skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The following is from PRC's Facebook page [1].

Most of it is in defense of their lawsuit, while the last paragraph is in defense of their request to remove the app from the Apple store.

Last week Prentke Romich Company (PRC) learned that Apple removed a language assistance app from its iTunes® store pending the outcome of a patent infringement lawsuit filed against the company that developed the iPad® app.

PRC and the licensor of the Unity™ system that powers our language devices jointly filed the lawsuit after our patent attorney found numerous instances of infringement on Unity patents in the “Speak for Yourself” app. Apple has a process that allows third parties to provide notice of infringement concerns as part of its terms and conditions. Accordingly, we reached out to Apple on two occasions. We provided Apple with a copy of the lawsuit, expressing our concerns about the “Speak for Yourself” app. We then responded to a later request from Apple asking for an update on the lawsuit. Last week, Apple elected to remove the app.

The Unity system is the result of the long commitment and hard work of Bruce Baker and his company, Semantic Compaction Systems (SCS). His life’s work, which he has refined over decades, created life-changing technology that has given a voice to thousands of individuals with profound disabilities. SCS and PRC filed the patent infringement lawsuit after we reached out to the app company’s founders and offered various business solutions, but were refused.

It is important to emphasize that while there are many useful language apps in the marketplace, “Speak for Yourself” is the only app named in the lawsuit because of its flagrant infringements on Unity patents.

There’s a reason patents are in place, to protect decades of hard work and research that go into our devices. To take someone’s life work and market it as your own is simply wrong. The founders of the company marketing this app are speech-language pathologists who were trained by PRC, and who used their knowledge of the Unity system to develop a Unity-like app of their own and market it in the Apple iTunes store.

We do recognize that new consumer technology, such as tablet-based apps, are playing a useful role in assistive technology, although it is unlikely they will be the best option for all clients. We intend to participate in this space but will only do so in a way that supports the best possible language outcomes for those clients with severe communications disorders.

[1] http://www.facebook.com/PrentkeRomichCompany
I don't agree that public shaming is the primary reason for Microsoft's demise -- there are lots of people who are attracted to work for the least ethical firms, just like Wall Street.

But, I agree with you, there should be more shaming when working for certain companies or in certain jobs. For instance, the companies that produce internet filters that are suitable for monitoring the traffic of entire countries.
Project Management According to Moses
It looks like a linear combination of shifted step functions/logistics. That's a complete set - it can represent any function to arbitrary accuracy. I agree that in practice you won't necessarily get better results, though.
Following your description I'd put it in the 500 range.
Agreed. The OWC after-market SSD upgrades are $450 to go from 240 to 480GB. Apple isn't gouging on the SSD at least.
"100 mutations seems high"

JTR has more than 180 rules, so I don't think 100 is an unfair number.

And yes, mutations do slow down typing which is why I most often use a random non-word that sounds like it would be a word (i.e., lickering, fauxd, glasster, etc.). Another is capitalizing in the middle of the word. And another is sticking a hyphen in the middle of the word. And another is adding a suffix like .com to your word.

Of course my favorite mutation is swapping the first letter of two of the words (i.e., cog drap).

But yeah you could also just add a fifth word and not even worry about mutations.
3 Easy and Efficient Methods to Break Windows Password
If you forgot your Windows password, and lost access to your computer, here are 3 easy and efficient methods for you to break Windows password!
I'm reading the book Priceless by William Poundstone which discusses the work of Kahneman and Tversky (among others) in great detail as it relates to the psychology of pricing (excellent read, btw).

This is O.T from what the article is saying but mildly O.T (meaning on-topic) and I'd love to hear HN's opinion on this.

One of the problems presented in Priceless is:

Would you rather $3,000 as a sure thing, or an 80% chance of $4,000 and a 20% chance of nothing

versus:

Would you rather a $3,000 loss as a sure thing, or an 80% chance of losing $4,000 and a 20% chance of losing nothing.

The erroneous path that most people take, in the eyes of these researchers, is that they set their base reference point at the sure thing, ie. they say "well the $3,000 is a sure thing so I can assume I have it".

If you do that, then your answers are different:

In the first instance you keep the $3,000 (because it becomes an 80% chance of winning $1,000 versus a 20% chance of losing $3,000).

In the second instance you go to court (because it's an 80% chance of losing $1,000 versus a 20% chance of winning $3,000).

However if you don't "rebase" your reference point, then you would make the same decision in both cases - that is you would take the 80% of $4,000 bet because it's "worth" $3,200.

As much as I realise what they're saying and they say it's statistically incorrect to do this, it really seems to me the most sensible way to make the decisions (which is, I guess, exactly what they're saying right? I'm human, ergo fallible to this kind of illusion).

