skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd personally be inclined to say that what you're doing when you resist my threat is contingent upon what kind of social arrangement we find ourself in.

In a Western-style parliamentary republic, your action will probably be interpreted as asserting property rights. If my intentions were obviously physically harmful, then we can throw in the self-defense, too.

But let's change the chair to something more consequential—a small crate of canned food. Let's say that you and I both know that you are not lacking for resources or food, and that I am homeless. And let's say that I steal this crate.

According to the interpretation of the NAP which takes property rights as a fundamental and does not admit of property already being an act of aggression in the first place, I'm the criminal, and you'll be in the right (maybe an asshole, but in the right) to resist my theft.

But assuming all the above, is it any more of an aggression to take your food (assuming I'm not off to stab you or whatnot) than for you to benefit from a societal interpretation of rights that threatens me with retaliation if I attempt to feed myself?
Not to mention that by the time it gets through the lobbying gauntlet, the legislation is more likely to protect Paypal than to harm it.
Joda Time is an absolute necessity for working reliably with dates and times, especially if you're handling different timezones
Fiduciary duty doesn't mean attempt to maximize revenue and profits at all costs [1]

besides, I would argue that the cost in both goodwill and brand value of pursuing a strategy of patent licensing far outweigh the potential benefits.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_judgment_rule#Standard...
When I'm doing print design, I love me some InDesign. But I don't understand your comment.

How do you (you-you, not the proverbial "you") turn an INDD into good assets for the web?
A major high five for Fireworks. It's like the "object"-ness of InDesign and the "graphic manipulation"-ness of Photoshop had a beautiful baby.

Fireworks' master page is a great way to keep the skeleton of your site consistent across mocks.

I'm a huge fan of using Fireworks for mockups. A heartily second (and third, and fourth) of this recommendation.
How contradictory and one-dimensional. Interestingly you call slums "urban". By just making these numbers up, did you take a look at the development of populations in these countries? Sudan has 20 times more citizens than 100 years ago, they increase their population by 5% every year and yet there is hunger every year. I could easily prove you wrong about your abnegate of the religious problem, but then some mod would delete my comment for reasons of political correctness.

You think know so much and understand so few, learn more about the basics, maybe?
No, sorry, I'm not in the room at other people's startups when they do that. What I can do, however, is look at the list of investments at Union Square Ventures where he's a principal. Then I can find patents and applications for founders and VPs at Etsy, Twilio, GetGlue, and others. I've probably been at more startups than most in this thread, and I've been under that pressure myself, so I know exactly how that happens. Do I know Fred was involved here? No. Does it seem likely? Yes. He sure doesn't seem to take a strong stance against the practice, does he?
This sounds like a good setup (and workaround the name+tag issue). Can regular Gmail handle a catch all or is this a paid feature?
True. Very true. They are in a weak position, and this is their hand.

It may take all out war, and an overwhelming of the legal v startup ecosystem, before sense returns. Akin to the opinion piece in the NYTimes "Go to Trial: Crash the Justice System" over the weekend.
Not only that but Fred would have to push for enforcing the frivolous patents for OPs criticism to be justified.
Peak Flow Meter
ARM produces design for a 32-bit 1mm-square low-power processor that costs 13p.
Care homes in cardiff
Some customer tells their bank "this charge from Paypal is fraudulent" or "this charge from Paypal is for an item that was never delivered". The bank says to Paypal "prove this is a valid charge or we will take the money back." How does Paypal not have to do fraud investigations in that case?
I did try that and found it not very consistent; plus you never know when it's going to be discontinued.
Almost no one can actually write down what "quadrillion" means correctly, because no one uses such a word in actual practice. Much better to use 10^16 or 10e16
Only 200 people bought it because the price of the drugs is ridiculously high. Even people who are dying would not have been able to afford it.
Full Titanic wreck site mapped for the first time
This comment is nonsense and is guilt by association. Fred has been on the record numerous times advising startups not to bother with patents.
Writing free software is not like giving away free coffee. Writing free software is like design parts for coffee machines and giving them away for free. Software is the medium, not the content.
DATE4J is a good alternative to the standard Java Date/Time lib or even Joda Time. (http://www.date4j.net/)
Play Framework 2.0 Final released
Vatican Radio hacked by Anonymous Hackers | The Hacker News (THN)
Camera+ 3.0 and The Maturation of the App Store
I am not terribly familiar with the process, but I assure you it includes: early computational simulations of the prospective molecules; testing on lab animals; testing on healthy people; testing on small (a few hundred) number of patients; large scale (a few thousand) multi-centre trials across the whole world (if you want to sell it to the whole world, that is). This process takes quite a number of years.

