skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For what it's worth, this doesn't happen in a vacuum. If you want to read the arguments, enter the patent number 8276057 at this website:

http://portal.uspto.gov/external/portal/pair

Look under the heading "file wrapper" for all the communication. In particular, read:

CTNF	Non-Final Rejection
REM	Applicant Arguments/Remarks Made in an Amendment
NPL	Non Patent Literature
NOA	Notice of Allowance and Fees Due (PTOL-85)

The initial rejection (CTNF) is followed by applicant rebuttal (REM), several prior-art searchs (NPL) and then the acceptance (NOA, first document with 6 pages).

I'm not bored enough to read the whole thing, but the claims seem to have been some constrained on very technical points.

Please note: this patent is completely bogus, and I am not defending it. I am pointing this out because I think it is critically important for people to understand how the process works. Otherwise all this hand-wringing is for naught (and those who don't learn from history, etc...)

A suggestion for an enterprising web designer who happens to also be a bored 2L: make a website to semi-automate collation of prior art challenges. Court is not the only way to challege a patent. Patents can be challenged by 3rd parties through an "ex-parte re-examination request". One of the big limitations to this is the cost of the legal process and prior-art search/summation. I'm dreaming of a website that would allow crowd-sourcing to get 95% of the way to a ready-to-file submission, which could then be vetted and finalized by pro-bono lawyers, students in legal clinic, etc.
Google Search Referrers Disappear In iOS 6
I imagine the average distance between these satellites is well over 100 km.
How much of the difficulty could have been avoided if the windmill wasn't for generating power? This is an amazing project, but I wonder if it would be quite possible just to get something looking nice that stands strong (even against wind force at the cube of its speed) without such quality lathes and metalworking tools. Obviously, you have decades of experience in the field as you noted, and I doubt this would be possible for most people.
Ever see the film Wall-E? Cause that's where we are headed.
The patent's claims are slightly more specific than the title would suggest, but are still absurdly broad. The patent appears to cover announcing, after a delay, a domain name registration on a social website using oauth.
http://www.esa.int/esaMI/ESOC/SEMN2VM5NDF_mg_3_s.html

The debris field shown in the image is an artist's impression based on actual data. However the image does not show debris items in their actual size or density. Note: The debris objects shown in the images are an artist's impression based on actual density data. However, the debris objects are shown at an eggagerated size to make them visible at the scale shown.
Of course it's spot on. It also doesn't address what I criticized at all.

As @nlavezzo pointed out, the reason why professional poker players can make their living off poker is because the average person has no idea how to play poker well, whereas the professional poker player excels at it.

The problem with your advice is that the more people follow it, the less money they can make from poker, because poker is a zero-sum game at best.

Now, I don't play poker at all, so maybe I'm wrong about poker and there's some way everyone can come ahead of the game. Or maybe I misread your post and you're not really recommending this curriculum as a replacement for college. But if I'm wrong, I'd rather you told me why ;)
I like gittip, but it really needs international payouts. I don't see much point collecting these tips for 1st world programmers, who probably don't need them that much. For developers in 3rd world countries, even small monthly tips could make a huge difference.
No, according to this theory, it is because Deep Blue has a completely alien mind, and of the nigh-impossible to count ways in which that alien mind could work, it behaved in one of the many ways that Kasparov failed to consider.

Now, it might about the game if complete randomness is a valid strategy in Go.
Just out of curiosity, does anyone have an idea of what sorts of software patent applications have not been approved?
The uncertainty coming from the spectral analyzer and not from the water itself, I expect.
Ask HN: I tested an idea with AdWords, are the result good enough to work on it?
I wanted for a while to experiment with testing ideas with Google AdWords so I finally did it going a bit meta: I tested the idea of a service that let you test ideas (landing page at http://unbouncepages.com/test-your-idea/). I followed the textbook: made a quick page describing the problem more than the solution, set-up a Google AdWords campaign, leaned back for three days and watch the results (I did do some tweaking of the AdWords campaign after the first day but it didn't really change anything).

