skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't worry about the heat. Karma here has no value, or perhaps even negative value, to me. What I'm saying about VCs, startups, and patents is real and important, even if some self-interested HN'ers don't want it heard or even if Fred was the wrong frame on which to hang that picture. I'll burn some karma to get the word out about the real source of the problem and the real solution.

To answer your question, of course IANAL but the way to do this is to assign the patents to an external entity such as http://www.patentcommons.org/ or http://www.openinventionnetwork.com/, where that entity has a charter allowing only defensive use - and preferably with other entities involved to enforce that charter. A public statement like http://www.redhat.com/legal/patent_policy.html doesn't hurt either, though it's not legally binding. Now, PC or OIN might not be the exact right vehicle for you, for other reasons, but that's the basic approach.

Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat, which is a strong proponent of this approach and supporter of these organizations. Until software patents go away - and Red Hat is supporting that effort too - this is the only way to play the game that is both safe and (IMO) moral.
Is he serious about consumers impacting government because they get mad about their favorite brand getting sued?

Consumers vote with their dollars - a massive change in spending habit would be required to impact congress. Voting consumers get a say in which congressman get to be bought off by lobbyists - not sure that helps. I'm not sure I get how anything would change unless executive branch saw risk of re-election (like what happened with PIPA/SOPA).

I've also wondered, since corporations are people with 1st amendment rights, how does a patent not infringe upon freedom of speech? Would love if there was some basis of judicial review that could effectively influence IP laws.
without logging into Google and creating a public profile if you don’t have one.
Nuclear power is a way cleaner than coal. Please, shutdown coal plants first.
I think Trada.com is your best bet for this. They have a number of case studies showing how they bring up conversation rates over time with crowdsourcing.
The reason I suspected that is grabbing 1.5 GB of virtual memory doesn't mean much. It just means you asked the OS to change its book-keeping to allow you to access that much. Applications and libraries that aggressively cache and prefetch routinely do that sort of thing.
I'd argue the 20 year long patent law in place now is way too long for a publicly granted monopoly of production.
>they have a fiduciary duty of care to the corporation

I absolutely agree. if you're the CEO of a publicly traded company, it is your fiduciary duty to extract value from the company's assets.

Exhibit #1: Sun Microsystems

if Sun had the cojones to sue Google (re: Java/Android) they'd still be in business today.
> In the 1800's the US was considered developed in comparison to other countries.

Not compared to Europe. There might have been some American inventions, but those paled in comparison to inventions from Europe. It wasn't until the late 1800s that things started to change.

> You can't compare developed vs developing using 2000s definitions and at the same time using 1800s definitions for IP laws.

> You have to be consistent, pick one era and compare everything using the same definitions.

For any sort of historical analysis, scientific levels of rigidity are impractical, because there isn't a large enough data set, so your point is moot.
Would be awesome Wish they had Win7/64 support. Need to push on Broadcom for that.
> Nonsense. The US was born as a developed nation, it never had a period of time when it wasn't.

You really need to study history again. There was a big gap between Europe and the US that wasn't closed until the late 1800s. In terms of scientific discoveries (which are often closely tied to patentable discoveries), Europe (Germany, more specifically) continued to lead until WW2, when we broke their PhD lineage with Operation Paperclip.
Exactly his point here. my.yahoo.com was innovative for its time, and patents are supposed to last 20 years, right? So according to the legal system in place, the public should use my.yahoo.com till around 2020.

I agree, what could really be any other purpose for patents? Is a judge going to say, 10 years into a patent, "well, our process thought this was novel 10 years ago, but it doesn't seem so novel to me now"?

The problem is that this 20-year term makes no sense in software, if the public wants to use the latest and greatest thing.
So you forget to take it for a couple of days? The biological half-life of dextroamphetamine is 10 hours and levoamphetamine 13 hours. That's 10 to 13 hours (since Adderall is a mix of both isomers) until just half of the dose you took is eliminated from your bloodstream. If you take something with a long half-life like that every day, it's constantly in your system. It takes roughly three days to completely eliminate a dose.
I was left wondering what could be the motivation behind the character to launch his startup.

It didn't seem to be the money nor the vision, ¿what do you think?
Is the code derived from a Cappuccino version, or did you build it from scratch using iOS?
Maybe that's more 'enterprisey', but its more 'system administrator'-ey to just use an onboard gnuplot and look at real graphs without putting much SNMP/traffic-load on the system of interest .. the purpose is to educate the user on how the system works, not use it as a monitoring device for lazy sysadmins.
I don't have a phone in my pocket because I hate carrying it.
But I do have a wristwatch. If modern smart-phones, and all the things they do, can be turned into wristwatches - great! Then I will have one.
I actually blamed the "hacker ethos," not the rank and file programmers, but the CEO of Borland was very much a coder:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Kahn
This is a common misconception. While the basic research that underpins the biological theory might happen in academic labs, turning basic research into an actual medicine that will a) work and b) not blow up your liver in the process is exclusively the province of drug companies currently. In fact, medicinal chemists (the people that actally figure out how to make the compound and scale up the manufacturing) are almost exclusively found in industrial drug development companies. They don't exist in any appreciable numbers In academia. They are analogous to the rocket scientists at NASA who worked on the moon missions that everyone worries can't be replaced because they have such specialized experiential knowledge.