Now imagine how many labs, hospitals, scientists, doctors, statisticians, patients (oh they do get compensation), and auxiliary clerical workers need to be paid for the whole process.
They saw Apple going away with that over and over again and thought "What the hell, let's do it".
I did consider the title, and was about to go with the original. Fred is one of the best writers out there - insight, humor, compassion, humility, honesty. I thought his closing remarks really captured his rare but real venom at the shakedown. Nothing more than that.
And how many worthless patents doe USV firms have?

And where was Fred when MS started its shit?

Oh effing come one now, lets have a honest conversation Fred instead of some lame miss-direction..
Sounds like something from Apple's portfolio.
I've been doing this for a while. I've caught out 3 companies selling (or leaking, presumably via an employee) my email address. In one case they claimed they'd do something and I never heard a followup (but received no further spam, which could mean the boss was in on it); in the second case the company never bothered replying (Topaz Labs, pretty disappointed with them) and I still receive spam directed towards the address; in the 3rd case I didn't bother doing anything because of the previous 2 experiences - I realised it didn't help much except in the extreme case of being spammed heavily, which so far hasn't actually happened.
I don't think there's an unbreakable bond between profitability and sustainability. To use a tech industry analogy, despite making insane profits off of Windows as it is (and has been for 20 years), Microsoft has realized that we've entered a post-PC world, and modified Windows to run on new form factors, such as the tablet.
> I just deleted my 10 year old Yahoo account in protest

From Apple device?
for starters, in the comment section of the original post

and besides, the onus of citation should be on you with your crazy broad assumption that Fred has placed 'immense pressure' on startups to generate patents.
Wow. Stereotypes are a real timesaver, eh? Judge the man by his actions and words. Not his freakin' job title.
$5500 a month per person? Bayer are scumbags, serious, serious scumbags.

Do they think cancer is just going to stop happening so their profit will dry up?

Kudos to India for doing the right thing, I think the 6% royalty is a nice offering.
> Surely the current scenario isn't working is it?

How so?

Are not drug companies finding drugs that people desire a great deal for their life saving and other efficacious properties?

I'm guessing that you don't like that newer drugs are too expensive. What would be your definition of "too expensive" and what would be your proof that such a situation exists?
> I've heard the "Libertarians are one step away from anarchists" argument multiple times before, but I've honestly always found it perplexing. At least with regards to my own libertarian views, government is essential.

Perhaps I haven't been clear, but I'm pretty sure I'm (mostly) agreeing with you.

U.S. Libertarianism is incompatible with most forms of anarchism espoused by those who use the term.

The term "libertarian," however, has a much longer history in Europe, associated with the spiritual heirs of the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, and so forth. Which is, to me, a fascinating transition in the commonly-accepted meaning of the word.

Also, I would note that:

> Without the government, you would have anarchy, which is a rule by force by intrinsically dishonest people resulting in the exact opposite of the upholding of contract law and rights.

is your editorializing. No self-described anarchist would accept that definition, and neither would most political scientists.

If you mean, on the other hand, that any form of anarchy as espoused by those who self-identify as such would lead to the kind of scenario you describe, then there's a whole other issue.

