skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that it would be an apocalyptic scenario and would require a lot of things to go wrong. But if every eurozone member only thinks about its immediate interests instead of working together and acting in a decisive manner, everything could really go wrong.
> If an unlimited use license is $10, it's not worth the patent owner's time to write a letter asking for the license fee.

I guess that's kind of the point.

Patents only inhibit innovation when they can be used as a cudgel to force inventors into paying exorbitant fees. If fees are inversely proportional to the proliferation of patents in an area, the natural incentive is to only patent that which is important.
While I agree with your larger point, that retribution (and worse) is not justice, I wouldn't put too much weight on the study you mention.

It's extraordinarily difficult to 'give details' in a completely neutral frame. Without knowing the details of the study, its hard to say more. It seems likely to me that they probably found what they were looking for.
Humans have won the gene lottery compared to other primates, what makes the next step hard to digest?
Chinese Media Crackdown
Well the reality right now isn't too different. Ignoring the bald-eagle situation, they sell some of the items to pay for the tax bill, and keep the remainder.

The government wants cash, it has no use for paintings!
Worse, we hear about it 24/7 until the next thing comes along to peak the interest of the media. We don't hear a lot about the 14 things higher on the list of things killing people in the USA (which affects their funding in Congress).

Hell, the rush in the media is so obscene that major news networks make stuff up. ABC seems to be the most guilty party this time, but we have had other incidents.

We have a no attention span media and it does hurt because we cannot get a good idea of what actually went on, and will never no if there is some warning sign that could of tipped people off (like the whole AZ shooting seems to be a collection of not my problems).

I have no idea how we get past this. Concentrating on the object (gun in this case) will not work (check out IED or actual crime rate statistics). Looking at the stats, your safer today then 10 years ago and much safer than the 1970s.
"This is very, very far away from the majority view of modern psychology (which has dismissed the vast majority of Freudian thought), but I still hear it repeated all the damn time."

Actually a lot of therapists still use personal mythology construction as a therapy tool, which is very similar to Freud's idea of directing anger outward in the sense that both creating a new identity for the person or strengthening their existing one. It's basically the same idea but expanded a bit and better explained. If you search for personal mythology on Amazon there are all sorts of books about this.
Each time I'm amazed by the lack of imagination of imaginary killers. "I don't have a gun... well better take my kitchen knife then!"
Really? REALLY?

Take your car and ram into people. You will probably be able to kill the same amount (or even more).

And while you're in your car, contrary to simply using a gun, you can't be stopped by someone else having a gun. Anyone wanting to stop you in a timely manner would have to sacrifice himself by driving into you.

It's easy to point the gun, because its sole purpose is to cause harm (be it in defence or offence), but if someone wants to kill, he can do with or without a firearm.
I've often seen SICP recommended as a good overall introduction to computer science and programming although I haven't fully read it myself. It is available for free online: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/

I am not sure about networking but whenever I want to find a good book on a given topic, I usually head to Amazon.com and find out the bestsellers or highest rated books: http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_nr_n_5?rh=n%3A283155%...
We live in public may be what you're looking for.
(Am not a lawyer, but am a tech entrepreneur whose job is to somewhat understand patent law:)

Yes, you would, in the USA. If you are not ever sued for infringing, nor asked to pay licensing fees by an agent of the patent holder, nothing happens and it's effectively moot. This is the most likely outcome.

If you are sued/asked to pay, you could try to invalidate the patent (or threaten that) because there is prior art... i.e. your implementation. You can only do that if you can prove that you implemented it, at a specific date sometime before the patent filing. This may not be easy. In fact - and ideally, there is a USPTO officer reading this who can comment - it may be the case that something can only be considered prior art if it's been published in a textbook, tech industry journal article, etc. (Or if there another existing patent for it).

Ideally your evidence is so strong, the patent holder will look at it and decide it's not worth taking you to court (i.e. they believe they will lose, or even risk getting their patent invalidated). Then they back away slowly from you, going after easier prey.

If you go to court for any reason, it's likely to be a long, hard drain on your energy, time and money.
It's also not a new thing. Typically when something like this is happening in the world, someone finds their way onto reddit and keeps a flow of information going.

Here's me doing this almost two years ago: http://reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/d8b6b/noooo_a_gunman...
The Whiskey Rebellion
But why grant software patents at all?

