skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
define "strengthened."

I don't know what percentage of patents survive by being read narrowly by a court.

The thing is that three things can happen to a patent when it is challenged:

1) The court can say "that's not a valid patent" kind of like the Supreme Court recently did in Mayo v. Prometheus (Prometheus patented how to interpret test results. The Supreme Court said you couldn't patent the results of the test, just the method of testing.)

2) The court can say "Ok, so the following is legitimate prior art, and additionally if we read this broadly, it can't be patentable, and so what's left when we read it narrowly and leave out the areas covered by the prior art is yours." In this case the patent is "strengthened" in the sense that everyone has a better idea of what will happen next time in court but it is also narrowed.

3) The court can let the patent stand as-is.

The problem is that while the latter two seem like they strengthen the legal position the next time around, where a patent was previously unknown or disputed, they also weaken the market impact because they provide larger reasons to work around the patent.

So I don't know. I don't see an upside for Apple here other than a very, very temporary edge in the marketplace.
Pretty funny, sadly it seems I am a Unix Geek.

To Understand Recursion you must first understand recursion.
But, why? Suddenly, without any confirmation and rumour?
So using them shows you have no balls to compete freely.

The best patent is the one never enforced. "Apple should focus on competing on the quality of THEIR product" still stands.
Definitely. I don't have any numbers, but over the years just have come to accept that as fact.
Sure. But after the porting work has been done by the distribution vendor, it's done. The package manager software should be able to do whatever is necessary to almost transparently ensure any necessary dependencies are installed for the required sub-architecture. So I would imagine that in most cases, end-users won't notice any hassle except having the option to choose between x32 and x86_64 per package during installation. I think that sounds kind of neat :)
>People already pay a fee for owning non-Apple products. All the crashes, malware, borked phones, wireless never working quite right, external monitors never working quite right, and various circles of driver hell aren't free.

Really?

I thought that was the fee for not using Linux.

(looks around for cover)
This just tells me to go out and buy one of these, since Apple sees it as a threat. Which means its probably a decent device. They haven't pulled a stunt like this on all the other crappy tablets that have come out.
My understanding is that Oracle completely expected this and knew the outcome before they filed it but they need the judgement to be made before they can appeal it.
Google's Schmidt: 'We always wanted to be in the hardware business'
I have a similar question, I'll use this opportunity to ask it:

If I present the visitor a thing or a service he can buy, is it bad that I need him to sign up separately and confirm his e-mail before he can actually press "place order"?

I guess it sounds bad from how I'm saying it, but my concerns are the security (confirmed e-mail = you can reach the person) and work investment (creating a form that would do two logically-separate things at the time is more work).

So what do you guys think? Should I let people do anything without a confirmed e-mail address and work on merging sign-up, sign-in and place-order forms together?
x32 is useful for VM-based languages: Java, Python, Ruby, Erlang, etc.
Letter From The Editor: The Lessons Of Innovation
Evidently Apple has patented the rectangle and working their way up to the wheel....
I would always let people test free stuff without an account, and for features that can only work with an account, create a guest one automagically that the user can convert into a proper account if they wish to use those features for more than one session.
Kata Kata Mutiara
It's sad to see what Apple is becoming.

They can not win this war, probably not even delay the outcome by a measurable margin.

Meanwhile Android begins to leapfrog them not only on hardware (which has been the case for a while, short of tablets) but also on software and the holy grail of user-experience.

They still have quite an edge on the UX-front but that is destined to fade if they don't come to their senses really soon now.
One problem Apple computer had is that it's trademark was limited to computing. That caused problems when they branched out to other markets such as 'computers that can do MIDI'

In particular, they had quite a few disagreements with Apple Records about doing audio. Even though more or less the only people who know Apple Corps/Records think "of the Beatles' records", they took action against Apple even as early as 1978 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer)

I think those lawsuits may have affected company culture at Apple Computer, now Apple Inc.
Taking the night off? Inform the IRS that companies are profiting from uncompensated labor!
Everyone talks about how innovative Apple is and how innovative Steve Jobs was and how he changed 'the world'. But no one talks about how much innovation Apple has crippled more than they had contributed.

For example, a recent broad patent called Universal Search was used by Apple to sue Android OEM's and the end result? The feature was removed from certain Android phones to avoid litigation. And mind you, Universal search had long existed before Apple had patented it. This is just one example, but there are many many broad patents that Apple uses to cripple innovation. The end result is that the users lose more than these companies because they are missing out a lot of features that their devices are capable of implementing. Funny how this is something that is not written much about by these tech Journalists. You never see someone writing how Apple crippled innovation, but only how 'cool' Apple is or how 'innovative' they are. Pathetic.