I was operating under the notion that we were discussing political philosophies as espoused by those who advocate them, not the plausibility of those philosophies as they might be plausibly implemented in the world.
Windows 8 is unusable by mouse, here's how to fix it
I'd encourage you to get a professional lawyer with supreme court experience involved in this. Perhaps the EFF can recommend someone?
Android 4.0 a.k.a Ice Cream Sandwich Update Now Rolling Out
Seems like something they could scale up and mass produce.
Show HN: Code search for StackOverflow
This is an afternoon project that I whipped up yesterday to search inside code blocks in StackOverflow posts.

I often find myself going to stackoverflow or similar sites to find example snippets of code for something that I can't quite remember how to do. E.g. I'm working on a Grails app and I want to specify a maximum length for a domain object field. I know that I need to add a constraints block, but I can't remember the exact syntax - is it

fieldname(maxlength:10)

or

fieldname { length, 10 }

or something different. All I really need to see is an example to remind me how to do it. So I build this page, which searches stackoverflow posts for a posts with a given tag which contain a query string inside a code block, and displays them as snippets. You can click through to the full SO post for each result by clicking on the title.

This page is the hackiest of hacks; it uses the stackexchange data explorer to grab results, so it's very slow for tags that have a lot of posts. If other people find it useful then I'll redo it properly with a local database with full-text indexing.
At this point, isn't the pharmaceutical industry playing games with supply by limiting the production of many medicines?

Even a common OTC drug like guaifenesin that has been around since the 50's is difficult to find by itself, except in the newly patented time-release formulation (ie. Mucinex). (Although it is an ingredient in many cold medicines.)
DevCon5 – HTML5 Developer and Mobile Applications Conference
It does not go down. The more drugs we know, the harder it is to prove that the new drug you propose is better than current therapy. A proposed molecule that does not have significant advantage compared to the current gold standard will never sell. To put it in another way: all the low-hanging fruits are already taken.

Add to the fact that science progresses; we now know more about the human body and generally everything compared to 20 years ago, so more stringent rules and testing are required.

Classic example: before thalidomide, nobody cares about how drugs work in pregnant women. Now all drugs have pregnancy category (how safe it is to be used by pregnant women) approved by FDA, and figuring out this pregnancy category comes with a cost.
No, he'd just have to allow that. Anyone can say they're spending all that money on lawyers for purely defensive purposes, but without a public written commitment it's just BS. If the talent leaves and the business dries up, the intellectual property is often the only asset remaining. That's why VCs demand it, so they can minimize their losses by capitalizing on the IP. I have friends whose names are on patents that have been abused, and they're livid about it (or in one case severely depressed) but there's nothing they can do. If the intent is to use patents only defensively, why not put it in writing? If somebody doesn't, anybody else who believes that will be the case anyway is hopelessly naive. It's part of the game plan from before the moment of filing.
Well I hope he doesn't use any Apple products then. That would be pretty hypocritical.
And here I was, thinking it was unusable by keyboard.

But sure, this would help with the discoverability problem a lot. "Oh, there's a lot of useful contextual options...somewhere, maybe." Once you know where to look, that is - a chicken-and-egg problem.

The impression I got from the Customer preview was "Not on a smartphone? No touchscreen? You're not worthy, go away." Well, that's good to know, too ;)
I was talking about my laptop. Terribly sorry I didn't make this clear, too late to edit! I mean that nobody even thinks of making a laptop with the battery life mentioned. For office tasks, who cares if it's an arm?
This doesn't work. I think it's an attempt at a closure, which you can do in the latest Python 3.x by `nonlocal i` as the first statement in the function definition...

def make_counter():
i = 0
def count():
""" Increments a count and returns it. """
i += 1
return i
return count
I was talking about my laptops -- terrible sorry this wasn't clear! I thought the cafe/home/office example made it clear. Who works all day on their phone?
make_counter and make_adder are not equivalent. How can he compare the two?
Introducing Typesafe Stack 2.0
Study Says Most IT Guys Are Ignorant
Hah. Given how far I lived from my high school, I now feel I got off really lucky.
That's not Fred's official standpoint. The author is Brad Burnham.
I have made it repeatedly clear that I am talking about the innocent Palestinian civilians and not "official policy".