So here are the results: in three days I got 245 visitors (all from ads click-through) and 27 conversions (people that left their email) for an 11% conversion rate. I spent $127 for a CPC (cost per click) of $0.64 (in particular $0.94 for search terms and $0.57 on the display network, that is the ads on third party web sites). The CTR (click through ratio, how many click per ads diplayed) was 0.07% (0.62% for search terms, 0,06% for the display network). Interestingly, ~75% of the clicks came from the display network, unfortunately I was an idiot and cannot track conversion from display vs. search (hey, it was my first AdWords campaign!).

So the big question for you guys is: are these numbers good enough to say, yeah, I'll go work on this? Or more in general, what are good numbers for an experiment like this? Thank you folks!
1/2 scale = 1/4 the power, so it would be closer to 2kW.
I can't believe how a 40" ipad with an apple tv stuck in the back with krazy-glue won't sell ten million units in its first xmas.
Damn I need to move that last domain off of Go Daddy. Ill do that today.
I don't think anyone has ever done purely a from light source tracing, because it doesn't make sense. Tracing from camera is not an approximation.

Brute-force path tracing is random sampling from camera to every direction and bouncing/interacting until light source is hit. This is the standard Monte Carlo path tracing method which is unbiased and arrives at the accurate solution given enough time. This is unbiased, accurate and very simple to implement, but very slow to compute.

Metropolis and photon mapping are bidirectional methods where rays are selectively traced back from light source to forward direction, to speed up the path tracing computation.
I don't think there would be any hope of actually collecting the bits piece by piece, the amount of fuel required to match trajectories alone makes it infeasible. The best 'solution' would be to change the trajectory of the garbage either away from the atmosphere, or into the atmosphere. Unfortunately a lot of it won't completely burn up before it hits the ground, creating a few more problems then just some broken satellites.
For those who haven't seen it:

http://patents.stackexchange.com/

(This is the same as askpatents.com)
Google something like: laser remove orbital debris

I don't know how old this idea is, but I think I saw some discussion on sci.space.tech a long while ago. (Yes, my hair is getting gray.)

Edit: After reading a bit myself (http://spie.org/x84761.xml), the lasers are Earth based these days (IIRC, the laser was in a high orbit in sci.space.tech) because adaptive optics is "easy" now. It should be less risk of frying satellites with Earth viewing optics if the laser is in orbit, but that should just be a software problem.
Is this something that can be solved from the ground (high powered lasers)? Or would we need mechanisms in space and up close to handle this kind of debris?
Looks like signup is broken :( Love to test this new tool out!
Awesome. I've spent months being annoyed by that!
Reporting science: Journalistic deficit disorder
Here's NASA's webpage for orbital debris.

(http://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/)

It's fascinating. It has better graphics than the linked article. (The linked article does have a link to this site, but not the front page and it's buried down the article.)
Digital piracy is not, and never will be, theft.
Richard Branson: Start a Business Instead Of Going To Business School
Sure you do, but I send my kids to KA. To assume a student knows what an ellipse is and what it means to fill it is a leap.
What is the New iPhone 5 Like?
The iPhone 5 is certainly an evolutionary improvement on its predecessor the iPhone 4S; however it is far from being revolutionary. It places Apple up there with the big guys in terms of smartphone technology, and arguably ahead of them in terms of style, but it really doesn’t seem to quite live up to all the hype that has been surrounding it over recent weeks.
As the designer/developer behind this I promise you plenty is being build, we'll be ready to start inviting people to use it in the next couple of days.

Sorry to have annoyed you, but there's really no better way to gauge interest/insight into what your doing early than this type of approach, it really does work out for the better in the long run.
Yup, he said that he designed for 2.5kW @ 10m/s wind speed, doesn't mention if he achieved that, though.
Event Manipulation in high-level Touch Interface for Windows Phone 7
Politico's locked room mystery Linux install crime solved
Don't forget that IBM actually designed Lucifer which was 128bits but it was the (edit:s/NSA/NHIS) that truncated it to 56bits and named it DES. So maybe this is an example of "6 of one or half a dozen of the other"?
Cute. Their sidebar isn't all that accurate, though. "Called Joe" a Britishism? 'Fraid not, chaps. Booking a flight? Also not that British. And "an American would say" is more than a little offensive, although surely not intentionally.

