skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"little patent fascists"

Wow someone's angry.

I just read through the actual responses at http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120904190933195

The smoking gun PJ decided to write 500 words on? The fact that he didn't answer a particular question. In fact there are hundreds of questions he didn't answer.

In fact he answered about 25-30 questions probably the number Gizmodo paid him to come and answer.
You know, if you were Samsung and you weren't too concerned with ethics in the strictest sense of the word, you might be tempted to approach the jury foreman and offer him a large amount of money to get in front of every camera and microphone he can find and demonstrate gross disregard for Judge Koh's orders and patent law in general.

Right now it seems like the appeals process is going to be like shooting fish in a barrel for Samsung, thanks in part to Hogan and his traveling Dunning-Kruger show.
Good suggestion, thanks -- I'll do it.
Surely this is no surprise.
Dunno.

O'Reilly seems pretty open to delivering their books in a number of ways at a number of price points. For example, several of the books on that page can be had as ePub based Android apps for $4.99 each [1]. Also, they're all almost certainly available via Safari subscription.

1: http://goo.gl/AF81F
Amazon certainly doesn't require it for 1-click purchases, and I don't think they require it for shopping cart purchases either if your CC is saved.

Typically sites that save the CC do not save the CVV, but they only require it on the first purchase.
A bank's software infrastructure and "attack surface" dwarfs these tiny bit coin exchanges. Banks also have byzantine processes and guidelines that encumber their technical teams so building their software is inherently costly regardless of security.

Meanwhile unregulated, nimble BitCoin exchanges struggle with the OWASP top 10.
thanks, exactly what I wanted!
Okay, let's get the first part out of the way really quickly: this would be an amazing piece of technology, if it were to be implemented successfully. Having a password that even you don't consciously know would be a huge leap in security, and would presumably make password guessing all but impossible--after all, if you don't need to remember your password in the traditional sense, it could be significantly more complex than traditional "Pa55w0rd1!"-style passphrases.

I, personally, don't know enough about the science behind this to comment on its feasibility.

I do, however, know a lot about security in general. Every time there is a leap in "password technology," meaning public key authentication, or password-keepers, or xkcd's "let's use several words instead of random characters," people seem to think that it would protect all their online assets. That if the password is secure, so is their data that's stored somewhere on the Internet.

On one hand, yes, this technology would easily protect you from brute-force and dictionary-based attacks. After all, if there's no dictionary (because no words are used in the secret "pattern,"), how could a dictionary be used to attack the protected account?

What isn't factored into this example is the service you're protecting itself. If you look at high profile breaches over the last year, you'll notice that few, if any of them are straightforward password-guess breaches. Sure, some (like the Wired journalist) could have been prevented with strong and unique passphrases. Most of the attacks could not.

If there is, for example, a buffer overflow in a service that is listening on the Internet, remote code execution may be possible. If you can execute arbitrary code on a remote service, you are able to effectively take over that machine. Combine this with privilege escalation, and it's pretty much game over for most data stored there. Proper database security like unique salts per user account can minimize the damage, but the fact is that the compromise still happened and the data--like your personal photos, or documents uploaded to cloud storage--are probably in the hands of an attacker.

It's always great to see cutting edge research in any field related to computer security, but don't think that "passwords even you don't know!" are going to protect anything behind them. Passwords are just the front door to the mansion, and there's a whole lot of other ways to break in.

The short version is that there will always be a difference between account security and application security.
Really it comes down to proving value. The price and content doesn't matter (very much) if the value is there. People like Chris Guillebeau (http://chrisguillebeau) sell digital guides on all kinds of subjects and do well.

Though generally something that helps people make money will be easier to justify. Send me an email (nathan@thinklegend.com) with more info and I'd be happy to give more detailed feedback.
Back in the late 90s, I had a dozen made-to-measure dress shirts and 3 made-to-measure suits made by Ascot Chang while in Hong Kong.

They wore incredibly well (for several years, I rotated the same 3 suits and 12 dress shirts on an every weekday basis).

There is also a huge difference in comfort between off-the-shelf and made to measure.

If I had much use for a suit these days, I would not hesitate to have a few made to measure, along with a new set of shirts.
This is a fantastic article, I learned a ton.

Unfortunately when I went to buy the product, it dead locks chrome at 100% process usage, and it breaks scrolling in a bad way.