If you want to change the subject to "official policy", then state whose official policy. Specifically who. Hamas? Fatah? Who?

Unless it is somehow the "official policy" of the individual villagers being deprived of electricity in the original solar cells story, I will not be impressed.

Oh, and provide references. Your word isn't good enough.

I have been sprinkling references throughout my posts and, last time I checked, you had not not provided even one, yet you accuse me of dishonesty?

The nerve.
Blog spam. Direct link:

http://hyperpolyglot.org/lisp
I'm seeing this Raspberry Pi meme on HN a lot lately so I guess I should look into it?

What kind of cool things will I be able to do with it exactly?
I just looked at all of Fred's comments on that thread, and saw no such thing. Please don't lie just because you find the truth about startups and patents inconvenient.
Please see route66's comment which points to Union Square Ventures' official position on software patents. (USV is Fred's VC company.)

To answer your question about novel software patents, yes, I've seen people say the RSA patent was novel. However, novelty is only one of three requirements for patentability. RSA is essentially a mathematical algorithm patent. It's not statutory material for a patent, any more than Benson's patent was.
Japan's record isn't that good - MITI tried to strangle both Japanese auto exports and the semiconductor industry in their cradle because they didn't conform to Japan's development plan.
I really don't see your point. Microsoft's basic business model hasn't changed, their products are just evolving. Drug companies make new drugs and refine old ones all the time. Other than whining by obviously-biased spokespeople for the drug industry, I have no reason to believe their business model can't be sustained indefinitely under the current regulatory regimes.
How does a 1mm x 1mm chip actually get used? I'm guessing that the actual package would have to be much bigger to enable mounting on a board?
Notas de prensa
Consejos de profesional sobre como hacer y publicar notas de prensa
Everyone was already using the existing "px" unit because UAs had shipped it. Would you have preferred that every single web page broke on high-res devices (so that no manufacturer would ever introduce any high-res devices to the market) to the status quo?

What would you have used the "device pixel" unit for, exactly?
I really don't understand what their weak market position has to do with this lawsuit. If Yahoo! believes Facebook violated their patents, they will sue. They _should_ sue. They do it now because apparently that's the way new CEO does the business. I can't blame him, can you? Now, whether FW post was an emotional rant or he has any business saying what he said, hard to judge. But I read his blog for a while now and don't recall last time stumbling at such an emotional rant.

Further, whether patent system needs "reform in this country" is relevant to the fact that one part believes other part infringe. If Yahoo!, Facebook or anyone else feels someone infringe and ended up saying "oh they system is broken lets wait until its fixed", then they may as well wait another 75 years.

I say good things can come up from this, especially if Yahoo! loses. Facebook is claiming that what they are being sued over was "nothing new" at that time. Cool! Have them win. Next time someone build highly successful social website with human connections done based on request/approve/reject, and Facebook will try to shut them down based on infringe of one of their hundreds of patents, you can say: "oh, none of this was new at the time of Facebook: MySpace, Fridndster, etc. Here, I am using Facebook own rules - they win, I need to win too".
I know this isn't the gospel and there is no right/wrong way to hand the files to the developers, but I was wondering if anyone else slice up all the images and organize them before handing it off to their developers?

Especially when drop shadows for images/png are involved, I tend to slice it all myself for pixel perfection and organize into appropriately file names for the developers.
You should have gone to small claims court, I think it is up to 10000$. You're within your rights to demand money and if your documents are in order then you might even claim punitive damages. IANAL, but I won't sit around when someone steals from me.
If you are not in US and Amazon has no representation then you might be SOL.

