skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does anyone have any thoughts on the lack of conformity to PEP8? His code works and it's valid python but I feel that it's difficult to read.
How to let the user know something is a design idea not an implementation idea.
It's not hard to argue that only the one that involves money is theft.

Not that that argument is exactly where I would stand, but I think you're on shaky ground to call them the same crime with the difference being magnitude.
This is a consumer. Do the opinions of consumers matter?

All that matters to Apple is sales. Do they care what consumers say about them on the web? Silence the nonbelievers!

Consumers do not need to understand patent law to make purchase decisions. But most consumers know what lawsuits are, especially ones that make a mockery of the justice system.

It's possible many consumers really don't care if they're buying Apple or Samsung. If they did care, if they only wanted Apple products, then Apple wouldn't need to sue other manufacturers, would they?
I'm not commenting on the legal issue, I'm commenting on the memo that claims a moral, values-based argument for this legal action.
What about "stealing" the pull-down notifications in iOS 5? That's clearly taken from android.
I apologize for any confusion I caused by being vague.

Firstly, I meant for Windows Phone 7. Not Windows in general.

Secondly, yes, Samsung did indeed try to make a product that appeared similar to Apple's.
http://i.imgur.com/TmUj2.jpg

Sure, there are elements of design that endure and designers draw inspiration from that, but Samsung's copying was just shameless. Look to HTC for another example of an Android OEM that didn't have to make their products look so similar to Apple ones.
But it wasn't (all) about the money. It was personal.

http://www.macrumors.com/2011/10/20/from-steve-jobs-biograph...

"I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong," Jobs said. "I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this."

With that in mind, the email reads far more genuine than the blog post implies.
Hmm - i really dont agree with this. Apple revolutionised the industry - before the iPhone we were using tiny screens with Nokia SMS interfaces or Motorla RAZR. Apple frankly blew the industry apart.

"These are not patents on innovation, they’re patents on simple ideas and features that you didn’t even think of first but you were the first to patent."

Then the magical aspect of patent law called "prior art" would come into play and it wouldn't be patentable. Yet it is - and yet despite all of Samsungs insistences and millions (no doubt) spent on prior art research - nothing has been shown prior to the date of filing that anything existed. It's no different than Amazon's One-click.

It would be interesting - if you invented something, you spent ten-of-thousands on patents, you spent huge amounts of capital in developing a product - you launch it to much positive press and then someone simply copies everything you have done. You're a small business - what do you do now ? According to your article you sit back and say "oh thats totally ok because thats innovation and I'm happy that everyone has copied me and destroyed my advantage".

The problems with the patent industry are patents abused by companies who have absolutely no interest in developing them but rather trolling them to simply extract money from other companies. Hence the reason the law should be reformed to attach patentable rights to have a enforceable requirement to actually 'use' the patent - thus destroying the majority of trolls. If you dont actively use it as it is meant to be - you have nothing. The requirements and the search of prior art should be greater and longer - to ensure patents are truly innovative and this should not be the role of the courts (due to expense, time and so on within the legal system)

The entire basis of patents was essentially trying to protect the little guy, with an idea against the onslaught of bigger companies just copying them outright and giving them no chance. You state "gone are the days of Steve Wozniak" and indeed "gone would be the days of apple" long ago - because he just wanted everyone to have everything and thats not how you run any business.

I agree that patent law needs reform - but I totally disagree that your somewhat misconstrued article that we should simply destroy patents all together. It should destroy them if they are not being actively used - but a company trying to protect its innovations in not something that I'm against. If you had a startup and a patentable innovation - it would be ridiculous to assume that you would be willing to forgo millions/billions in revenue for some abstract concept of "a greater good". America is a capitalist society and therefore you are fighting that as a concept - not the patent industry. I know my post will get down-voted but it's a reality of business and running a business - you either file for protection or you don't and get copied.
"All this blog post is one person's misunderstanding of patent and copyright law": If you refer to the current patent laws in the USA, then you're probably right. But I think that laws that grant the possibility to give anybody a 20 years monopoly on something like "double tap to zoom" (or "1-click purchase") are completely against the original spirit of patent laws, very stupid, and, most importantly, pose a severe risk of slowing down innovation almost to a halt.

I just hope that this madness will not come to the EU too (eg the 1-click patent was never granted here).
37 Signals has a great approach where they have open office space, phone booths for private calls, and meeting rooms of varying sizes.

Speaking of research, they should also find out how much it costs to maintain a Ghery building. If you think Facebook stock is bad now wait until you see how a Ghery building affects their bottom line.
Apple's Mistake [2009]
I´m personally quite conflicted in this case:

Apple has a point that Samsung was copying them. Pure, simple, stupid copying, not using elements of it and turning it into something new and great.