Also they missed "wanker" - which has been used a lot lately. It's a good word.
Odd, send me an email at andrew[at]scratchpad.co and I'd be happy to give you access when we have the tool live in the next day or two
Newer Kia's are the best value money can buy. They are solid and very reliable automobiles. And, they cost 10 times less than a Mercedes. Smart buyers buy them.
Do you really think "academic finds back door in NSA's random number generator" wouldn't get headlines? Remember how people freaked over the mere mention of the name of "NSAKEY" freaked everyone out?
I think that is kind of the point. It isn't really immediately clear what that will do. I think the message should read something to the effect of "You have purchased items on your device, which are not currently sync'ed to this computer. Would you like to transfer them now?"
RIMs Fate Hangs On BB 10
Apple owns up to mapping errors – “This is no one’s issue but ours”
"Reliability of the app store"????

This goes back to the beginning of the internet, where folks were reluctant to link to other sites because they might have 'bad stuff'. Does anybody alive think Microsoft is responsible for stuff they link to? When you have to buy the stuff on some obviously-3rd-party website?

Paying to link to a 3rd rate store is not worth any of the money or hassle Microsoft put the guy through. Its exactly as if a bloated corporation overdesigned the process - full of arrogant assumptions and pointless theatre.
What every developer needs to know about Ubuntu Upstart
So one week iterations with a showcase at the end?
This Week's Top Ten Opportunities for Changing the World
Ha, I wish I could say I was that fast, although the whole thing's still very much in it's infancy sadly my turnaround time isn't quite that quick!
Guys, this isn't reddit.

Edit: Or Slashdot.
These are good points. I'll experiment. Thanks!
Someone should post this on AskPatents.com, to make sure the Patent Office sees it, or is it too late for that already?
I'm betting on Google Drive Engine.
Completely. I want to use my tablet but always end up using my laptop on the couch or desk. The only times I prefer a tablet would be on an airplane or in bed.
Perhaps the government required defense contractors to use this one in products sold to other countries?

I don't have any evidence for that, just speculation on one reason the NSA might insist on including something like this in the spec.
i'm not assuming you are incompetent. what i'm saying is that no system is fully secure, and by saving the users' passwords, you are risking them.

one of the first rules i learnt in web development is this, you do not store passwords. (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/12/the-dirty-truth-abo...) you never assume that your system will be so secure that no one can hack it.
Quantcast releases bigger, faster, stronger Hadoop file system
He's joking. We don't have satellites the size of entire cities. If this were to scale, it would look exactly like the pictures of earth we are used to seeing with nothing but black surrounding it.

There's a lot of space debris, but there's a whole heck of a lot more "space."
Don't be afraid of losing jobs because you charge too much. When I first started on oDesk I charged $10 an hour, because I didn't want to put people off. Then I realized that kids in my neighbourhood make more walking dogs. Since then I've put my rates up considerably, and even though I still get nervous when talking money, I've never had a client say it's too much.

Charging more lets people know you're serious. Low paying customers typically ask for way more "can you just" tasks, like changing the font colour a dozen times or moving something "just a little to to right". You don't call your lawyer to change the typeface on your legal letters.
Discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4578267
A* is fine if you have a single moving object navigating a static scene. Problem is that most game scenes aren't static so you either have to recalculate on every movement (very expensive) , break it down to smaller paths (possibly leading to very sub optimal paths) or wait for it to get stuck (at which point it might become impossible to be unstuck).
The block quote from the book states, "Toward the end of my interview with him, [Murray] Campbell somewhat mischievously referred to an incident that had occurred toward the end of the first game in their 1997 match with Kasparov."