The thing that kills me is this: if this is a one time thing, I'd rather be sure of the $3,000. If I'm buying and selling these bets all day, then sure I should take the $4,000 at 80% because even if I lose this round, the next time I take the bet will make up for it (ie. law of large numbers).

But what this problem doesn't address is how often I get this opportunity? Depending on my circumstances, $3,000 could be a life changing opportunity, ie. if I "win" $3,000 or $4,000, my circumstances are essentially the same so I should always go for the sure thing. If I lose $3,000 or $4,000 I'm equally screwed, so I should take the risk and try and win in court.

What am I missing?
All the reading in the world will not change the fact they pick retarded names.

Routing mesh? We call that a cluster of load balancers in the real world.
Things like this make me wonder if we're missing something by decrying the patent trolls.

When the patent holder is a non-practicing entity, there is no incentive for the holder to interfere with the creation of competing products (abusive attempts to extract a settlement notwithstanding). Anything covered by the patent is a potential source of licensing fees, simple as that.

I'm going to start thinking out loud here: Imagine patent holders are disallowed from directly exercising the techniques covered by their patents. Corporations that patent technology in their field essentially have to sell their patents to NPEs and license them back. The researching corporation gets an up-front return on their R&D investment (and a potential head start in implementing the new patents before the rest of the public actually sees them) and the public suffers none of the side effects of a government-granted monopoly.

The biggest wrinkle in a system like this would be the whole mess of submarine patents. If NPEs could be incentivised to make their patents broadly known, and approach licensees before they implement those patents, they could actually become a real value-ad to the system rather than a parasite: Imagine a one-stop shop where you could license a patent, get a reference implementation, and access experts who could help you apply that patent to your product. It could be similar to companies like ARM that license reference chip designs to manufacturers.

Again, I'm just thinking out loud here, so feel free to let me know if I'm off-base here.
Echoing, great quote. "Gosford Park" has been sitting in my netflix queue for too long, time to watch.
I would remove the comma after "Enter your email", as it inserts an unnatural pause.
It was built with music studios in mind, not music fans.

Plus it didn't improve over time and was rarely marketed.
I work primarily with Hardcore Apple Partisans. When they'd ask what Ping was, I'd say "It's this thing where you can buy a song and then talk about it with your friends."

Their eyes would be fluttering away by the end of the sentence. Nobody, not a one ever, cared at all. There are a thousand other venues to discuss music with friends, most of them involving alcohol.

I personally feel Ping could have been amazing were it a rewards shop that rewarded you with extras for buying tracks.

You buy a top single - a free remix of that song is offered on the side. Nothing obligatory, just extra.

You buy an album - Ping provides that album's music videos and a writeup from the band.

You buy a pop song from a hot entertainer - you're entered into a raffle for show tickets.

You buy a karaoke standard - Ping asks for your best Photo Booth karaoke version that gets uploaded, shared, and voted on next to that standard.

If it was value-adding what you were buying, I think that would be interesting. But hearing your Address Book chime in on a trashy single you bought? No thank you.
Linus Torvalds: Linux succeed thanks to selfishness and trust
How much time do you waste due to resistance?
I agree about downscaling being impressive, but I was using 1920x1200 on a 15" notebook in 2004.
The founders of the company marketing this app are speech-language pathologists who were trained by PRC, and who used their knowledge of the Unity system to develop a Unity-like app of their own and market it in the Apple iTunes store.
Because people are being told they 'need' a tablet. But also that an iPad isn't enough by itself- they need a computer too. So the 'choice' for your standard uninformed BestBuy consumer is iPad & Laptop or a single Win8 machine, and the single machine solution is vastly desirable.

I think this argument is bull- and we can poke a ton of holes in it but it's difficult to communicate this to many people. I almost always try to sell them on a Macbook Air instead (a Windows ultraportable would work as well, I just haven't had as good experiences with non-Apple ultraportables).
Sure, you can (presumably) download it from both places any time after purchase. With steam, all you have to remember is your steam ID and password.

Now where did I put my humble bundle key again?

(of course humble bundle gives you website and steam keys, so it's an unfair comparison. My point is that if buying one copy of this film doesn't give you the ability to download it on the other service, there is something to be said for the ease of finding the download URL)
No. Hardware can be commoditized as with the PC market.

Apple has an incentive to sell Mountain Lion at $19 which is to increase the adoption of new OS versions. They also make money predominantly on hardware so a lower software cost isn't such a financial hit. Lowering the price of their newer OS also depresses the value of operating system software in the eyes of consumers. This is important with the upcoming release of Windows 8.

Innovation and market differentiation is essentially what you are looking for. And ultimately you need a good product and resulting sales.
These things happen. Next.
EC2 and Riak
> ...is it still the same person when you wake them up?