On the other side, the ways of protection with patents of tiny bits of it is silly and broken. They are trivial and regard the overall design and should not be allowed.

Famously the Mac itself is based upon the work of Xerox Parc. To the credit of Apple and Steve Jobs they put in a lot of work, made many concepts useable and re-developed the mouse to actually make a consumer product out of it.

For me the morale right or wrong is the following:

make it your own: While heavily using concepts existing prior, you´ll re-combine them into something way better than the thing you copy: That´s ok for me, it has creative value.

copy: You simply dumbly copy things line-by-line without even understanding the basic concepts of why something is great and throw it on the market at a lower prive: That´s wrong and ripping of the creative work of others.

Samsung to me falls quite clearly into the copy category. I doubt that they have a deep understanding of UX design and the subtleties what actually made the iPhone great and delighted the users.
I wish we had fake red lights in Germany, to keep all the crazy obedient bureaucrats occupied. The longer they wait at red lights, the fewer Wikipedia pages they can delete or create new tax forms.
Ask HN: AngelList jumped the shark? Feedback please.
"sending a loud and clear message that stealing isn’t right"

are copyright and patent infringement, the same as stealing, i find the choice of words ... alarming

stealing should be kept related to tangible goods
Apple Gets Terse DoJ Rebuttal in E-book Price Fixing Case
there are quite a few in san mateo, marketo (late growth startup) is in San Mateo for instance.
"It's no different than Amazon's One-click." exactly: It is just as outrageous as 1-click.
Twitter Engineering: How we spent our Summer of Code
I know that some people can do this and good on them for doing it, but not everyone will be in the position to do it.
There shouldn't be any patents for algorithms - algorithms are math, and math is not patentable.
What's wrong about the Galaxy Nexus?
Color Scheme Designer Explained
I don't know of any deeper interpretation of blending. I guess one could look to the 'wisdom of crowds' for anecdotal evidence. There might be connections with consensus and voting systems, but those are mostly discrete AFAIK. It is at least a pragmatic way of exploiting the different biases of the members in the ensemble. In our case, the Netflix predictions we made based on Wikipedia data scored worse on their own than ratings-only predictions, but they attracted some weight in the blend and made the overall score (marginally) better.
It´s essentially all in the mostly miss-understood Picasso phrase "Good artists copy, great artists steal.". Although the phrase confusing most people more than it helps.

It´s got the basics though that has guided the moral compass of creatives:

If you take inspiration from me and turn it into something mind-blowing, it´s ok. I´m flattered to be a part of it.

If you just plain copy my stuff to make money with it, it´s not ok.
I need to do this every day for clients.
Then if its not innovative - show me the prior art ? There is none - so it's innovative under law - regardless of whether I agree or not. Amazon patented an innovative process unthought of at the time - the fact you apply retrospectivity to it now and look at it as ridiculous does nothing to prove it was not innovative back in 1998. If you thought of this process - would you be happy not to charge Amazon if you patented it ? Lets assume you didn't patent it and now its used by everyone on the planet - would you sit back and think "I wish I had of patented this so I could make millions" ? Again, they're the questions you need to ask because in my view it's a capitalist question over and above hating patent rights. If you didn't choose to patent it and someone took advantage of you - then in every country but America - they would have the rights (as has happened before). America relies on first to invent - but its a big ask and its being abolished in changes passed by congress to fall in line with first-to-file.
> Despite all the outrage around patents being bad, at the end of the day, what is clear is that Android products that did not set out themselves to copy everything Apple had did not find themselves in trouble

Is that clear, or is he just being cute? Are there any android products that aren't currently "in trouble"?

And if legal trouble is the only criteria we need here, what does Apple's settlement with Nokia mean about Apple?

> I would love an Android with bouncy scrolling

Well that just about sums up how stupid the situation is. Sorry, bouncy scrolling. Apple has a 20 year monopoly on you. Nevermind how you're implemented! We don't need pesky implementation details, just knowing that you're a rubber-banding scrolling view on a computing device with touch sensitive display is enough.

> It is clearly possible to create fresh new OS that does not copy the iPhone. Windows Phone, the Palm Pre and Blackberry's new OS show that it is possible.

Saurik summed this up perfectly earlier today:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4430302

People who say this haven't actually tried these phones or they're practicing some powerful cognitive dissonance (or they're fans of the "they're copycats, so I'm just happy they lost" legal approach).

The utility patents that Samsung lost on today weren't magical iphone-making ones, they were things like pinch to zoom. Those other phones "copy" these things too, they just happen to have patent licensing for historical reasoning, or a reasonable threat of serious mutual destruction.