This suggests rather strongly that the author of the book interviewed Campbell, rather than relying on some secondary source. Campbell, of course, may be speculating, but this seems like pretty direct attribution. The only more direct source would be Kasparov himself.
The patent is valid as of the issue date. A re-examination request can be filed at any time during the life of the patent.

I haven't yet heard what, if any, formal relationship AskPatents.com will have to the examination process going forward. However, at least for an already-issued patent a re-exam would be required.
I still think it's funny that for a culture that was so at odds with the French that their slang for toilet is named after a line of French kings, they still spell things like the French ("colour" being one example, "theatre" another).

As to Doctor Who, well, it's more soap opera than science fiction these days (and has been for a while), so it's no surprise that it's wildly popular in the states.
You mean Britishization? USA USA
They're fun. I can code on them so long as I don't mind waiting a long time for the compiler to run, and I find the screens are easier on the eyes in the dark.

But I'd never try and use one to do my job.
Apparently the mods added it later. There really should be some way to tell what the mods have and haven't done.
Joomla Debuts Version 3.0, Mobile Optimized Thanks To Twitter Bootstrap
Just another startup lesson by Mahesh Murthy
GMT timezone too! Thanks!
Texas Instruments withdraws from smartphones/tablets
Something like mouse-over for original title would be great.
The experience getting it into the app store was actually quite pleasant. The app only got rejected once because it didn't have a privacy policy. After I added one (https://github.com/joelmartinez/Khan-Academy-for-WinRT/commi...), it got readily accepted :)
Next generation Meizu MX2 Leaked photos gets quad-core 1.6Ghz CPU
Richard Buckland's UNSW Computing 1 - learn with games, puzzles and friends
Gabe Newell has been publically denigrating Windows 8, but I think his real fear, and this idea would support the move to Linux, is the way Windows is moving towards a closed app store model, which brings it into direct competition with Steam.
yes, thanks for the bug report. This was totally working, but it must have regressed at some point. Will definitely fix in the next release :)
I'm curious as well. Why not?
I think I heard about that. I think it's interesting to note that, in much of science fiction, the home planets of space-faring species are always terribly littered due to the bootstrapping process of reaching the stars, whereas the orbital debris of colony planets tends to be non-existent.
Yet there is a strong niche for Mercedes buyers as well. (Executives and so on.) But I think you are right that Apple is not likely to be happy to become a niche manufacturer once again.
Be careful what you wish for.

There are pretty well established guidelines for determining the "obviousness" of a patent, and one of these (as you mention) is determining whether the patent would be obvious to one with an ordinary level of skill in the relevant art.

The average software developer can't code fizzbuzz. Therefore anything more sophisticated than fizzbuzz is potentially patentable.

Think about that. Really let it sink in.

I have come to believe that the problem isn't with software patents, the problem is with us. Most software developers really are that bad. It is easy to forget this, but the people who hang out on Hacker News are really a slim minority.

We need to get our own house in order and demand more of the people who practice this art. Other industries have professional certification or restrictive guild systems - maybe we need to adopt the same.
Yeah, I started reading it and thought gee this sounds familiar.
Under the hood: Incapsula Dynamic Caching
This all sounds very exciting. I've tried out mind mapping software in the past for various things, and it has always seemed nifty, but I never really stuck with it. Maybe the qualitative difference in experience the author talks about will actually show up, in which case I certainly hope to stick with it.
Objective-C was developed mostly by one guy (Brad Cox) back in the '80s. He was inspired by Smalltalk. He didn't do it on behalf of any corporation that I know of, though he and a partner did try to commercialize it later.
I think in British English it is more common to say 'best before date' rather than 'sell-by date'.

One 'Britishisation' I wish the US would get is 'I couldn't care less', meaning I care about some thing as little as possible, yet in the US they insist on say 'I could care less' which makes no sense.
Can you concretely state what the abstraction you are describing is? In particular, what details does it hide or factor out?
Zend Framework 2 Model Generator for quick prototyping
Amazon Robots.txt - Disallow certain product reviews?
I'd say go for it. It sounds like a cool idea.