We need a better, unbiased source for technology news. The current set of tech journalists sound more like Apple sales men. We live in a world where we are forced to read what the journalists think of the news rather than just the news itself. Hope someone from HN builds such a platform.
You might want to do a bit of research on something called a "design patent".
Like briandear mentioned, this is more directed towards Samsung in particular (although Android itself is a big part of it, and this is part of a broader war on Android), but at least part of the reason I think Apple is going after the Galaxy Tab so strongly is that is that, from a physical perspective, it looks quite a bit like the iPad. When a few of my co-workers got them and had them sitting on their desks, I sort of assumed that they were iPads - they very closely resemble them.

While I think Apple would still be pursuing them without the physical resemblance, at least some of the strong reaction you're seeing is due to it, so I wouldn't necessarily take their reaction as an endorsement of the Tab (although I have heard it is quite good).
Influence has a way of perpetuating itself, especially when its protected by nerdy little enclaves. So you are saying that because women (or mexicans or furries) did not contribute in the past, they now deserve to be excluded in the future?
I think what rwmj is saying is:

State total cost = State front line workers' salaries + State overheads
Private sector total cost = Private sector front line workers' salaries + Private sector overheads + Profit.

Overheads are everything from paddy wagons to radios to uniforms to back office staff to police horses loaned to Rebekah Brooks to the G4S CEO's £830K/year salary. Private sector firms will presumably only bid on a contract if the profit is positive, I'd agree that's a truism. But is the profit positive because the private sector total cost is higher, or because the private sector front line workers' salaries are lower, or because the private sector overheads are lower?

I think that's what rwmj wants evidence of.
I think this is a case of the usual issues of in-sourcing vs outsourcing. I know a large insurance company that flip-flops on their decisions every 3-5 years. When in-sourced, staff are "lazy, cost too much, can't be fired due to HR rules, etc, etc" so they outsource, at which point the outsourcer becomes "they are not responsive, too hard to work with, every little items needs to be tallied against the contract, every little change requires too much time and requirements specification, etc, etc" so they turn around and in-source again, to begin the cycle over again.

In theory, in-sourced allows for better flexibility on what work is being performed (you are already paying the dollars for hours, so you can allocate as you desire) but you may lack expertise, less flexibility to expand then reduce/contract the workforce (which is especially true with governments and their unions), too hard to get rid of people if they do not grow skills and adapt as the organization changes, etc. Outsourcing works well when there are well defined boundaries, and requirements to expand/contract the workforce (within reasonable limits, the problem here is that the Olympics are too big for an outsourcer to deal with because there are not enough staff in reserve).
I'm not sure what the purpose of that was. Clearly, you CAN light a small bulb with a battery and wire, as done in the video and introductory physics classes everywhere. So... is it the fact that the students were unable to figure out that the battery produced insufficient power to light the big bulb? That shows a lack of "fundamental understanding about electricity"? More like a lack of knowledge about power requirements of household light bulbs.
Lets at least compare the products in question. The link in your comment compares the Galaxy Tab 7 to the iPad 2, and even then is making its comparison based on very old pictures. I went to Samsung's and Apple's website and downloaded images of the home screen of the products in question.

Quick side by side job-

Tab10 vs iPad: http://i.imgur.com/3jnEf.png

Galaxy Nexus vs iPhone: http://i.imgur.com/eZAyj.png

You are free to choose which you think looks "better" but the design is not even similar. One is made of glass of and aluminum, the other of glass and plastic. The differences between the the Galaxy Nexus and the 4s is even more striking. My comparison doesn't go a good job of showing the scale but they are no where near the same size either.

If you really want to compare old and completely unrelated devices, have a look at this picture that made its rounds on Google+ during the #boycottapple time: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nMgzXpDyNhA/Ta3iBWUo3bI/AAAAAAAAM1...
Experiment 19: The back story of Microsoft's work to bring NT core to ARM
Wikipedia has long adopted those of your rules that are workable and discussed all of them at great length. None of the rules you propose is any use as an alternative to notability criteria. None of the rules you propose is simple to apply in the real world.

Notability is a technical term on Wikipedia. It's a mistake to interpret it as the common English word or concept. It's also not all that subjective: When defined for all possible articles, notability is necessarily extremely abstract. However, notability is being refined and re-interpreted for specific areas in a community process. I'm not always happy about this process, and I certainly don't agree with its results in all cases, but that's a different issue.