This is pretty much where I land on this. Given any empirical theory of consciousness, it's never going to be "I get to live in the computer," just "I die, but a copy of my brain lives in the computer." And it's pretty hard to draw a bright line between that and "I die, my brain slowly decays for thousands of years, then it's surgically reconstructed and awoken." Still feels like death to me.

Of course, to your transhumanist theorist, there's probably just as much connection between me and the computer as there is between me in the night and me in the morning; it's all just an illusion created by a persistent brain state. But that doesn't help either, because now you're describing a kind of immortality -- "This exact stream of continuous consciousness is a dead end, but something very like it will continue to be and think of itself as part of me and that gives me and it some comfort about the whole thing" -- which the general public has been achieving quite successfully for some time in the form of procreation.

In fact, since every living organism represents a terminal link in a chain of unbroken life dating back to the first self-replicating molecule, it might be quite reasonable to say that we have all been alive for billions of years at least, we just don't remember most of it. But this is changing: I can go on Wikipedia today and recover the memories of our culture dating back for most of its existence.

Naturally, they grow vaguer the further they go back in time, as memories do; but for events that take place today, we have a record which far exceeds human memory in accuracy and exactness of fact, and which will very soon be competitive with it in emotional effect. It is quite realistic for me to expect to create a record of my life which has as much effect on my descendants in a hundred years as my own memories of today would have on me were I to live that long.

So I think it's possible the transhumanists missed the boat. Or rather, they're on the boat already and just don't realize it. The human macro-organism does, starting from now, seem to stand a decent chance of living to see the heat death of the universe.
Oh, you mean that same money that is literally the only reason that they provide these "essential" products?

That simply isn't true.

I know a lot of people who work on apps similar to this, or in related fields, and money is far from the only reason they do it. Infact, I know people who literally give away their work to make sure people can use it.
I mean, take a look at this quote:

The founders of the company marketing this app are speech-language pathologists who were trained by PRC, and who used their knowledge of the Unity system to develop a Unity-like app of their own and market it in the Apple iTunes store.

If PRC was able to prove that to Apple, you hadn't read the OP but PRC had posted something about how people they trained stole their technology, would you direct the word "villain" towards Apple, PRC, or the makers of SpeakForYourself?

If I had a choice I'd keep the app on the app store. But, its important to keep a cool head and consider things objectively.

Source: http://www.facebook.com/PrentkeRomichCompany
Full text: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5317066/2012-west.pdf
Just to clarify, there's no need to root the android device to run an app that's not on Google's market. There's a checkbox you fill that allows installation from "unknown sources". SfY could sell directly from their website if they wanted.
The data connection only supports one protocol at a time, so it's IPv6-only. T-Mobile provides a NAT64/DNS64 gateway which generates an IPv6 address for every domain you query.

This works in most cases, unless you have an app that doesn't understand IPv6, or a site that uses raw IPv4 literals instead of DNS.
"It's a perfect parallel to ASL."

Untrue. ASL is its own, unique language with distinct vocabulary, syntax, morphology and grammar. It's actually of significant interest to linguists due to the interesting spatial frames that appear to be unique to visual language.

However, this mechanism for communication does parallel books that have been used for years and electronic devices involving Bliss symbols (a paper from 1981 describing this: http://www.speech.kth.se/prod/publications/files/qpsr/1981/1...)
Perhaps SfY is seen as the good guys as they've been able to deliver a quality product at an attractive price point, on commodity hardware? As compared to thousands of dollars for clunky hardware? Not to mention that patents are generally harmful, and this patent does not seem to be contributing anything truly groundbreaking...
It would be cool if it worked like a prediction market as well, so that if you were one of the first people to buy a song that later became very popular you could actually make money.
>I mention the prices because I wondered why the author couldn't just go buy one of PRC's products. They may be prohibitively expensive.

He covered that: He said that he'd spoken with PRC and Maya couldn't use their device (PRC's).
Absent a court-ordered injuction, Apple has no obligation to read, let alone give credence to anyone's claims in this matter, and that's exactly what they should have done: let the courts sort it out. Make PRC get the injuction, don't just give it to them for free.
I'd gladly pay +$85 for a tablet where I have file system access so I don't have to use another computer to get a file on the darned thing.

If that is your entire set of requirements you can get Android tablets for $85 (total) that give you file system access.
Don't forget that free yearly upgrades are the norm for tablets (well, iOS at least. Android, where art thou upgrades?).

What will Windows RT users be getting a year from now when iOS7 is released?
I was thinking something along these lines too. I would guess that people who make these sorts of mistakes when they're in test mode might not make them in a real-life situation

When you're taking a test, you have the expectation that the problem was designed by a human who wants you to demonstrate a particular piece of knowledge. You look for subtle clues in the words that point to which core problem was in the mind of the person who wrote the question.

The experimental setup seems like it would catch out people who make the assumption that the problems were designed to test knowledge.
Machiavellian IQ
Ooops, yes, you're right on both!
Fair point on the first one, I did assume US & DMCA.