I also don't like the pricing:
- give me an obvious choice like the Economist. At the bottom there should be a launch day offer for $80 that gives me the full package for being a pre-review adopter. I need your product, but as it stands there was no clear package to choose.
Or nearly every restaurant in America that charges you twice as much in the evening for the same thing they served at lunch.
Posted by request -- yes, over a year old, but still an active topic of conversation among social scientists.
Interesting effect. I've done things similar to that in the past on my Tumblr. http://sfbne.ws/PH8kO8

It does have some downsides, and alas, the biggest ones show up in the reblogs of the content on Tumblr — you reblog that post and you see everything. My suggestion would be to see if you could do the collapsible effect with a p title tag, rather than setting two paragraph with two CSS classes, and embedding the Javascript into the post. That way, the effect follows people on Tumblr reblogs.

I'm a bit of a nut for visual effects like this, though. I might try it at some point. Good work.
First link after a Google search:

http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/videos
Interesting. It looks like the various taxi heavyweights of the world are due to battle it out in New York. Uber from SF, Hailo from London, GetTaxi from Israel...

A telling quote from the Betabeat[1] article:

Uber has 10 to 15 yellow cab drivers pre-registered to use its app, whereas Hailo has 2,500. A representative from Uber scoffed at that number. Reached by phone, Hailo confirmed both its planned launch and the number of registered drivers in New York City

It'll be interesting to see if just being the first into market will allow Uber to overcome odds like this, but that is a giant difference. 10-15 cab drivers is nowhere near enough to satisfy demand from New York customers.

[1] http://betabeat.com/2012/09/uber-launch-yellow-cab-taxi-app-...
Great answer, I really appreciate it.
Love that you used Gumroad for the sales. :)
It would be reasonable for individuals to purchase insurance against loss of bitcoins held by an exchange. The insurance would be much less expensive for exchanges who have agreed to an audit (and possibly other controls) by the insurance company.

As a sidenote, the previous comment trumping up the FDIC is kind of misplaced. Government is needed for some things (like police), but not insurance.
Don't be defensive, I think you are right and the feedback helps.

Confidence is something I have never had. The truth is I poured a long time into writing and developing the concept and idea. Years of learning how to properly write and record music.

I need to revise the Kickstarter. I didn't know it was going to fail, but as some sort of defense mechanism I think I wrote it that way.

In a way, I think I gave up before I even gave it a chance. Maybe I need to push much harder than give in a few days after it started.

Once again, thank you for the feedback :)
Yep. Exploring that risk, they might say something like "the attacker gained accesses to an unencrypted backup of the wallet keys", then say they'll consider making everyone whole, then go bankrupt.
Start saving up. Maybe it means a second job. Maybe it means no going out.

It's like when you're a kid and you get a job to buy a car. To offset college loans.

I read the listing and it sounds like you have almost nothing. You mention broken strings and then I think this is someone who doesn't love his instruments.

Or you've fallen on hard times. But if that's the case I'm not sure that's the best time to start an experimental album.

I don't know. Hopefully someone will see this and have an idea. The ones I know do something on YouTube, but given that you'd like to stay anonymous ... I suppose you could show static images instead (the art shown?).

But if you don't have the tools ...
Those kinds of trust issues are present in some form in many kinds of commercial transactions, and there are many ways of dealing with them (insurance, lawsuits, interact with companies you can trust and avoid ones you can't, etc.).
Before and After filters for Backbone.js routes.
Awesome job, Inkling (& O'Reilly). Wish all programming books are like that.
I work for a finance related technology provider and as a consequence get to see the technology practices of many brokers and other market makers. Often times their security is just as bad. The key difference is that trade settlement (a.k.a clearing) is a separate process (usually also separate company from exchange). This adds a layer of security because compromising the exchange doesn't always get you access to the clearing details. Clearing details are usually things like "Depoist X million dollars in bank account A, I will deposit x million euros in your bank account B." With Bitcoin quoting, trading, and clearing are all rolled into one.
Probably because the PostgreSQL people value humility more than hype.
Imagine the arms race with a super fast 30 minute release cycle. Every 30 minutes a new updates comes, 30 minutes later a new counter measure.

During those 30 minutes of vulnerability Google is losing only the marginal cost of serving an ad-free search, a rounding error.

During the other 30 minutes ad-blockers will lose users. Users of ad-blockers are not fanatics, they have no moral issues with ads. They are normal people who are using ad-blockers because it improves their browsing experience. So what happens when these ad-blockers temporarily ruin the browsing experience? They'll temporarily turn off said ad-blocker. By the 87th time what percentage will have given up on ad-blockers for good? If that percentage is anything greater than 0% then Google is winning.

The race is not like the DRM arms race, it is more akin to the virus arms race. Users want to run untrusted code and said untrusted code wants to do something the users do not want it to do.
Feed aggregator in node with source inspired by another HN Post
Awesome stuff.