It's this process that matters. There has to be some process to determine whether an article gets included (though extreme inclusionists may disagree). For this process, Wikipedia:Notability is the constitutional law, the individual Wikiprojects' notability criteria are the law derived from the constitution, both of which are applied to specific instances, in a system with a rich body of case law and with various bodies for arbitration.

In a way, it's more useful to think about notability not as an attribute of an entity, but simply as a short verdict of the current process. In other words, a thing is not notable enough to get its own Wikipedia article, but rather the fact that it got included and remained included makes it notable according to the technical meaning of Wikipedia.

Of course this is complicated and of course there are horrible downsides of having such a complicated system. Maybe we should just opt for a simpler system and resign to the fact that the end result will be worse. However I doubt that people would herald the new inclusionist Wikipedia where everyone's dad can get an article, instead they'd mercilessly pounce on the new Wikipedia full of spam, self-advertising, non-referenced, non-verified, non-sensical and attack articles.
The Cost of Free Doughnuts
The Trouble with Ouya
Throw in Jesus and Zappa. As likely to happen.
Grow up.

The simple fact is this: Apple can't demonstrate 10, let alone any meaningful number of people who accidentally bought a Galaxy when they meant to pick up an iPad/iPhone.

It doesn't happen.
Excuse me, but what is this doing on the front page? This is not edifying in the slightest.
NO. OMG NO. This (artistic) class of algorithm makes things look pretty, but does not add information and ABSOLUTELY does not add evidence. Any serious mention of generative algorithms in the context of evidence is at best negligent.

Humans are easily fooled. They will look at a fuzzy picture and see possibilities, but they will look at the output of this algorithm and see fact. There are other algorithms that predict the possibility of objects (usually letters) producing an image that are more suited for investigative work.
I hope you are consistent with that belief.

Because what Samsung is doing with its FRAND patents is 100x worse than what Apple is doing.
Fun fact: In 1999, Mozilla (around its M11 release) introduced a "Search" button to the location field [0] which meant a unified input box. Firefox and its two-field setup is, absurdly enough, a later move. I can't point out when it happened, or if it was already there in the earliest days.. The single box is still there in Seamonkey, though, iirc.

[0] http://www.andrewturnbull.net/mozilla/history.html
Technically, all modern Windows versions have PAE enabled (the NX bit requires enabling PAE for instance), but Windows adds license-based memory restrictions on top of that.

That's how the 2GB limit on Starter, the 4GB limit on non-server and the various limits on server editions are implemented.

And there is a kernel hack/patch to lift that restriction, although it is of course fully unsupported: http://superuser.com/questions/52275/how-can-i-enable-pae-on...
Still, I think a patent only reaches functional aspects.

I would be just as surprised if you could patent a shade of green as if you could patent the meaning of a test result.
Show HN: Band of Google software engineers playing NYC gig tonight
Chances of me signing up for a service which has an online demo - increase - because I can actually know what am I getting into.

However, at the same time if the demo looks crappy enough, chances of me signing up decrease exponentially.
I would say you should combine them. As long as you provide an easy way for contacting in case they have a problem, they best thing you can do is simplify the registration/purchase process.
Is it possible to prove that 0.99... = 1? If yes, how?
To be fair, no. They argument is not that the device is rectangular. Their argument is that very specific elements of the device and its packaging are virtually identical to Apple's designs.
I'm still not quite sure what to think about Windows 8 and the new Metro-style apps. My first (and somewhat lasting) reaction was that I didn't like the design, but I wasn't sure if it was because it was actually bad or if it was just new.

I think part of it is that the Metro style apps seem heavily slanted toward consumer/social apps, designed with a tablet in mind first. Utility/business apps don't seem to fit the Metro style as well, and now that I've seen some examples of such apps built with Metro, I feel inclined to hold off on porting my Mac app to it.

I hope I'm wrong, but it feels like in some ways, Microsoft is making the opposite (but similar) mistake they made with tablets in the past - this time, they are forcing a tablet paradigm onto the desktop.
>many technical types who aren't really mathematicians can do that because they've read enough popular math books.

Well, fizzbuzz doesn't exactly require a masters degree either. Proving sqrt(2) is irrational requires at least some understanding of how math problems are approached (unless you do it completely from memory, which is also possible with fizzbuzz), so I would say it's the equivalent.
Or, if the masters are too hard at first, see if their pupils have written annotations. I tried Turing, couldn't even understand why what he was talking about was important (or why his "computers" seem so much... lamer than the ones I was used to), and then found Charles Petzold's "Annotated Turing".

http://www.charlespetzold.com/AnnotatedTuring/

He takes Turing's "On Computable Numbers..." and mixes in chapters giving the necessary background on the history of mathematics, number theory, logic, etc. in-line (albeit, it takes about 100 pages to get to the first sentence of Turing's paper). I whole-heartedly recommend it.
I dual boot Ubuntu 12.04 32-bit and Windows 7 32-bit on my HP laptop, it has 8GB of RAM. When I am running Ubuntu I see 7.8GB (I'm assuming this is 1000 vs 1024 issue and doesn't concern me) in my system settings and resource monitor. When I am running Windows I only see 3.8GB of RAM in resource monitor, but I see the full 8GB if I look in device manager. Can somebody explain this to me?
> [As related by Mowlana Shamsud'din Tabrizi.]

