skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even assuming they can find buyers for enough of the collection to pay the taxes, that's an enormous, instantaneous pile of stress on the children of a parent who just died and is probably missed tremendously.

Hey kids, I hear your parent died? Great! You owe us 500 million dollars, get to work.

I think estate taxes are defensible, but the way this particular estate was handled doesn't seem defensible. Out of all the things someone could do with their vast fortunes, buying art and then loaning it out to museums and collections doesn't seem like the worst thing in the world.

In particular, the article points out that black market valuations may have even been considered when valuing the art in the estate: That means the government is basically encouraging these works of art to be sold on the black market (likely to private collectors who will keep them in private), where if they were at least sold on the open market - or in this case, held by the original owners - they would be more likely to be put on loan to museums so the public could benefit from them.

Alternately, in a case like this where it's illegal to sell the item being taxed, the government should offer the option of simply handing it over to them in order to erase the tax liability, or giving it to a charity, in order to conclusively demonstrate that no profit is being made from the work of art (black market or otherwise).
MELPA co-maintainer here. MELPA builds packages from source, so once there's a recipe, there's no need for package developers to prepare or upload new package files -- the packages just appear automatically on MELPA soon after the source code is updated.
I can't remember a single case of patenting improving consumer experience in the modern era.

The way I see it, patents are designed to improve capitalist behaviour, once where your ideas are protected: the march towards innovation is strictly optional.

It's time instead to consider how dependent our world is on iterative practices. Everything we build on and upon is no longer unique: it's all inspired, and improved.

Jim Jarmusch said this once:

>Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows.

To embrace iteration, we need to get rid of patents. That much is certain.
The sampling frequency doesn't directly effect the audio frequencies it can encode. Telephones do PCM encoding (meaning it has data representing the graph of the sound wave) at 8 kh/z. Following the nyquist sampling theorem (cut your rate by 2), this can allow frequencies up to 4 kh/z (as you said). It's not a hard cutoff though, you can still get most of the sounds above that pitch, they'll just sound pretty weird (as if you were talking on the telephone!)
Would you pay somebody $10 for a blogpost like that?

There's a bunch of those around. Most don't even have ads or any revenue stream other than infamy.
Of course it sucks, in lots of ways. That doesn't mean it isn't also good in lots of other ways. Don't get so attached to your tools, recognise that most things suck in at least a few ways and life will be easier :)

Once you recognise the suckyness you can start thinking about ways it might be reduced. You can also start reasoning about whether things that reduce some dimensions of suck are worth the cost of the other dimensions of suck that they increase.
Power Up Your Brain: Myth vs. Reality
My point isn't that Marx was correct (I really haven't studied him more than topically).

It's that a lot of what's passed off as free-market capitalism is anything but.

In biot's case, arguing that the value generated by an individual should serve as the basis for that person's pay. It isn't, but is only one input (essentially defining the demand curve, and setting a possible upper limit), but the true market pay scale being one that would also have to take into consideration supply. As I noted (somewhat snarkily), market conditions for establishing executive pay fall somewhat short of the free market definition. For a more popular treatment, Eddie Murphey and Dan Akroyd's "Trading Places" explores a similar idea. Mark Lewis's writings on the stock market provide some insight on trader qualifications and pay.

A friend some years ago provided an intriguing argument for why financial traders' pay was as high as it was. It was less a conventional market pricing argument than one of creating incentives to minimize incentives for fraud. Essentially: we're going to pay you so goddamned much money that you'd be completely mental to try to cheat on us and lose out.

I really cannot speak to the merits of this.

What that, and numerous other arguments for the rich getting ever richer do suggest is that there is a class of people who are very well versed at rationalizing their income and remuneration rates.

There's also a great deal of very, very, very sloppy thinking, rationalization, reportage, etc., in economic matters.

I'm also coming to feel that much of economics as it's been taught for the past 150 years or so simply isn't so. That the conditions described by free markets are far less common and far more fragile than commonly believed. That much of macroeconomics is bunkum used, again, to rationalize why them that has gets more (though, oddly, I'm also coming to understand money, fiscal policy, and Keynesian theory better than ever before), and that much of the economic gain is really a power game played for leverage and advantage, rather than for strict financial gain. A lens which makes the MPAA/RIAA, copyright, patent, trade and immigration law, etc., far more understandable.

Jonathen Nitzan's Capital as Power seems to have stumbled on this same insight: http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Power-Creorder-Political-Econo...
What's the international position on this?
I am living/working in the UK startup scene and it seems to me Berlin could become europe early stage garage very soon.
Personally i believe London might be still the place to be after P/M Fit (the place to be in europe…)

What's the US take on this ? Do people actually care outside of the german speaking areas and maybe Uk?
Debating whether patents are good without differentiating on industries seems wrong to me. I've been involved in investments in pharmaceutical companies and investments in IT companies. Those are two completely different worlds.