Every once in a while an academic research lab will spin off a biotech to develop a new compound, but in general this is not how things have been done in the past. There is a current trend to in-license things from academia to lower the companies' exposure to early R&D risk. This ignores the fact that early research costs pale in comparison to the later clinical trials where most potential drugs go to die. Cancer is particularly bad with something like a 98% failure rate. In-licensing from academia isn't going to buy you much comfort when the thing doesn't work in a phase III clinical trial.
I do not think Yahoo winning billions will make the public realize what is at stake. Those not in tech, don't really think deeply about our dated patent system. This will just result in more lawsuits just before companies IPO. Yahoo "crushing" FB won't change much, but we can hope it will.
The Page Object Pattern can help reduce the brittleness of automated UI tests.

http://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/PageObjects
Ask HN: best security aware web hosting? (tired of malware scripts)
I have a couple of sites on Dreamhost and malware scripts are inserted in our many PHP scripts (i.e: Wordpress) very often. I am thinking in moving our sites to specialized places. For example, move our blogs to wordpress.com, where I assume they pay more attention to security.

I don't see the cost/benefit of putting human resources working on this.
My karma ran over your dogma.
If it's pure crisp black like text, then no.

Sometimes pure black is printed incorrectly and looks "fuzzy" with dots around the edges - in that case it is rendered with a halftone screen.
Here's how I explain the problem to my tech-impaired friends and loved ones:

In 2012, software patents don't cover solutions. Rather, they cover problems. Anyone creating a solution to that problem must pay licensing fees. This takes large amounts of money from the people actually solving problems and improving the world, and gives it to people who don't do anything to advance human progress. If the law isn't repaired, my fear is that other countries will far surpass the USA in our lifetime.
He also could have only spent $150 on hosting and been fine - wasted a lot of $. I imagine since he didn't work on it, sales were declining as well.
Where can I get a Matt Cutts of my very own? I like fun gadgets too.
Bad Karma: $100K Plug-in Hybrid Dies Before Consumer Reports Can Test It
Why are people so upset with Yahoo?
Apple is still incredibly popular with the tech crowd, I bet many of these blogs and comments were written with their hardware and software, and they are currently suing just about every phone manufacturer over patents?

Aside from the fact it's not a web thing, how is this different? Or is that difference somehow enough for people to choke down their bile and keep using apple products?

I originally was going to post something about banding together and boycotting Yahoo but then remember the HUGE apple fan group that lives here.

Apple is worse than Yahoo IMHO (considering this is like Yahoos first suit) and yet no one cares. So why do people care about this?
I don't see why it would be -- couldn't you characterize it as development kit? I assume it belongs to the employer not to the attendee, but that's just a company rule. I thought the rule was you couldn't pay "kickbacks", not that you couldn't receive them, and a phone is hardly a healthcare service itself anyway.
There are three or four watches out, and probably more in the planning phase. InPulse, WIMM (http://www.wimm.com/platform-concepts.html) are the two that spring to mind...anyone have any idea which is better in terms of battery life, small size, expandability?

Edit: Sony SmartWatch should be coming soon, too (http://androidandme.com/2012/01/news/hands-on-with-the-sony-...).
Which is why I fear that Yahoo winning over Facebook wouldn't start a lobbying war against patents. But instead, Facebook would simply become one more in the list of patent supporters.

I think that it would be better if Yahoo loses remarkably. Such as that it becomes reference for future judges to take better caution with software patent lawsuits. Which would slowly "reform" the system, instead of a fast revolution with new legislation. One can hope.
Hindsight won't fix old mistakes, but looking at the past helps avoid new ones. If there are lessons in the success of Borland and Facebook, surely there are lessons in their failures, too. Or maybe we disagree on that.
No, they didn't. Your memory of history is incorrect.

Overture, a completely different company, sued Google in 2002, two years before their IPO.

Yahoo purchased Overture in 2003. After this, Google settled.

Google's IPO wasn't until 2004.
> i.e. compile android for x86 and don't do hardware level emulation.

Keep in mind that Windows 8 will run on ARM.
It's based on the crowd's judgement of merit and who is filing the lawsuit and why.

