skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Special effects are not prior art. Demonstrating a feature does not give you prior art neither.

Patents cover implementations. Two people can invent two different methods to do the same thing. It is not the case that the first patent gives them a monopoly on the features.

Just because the internal combustion engine (eg: with pistons) exists, doesn't mean that you can't patent a rotary engine (like Mazda did). Both are internal combustion engines, but the rotary engine uses a novel method.

So long as your position requires pretending that patents are something other than they aren't your arguments are going to be logical fallacies.

This article is thus nonsense.
One nice thing about printf debugging is that your eyes and brain never leave the code. There is mental overhead in involving a third entity (in addition to the code and command line) which is the debugger.

Obviously, if the compile/execute loop is cumbersome then GDB will save a ton of time. But when the loop is fast, I find printf-ing to be effective and easy on the brain since you focus 100% on the code.
It seems Google has never been able to figure out that people actually travel between countries, which is amazing given how much the Googlers I know move around.

Great example is translations... often various Google properties speak the whatever local language to me, even though I'm logged in. While it has been a while since I've seen GMail in Turkish, this still happens frequently with search.

Two issues here:

1. my Google account knows what language I want to use

2. language !== country. Many countries have multiple official languages, not to mention immigrants etc.
In the off chance that it doesn't save their life, theres a great concern that it would significantly decrease her quality of life preceding a diagnosis. not just psychologically--theres insurance to worry about here too.
Hey, thanks for the feedback!

Number one makes a lot of sense - I'll take a look at that. You're right that number two is tricky, but I think it's possible to do something good there - I'll look at it, for sure.
I imagine Twitter's reaction to a major client doing such a thing would be less than favorable to developers (no more free API keys, if I had to guess)
Can someone explain to me (like I'm 5) exactly what, besides the general concept of list scrolling with bounce-back to indicate end of list reached, it was that Samsung copied from the 7,469,381 patent? The Apple fans here get pissed when someone argues that Apple is trying to patent an obvious "idea" and they claim that the general idea of bounce-back scrolling isn't patented, but instead it's a very specific implementation. And yet I've never heard an explanation of what the technical details are that specifically are patented. I've tried reading the patent, but my head exploded.

So please, for the love of god, can someone explain the non obvious implementation details that were copied?

If I were to see someone use bounce-back scrolling, or if I saw it in a movie, or even if I heard someone explain the idea, I'd go off and code something up. My amateur implementation would use the general principles of inertia and physics. Is there a way to do that without violating this patent? Because I'm tired of people yelling about how the idea of intertial bounce-back scrolling isn't being patented, only a specific implementation is, and yet I have no idea how that's possible. If that's true I should be able to implement the same general idea without violating the patent, right? How?
Many breakthroughs are invented multiple times before they stick. The patent doesn't belong to the one who made it popular, but the one who made it first.
Problem 1: I can't get this damn div to float to the right of my content.

Problem 2: My network card firmware stops acknowledging commands from the driver after 3 days of high utiliization.

If you think you would assign the same person to "solve these problems with code", you're being silly. People specialize and gain expertise in their areas. Use the right tool for the job.
It's almost like you read the first sentence and decided to immediately rebut it without reading the rest of the comment.
I'm trying to make it easy for people to generate Linux live and install images.
This is something I've wanted to do for a long time, and I'd really like to be devoting my time to getting it up and running. It's the future, a well-done service like this is something I really think should exist. It would definitely be a benefit to myself, and to a lot of Linux users I know, let alone general computer users.

Please check out the indiegogo campaign at http://igg.me/p/212585?a=1092744 -- any feedback would be greatly appreciated!
I hope you recognize that when you say "A simple way to sum the problem up: Semmelweis advocated handwashing... for staff who had been conducting autopsies" you also confirm that there were actually the doctors that did autopsies who didn't disinfect their hands. So he was obviously right. You can just claim that he set his goals too narrow, but even that much was not accepted by others.
The reason people are arguing against you is that even in 2012 on HN in the face of currently incompletely understood complexity people instantly start forming micro-religions complete with prophets and various 'higher-powers', and of course heretics and infidels.

I mean seriously this article pretty much says "wow, this stuff is complex and really hard to make sense of", and the top comment is "but I have found the truth in this book!"

I fully agree with you, I think the paleo approach has some pretty sound ideas. But when I hear people talk about how "evolution" commands we shall eat no grains I get really worried about how quickly educated people can turn science into magic.
I think daniel_reetz put it right with "good enough". This isn't a lab or scientific instrument. But its cheap enough to use as a teaching tool, to get people interested and in-the-know about light and its connection to common life.
Great article, thanks for the link. For those who don't want to wade through this technical and fairly lengthy article, here's a quick summary:

The people who say "a calorie is a calorie, and to deny that would violate the laws of thermodynamics" are arguing from the first law of thermodynamics (conservation), but misunderstand the second law (entropy). The article shows that if you take into account both laws of thermodynamics, then the statement "a calorie is a calorie" is actually a violation of the laws of thermodynamics.

