will support Thunderbolt and Apple will be on to some new thing. Between now and then there will be at most a dozen devices supported, and all massively overpriced. The failure to adopt USB 3 and BluRay, in addition to their locking down their OS to be iOS with Big Screen will lead to Apple losing significant market share. After the big plunge in a few years, people will say that things all went wrong when Tim "Cost Cutting at any Cost" Cook was foolishly put at the helm rather than someone, anyone, with the slightest design sense, taste, or concern for the customer's experience.
I believe that's "HP To Competent Businesses."
That's a great vision, but I think it's highly unlikely to happen.

A scenario I can see developing itself would be one where Samsung, LG, or HTC buys WebOS. Either, to have an edge in this patent mess, and/or in response to Motorola acquisition by Google.

Interesting times.
Admittedly, it might be someone ELSE'S email address, but they could manually unsubscribe from your mailing list later.

That's half the point of verifying e-mail addresses. Doing this is likely to engender significant ill-will in anyone who is an unintended recipient of your e-mails.
Is this a practical example of how Google's strategy with Android is just a bit anti-competitive? Neither Palm or HP could have seriously considered licensing WebOS to compete against Android because neither has a gigantic advertising business to subsidize the cost of development. On the flip side of that how is Palm or HP going to compete with companies like Samsung, HTC, Motorola, etc who are getting their OS for free? If they skip the costs to develop their own OS and go with Android what differentiates an HP tablet from a Samsung tablet if they're running the same OS? All roads lead back to Android. You either use it or you can't compete against it.
I never thought to look the guy up. It's one thing to file a bad patent. There are potentially many reason, such as your employer forces you to. But I'd feel dirty doing so. He seems to love it.

Has he commented at all on the state and use of his patents?
So you take a few edge cases and make them the example for the main stream?

I doubt you should ever use Edison or Einstein to ever refer to the average person. Let alone put yourself in the same camp, you'll probably do yourself mental harm via exhaustion. Fine if you have abnormal drive and intelligence go for it.

But chances are you are an average person and need to obey the rules of what makes average people happy. Or you won't be happy. Maybe you'll throw yourself at your work in the hope of finding happiness.. something I'll admit to doing myself.. chasing dreams of a better life.

Theres plenty of research that states the exact opposite of what you are saying, enough that France even had laws banning working over 35 hours (and its 48 hours for the rest of Europe). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Western_Europe

What works for some people doesn't work for others. I remember listening to my friend talk about working in Japan during the late 80's early 90's and described the people he worked with as having an ingrained apathy towards the long work day, and most just mucked around all day. Took 2 hours to even start work, the work force was extremely unproductive for the hours they where doing. I'm sure theres different stories in different industries but thats a story I take as 100% as the person isn't known for being a liar or exaggerator.

Just because you can make people work long hours doesn't mean things get better, it often means things get worse. And thats the moral of his story about Japan.

The stories of how industrious and loyal they are... just stories... they are just people like everyone else. And as a majority they'd rather be at home with there families and friends than at work making someone else rich.
These are the types of stories I like to see on the front page of HN.
I also think it's fair to question whether such a lopsided opinion piece, opposed to the seemingly general prevalent thought, is indeed trolling.

Well reasoned opinions that are opposed the prevalent opinion are never trolling.
Also reachable at http://fullscreenweather.com
And these children always have at least five siblings, and parents whose only interest is collecting welfare checks or child support payments.

The culture needs to be changed. It's not something that can be solved by giving people enough money to rise above the federally defined poverty line.
Saying you "cannot stand the taste of alcohol" is like saying you "cannot stand the smell of air."

Well, alcohol is flavourless on its own. Also, it will kill you if you drink it raw, so don't try that.

Just like air, context is everything. The air in a sewer is much worse than the air in a field, because of the odours that are mixed into it. Now, preference for drinks is 100% subjective, unlike preference for air, but the idea is the same. If you only tried beer, perhaps you'd prefer wine. Or vice-versa.

You just have to find your own drinks you like.

> The only drinks I liked were usually labelled "girls' drinks" and I was constantly made fun of.

That's shameful (that you were made fun of). What, specifically, were the drinks you were made fun of for liking?
djvu + OCR and epub would be my preferred formats. The original tiff along with it would be nice too, in case there's a better lossy format in the future.
Amazingly, Microsoft may not miss the boat on tablets
Everybody hates their first year (or 5) at a top tier investment bank. since everyone is telling you to bail, ill tell you to bite the bullet and quit only after you get your bonus...or even your second one. most people I know take jobs at firms like yours because of what they can do after they leave...not because it's the greatest job in the world.
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Ask Noah Kagan (AppSumo.com) anything about your startup
They're solving that by no longer releasing products.
> when they stand to make money from selling it.

Really? Seriously? Who would buy WebOS today? I'm all ears. I'm sure HP is too. Not only has it failed to gain a foothold under two separate companies, there is no successful licensed (more than $0 cost) mobile OS on the market today. You have two vertically integrated (AAPL and RIMM), and one free one (Android). Windows Phone is not as much of a failure as WebOS, but that doesn't exactly make the job easier for WebOS's next owner. It just means they have to fight even to be #3.