That is to say, Yahoo is viewed as non-innovative, and their action is viewed to be the result of a new CEO intent on aggressively finding pennies through any means including just by lawsuit. Meanwhile, most of Yahoo's team is apparently against this action.

So, it's the context. If you drop the context and equate Apple to Yahoo, then it's easier to arrive at: why is everybody upset when a company files a patent lawsuit.

I bet the same people upset about Yahoo also find Apple's lawsuits to be distasteful. Apple is viewed as a very innovative company, so they're given slack when it comes to suing over issues related to innovation.
The possible exception being in regulated industries like pharma where it's entirely possible for a drug to take 15 years to develop and test. I think healthcare and pharma probably need to be treated differently, but even there, patents don't seem to be making the world a better place, at least not in the way they were originally intended.
In this case, it's unnecessary to make a leap from government gaining control to corporations gaining control, since patents are created and enforced by governments, not corporations. On top of that, a corporation is by definition an entity created by a government.
Gephi - The CDDL1/GPL3 Photoshop for graphs
A well-written reminder, I'd say. Even more so for startup founders - are you working on it because of sunk costs, or are you working on it because it is still the thing that you love to do.
Correcting Human Mitochondrial Mutations
I'm not talking about moral hazard.
Escaping from the typical IT world I believe...
Django Cheatsheet updated for version 1.4
I do not know, but I suspect their one-per-person restriction is "one per person, unless you can convince us that you are not a scalper, and plan to order > 100 to make our time checking out your explanation worth its while".

I suspect if a well known hackerspace (SF Noisebridge, NYC Resistor, PumpStation One, Nottinghack) made such a request, they could get it.
"It's Hollywood, write something, write anything: laser beams, earth explodes, dog flies to the north pole".
Because writers don't speak epub yet? I realize your question was hypothetical but there are a zillion things that generate PDF out there and only a few that generate EPUB or other mobile friendly format.
Which iPad should you buy on Friday? Your questions answered
Because there are iPads and other tablets today that can do them.
592-hp McLaren supercar hits 200 mph, proves Moore’s law is alive & well
I was expecting an article on management styles. I left a firm after it was taken over by people who wanted absolute control of behavior. This was attained through Bolshevist Change Management meetings and mandatory ITIL course attendance. ITIL, for those who don't know, is the Information Technocracy Indoctrination Library, a collection of smug, manipulative, platitudinous and mind-numbingly boring volumes that serve as an outlet for the frustrated British Colonialist impulse, and all this implies (think Parkinson's law).
The Hacker News guidelines say, "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

CBS News is a network TV news site. Just in case this thread gets traction, I should share the most accessible link

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/

about the underlying science.
I really liked that. I read it without realizing it was story. So I was shocked when I got to the end and saw the writer credit! I thought it very believable, even if some of you didn't buy the VC making an immediate offer.
A book like that can also be useful for understanding what you take for granted.

If Kernighan explains a concept that seems obvious, it's almost certainly because most people haven't a clue about it.
Bootstrap or not? High level pros and cons of using Twitter Bootstrap
Samsung official: Apple to use Samsung displays in smaller iPad
> When people don't even care that their loved ones die enough to donate to anti-death institutes

Err, what? Elaboration required.
Things worth being made would be prefunded, and things that aren't won't get made. As much as we enjoy entertainment, we cannot claim it is implemented as cheaply as possible.

This would let the market actually sort out what is naturally viable.
It’s the law of big numbers. When there are enough of anything issued, some good will be done.

Can we stop using the law of big numbers as an excuse for everything in the world? </pedantic>
I think that movement was called gmail beta.
You're the problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_input_and_output_handli...
The current patent system is broken. That does not imply that the right thing is to have no patent system; are we sure that the problem is with the idea instead of the implementation?

Can we talk about what an ideal system would look like instead of saying that what we have now is broken and therefore nothing can work? Isn't debugging broken systems what we're supposed to be good at here?

I've tried to come up with a reasonable patch for the current system:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3698637

I'm sure that there are problems with it, but at least it's a starting point.
Google Could Lose Default Search Engine Status on iPhone
Node v0.7.6 released with V8 3.9, Win x64 build, hrtime binding, and more
not true, I just got my I/ON pre-registration email
Open-source writ large is a dumb marketing gimmick. As far as useful code goes, the people who care and respect other hackers release the code anyways, copyright or no.