The next two paragraphs are the conclusions of the article, quoted verbatim:

A review of simple thermodynamic principles shows that weight change on isocaloric diets is not expected to be independent of path (metabolism of macronutrients) and indeed such a general principle would be a violation of the second law. Homeostatic mechanisms are able to insure that, a good deal of the time, weight does not fluctuate much with changes in diet – this might be said to be the true "miraculous metabolic effect" – but it is subject to many exceptions. The idea that this is theoretically required in all cases is mistakenly based on equilibrium, reversible conditions that do not hold for living organisms and an insufficient appreciation of the second law. The second law of thermodynamics says that variation of efficiency for different metabolic pathways is to be expected. Thus, ironically the dictum that a "calorie is a calorie" violates the second law of thermodynamics, as a matter of principle.

The analysis above might be said to be over-kill although it is important, intellectually, not to invoke the laws of thermodynamics inappropriately. There are also, however, practical consequences. The seriousness of the obesity epidemic suggests that we attack it with all the means at our disposal. Metabolic advantage with low carbohydrate diets is well established in the literature. It does not always occur but the important point is that it can occur. To ignore its possibilities and to not investigate the precise conditions under which it appears would be cutting ourselves off from potential benefit. The extent to which metabolic advantage will have significant impact in treating obesity is unknown and it is widely said in studies of low carbohydrate diets that "more work needs to be done." However, if the misconception is perpetuated that there is a violation of physical laws, that work will not be done, and if done, will go unpublished due to editorial resistance. Attacking the obesity epidemic will involve giving up many old ideas that have not been productive. "A calorie is a calorie" might be a good place to start.
This stings a lot less after the announcement of Tent (http://tent.io, discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4418904), a project aimed at similar goals, but starting with a protocol, not an application. I think Tent, or something like it, is what those of us concerned with Facebook's monopoly power should keep our eyes on.

Why? Because it's just a protocol, so you can build a Facebook alternative on top of it, sure, but you can also build services equivalent to Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, FourSquare, Instagram, Pinterest, Path, you name it, all interoperable. And the guys coming up with Tent don't have to be the ones who design the application layer. If they suck at UI/UX (which was questionable in the case of Diaspora), no problem, we can still build on their underlying tech.

Plus, it's not inherently noncommercial. With email you have three hosting options: free with ads, paid, and host it yourself. That's the best possible situation. On the one hand, companies are making money off ad-supported and paid email hosting, so they have incentives to provide the best service possible — unlike the non-profit "community pods" of Diaspora. On the other hand, you have interoperability and the freedom to use your data as you want — unlike on Facebook or Twitter, which will block you from exporting your contacts to a competing service. The Diaspora hosting model — where random people hosted servers for free just because they thought it was cool, or something — basically doesn't exist for email (or, say, web hosting), which is a good sign that it's unsustainable.

Diaspora was a flawed idea, but Tent, because it's a protocol, looks like a much more promising and realistic way to open social-media walled gardens.
Also cool to play around with are the various options that let GCC (and presumably LLVM) show you the various compilation stages of your C code. You can even spit out the C and resulting assembly side-by-side.

I haven't had the time to play with this, but Part 4 of the excellent "Unix as IDE" series [1] goes into it and I'm sure there's more around the web.

Another really fun way to get into the underlying assembler that the C compiler generates is Vidar Hokstad's "Writing a compiler in Ruby, bottom up" [2]. This series involves writing little C functions, compiling them to the simplest assembly you can get, then writing a ruby compiler (in Ruby!) that emits that assembly. Some people have objections to the approach, but it's really quite nifty. I especially like it because it's really refreshing to see a compiler tutorial that doesn't start with the lexer and parser.

[1] http://blog.sanctum.geek.nz/unix-as-ide-compiling/
[2] http://www.hokstad.com/compiler
Actually they are not just "marketing people". They top growth hackers are often full-stack developers (Jesse Farmer, Matt Humphrey, Jim Young, Mike Greenfield, Dan Martell, Danielle Morrill, Ivan Kirgin etc).

This is not inbound marketing but building product that, at its core, is focused on growth. LinkedIn, Zynga, Quora, Twitter, and Facebook all have growth teams.

Do you know Dropbox's brilliant referral strategy? That was the brainchild of Sean Ellis (growth hacker), Ivan Kirigin (growth hacker), and Dropbox leadership.
Zuckerberg was pretty far from "extremely junior" when he started facebook. He had already produced a product that had the interest of both AOL and Microsoft before he had even graduated highschool [1].