> I agree that many software patents set the bar too low, and I think we should work towards making that bar useful, instead of outright dismissing the whole thing.

People really don't seem to remember that software patents did not exist not too long ago. They are a legal fiction of only the last decade or two, and the sooner the supreme court takes them back on and shuts them down, the better.

Ars has a good take on it, when the EFF started their campaign for at least reforming the software patent system:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/06/opinion-eff-shoul...

Bilski was our last chance, but they ruled narrowly. Hopefully next time...

Edit: Incidentally, Apple had plenty of protections here without the utility patents. There could be no such thing as software patents and Samsung would still have been handed a very large bill for their products. Bullshit patents are not necessary for trademark, trade dress, and copyright protection.
People often leave comments that are poorly worded, poorly thought of and sometimes completely irrelevant, all to make their voice heard and not because they care. There's too many of those here on HN
The Color Scheme Designer tool that the article mentions is amazing:

http://colorschemedesigner.com/
Hindsight, I don't agree with a lot of things in that essay. Its mostly hard lined towards software development point of views.
Hopefully we can do better than taking a quote out of context, interpreting it literally and drawing false contradictions.
When one takes a whole idea and distills it into a short phrase like this, it ends up sounding short and sweet but information is inevitably lost. It is fallacious to attempt to unpack it and interpret it under different context.
To get clear: please no discussion about Alexa's relevance.

I've just the feeling that not too many seriously try to raise money on AngelList, anymore and prefer the classic way over intros and that being on AngelList too long w/o any success can even backfire on your startup's reputation.

What you think?
https://twitter.com/Franceschine/status/239280096173776896
(6560)
I believe that's an example of 'logical indexing', which is a useful feature in many vector-oriented languages / packages:

http://blogs.mathworks.com/steve/2008/01/28/logical-indexing...
I found out via some prodding on Twitter that Supergiant is looking at making a pull request to the main project. I hope they do - their changes (from my limited look at it today) look fantastic overall, but - and, mind, not trying to look a gift horse in the mouth at all - it's often pretty difficult to integrate someone else's large-scale changes without cooperation on their end.
The new Apple mothership and the Ghery Facebook HQ share an affection for poor planning. Neither will be able to accommodate future growth and renovating existing facilities will be difficult logistically. Being able to afford it today doesn't mean they'll be able to afford it in the future. Hopefully they'll be using recyclable materials since neither facility has been designed for permanence.
DAE? Whoops! What is that one? My appeal to the masses? Going off topic? Talking meta?
How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook
My impression was that they were only using half of that campus and that was when I visited somewhat recently. I'm not sure what the objective is here.
Just because something makes you money doesn't mean it's inherently good or useful, and it doesn't mean it should be protected by law. Every time a company's competitors catch up to it, and every time technology makes a company's business model obsolete, they turn to the law to try to wipe the competition/technology out of existence. And, quite frankly, it's bullshit.

You're right, the entire basis of patents was to protect the little guys. But nowadays the exact opposite is happening. Over the last 200 years, the big guys have wielded their influence to change the system to their benefit. And now they abuse patents to crush anything that threatens their leadership position, whether that's a little guy trying to innovate or another big guy trying to play catch up.

Either way, the consumer loses, and for what? Innovation certainly isn't any better off.
You think Apple cares about a measly $1b?

Think about it, the company itself is worth 600+ billion dollars.

They did this more out of principal and to defend their products than anything else.
Nope. The patent should be granted only if it is "not obvious to a skilled practitioner skilled in the art", not just if nobody published the same exact thing before. 1-click WAS obvious in 1998 to any skilled practitioner who knew about cookies.
While lots of MacOS was taken from Xerox’s work it wasn't’t copied, it was licensed.
Donated. Now what about fixing your health care system, Uncle Sam?
You're overly-focused on the existence of prior art. Simply being the first to do something shouldn't automatically give you the right to prevent anyone else from doing it. That philosophy, applied consistently, would lead to ridiculousness.
Ask HN: Good experiences with domain auctioning?
I've got 2 or 3 domain names I'm thinking about selling (they were related to work I used to do but have since stop developing).

Does domain auctioning work? Wheres the best place to auction it? I'm trying to avoid GoDaddy at all costs...
Is it possible that there's in some sense a unique "global optimum" of UI and/or aesthetic design (as opposed to just a bunch of equally good but very different designs), at least as far as is possible under the constraints of available technology and resources at any given time? I would guess probably not for aesthetics (too subjective), but it's reasonable IMO in at least some very minimal cases of UI design - e.g., the idea of using some kind of touchpad gesture to scroll on a laptop. If so, maybe that optimum should be considered a "public good" that no single entity should be allowed to monopolize (or, they could be allowed to monopolize it only for a certain period of time like in the pharmaceutical industry and/or forced to license it for a reasonable fee) - otherwise for all of eternity it's illegal for any other company to use the "best possible UI" in their competing product, and in the meantime the company that filed a patent for it could have stopped developing their product entirely.