This needs to be corrected. The story is called the "blind grammarian" and naturally far more robust in the original by Shams (as translated into English) than my recollection above. There is also a second part to it that has been omitted.
The galaxy nexus is a stock android device, no such UI modifications from samsung are present here. Instead, apple is going after device-wide search and some other ridiculous patents.
Testing your LDAP code with OpenDJ
Even with PAE, many Windows versions hard limit the available RAM to 4GB (or less). So his answer isn't even correct given the reality of many operating systems & hardware.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension#Oper...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_GB_barrier
You might want to read before posting. There are no design patents being used in the Galaxy Nexus ban. Their argument is Samsung copied "unified search".
One thing is being a good programmer and wholly another selling oneself as good programmer. And that's absolutely not sad state of affairs; it is how it is and it is how it should be.
The stuff has been aluminium for a century, but that doesn't make any difference to its RF blocking abilities - Al is actually rather better.
The trick is to wrap it so that there are no gaps, phone signals will get out of tiny gaps.

... of course before even tin "tinfoil" things were tough. Mother would be stood over her anvil in the kitchen battering the wrought iron over the tops of left-overs
Simply using a language to build interesting software doesn't make it good.
Other recent suggestions include:

* Show that two irrationals can add up to a rational.

* Find three whole numbers in arithmetic progression whose product is a prime.

* Find a prime that is one less than a square. Now find another.
Because it's highly publicized...
Apple is definitely a patent troll, even if they're doing it indirectly. Ever hear of the Rockstar Consortium?

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/05/rockstar/
But the point is people are using the computer - previously they wouldn't touch it unless they absolutely have to.

Facebook has played its part in that - but in the main computers were "those bastard machines I have to use for work" and only used under duress.
BD - Humour - Illustrations
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Patrick patarsort@yahoo.fr

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Your analysis here is entirely wrong. Please stop spreading misinformation.
well I was just trying to make the point on the implications some forms of viewing things and doors they leave open

but I guess this is also aching to political/ideological views, as I am very libertarian... Anyway, this argument has lost its purpose, better let it die, be good!
I love the fact that the huge legal teams from Samsung, HTC, Google etc can't find prior art for Apple's "universal search" patent but you can.

Or maybe if you actually read the patent you would realise it is for a specific client side, plug-in based implementation which at its time definitely didn't exist on any OS.
With that kind of attitude, why are you here?
I have a dirty secret that so far has not turned out poorly, but which could.

About a decade ago, before I was fully aware of the problems with patents, my employer asked me to assist in the filing of a patent on some work that I had done. Because it was my job, I complied. Then about 5 years ago they contacted me about the patent application, I answered a few simple questions and did a bit of routine paperwork as I believe was required of me based on contracts signed during my previous employment.

The patent was granted. Unbeknownst to me, 2 follow-on patents were also granted.

I learned recently that these patents were evaluated by 2 patent trolls, and both agreed that they were worth over $100 million dollars. Easily.

Why so much? Well we had done a careful review of the technology at the time, had demonstrated that we were solving a problem that a lot of companies were trying to solve, and our solution was different than any of theirs and had advantages. And since then other people had independently recreated the same solution, and now big companies like Facebook were infringing.

Luckily that patent wound up going into the hands of RPX instead of to the patent trolls. Unfortunately in the small print of RPX' FAQ you can find that while they are not a patent troll, they are willing to sell patents. So there is a non-zero possibility that those patents could be sold to a troll that could start suing people.

But here is the key takeaway. Software patents these days are most valuable when you did it first, then other people redid it without knowing about you. In other words patents have become pretty much a pure tax on real innovation rather than an incentive to innovate.

I apologize in advance should my actions wind up contributing to the current patent mess that our industry is caught up in.
I recently started highlighting a demo option next to the sign up button on my site. The total number of people who signed up for a free trial dropped, but that's only because there are a bunch of people who aren't a good fit for the service, and the demo weeded them out. So the total number of signups dropped, but the total number of people that paid at the end of the trial period went up significantly.