"Free software" vastly overestimates the value and talent of the average user--I don't feel any pity for the average City Of Farm Wars user if they don't get the source to IE.
No superconductors needed, DC power conversion is the key. There is a large project on the way in Europe/Northern Afria called Desertec.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec
Long space missions 'may damage eyesight'
I know libraries can do all those things, but I've never preferred it over the real thing. As an example, I might do something like this (not Python):

my $bar = 0;
class FakeFoo {
sub bar { return $bar }
}

my $thing = ThingToTest->new( foo => FakeFoo->new );
$foo = 42;
is $thing->make_bar_two_bigger, 44;
$foo = -10;
is $thing->make_bar_two_bigger, -12;

Mock enthusiasts would write:

my $fake_foo = Mock->new( Foo->class )->instance;
$fake_foo->return_sequence( bar => [42, -10] );
my $thing = ThingToTest->new( foo => $fake_foo );
is $fake_foo->make_bar_two_bigger, 44;
is $fake_foo->make_bar_two_bigger, -12;
ok $fake_foo->ensure_exhausted('bar');

Yes, it's less lines, but I think it's harder to read because the values are being set up long before they're used.
>Imagine if you had eliminated Bayer's incentive for even creating this cancer-saving drug in the first place.

It's distressing that people think that the only possible motivation for inventing life-saving drugs is money.

Lots of people want this and lots of people want to put in the work. Our governments are supposed to be representing us, right? In fact, they are already one of the main contributors to cancer research (http://kcl.academia.edu/RichardSullivan/Papers/263427/Trends...). So why are we leaving it to profit hungry organisations to literally save our lives? If governments do all the research instead then they can all collaborate and share each others' knowledge. That way everyone gets access to everything just by doing their part. It's the open source, creative commons approach to the problem. People can pay a company to do research just so that company can turn around and charge them a fortune or they can pay the equivalent amount in taxes and get cheap product with guaranteed access.

Business is useful for a lot of things but definitely not the basics. They need to be kept simple, cheap and reliable. Only way to achieve that effect is through collaboration, not competition.

>The pharmaceutical industry has had quantifiable and demostrable success

Then I guess our definitions of success differ. To me, success is not in how big their turnover is but what kind of an impact they make on the world and how fairly they treat it. I don't blame anyone for these kinds of actions, their monkey spheres (http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html) are full and they can't empathise with the people they affect. They're just reacting to the rules of the game. And that's what's backwards - the game, but we can choose to play a different one.
He's not arguing against liver transplants so you've just thrown a redherring into the discussion.

I believe his argument is that expensive end-of-life care is unnecessary because death at that point is inevitable in the immediate future. You can gain months on average, but those months aren't economically invaluable.

With limited resources, its better to spend on treatments with the greatest quality of life to cost ratio.
> How do you fire up a significant portion of you fellow citizens over copyright issues is the question.

Talk to your local pirate party. Join them. Vote for them.
That only explains why use a sprite sheet. But not why use jpg instead of gif. Neither it talks about the alternative of gif animation. Does the javascript dom method really offers better performance than a simple gif animation? Or were gif animations taken off the equation before that comparison for other reasons?
One of my friends has put an ipod nano into a watch strap casing. It looks stylish and works well too. I just wish you could build apps for them, there would be a huge market for that surely.
I assume that I have some responsability but at the same time there are ways to isolate issues on different sites.
The 'Father of Video Games' Reflects on His 40-Year-Old Invention
Ask HN: Is there room for DRM-free movie distribution?
Hello HN,

I have been recently exploring the current models of media distribution (music, TV, and film) and wanted to ask a few questions here on HN as I am sure there are people much smarter and more experienced in this area than I am.

"Steam for Movies" would summarize the basic idea that I've been contemplating. The service would allow users to purchase digital copies of movies and it would ideally need to contain the majority of all modern movies (making whatever licensing agreements with movie studios required to distribute digitally). After purchasing a movie, the user's account would "own" the movie and could download it onto any of your devices (a la Steam). Ideally it would also be DRM-free, and the user would have a choice of download formats.

Here are a few of my questions:

Firstly, will movie studios tolerate a DRM free distribution model? The music industry seems to now be okay with DRM-free distribution (iTunes, Pandora with HTML5, etc.). I would assume that the argument would be between those who said that DRM-free means easier pirating and those that said that increased sales would make up for lost sales or that pirating will happen regardless.

Secondly, how does what is happening with UltraViolet [1] affect an idea like this? From a user's perspective, UV was one of the most difficult and complex applications I have used online, so it would be definitely be possible to compete from a UX perspective, but I am not sure if movie studios would be willing to license digital content to another service when there is already a "successful" competitor that contains DRM, etc.

Thirdly, how are such distribution licenses formed? Are they with movie studios directly or someone else? How do would one go about negotiating such licenses?

Finally, what do you think about this idea in general? Is there anything I might be missing or any resources that I should know about?

Thank you for your feedback,
Jacob

[1] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2012/03/walmarts-starts-dvd-to-digital-conversion-service.ars

P.S. I am a 19-year-old developer who has been thinking about this problem for the past year and a half or so and is looking for some direction on where to go next. Thus, obviously, I do not have any experience in this industry - hopefully there are some experienced people on HN who are willing to share their insight.