Less abstractly, I think the author's point about the standardized "UI" for cars is a good one - society is better off, not worse off, as a result of companies copying each other in the auto industry. If you can drive one car you can drive them all (well...except for the automatic/manual thing). You don't need to spend three days relearning how to drive every time you rent a car. In the same way, society benefits a LOT from familiar UI design across different software companies - e.g., anyone who has ever used any mainstream desktop OS in the past 15 years or so can pretty quickly figure out the basics of any other mainstream desktop OS - they all have programs partitioned into "windows", have a "desktop" with "icons", etc. These UI elements all seem trivially obvious to us precisely because of copying, but there are certainly alternatives to all of them.
They didn't it to get $1b from Samsung. They did it to stop anybody else to compete with the iPhone, and so be able to make even more money.
The Jury system in the US is actually well suited deciding complex moral questions and too much fine print hinders more than it heps, which was evident in this case.

To me, instead of a patent office there should be a central online register to archive jury-understandable photos and descriptions or ideally videos of the stuff you do simply to have a validated reference of when you thought of it.

And then patent/IP Law may simply should read soething like this:
It is ok to base any creative work on the work of others as long as the result is something new and great in it´s own right.

It´s not ok to copy the work of others without significantly improving it simply for making money.

Done. Plain Language.

Everything else, the moral right or wrong would be left to a Jury with guidance from a Judge.

Which they basically did in the Apple case. All that patent BS aside, I guess they descided on the basic morale question and started the paperwork.
I do agree with you in this regard. True innovations should be patentable and it's been the consistent bashing of the law to extend the scope of what is patentable that comes to the fore here. By fundamentally - having a patent and litigating a patent are hugely different things and that's a big problem. The patent offices around the world have timelines and deadlines - even if they approve a patent which shouldn't be - they rely on the courts to determine whether it is or is not. That's a huge time cost, financial cost and so on - thats the system today. So you go to court - you spend literally millions arguing and you get a decision as to whether or not it's innovative. That's wrong in my mind.
In October, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) rejected 21 of the 26 claims of Amazon's famous patent after an Auckland patent enthusiast, Peter Calveley, produced evidence of prior art.

http://web.archive.org/web/20081211093025/http://www.out-law...

Of course, this was only after Amazon bullied others, including B&N, using the bogus patent.
Wow, you're going to also take down your current iOS apps from the App Store as well?
Is your code bug-free? Pot. Kettle. Black.
To beat a dead horse (been away a few days), the periodic table is still chosen to be grouped that way. I know what you're saying about the structure of the table, but it's still been chosen to be arranged that way, just like declaring 'six legs = insect' is in taxonomy. Similarly, the 'horned' appearance of it is a human decision to help with the grouping. You could just as easily have H and He right next to each other and each new line representing a shell be arranged the same way. The problem is that you're not seeing the forest for the trees.

Perhaps another angle: if the periodic table is defined by the structure of the atom, why is there no representation of neutrons? Neutrons are part of the atom, and though an element is able to have differing numbers of neutrons, there is no indication of this in the layout of the table.

the results from those disciplines can never be considered definitive

You seem to have a lexical problem here: in one breath, you demand that science is definitive ("it can't be science if it's not"), but in another you state that defining things is cataloguing, not science.

And you appear not to even know any physics,

I know a moderate amount of physics (certainly enough that hollywood films drive me nuts, and I spent several years as a medical scientist), mostly in the form of chemistry, but you're showing all the typical signs of someone who is clueless about the actual practise of "soft sciences" and is running off prejudice.

There is plenty of good science in fields like psychology; just because the brain doesn't work like particle physics doesn't mean that you can't have the falsifiable hypotheses that lutusp demands. There is plenty of shoddy science in psychology as well, sure. But that doesn't mean that you can simply discount the good stuff - that's a logical fallacy :)
Indeed. The quality of design affects the quality of construction. The cost per square foot is typically shocking and the Ghery definitely places form over function. After visiting many buildings by Ghery, Hadid, Holl, and Libeskind I've found them all to be lacking. If you prefer modern design with refinement seek out Ando or Meier. There are plenty of others, as well, who have much more talent.
How I learned to stop worrying and live without version control
Again, this patent has been litigated over and over and over - so it has been deemed not to be obvious to a person skilled in the art at the time of filing relevant to the claims. You can't state "it WAS obvious" - because literally millions has been spent on PROVING it wasn't. Even if some of the claims have been subsequently rejected - there are still components that are patentable.