Software is already protected with copyrights as literary works. Copyright protection is not as broad as patent protection. It doesn't prevent competitors from writing a program with similar features but different source code, but it does protect against competitors copying the source code.
> I am not against patents. I am against the granting of patents for non-inventions.

Agree, to the point where I could let this summarize my view on patent related problems. There is obviously something wrong with the USPTOs cultural definition of obviousness. Part of it is as you say that they see patents as the only prior art (in practice - I know it's not so in theory). But another part is that they seem to think that the slightest difference in comparison to prior art suddenly makes it non-obvious. That's ridiculous. The obviousness of a patent claim has to be judged in light of prior art. The test should be that the difference is non-obvious "to a person skilled in the art".
What exactly is Urge.io creating?
Certain rights can be signed away. A right that cannot be given up, even willingly, is called an 'inalienable' right.

Thus in most of the world today, you cannot willingly sell yourself into slavery.
How will you pay for it? Furthermore, how long will it take this (for now) theoretical career in ML which will require an MS to pay off the money you sunk into your degree?

Can you afford it mentally? How much time and effort can you afford to siphon away from your work to excel at your math studies? You can't go full-bore on both.

While some on HN I'm sure have been working software engineers AND pursued a bachelor's degree AND received it in only 4 years (or less, even), the truth is that it is very, very difficult. There will be a lot of misery, and a lot of time & money spent on something that, for now, is over a decade away.
Not Sleeping In
>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.

Yeah, it sucks, and it's not ideal, but out of all the places the government can extract money to benefit society, it's one of the most effective and least painful in the big picture.
Your source fiddled with the PISA numbers for the USA to exclude all students of non-European descent. I'm not sure what s/he was trying to prove.

This post breaks results down by income segment and suggests that if you exclude poverty, the USA does indeed do great. Otherwise the USA as a whole is no better than average, maybe a little below average.

http://www.schoolfunding.info/news/policy/2011-01PISA.php3

I have to say this agrees with my anecdotal experience of the USA. If you went to high school in Palo Alto, you might be having enriching experiences that even students in rich European countries can only dream about. Or you could be like the students some friends of mine tutored in North Carolina, who were not aware of what the Duke University buildings in their city were for.

I'm not actually knocking the USA. It faces social challenges that no other country faces, and often gets a bad rap from critics who've never even visited and think it's populated by sociopathic Randroids. But it is a country of enormous contrasts.
I would love to buy one of the 10,000 sq metre mills 5 mins taxi from Manchester's central Picadilly train station and turn it into startup accomodation. We're only 2 hours from London's Euston!! (So less than 3 hours from Shorditch)

Berlin however does seem to have the greatest multicultural vibe going for it for startups. It's pretty impressive, and I hope to sample it later in the year :)
Is this "real" money, or is this 300X-leveraged financial instruments that could evaporate if someone breathes too hard.
... and if it were made to circulate, we'd have hyperinflation and it would quickly become worthless. But I doubt that it can be made to circulate. I doubt that this is cash.
FTA:
“[It] is because of Firefox and other open-source projects like Apache and Linux that the web, smartphones, and the technology sector in general are so healthy. 15 years ago, as IE6 and Nutscrape fought over various non-standard implementations of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, no one would’ve predicted that today there would be standard implementations of all three.”

I object. Mozilla Firefox 1 came out in November of 2004. Apple Safari 1 came out in June of 2003. By then, WebKit had already been around for several years. In mobile, Mozilla's browsers play little to no role, nearly all mobile platforms use WebKit. In 2007, Mobile Safari was the first decent mobile web browser. It's silly to credit Mozilla with the advances of the mobile web.

“10 years ago, [...] no one would’ve guessed that today you could write a full-blown program with open web technologies and have it run equally well on dozens of different software platforms.”

Let's be honest, that's still not really the case. In the US, 40% of web usage comes from IE. About half of that comes from IE version 8 or lower [1]. I wouldn't say that full-blown web apps run as well in IE8.

[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-US-monthly-201106-201206
Previous submission of canonical URL that reached the front page of HN yesterday with multiple comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4276216
This article reminds me just a bit of these: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2008/10/22/revisiting-the-dumbes...

It certainly doesn't have to turn out that way in this case, but for the sake of the open web and software, I would love to be able to look back at the title "Firefox OS doesn’t stand a chance" and laugh.
Here is an idea I just had. What if the PACs where required to list their 10 top contributors on any ad that they run.
> Now look at the United States list as a comparison: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_the_United....