What gets me is why these people don't go to court. It would be the best to win in a court of law and plaster that everywhere that that corporation is a crook not publish stories of butthurt and how life's is unfair.

my 2c.
There's also all the other small companies that benefit from being near ARM, for instance the chip design team in Britain my company picked up.
And if they lower the price drastically in India and then are accused of gouging their customers in other countries?

When they lower the price of the drug in India, a gray market arises that resells the drugs to other countries. The presence of the gray market creates yet more opportunities for scam artists to sell fake versions of the drug, creating yet more victims.

My point is that this isn't as cut and dry of an issue as you imply.
Got any examples? The trial process for new medications isn't perfect, but without citing specific failures in the process it becomes to easy to discount the parts of the process that do work.
5 days late, so hopefully someone answers --
If you run your web stack on Heroku, and your database in another provider, doesn't that introduce a ton of latency for your DB queries? I thought that you should strive to host in the same datacenter to minimize the latency.
wedding websites for singles
How to review code when you are working solo
Apple's 'iTV' to launch in Q4 according to report
Interesting. Do printers use halftone screens for pure black-and-white content as well?
RINGTONE BBM LUCU Waloetz Go Blogg
In addition, if you're developing a web-based system you can write your code in preparation for Python 3. When you're ready to move over, you do a one-time port and drop Python 2.x support altogether.

Obviously this depends on a few things - deployment, time/cost etc.
NASA admin returns to Congress to fight for commercial space
I'm confused by your use of the word 'meme.' A meme is generally some sort of fairly abstract thing (e.g. a funny picture of a cat with various witty statements superimposed on it).

This, on the other hand, is a physical product, so I'm not sure how it could qualify as a 'meme.'
The book mentioned appears to be: http://www.amazon.com/B-S-Price-Strategy-Prisoners-Prosperit...
It's also now part of the Typesafe stack - here's the release announcement from the typesafe blog: http://blog.typesafe.com/introducing-play-20
Cheap Beats Headphones By Dre on sale
Cheap Beats Headphones By Dre on sale here with big discount
Why Technical Support for Avast Antivirus Tool
I bought the Avast! version 7 because it said I could customize my PC security. And I did. I can even say that it’s reliable protection against viruses....
Like the GP post says, things are changing for big pharma, just as they are for MS. There's no way to keep up these prices, and the corresponding R&D costs, when (and not if, because it will happen) healthcare gets nationalized and you have one government representative with the monopsonistic power to really drive prices down.
I wonder how hard this is to set up if you run your own mail server.. should be pretty easy..

Do you get a lot of spam to addresses like admin@domain ?
The free Google Apps has catch-all, yes.
The article says we still need better battery technology, and there's truth to that. But even without batteries, just providing power on days when air conditioners run continuously, solar could make a huge difference in the energy picture.
I think we're heading for something closer to C inside JS inside Rust without C++ plugins allowed, honestly.

> Nothing going on in the browser is even CPU
> intensive if not for the huge gobs of complexity going on.

That's not quite true. People do in fact do CPU intensive stuff in browsers, if nothing else because they write algorithmically slow code.

Note that GMail is not an example of an application that really does intensive JS. A photo editing app would be a better example.
OK, let me help you with my personal case related to this:

I have two handicapped children. One of whom is severely handicapped and even at age 18 has a mental age of around 6. I would make every argument given in this article and then some. The most "fun" I've had with an iPad is when she was placed recently in a group home and I had to protect it against all sorts of things she accidentally does, as well as underpaid staffers (not my decision there by the way) who may well want to play with it when she's at school.

Other "child" is around 20 and mainly has the issues you would normally associate with Tourette's. Guess how many of these arguments still hold water given his problems with fine motor control and tendency to react based on impulse?

Now I think that shows that whether you feel a 2 year old should use an iPad (and regardless of whether you think they should they probably will), I think the article makes a case that certainly expands well to anyone with usability limitations.
I actually like Yahoo News for some reason. Some of the stories they feature in the front page makes me want to click through and read it when I'm bored.