[1] https://www.google.com/#hl=en&sclient=psy-ab&q=synap...
Have you referred to the case studies in the 4 Hour Workweek or $100 Startup? Email me at stanley at sysil dot com if you still like to chat.
If they went that route, they would be limited to 100,000 users. Tapbots likely had more users than that when the new API guidelines were announced, which means that they can have two times their current userbase, a (potentially) significantly higher number, if they keep the same key and secret as for the alpha.
The visual debugger in both Eclipse CDT and Visual C++ let you do things like create breakpoints, step through your program, monitor variable values, even create conditional breakpoints that are triggered when a particular lineof code is executed n number of times or when some particular expression involving variables in the local context of the breakpoint turn true.

My question is, what advantages do you get in using gdb directly through the CLI rather than through an IDE? (like Eclipse/NetBeans which itself uses gdb for C/C++ debugging, but has a nice graphical UI for it.)
Creekmouth Man and Van Services
Varies based upon selling price, type of book, etc. Wide variation on quality and scale vs size. page count. etc. printing something != something quality. and copy 1 = not equal 1/4000 or 4000 copies. So, sell thru rate matters (how much of the run you sell). The costs are borne by someone.
> What's the premium? The annual fee?

Assume for a moment that the point allocations are constant (though in reality they usually fluctuate). I can redeem those points/miles for flight tickets, hotel bookings, in-kind purchases, etc. In that case, the exchange rate of the point is set by the dollar value of the reward that I'm purchasing. Usually rewards-based cards let you choose from a few options, so we can define the highest-valued reward to be the one that determines this exchange rate.

The credit card company can adjust this exchange rate at will, either to the benefit of the consumer or not. They can do this by awarding more/fewer points or by adjusting the value of the reward (by changing the number of points required to purchase a particular reward) - or both. This is analogous to the US government increasing/decreasing the money supply (and in fact, it has the exact opposite effect, since it's the credit card company doing it). In the case of airlines, frequent flyer miles have experienced dramatic inflation recently - if you had held onto your miles from, say, 2002, they'd buy you a lot less today (assuming they didn't expire altogether).

The credit card company can do this because they're acting as a central bank for the 'points' currency and as a monopoly (if you consider the products' parent companies, not the final branding), and as a monopsony (they are the only purchaser of the 'points' currency, so the only way to gain value from their points is to purchase their products - but they can set the prices of those products at will, since they're also a monopoly).

So, to circle back to your original question, the 'premium' is the difference between the constant cash rewards rate (say, 1%) and the 'effective' exchange rate of your points.

> I am skeptical of the actual worth of the points provided by various travel rewards cards. Here's an example: http://www.delta.com/skymiles/use_miles/pay_miles/index.jsp -- the typical conversion rate for a "mile" is one point per "mile", is it not?

I share your skepticism - they can probably change the points-per-mile rate via the fine print (though that's a more cumbersome sword). More likely, though, they'll just change the dollars-per-mile rate (ie, 'how many points does $FLIGHT cost'), since that doesn't require notifying the customer of the updated terms of their card.

For that reason, the cash back cards are more reliable - why arbitrarily force yourself into a completely centrally-regulated market?
I think you've mistaken the point of my comment; you appear to think I'm sticking up for 1840s surgical hygiene. If you read my comment all the way through, you'll see that that's not at all my point.
> If you keep a moderate library, there's nothing wrong with physical media.

So I should listen to the same disc over and over?
Another way to dive into the socal tech scene: Spend 18mm on startups.
Are Twitter and DataSift linked in any way in terms of their company ownership etc?
>Look at the prior art in the patent itself, e.g.:

Since the patent itself cites prior art, obviously the patent isn't patenting the same thing as the prior art.

>All Apple did was jumble these same longstanding .... was at best modestly different from prior implementations

You have provided no evidence or reason to believe this. In fact, I've seen this claim hundreds of times, and never seen anyone even attempt to provide a defense for this assertion.

Yet the evidence at hand shows the opposite- the patent was reviewed for a significant period of time by the patent office. Further, this isn't Apple's rodeo. After the Microsoft loss, Apple has a great deal of incentive to make sure that their patents are solid.

So despite evidence to the contrary, you just repeatedly assert this position because it helps your ideological position. But we need more than mere assertion.

In fact, your assertion isn't really consistent with history. To make this obvious lets change the context. Imagine it is motorola being sued by Bell:

Graham demonstrated and patented the telephone, therefore phones are longstanding and the cellphone is just "modestly different from prior phones".