In the pharmaceutical world founders and employees more often have large opportunity costs by starting or joining a new venture. They are usually in their 30s or 40s with huge student loans, mortgage and kids. They forgo high incomes if they join a start-up. The road to the market is much longer (often more than 10 years). Investment in machinery is also at a completely different level. Drug development usually entails million dollar investment in specialized equipment. Perhaps the most costly aspect of drug development is the regulatory obstacles, such as getting approvals.

In contrast, IT companies are cheap. Founders often have little formal education (Microsoft, Facebook, Skype) and the road to market is much shorter. IT start-ups expect customers (or at least users) in a matter of weeks or months. Many IT companies can get to proof of concept with almost no investment in equipment. The founders simply bring their laptops on board). Regulatory concerns, if any, can usually be dealt with by one lawyer in a few days.

I cannot imagine anyone investing hundreds of millions of dollars in drug development over the course of 10 years without some assurance that competitors can't "steal" their idea. Usually that assurance is a patent or a trade secret. But keeping secrets over 10 years with employees coming and going - that's difficult.

tl;dr: Once you have an idea about, say a shopping cart in a web store, it can be implemented in a few man-weeks. Turning an idea about a new drug into a product often takes thousands of man-years. Whereas the institution of patents seems harmful in the world of software development, it may be necessary in the world drug development.
I think this is targeted at Haskell people looking to compile to JavaScript rather than JavaScript people looking to use a new language.

Roy and Elm are new languages that people who follow Haskell are probably familiar with. Comparing to them makes more sense than comparing to LiveScript if your audience is Haskell programmers.

LiveScript is not really anything like Haskell at all except in some entirely superficial ways. Even the syntax isn't all that similar. Essentially, it's a slightly more functional CoffeeScript. While certainly interesting to the same people and for the same reasons as CoffeeScript, it's not very interesting to people who primarily use Haskell.
Explain yourself.

I don't see any reason to not own patents in order to protect your work from being patent trolled.

Let's say you invent the novel. Right? You don't patent it because you think patents kill babies. Then I act fast enough and quickly patent the novel, because no one did so before. I did it quickly enough to make it unclear who was first. Then I sue your company for copyright infringment.

Yeah, that means I'm an asshole. Doesn't matter, I'm rich now. That's why you should patent you ideas, even if you don't mind other people using them.
Wealth doesn't trickle down
Well, I think my system would actively incentivize the reduction in the number of patents. Fewer patents would lead to higher licensing fee per patent, so you'd have an incentive to only patent the stuff that really matters (since every patent has a base cost to acquire).

Also, I'm not proposing that there be some sort of strict requirement that you must pay the licensing fee for all the patents you use. Obviously cross-licensing agreements and such would still be valid.

What I'm trying to cure is the system the patent trolls currently operate under:

Patent Troll - "I'm going to sue you for $1 mil for infringing my patent unless you pay my licensing fee."

Startup Founder - "How much is your licensing fee?"

Patent Troll - "Only $10,000"

You have to keep in mind that most patent lawsuits never see judgement. They exist only to coerce alleged infringers into paying licensing fees. The problem is that the licensing fees are arbitrary. They are not reflective of any sort of market, but rather reflective of infringement-penalty * chance-of-judgment-against (well, I guess this is a perverse sort of market: a market of jury pools).
Ever heard of a small company called Adobe? How about Autodesk? Or how about every antivirus company on the planet? They might all not have an explicitly recurring revenue stream, but the updates to the software damned near mandate the purchase of a new license to prevent problems with incompatibility.
Maybe it's for tax reasons. Or he's going through a messy divorce and would rather set fire to the money than have to split it.

Cynicism never fails me.
First to file only comes into play if someone is filing a competing patent. You can no longer say that you had it in development 10 years ago and just hadn't released it.

Additionally, proving first to invent is difficult and favors large companies already.

>Now in business the reason you will have a long time lag from invention, prototype, and then into production is lack of capital. It's extremely expensive process and you must have significant ability, credit, and resources to take something to public in a meaningful way.

There is no need to actually produce a full commercial product. All you need to do is publish your work to establish prior art. You can publish and file a patent at the invention and prototype stage. Plus, after you publish it you have up to a year to file for a patent.

Invent something, publish, file for patent, and then develop it commercially.

In practice first to file will have very little effect on the vast majority of patents.
So the coach of a football team could win as many games with a bunch of people off the street as he could with a competitive team?