You realize this list contains everything from wars, to 9/11, to drug gang battles, etc, etc. It is not even remotely comparable to a list of actions with "no apparent motive".
I'm not sure if as user I want to use a platform where the apps are written by people who think Java is heard to learn. It's not a simple language by any means, but it's also hardly a difficult language to learn.
Yes Firefox OS might not catch the momentum the expect it to.
But other than using words such as "Hyper-Competitive" the author fails to provide even one cogent argument for why he is so sure that the Firefox OS will fail.

Lot of developers are already excited about this and there are a couple of large Carriers that have already announced their support. Apple or Google or MS could indeed "implement the same spec" (whatever that means) but that would prove to be a good thing.

Not worth reading.
De beste last minutes met Thomas Cook - Richting Vakantie
First of I'll assume that by computer science you really mean software engineering, more specifically network and web applications engineering. Otherwise if you want deep CS foundations start by getting a good CS theory book (Sipser or Hopcroft et Al.), and a good algorithms book(Skiena or Cormen), and complement them with some introductory logic(phil/math introductions are generally good enough).

For the "how does the web work question", the real question is if you are really interested in knowing that, if so "Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach" gives a really in depth analysis of protocols at the different levels of abstraction. Otherwise most web related O'Reilly books cover the surface of what you need to know to develop applications at most small corporations.
Hrm, well, it is Firefox that went from nothing to 25-30% in a few years:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Browser_Wars.svg

Yeah, WebKit is old, but it wasn't until Chrome came along that it actually made inroads in Windows browser share -- and let's face it, that was the platform that developers focused on for over a decade, until the recent smartphone/tablet revolution.
Projects like this are motivated by a belief that JavaScript _is_ web assembly, though.
Just a minor nit with the opening paragraph - citizens united did not give corporations any rights. It merely reaffirmed the free speech rights of their owners. I.e., you have the right to free speech, and you can use your computer, your telephone or your corporation to further that speech.

Among other things, Citizens United protects the free speech rights of the owners of computers, a topic we discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4139590
"Computer science" is a misleading search term for learning about web development, that's likely to point you towards things like algorithms & big O notation. By all means, learn that stuff too (it will make you a better programmer), but also look into the protocols and conventions the web is built on.

For example, here's RFC 2616 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt), the primary definition for HTTP/1.1. Try writing a web server just using sockets in Python/Ruby/whatever, based off of that. Don't worry about performance, handling more than one client at a time, or covering the complete spec, just look at how the essentials fit together.

I learned a LOT doing this (in Lua); I learn best building from the bottom up. If you learn better top down, try digging down from whatever platform(s)/framework(s) you're using now.

If you want to dig deeper, look into distributed systems, Unix network programming (Stevens's books are great), and let your interests lead you from there.
> You think some person with a handgun would stand much of a chance against someone in body armor with an assault rifle?

Considering he was stopped simply by 2 people tackling him I would say: quite possibly.
The way I see it is this:

HTML5 still early days so it's like a new games console, get some ok things but not alot of wow as people still finding there feet and what you can do and how best to do it. It's also using more CPU/resources than more lower level of approach's.

Now CPU's/resources get faster and cheaper and the bettery life moves on slowly. So eventualy you get a enviroment were you can run various levels of obfiscation to the raw tin and still give a good user experience.

PROS: HTML5 aint going away, can allow developers to more easily port your applications and as for having to do alot of effort into a development enviroment and IDE then 99% of that work is just done for you with a little documentation needed on your part pretty much

CONS: New, different, still being embraced and in many ways HTML5 is being is the WEB 2.0 promised years ago which ended up being part of the reason Nortel broke (they did some cool stuff ahead of it's time, too ahead sadly). But this time it is the right shoe and the right noise with the backing to work this time around. Though it is a resource overhead Android is a virtual machine so that is kinda already covered by hardware. It's just different for mobiles in many ways, but at the same time logical.

So the way I see it is that in many ways it can't fail, even if it dosn't become the next mobile enviroment, the way things are going it could become a virtual enviroment that runs on any mobile and in that be a sufo application-GUI that sits ontop of Android or IOS or the like. In many ways it helps converge desktop and mobile development and in a way that makes sence with were we are today. So in many ways I see it garanteed to do well, though maybe not as the envorment initialy entended, alot of good will come from it.

Now I'd love a phone that had a micro/dual boot OS in that it booted up in nanoseconds allowing me to do a simple make and recieve calls in a sudo micro-kernel approach and loaded up the fancy gubbins in the background on one of the many cores available to do such things. With this type of mobile OS, such things become alot more viable i feel and in that I look forward to the outcome.