The iPhone doesn't have cameras three feet behind the screen taking photos of your fingers. But you would have us believe that a patent on using that method of touch interface means that apple didn't invent nothing for the iPhone.

You're relying on the ubiquity of copies of Apples devices to make an emotional appeal claiming these things were obvious.... yet this is post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Before 2007, Android was working on a blackberry ripoff, not a touch UI.

And your argument fundamentally misrepresents what patents are.
Launched my first physical product business last week: Hoppy Press [0].

I'm not shipping heavy components (opposite, actually: 12.5 ounces/~350g) so I don't have much advice for you on that front. I would like to share one lesson that I learned so far: the costs of shipping the actual shipping/packaging supplies was a bit more than I estimated. 40lbs of Kraft paper doesn't ship free.

Right now we are only offering USPS for shipping. We looked in to Amazon Fulfillment which is priced appropriately and would be good for a "hands off" approach. However, we like being able to include hand written notes and other gestures when we ship to our early customers.

Good luck!

[0] https://hoppypress.com
Try http://www.cloudorado.com/ it does exactly that. You specify the requirements (RAM, CPU, etc) and it finds appropriate options from multiple providers.
I too have used that approach, and the only problem I've found is because I'm still used to taking in a large mass of low calorie raw foods, if I'm in a situation where the type of food I'd normally eat isn't available, then I have the capacity to really pig out.
How to learn in your sleep
Great job on the CTF, had only minor issues with level 8 because of the traffic (which made it more of a challenge) and I was wondering how you guys did the XSS vulns, really nice job!
My bad! There is a BigScreen.onerror, but I missed it in the docs.

It should cover most things, but I didn't fully test it. I also couldn't get any browser to fire the native event in my testing.
Sorry, it's not clear to me which one of those patents you feel is prior art for Apple's specific claim of a method for scrolling on a touch-screen display where a distinct area past the edge of the document is displayed and then removed when the touch ends. Can you clarify?
A Twitter account can have a large number of apps so TapBots would jut have to rename the old one and create a new app for the release.
You can get Hadoop The Definitive Guide at orielly.com.
along with this, the best way is to enable experimentation and iteration.

Cloudera has a training vm at https://ccp.cloudera.com/display/SUPPORT/Clouderas+Hadoop+De...
Did you miss when Twitter explicitly told developers not to make any more third-party Twitter clients? The situation is simple, and just as the comment you replied to states.
This reminds me of all the major flaws in the DMCA, like not being allowed to "circumvent any measure that effectively controls access". The question that's unanswered: if a few lines of code can circumvent a measure, does that measure effectively control access? Either way: didn't stop Cisco from sending Github a takedown for a keygen. (Despite provisions in the DMCA that make distributing the circumvention device legal, like "a person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs".

Corollary: is it legal to open a closed door if you have to twist the handle first? What if the spring is tighter than on a normal door?
Another example i belive is similar was patent "exhaustion" in the apple/samsung case. If apple buys the chips from qualcom, and qualcom has a licensce, samsung can't double-dip and accuse apple of infringing on things they bought from qualcom.
Ruby Bits released
If you're aiming for the bbcode sector, sure. Bloggers etc. (i.e. the textile/markdown crowd) would usually expect more well-formed results.

Not sure whether that's a good demographic to aim at. Basically everything is better than bbcode, yet it's quite firmly entrenched after all these years (with a bit of tag-limited HTML and WYSIWYG as alternatives).
And the Tesla's value drops over time also. I don't know the exact set of cars you own, but I imagine that together they were likely worth more than 50K new.
Yes, that was it! We have a winner! (A wiener?)
The top voted answer explains that the premise of the question and therefore the title of the submission is wrong.
As a minimum test for whether something is non-obvious enough to be patented, I like to think of whether it could have been published in a computer science or UI journal. Similarly, if it has already been published in a journal, then it should be off limits for being patentable.

Let's consider multitouch. This invention has already had numerous articles written about it [1]. Thus it is patentable, but Apple is decades too late. That it can be used with any input device that supplies multiple touch inputs is obvious. You cannot write a paper about that.

Can you write an HCI paper about the disappearing scroll bars? I would be a bit surprised, although possibly. I imagine if you did, it wouldn't be a very prominent paper or in a very good journal.

In any case, I think that an invention being publishable is a minimum. There are also many publications that do not represent techniques so innovative as to deserve a short term monopoly.

Also, your distinction of ideas vs invention is not shared by books that describe good patent drafting. On the contrary, the book Invention Analysis and Claiming [2] opens with:

"Part I - Identifying the Invention - takes as its central premise that an invention is not a thing, but a concept."

[1] http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html
[2] http://books.google.ca/books/about/Invention_Analysis_and_Cl...