For the second. A law is a law is a law, even if there is no successful conviction using it yet. It is a "Damocles Sword" hanging over every person in the country it was enacted until courts actually rule on it at which point we will know what the judiciary thinks of it.

As for "illegal" vs "unlawful". As far as I am concerned they are synonyms.
A simpler explanation is that Microsoft's fortunes are tied to the PC. As that market matured, so did MS's profits. Now PC's are being disrupted by ARM/touch/mobile devices and their OS's, and MS is not dominating that area - just as Christensen's theory predicts. Of course, you'll be happier working for a company you like.

Note 1: MS made $5.11B profit last year.
Note 2: Apple's star is rising with the new devices.
There is also the issue that the FRA in the US makes trains considerably heavier than equivalents in the rest of the world. http://www.ebbc.org/rail/fra.html
The idea that we need patents to foster innovation is a self-serving lie. Most of human progress -- everything that got us to where we are now -- happens faster the more copying everyone does.

America industrialized faster than Great Britain thanks to widespread copying -- and this saved countless human lives by lifting millions of people out of poverty faster than otherwise possible. Today China is industrializing faster still by rampant copying, and good for them.

This story is just another great example. The patent holder is reluctant to enter the iOS market because they know it will cannibalize their existing very-expensive-device market. Too bad for them. The market should punish them for being slow to serve people in the best possible way. I don't care how much they invested in the idea. That investment has zero value to customers unless it's actually being applied to serve them on the terms they want.
> And if you read this article carefully, you see that while it uses these two CRT questions as examples of tricky questions, when it discusses the results about awareness-of-bias not helping alleviate bias, it isn't necessarily saying smart people do worse on those two CRT questions. It's a bit muddled in what it's saying, and reviewing the linked abstract doesn't help much either. The paper is evaluating some very specific things under the umbrella term 'cognitive sophistication', which might not map to what we usually call 'smart' or even 'test-smart'.

Fulltext: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5317066/2012-west.pdf

No, the smart people essentially never perform worse on the CRT or bias questions than their stupider confreres. What the headline is boasting about is that when asked to guess whether they will do better on the biases than their cohort, the smarter people tend to think they will do much better than their cohort, but actually do only a tiny bit better or identical.

But as the authors admit at the very end, this may be a reasonable generalization from their lives, in which they observe smart people outperforming stupid people at just about everything and these biases were selected from the big heuristics & biases literature for being resistance to raw smarts...
If you take a look at the PRC Facebook page [1], there is a SWARM of angry people making a mess of their name.

I wonder if this removal will be a net loss for them.

[1] I've linked it twice on this thread, and its in the original post's conclusion
As someone actively trying to help shape the crowdfunding space, I personally think it really is the next big thing and not just a bubble. As Tim Brown puts it, big design used to be big companies making solutions for little people, then little companies making solutions, now it's people making solutions for themselves.

I don't think crowdfunding will be another venture-infused flash in the pan. As long as the regulatory framework and the tools continue to make proress for the end user, then the potential for crowdfunding to become a huge engine for disruption is unknown. We have to make sure we treat crowdfunding with the patience and respect of a new idea. It's not going anywhere, especially as people start to see the power of leveraging it in yet unseen ways.
I like the part where some guy/gal with a stop watch was keeping records of every minute.
Ah, thanks, I missed that bit.
Amazon.com reviews by Adrian Lamo
Haven't seen anyone ask this, but is this also going to be the OEM price for say Dell, Lenovo etc for desktops and laptops? In a business with as slim margins as those folks have, this could scream for an alternative.

Ubuntu anyone?
ok, but can someone who has this app copy it into a jailbroken device? this way OP could have a backup device (or even two iPads!) with this software on, just in case.

Sorry, but fuck patents when its comes to human life. And silencing this kid is like taking life out of her and her parents.
This is not correct.

If you have a GC petition under processing, and switch jobs by transferring the H-1B, at the new job you will have to start the GC processing all over again. Nonetheless, you can transfer the "priority date" (PD) from the first (abandoned) GC petition to the new one.

This piece of misinformation cost me many years, so please don't spread it. I waited too long for the "right job" to come by and wasted many years. I could have started the GC petition at the first opportunity and transfered the PD as I switched jobs.
Couldn't you use electricity to separate hydrogen and oxygen from water, and then "burn" that in the rockets to produce water again?
A math puzzle that relates algebra to set theory and combinatorics
Bear in mind the parent comment isn't saying that the two CRT questions are bad because they probe understanding of mathematics. Understanding of mathematics was presupposed in the objects under test. Everyone had it in them to answer the question correctly, but a large part didn't, and that's the actual kicker of the article.
Radia - The Greatest Tilt iPhone Game Ever