Two things I thought would significantly boost your sales:

1) Try book reviews by bloggers
2) Run deals on AppSumo, etc?
Costco had a company that was bringing in 3d scanners to scan your body and then making suits based on those measurements. Haven't seen it advertised for awhile, so I'm not sure how well it actually turned out.
>Or maybe the price of top bespoke tailors in town is comparable

Yup. You'll get a beautiful bespoke (not M2M, truly bespoke) suit in an elegant showroom in Manhattan with fantastic customer service for the same money. I've bought basic suits for two-thirds the price, in fact. He might have an attractive pedigree via his apprenticeship, but that's not worth three times the price to me. There is real, legitimate, similarly credential competition here.
CSS3 will inevitably reach some kind of EOL eventually. If there will never be a CSS4, what will take CSS's place?
The criticism of the jury in this case doesn't seem to stem from their lack of technical understanding, but rather their following the judge's jury instructions. Indeed, there isn't really anything technically complicated in this litigation, a lot of it is over design patents.
pg: when will the applicants know if he/she got accepted?
3.5 billion year old organic deposits show signs of life
Despite there being obvious confusion over the css4 selectors, I'd bet they make zero effort to rename, thus clearing up confusion for all the folks who don't follow up with CSSWG.
This is very useful. Thanks for sharing link
The future of work in America
This looks great! I'll be checking this out. I've been in the market for something new/different/some kind of change with my freelancing project management.
This looks lovely.

I'm a fan of Inkling, disappointed at its absence from Android and hopeful for the day that textbooks - printed, interactive or otherwise don't cost $160+.
I realize that. But all the site owner has to do is keep a list of the UDID->hash mapping and then he can lookup the original UDID...
edw519, cperciva, cletus, jrockway, swombat, mark_l_watson, andrewcooke, ...

>> I'm on the lookout for more very high quality contributors;

As am I.
"In a way, I think I gave up before I even gave it a chance. Maybe I need to push much harder than give in a few days after it started."

Yes!

And you might be niche, but I'm sure there's similar music. Find those groups, and get your music out there.

I've found a deal of stuff on http://soundcloud.com/ (based on equipment you're looking for, you may be aware). Again, they won't do your marketing for you, but get your stuff out there.

Don't spam, but find people who do something similar and ask if they can give a listen and provide feedback.

And if the Kickstarter fails, give it some time. Do what you can to get what you need. Keep producing, and try it again.

If you love it, if you fall, you'll get back up and try it again. It hurts, but it makes success that much nicer :D
Why do people leave any amount of money in the wallets at these places?
The Twitter Bootstrap effect.
What would be interesting is if there were real online bitcoin banks that leant or invested the bitcoins to both make a profit themselves and offer their customers some interest on their savings.
You're right, the auto-wire-organizer tool is fantastic. Every time I use it I wonder what algorithm LabVIEW is using to rearrange things - not an easy problem computationally I'm sure. I use it for small sub-VIs but I find that if I use it on a large project I can't find anything after using it - I was relying on spatial layout of the VI which was lost after auto-formatting.

I guess this is analogous to algorithmically reformatting code in a normal text-based programming language...
I really don't get the point. Why not just have two divs inside one paragraph, where the display property alternates whenever you click on it? Also why use an id when what you're actually doing is alternating certain classes of divs? Am I missing something?
This shouldn't be an issue to programmers. With Greasemonkey or Scriptish it's trivial to write a script to clean up the page so that you only see the results.
Kiton is in an altogether higher tier. According to the Wikipedia, their ready-to-wear line ranges from $5500 to $8000, and their bespoke suits command $20K to $50K. They sell about 20,000 suits a year.
I was happy to see that you actually were doing genetic algorithms (usually people incorrectly refer to simpler evolutionary algorithms as "genetic", which is a pet peeve of mine).

A few points of feedback though:

Typically, what you are calling "genes" are called "chromosomes". Calling them "genes" is confusing because genes typically refer to smaller hereditary units (generally an individual bit on the chromosome). It would also be helpful if you mentioned that what you call "mating" is usually called "crossover".

Also this bit is rather inaccurate in terms of theory:

>Mating alone has a little bit of a problem: in-breeding. If all you do is mate your candidates to go from generation to generation, you run the risk of getting stuck near a “local optimum”: an answer that’s pretty good but not necessarily the “global optimum” (the best you can hope for).

You're sort of looking at all of GA backwards here. Mutation is the main way that a GA arrives at new innovations, and an algorithm with no crossover will do usually pretty well, but will be prone to getting stuck in local optima. This is because it is possible to arrive at a solution where no incremental change can improve the fitness.

Crossover is somewhat helpful against local optima because it allows the algorithm to try combinations of innovations from different solutions. Depending on the fitness landscape, this can be either helpful or useless. Regardless, a GA will, on any non-trivial problem, almost certainly get stuck on a local optimum, which is a very important point for users of GAs to realize.