Be nice if you cold just buy your phone and had a choice of the operating system as well, manufacturers pay attention, as for you then you could sell hardware and have another company sell the OS and make all the IP trolls have a harder time blocking hardware over a simple software issue in a OS. I realy wished they would. If you gave the OS away then that would also limit certain types of lawsuits fiscaly as well. Also be interesting when Samsung go we want to be able to sell IOS for our new mobile phone as a option to the free bada/android/mozilla/symbian.... options. Fun times ahead - hopefully.
I've read SICP, and while it is a brilliant book, I think it is a really bad suggestion here, given what the op seems to be interested in.

SICP is a great introduction to programming topics like recursion, abstraction, and implementation of programming languages. It teaches a way of thinking about programming, which is quite abstract. It is utterly unhelpful if you're interested, as the op seems to be, in the more practical concepts of real-world systems, and the internet / web-development in particular.
To quote robomartin (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4275361): "I am not against patents. I am against the granting of patents for non-inventions."

The main problem IMHO is the cultural definition of "obviousness" among patent examiners. They seem to think

a) that (in practice) all meaningful prior art is patented so all they have to do to find it is search their patent databases and

b) the slightest difference between prior art and a new "invention" makes the "invention" non-obvious.

IMHO prior art should be whatever you can find in library and (more importantly) on the Internet. The test should be that the difference is non-obvious "to a person skilled in the art", i.e. the inventive step itself has to be non-obvious.
Apple’s infiltration strategy for the enterprise market
I think you want the basics of networking as it relates to the World Wide Web. So let's start at the bottom of the stack and go all the way up to a webpage:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_switching

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Protocol

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Datagram_Protocol

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client_server

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Http

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Sockets_Layer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_script

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-process_communication

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorythm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_%28programming_language%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sql

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_known_ports

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_page_rank

There are good links at the ends of these articles. If you can remember some of the history of these various technologies and mention it in an interview it could be the deciding factor for a nerd to give you the job :-)
Looking beyond Silicon Valleys Bubble
Where do you get the idea that museums wouldn't or couldn't purchase the work, assuming this purchase is OK'd by the government first - which given the history here and the work in question the family can easily count on?

Your comment doesn't make sense in light of the fact that the family was forced to put the work on display, which doesn't sound like they "can do the other trappings of ownership but No One Else Can".

The article says: "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. {P} Even then, the government revisited the issue in 1998. Rauschenberg himself had to send a notarized statement attesting that the eagle had been killed...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 does not sound to me like it matches what you are saying at all. Quite to the contrary, it sounds like this work is quite special and important and for this reason was given these exemptions - this makes it quite likely for a sale to a museum to be approved, and the family has every reason to believe this.

So we must return to why you would say that a museum wouldn't or couldn't buy it (after saying earlier in your comment that museums were allowed to own such works, though the article does not make this blanket statement.)
Yes, I agree, that would still be a successful outcome. In the last paragraph, I pretty much state that the web is in such a good state today because of Firefox -- I guess I should've explicitly tied the smartphone OS into that sentiment, too.

From a few conversations with various bigwigs at Mozilla, they're definitely not worried about absolute market share. They see themselves as custodians of the web. As long as everything remains open and free, then they feel like they've succeeded.
Please hack LuaJIT into WebKit. I was thinking of doing something even more crazy: hack Mono into WebKit!
Thought #19: Virtual Library
Well, being that 'sucks' is subjective, and every language 'sucks' under different scrutiny, then this statement is as useful as "Javascript is a programming language". Useful in almost no contexts, but completely inane and irrelevant when having a discussion on web programming.
Javascript is an usable language, just need an open mind to learn it.

Javascript is a simple language. Compile(translate) other language seems good. But complicated things.
It was a combination of the (1) court order and (2) the juvenile court proceedings combined that appear to give grounds for charging the victim with revealing her attackers' names.

Juvenile court proceedings are confidential in every state. Witnesses (including victims) who appear in juvenile proceedings are informed that the names of all juveniles party to the case must remain confidential. This is both to protect the juveniles involved (victim, defendants, and witnesses) and to prevent their immature acts of youth from haunting them as adults (assuming no recidivism as an adult).
Some of those American massacres go back to the 14th century. It's quite possible that more have occurred in the USA than the UK, but that's hardly a fair comparison.