The CEO is just the pointy end of the stick. They're not the singular reason the company is successful.

If anything the job of the CEO is to not screw up more than it is to be amazing. There are too many bad decisions to be made on a daily basis.
Because there is no need. Lunar race was for dominating ideologically. The USSR decided to 'lose' in exchange for more favorauble grain prices. Would NASA really be able to fly to the Moon, why'd they care to abandon Saturn V and start to buy Kuznetsov engines from Russia (effectively 40 years old tech). They simply were not on the Moon. Saturn was a weak rocket, unable physically to deliver Apollo module to the Moon. Also look for details of the Southwind icebreaker mission in 1970. 8 september. Sorry dude, its all lies, man never been on the Moon. Soviets did not wanted, Americans simply could not.
> I was only able to reject those offers because Instapaper is a healthy business, and the life that Instapaper provides for me and my family is better than what the big companies offered.

The subtext I'm reading here is that none of the offers Marco has received yet are attractive enough for him accept. So he is in the exact-same position as Pulp Wallet and Sparrow then, it's likely that quite a few offers came knocking before the right one came along.
> most bloated kernel?

I wonder how you arrived to such conclusion.
That wasn't clear to me from the description. Very cool btw how the homepage is shown with the same tech as it describes.
Yes, because it is instantaneous, and not months down the line.
Main reasons for Berlin are its young and creative culture, affordable prices (rents, food etc) and overall great quality of live.
The city itself is not the prettiest though, but it has its charme :)

Ive been there a few times at pitch/startups events and always liked the locations and overall vibe.
HTML5 Work Splits Into ‘Living’ And ‘Snapshot’ Standards
Of course the flip side is that if a drug is not patentable then research stops. More effective drugs are replaced with slightly modified, possibly less effective or more dangerous, and definitely shorter track record drugs just to preserve profit margins. If natural compounds are more effective in treating some condition, today's pharmaceutical industry will do all they can to avoid discovering that.

Sure drugs are expensive to development, but I'm not sure that the twisted system of incentives is beneficial overall. Of course the industry will claim that none of this research would happen without patents, but of course they are set up that way and can't imagine it any other way. I doubt that humanity as a whole would simply stop advanced medical research because the economics changed.
Fair point. But somehow, if you're employed, you don't own your inventions: your company does. Your company's policy is sadly not taking your beliefs in account… and if they sue people using your invention, you can't complain.

So basically, you'd have to make the difference between personally owning a patent (in which case you do whatever you want with it) and inventing something for your company (in which case you can't control it).
cmd.exe

Yes really! I prefer its for loops over those of bash: filenames with spaces are no problem . I prefer they way it assembles environment variables: it is easy to put quotes and spaces in them. Tab completion is better: again filenames with spaces plus looping through matches (which I have just discovered bash can do too).

A set of unix/GNU tools does improve it further. I'm just sorry that it costs so much money.
Google doesn't stand to lose much of anything. The other tablet manufacturers have released very few solid tablet products, and mostly at prices that put them at a disadvantage to the iPad. If Google can put out their own tablet with good build quality, decent specs, and reliable software updates for more than a month (I'm looking at you, every other Android device), then they're improving the image of the OS itself as well as giving consumers a better tablet to buy.

What do the other manufacturers have to offer to the ecosystem? A few things, like the Transformer Prime, have been genuinely innovative devices, but it seems like they mostly just dump their own UIs on top of old versions of Android and act like that differentiates their products.
This whole "fraction of America's" crap is really uncalled for. Canada as a country is more populous than many European states that have been very successful on the international stage. Also America is completely eclipsed by countries like China and India that have far larger populations.

Does that mean America's at a "steep disadvantage" to China? For the last century America has done pretty well despite being so far behind in terms of numbers.
NaCl is a side-long step in the right direction, but it gets almost as much wrong as it gets right:

* You have to know what platform you're targeting (ARM vs. x86), which eliminates the browser/JS advantage of architecture abstraction

* You have to recompile specifically for NaCl, which removes any potential benefit on binary reuse

As others have noted, NaCl is closer to ActiveX-reborn than it is to a generic web runtime architecture.
That's nice in theory. In the "real world" it would never work.

The patent office would be too scared to actually award patents and even if they did the due diligence they would do would take ages. During which time copycats could come in and copy the invention. You may as well abolish patents altogether.

A better solution is to punish those companies who are defeated at trial and then strip them of the patents to prevent future lawsuits.
You can't convince people and companies with man-hours.
The girl should have the power to ruin the lives of these boys. If they get a job, she should be able to send a letter to the all their coworkers describing what they did to her. When they enroll in college, she ought to be able to take an ad out in their college newspaper. If they are on Facebook, she ought to be able to take out ads targeting women in the cities where these men live. She is in possession of the truth and nothing should hinder her right to communicate that truth, up to the point of publicly shaming these men into suicide.