But what is not the case is that mutation prevents crossover from hitting a local optimum. Crossover by itself basically just won't optimize at all. It's generally best to think of a GA as being driven primarily by mutation and selection, with crossover as a tweak that can make the search more efficient.
The below,from the groklaw.net comment section, might be of interest re: prior art.

_____________________________

Authored by: nsomos on Tuesday, September 04 2012 @ 09:57 PM EDT
I am guessing the foreman was confused by the last paragraph
of page 40 of the instructions.

---------------------

In deciding whether any difference between a claim requirement and the
product or method is not substantial, you may consider whether,
at the time of the alleged infringement, persons of ordinary skill
in the field would have known of the interchangeability of the part
or software instructions with the claimed requirement.
The known interchangeability between the claim requirement and
the part or software instructions of the product or method is
not necessary to find infringement under the doctrine of equivalents.
However, known interchangeability may support a conclusion that
the difference between the part or software instructions and
the claim requirement is not substantial. The fact that a part
or software instructions of the product or method performs the same
function as the claim requirement is not, by itself, sufficient
to show known interchangeability.

-----------------------

It seems that the foreman at least has the ideas
given here backwards. I suspect that he quickly
skimmed and basically cherry-picked those sentences
and paragraphs that allowed him to come to the
conclusion he already had decided he wanted to come to.

The interchangeability that is mentioned here
only applies to infringement, and not to prior art
which is invalidating.
It would be interesting if you and others with their device on the list could come up with a list of apps that you've had installed.
His premise, in my opinion, is wrong and therefor invalidates everything following it:

The problem is that the topics that are most painful also tend to be the topics that are most important for us: they’re the projects we most want to do, the relationships we care most about, the decisions that have the biggest consequences for our future, the most dangerous risks that we run.

Am I missing something, or am I just weird? This makes absolutely no sense to me. On the contrary, the projects and relationships I care most about are what bring me the most pleasure. Things that bring me the most pain are projects and relationships that I can't stand or don't want to deal with. What am I missing here?
Publicly educated students in Estonia will learn to code starting in 1st grade
The slowness is probably how far apart your data is spread in the google "cloud" over the years.

Map/reduce probably gets a heck of workout, imagine their entire global database size, it must be staggering.

Maybe they can fix it by periodically rewriting the entire dataset for a single user onto a cluster that is much closer together. Once a year?
There are ways to do this securely, like client side hashing, that are worth learning and showing off to make you a better web developer and set a good example for others. Yo have a chance to learn and teach here.
Boost Android emulator speed to real device levels -- or even faster.
It's just nomenclature; CSS3 will eventually just become "CSS" and each module will move forward on its own. And they're really just codifying what was already happening: browsers never jumped from CSS1 to CSS2 or CSS2 to CSS3; they just added support bit by bit.
google app engine takes care of everything for me
I have a free Google Apps account with ~2GB of mail.

I definitely saw the same symptoms for quite a while, which eventually got to the point of serious downtime last year. At some point, the last big downtime (over a day!) involved some sort of transfer to different infrastructure (and I wish I could remember the exact wording now), and since then it's been back to lightning fast.

There definitely seem to be some endemic issues, but they're only for certain slices of users, it seems.
That more or less proves the point.

Clearly pricing below their ready-to-wear line only gets customers who are looking to save money, and people trying to do bespoke suits in that price bracket will get squeezed from below (premium made-to-measure (not the same as bespoke) suits) and low-end ready-to-wear suits from premium manufactures like Kiton.
> There is the high-pitched whistle, the two-handed gesticulation, the rapid snapping of fingers. Many favor the classic wave — an open palm raised high, stretching into coming traffic.

Does anybody honestly do anything but stick their hand out (Statue-of-Liberty style)?

On a more serious note:

I'm surprised they're even attempting this with medallion cabs. I honestly don't see the need here - Uber's availability in NYC is decent... could be improved, certainly, but there are well more than enough gypsy cabs/car services around to tap into, it seems.

The NYC medallion system is one of the few that I think works well. Unlike in other cities, the rules that Uber would potentially be violating are those which only affect medallion cabs, and explicitly exclude car services like Uber. (The intent is to have the medallion cabs resemble a 'public' transportation system more, in that they cannot refuse service to anywhere within the boroughs, cannot refuse passengers etc.), while the private cab companies can do whatever they damn well please, more or less.

I'm not sure what Uber has to gain by doing this - it's a hefty risk, especially since the forces they're probably up against here in New York are very powerful and very well-funded, and the laws are already rather lenient - they've been able to establish a successful business already without pushing the envelope.