Maybe you could market on forums like the four hour workweek?
This is great. If someone asks me the dreaded "what is a hacker" question again I'll link them to the article.
Great to see major software use Bootstrap.

Lots of typical TechCrunch mistakes when covering open source, though. They always think open source projects are "companies". Related example: every single TC article on WordPress seems to say that Automattic is the owner of WP.
What was the word they associated you with?
You don't have to be smart to buy an Apple device.
I wonder if it would be practical to mitigate ground strikes by steering objects into collisions. I guess if you got the math right you could do the collisions at low orbits and avoid making things worse.
I'm a new father (4 weeks). From the pregnancy, to the delivery, to the first smile, to the every morning warmly feeling of having created life with my love one, it is all about love and sincerity. We are already thinking about a second one...
> I still think it's funny that for a culture that was so at odds with the French ... they still spell things like the French ("colour" being one example, "theatre" another).

But the word descends directly from the French language; 30% of English is from the French, it's largest influence (another 30% is from latin, 30% from Germanic, and the rest from other sources). So it's not that we are choosing to 'spell things like the French': the word IS French, as are countless other words. It's our biggest source of vocab.
Not to mention the problems with the rest of that paragraph:
>"the type you’re born with (Type 1) and the type you “get.” That’s called Type 2, and was called “adult onset” until it started ravaging kids. Type 2 is brought about by a combination of factors, including overeating, American-style."

I have Type 1 Diabetes and I "got" it when I was 19. Type 1 means your pancreas has zero capability of producing insulin, Type 2 means your pancreas has reduced ability to regulate or has reduced insulin production capabilities. Maybe he could have said Type 1 is a genetic disorder and Type 2 is generally brought on due to environment or lifestyle.
How can it be for real? Not surprising tho since the structure of the legal system and the law as it currently is just cannot keep up with technological progress.
So are you collecting money up front?
Whilst teaching someone programming the other day I realised that the overloaded word "call" causes great problems. I had to correct "a function called main" to "a function named main", in order to make sense of "calling a function".

Before then I had been unaware that I use the word for different meanings.
See I know the limits of a tablet. It is not some fancy all singing device. If I want serious power I get on my desktop or laptop. But as a device to surf the web or read an ebook it is much nicer to use a tablet than have a laptop on my lap
So are ad-hominem attacks.

The first line is a quote from Douglas Adams. Well known to anyone who has tried to run a conjunction analysis and had to set the range to 50 km to get something to show up.
I can't find the citation right now, so treat this as apocryphal, but...

I've read an explanation that the USA's focus on security has changed in the days since 9/11/2001. At one time, the philosophy was that the country was more secure when we could all be assured that the privacy of our communications was intact.

But in the last decade we've changed that philosophy. The government's security philosophy now is that the most important thing is for the government to be able to tell what's going on.

So it may be that the parent post's anecdote is quite correct, and reflects the policy of that time. But in the days of the War On Terror, we can't trust that anymore.

(And OT, I believe it reflects a fundamental change in the philosophy of governance that is against the founding principles of the country, and a pretty bad thing. I believe that our strength derives from ... us -- we the people. And so strengthening the government by weakening us in fact weakens the nation.)

EDIT: fix date. Thanks, Retric.
Implying Google sells subpar tablets - I disagree with this statement. I believe Jelly Bean is a better OS than iOS5 for tablets (idk about iOS6, but I'd be willing to say it still holds for that one as well). On the hardware side, all you need is enough CPU/GPU to run the OS and apps flawlessly, which I believe both Apple and Android tablets manage to do.
Maybe you wanted access to a faster expanding market?
Agile and Customer Communication
Good point.. maybe there are "rings", or orbits with a high concentration of junk that justify the fuel?
The reason nearly a third of English words derive from French (the same proportion as directly from Latin, which the romantic languages, e.g. French, derive from) is because the British Isles were largely conquered by William the Conqueror (to the Brits) in the 11th century.
can't wait to take the course!