I'm not saying she has these rights, I'm just saying she ought to. The truth is not something that should be silenced, even if that means that a few upper-class rapists from the South might not get the life their parents tried to buy.
Bytecode on the web is a shitty idea. The minifiers and obfuscators out there are already breaking "view source" and with that the spirit of the web.

Besides: I can't think of language-neutral bytecode projects that ever worked. Remember Parrot?
> Founders often have little formal education.

This sounds ridiculous. Most founders I've seen had degrees.

And for the three companies you listed. Gates and Zuckerberg both went to Harvard but dropped out. And Zennström had an MBA and Masters of Engineering/Computer Science.
>Then I act fast enough and quickly patent the novel, because no one did so before.

This is incorrect. Prior art would invalidate the patent, since someone is already selling novels--patents have to be novel(no pun intended). You can't patent the idea just because it hasn't been patented already.

If you don't mind other people using your idea, all you have to do is establish prior art by releasing it to the public, either by selling it or publishing it, to prevent anyone else from patenting it.

If you want to make doubly sure the patent office actually finds your prior art when doing a prior art search after someone else applies for a similar patent, you can file and abandon the patent by failing to pay the fees.
This article got a whole lot less interesting with the sentence: "In this instance, the 1940 Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act make it a crime to possess, sell, purchase, barter, transport, import or export any bald eagle — alive or dead. Indeed, the only reason Mrs. Sonnabend was able to hold onto “Canyon,” Mr. Lerner said, was due to an informal nod from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service in 1981."

This is a piece of artwork it's apparently "just as illegal" merely to own. (i.e. illegal under the same clause of federal law.)

Suddenly it sounds like they found some obscure law to value it at $0, and that they would not get in trouble for actually selling it. Rather than appraisers in on the heist, perhaps they should have written to the Fish and Wildlife Service to ask if they can sell the thing to pay the taxes on it. The reason they didn't do that is they didn't want to hear the answer, yes. They want their cake and to eat it, too. (Keep the work but not pay taxes).

I'm not sure I agree with the existence of this kind of tax, but the case isn't as clear as the title and first half of the article make it sound.

Even then, the government revisited the issue in 1998. Rauschenberg himself had to send a notarized statement attesting that the eagle had been killed and stuffed by one of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders long before the 1940 law went into effect. Mrs. Sonnabend was then able to retain ownership as long as the work continued to be exhibited at a public museum. The piece is on a long-term loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which Mr. Lerner said insures it, but the policy details are confidential.

this is respected art with a high market value. They should not have put $0 as its value.

take-home lesson: don't do that.
The thing is: the side effects of such efforts are unknown.

From one of the mailing lists that talks about tDCS, here's a snippet of a recent email that caused me to take pause:

-----

I have never been able to directly correlate anything i've done, or taken, to the severe decline in my sleep quality (both falling, staying asleep). Being diagnosted with sleep apnea has helped, as the machine has been a bit of a help, but not as much as I would have hoped. I'm wondering if any of the tDCS I had done on myself (and i did do a pretty significant amount I guess about 12-18 months ago) might have caused persistent sleep disturbance?

-----

If indeed this person is correct, then it is possible that long term heavy use of tDCS can cause sleep issues. I'd much rather sleep well than play the piano. :-)
A (possibly) radical idea about patents: The Patent Union
Consider a patent club: Google, Apple, Facebook, Nokia and Twitter (more members are always welcome) and they decide to protect the interest of innovation with a simple rule:

If you use a patent to impede progress (as deemed so by the committee), every member of the committee carpet bombs you with IP claims. If you protect your interests, but don’t legislate ridiculously, you get a free pass.

Now its obviously a dream scenario to get firms to come together and sign such agreements (and it still doesn’t solve the existence of patent trolls like Intellectual Ventures, or the classical problems of Union manipulation), consider the benefits for once:

Legal claims are significantly limited: you really don’t want to sue for fear of multiple counter-punches from all sides.
Innovation is upheld (significantly more so than before).
And if a body like the EFF can monitor such a committee, it’s great news for smaller companies who can’t afford the people necessary to maintain compliance.

Disclaimer: Idea may not be radical. Hopefully, it’s still effective.
> I doubt that humanity as a whole would simply stop advanced medical research because the economics changed.

It wouldn't stop but it would definitely decrease significantly. The fact is that many countries are implementing carbon tax/ETS specifically to make the economics more favourable to renewable research and development. So economics matters.