Come to think of it, open sourcing the whole thing could be a good move. It's the Netscape strategy all over again. It wouldn't really make HP any money, though, so they won't.
Randomness is relative to the knowledge of an observer. If you can not work out what a system is going to do in advance, it's random to you. If nobody in the universe can work out what a system is going to do in advance, even in principle (which can be established by complexity arguments and such), then it's as good as random, even if the universe is fully deterministic.

"Absolute" randomness isn't a useful concept, it tends to come apart in your hand when examined. Even if the universe is deterministic, you aren't smart enough to make it not random for you, nor can you be.
Zombie Wedding Surprise
For one thing it was Apple's exclusivity with AT&T that opened the door for Verizon to push Android which played a vital role in its success. Things are a bit different with the iPad being that it's offered in both CDMA and GSM and the wifi-only model is, by far, the most popular.

It's also important to note there's really only one successful competitor to the iPhone -- Android. WebOS is dead, RIM is on the ropes, HTC, Samsung, Motorola, LG, etc didn't catch up as much as they let Google catch-up and they rode their success. (my point being we can't under estimate the difficulty in trying to compete toe-to-toe with iOS as only one company has done it successfully to date)
That's interesting. It contradicts GigaOm's reporting that Rubin was brought late into the talks between Page and Jha: http://gigaom.com/2011/08/15/guess-who-else-wanted-to-buy-mo...
I wonder if one of those nervous Android licensees will pick up the WebOS assets as a hedge.

It's a shame Nokia didn't have the balls/foresight to buy Palm, they could have been shipping gorgeous Nokia crafted WebOS phones for the last couple quarters instead of getting slaughtered by Android et al.
Yeah, I really don't like how Groklaw tries to play the principled moral leader. I generally don't read Groklaw (including this article). You can just tell me who the principals in the case are and I can tell you what Groklaw's opinion on the "merits" are. The fact that I can pretty consistently do that tells me all I need to know.
Since it's tailored to lawyers, make it obvious that you only store the DOC files for the duration of the comparison, and then you delete them from the server. And not just delete them, but fill the files with random data before deleting them.
I think it would be more beneficial to the authors if you explained why the tone is arrogant? Also, why do you assume the authors aren't qualified to teach -- why do you immediately assume them to be incompetent by noting the Dunner-Kruger effect (that sounds a bit arrogant to me?)? On the same note, what exactly do you believe makes someone qualified to teach? One more question -- what exactly is wrong with targeting complete beginners? Please explain how that is patronizing -- it is a fact that some people in this world don't have programming experience, are OK with that, and would be happy to learn.
I've been reading quite a lot math books on a Kindle recently, but I didn't bother to convert them to a native format -- I've been using PDFs.

Because of that, I needed to convert a DjView file to PDF a few times. The thing is, I have yet to find a good djvu2pdf converter -- they create PDF files with ridiculous sizes, like 100 or even 500 MB and they are terribly slow. I got better results in terms of size when I tried printing from djvu viewer with PDF printer, and while the file size was good (10-40 MB) and quality was acceptable most of the time (depending on the initial quality of djvu), it was so goddamn slow and resource intensive that I stopped doing it altogether and went back to dead tree books -- converting ~400 pages djvu this way took about 3-4 hours on 2 years old laptop.

Also, my Kindle was really, really slow showing them -- turning pages took about 10 seconds. Everything else was fine, though -- math books aren't really meant to be read fast, so this was not a big problem.

Anyway, anybody knows a better way of doing that?
Because this is a huge shift from the PC era. In the same way as shifting from mainframes to micro's was, and then again from micro's to PC's. Shifting from PC's to tablets again changes how and what we can do with computing.
Thanks Matt! I did find the Shyness Clinic as well before I posted here, but the frugal person in me thought that maybe I can get over this without spending a ton of money. But in the end if nothing else helps I'll definitely consider it.

As to answer your questions, I moved here because my wife got a job and we've been wanting to move away from LA for a while. I've been really interested in how to run a startup recently and I'm currently trying my hands on one as well. So I'm looking to meet people who are technical and entrepreneurial, as that's how I would describe myself.
Accomplishment is nice, but there's a lot more to it than simply working hours. A consistent thing: long hours without consideration of whether you could do even better with a change in process are always a mistake.

If you're doing the work in a situation where adding staff or changing commitments really will not help you, by all means, continue to work, and find whatever tricks you need to stay focused in that time.

Edison had a whole company helping him do his work, and I bet the best of piano players have a cleaning lady, a chauffeur, and a specialist in tuning pianos all helping them to spend more time mentally preparing (including via sleep) and with hands on keys.
There is clearly value in organizing the content into an iTunes-like UX.
I thought Omega v. Costco was correctly decided and that Mike Masnick is full of it, but I got into a week-long argument with someone in the wake of that case and don't want to repeat the experience. I think it's telling that Masnick left out the data point that the defendant had earned somewhere between $900,000 and $1.2 million from his book import & resale business, but that's not germane to the decision.

Murtha's dissent is error, in that first sale only applies where the United States is the country of first publication, notwithstanding that the foreign publisher may be a subsidiary of a US entity which is the ultimate rightsholder.

The argument that this will hurt libraries is completely bogus. 17 U.S.C. § 602(a)(3)(C) specifically authorizes libraries to import copies of foreign copyrighted works for both archival and lending purposes, thus providing them with a statutory 'safe haven'.