skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I'm going to read the article now but even if you are right then that is really bad news for the world as owners of standards essential patents have the power to bring whole industries to gridlock and to demand massive sums for patent licensing.

I don't think it's that bad, considering where FRAND comes from: It's a contract term they put into agreements that industry bodies require members to adhere to before they'll accept known patented technologies into industry standards. If it turns out that the courts interpret it to mean something disastrous then they'll just start using a different term for future standards. Or just put the actual licensing price in the contract.

In theory that would still leave a problem for all the existing standards, but I don't see how that problem is significantly worse than the existing problem with submarine patents that were never FRAND in the first place because the patentees didn't participate in the standards process.

>I didn't see any comment regarding anti-trust law from this judge and I don't know if that topic was ever on the table in this case.

The relationship between patents and antitrust is by nature inscrutable. The whole point of a patent is to create a temporary monopoly to reward the inventor with monopoly profits. But the patent is only supposed to cover the claims -- so when a patent is essential for a standard, the patent inherently can be used to block implementation of the standard, including those aspects of it that supposedly aren't covered by the claims.

The result is a situation where either you de facto prohibit the patentee from enforcing the patent against any infringer (i.e. everyone) who is implementing the standard (perhaps in exchange for some almost certainly below-market royalty chosen arbitrarily by the courts), or you de facto allow the patentee to expand the scope of the patent to the entire standard rather than only the claims as it ought to be. There isn't really a lot of middle ground: You have to pick whether you want meaningful patents (else anyone can just make a standard around it and claim a right to violate the patent's guarantee of exclusivity) or meaningful antitrust (else anyone can allow their submarine patents into a standard and then sue the world). There is no guarantee that the courts will be able to find a solution to that capable of making everyone happy.
I wish this was simply because demand for food-like substances had disappeared and the market was punishing those companies that make predominantly food-like substances, and instead choosing actual food made with recognizable ingredients.

But, it's not. It's mismanagement. I suspect the bankruptcy is simply a method of ending all of the union contracts and moving to factories in right-to-work states in cities without strong unions. It's been done more than a few times in the past few decades by major corporations. That's not to say the unions are all right, just that based on my reading of the situation, they're being used as a convenient scapegoat in a situation caused by long-term mismanagement and incompetence.
Pentagon forgets to BCC Bradley Manning journalistss
Essentially, yes. An overview is here:

http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2007/02/how_paul_volcke....

and the original interview is informative too. (tl;dr: Great Inflation)
Ask HN:How do track your daily learning progress?
Hi,
I'm taking a break from work for a few months. I would like to utilize the time effectively to learn about an unfamiliar branch of computing and try applying it to interesting problems. So it is part learning and part applying.

But I'm afraid I might lose track or balance and not achieve as much as I would like to. I believe tracking my activities daily would help. I should also be able to share it with my accountability buddy.

It would be nice to also be able to map my daily activities to the overall plan to visualize how much progress has been made.

Have you faced a similar situation? How did you handle it? Was there any particular tool that was useful for you? It would be great if you can share your experiences.
The desire to want to just "make it" seems deeply wrong-headed to me. Granted, I don't own a company so this may be one of the many times that I am wrong, but it seems like a pretty important characteristic would be having a particular product or vision you are passionate about.

And deeply wanting to be a "reluctant billionaire" seems contradictory. All that said, good luck to the guy. I sincerely hope I'll get the chance to eat crow on this one.
Show HN: SuperGrid, a lightweight responsive grid and layout system
In bitcoin this is solved by tying the "vote" to proof of work: the explicit assumption is that the majority of the computing power is controlled by participants who aren't trying to attack the system.

...and if these Bitcoin-mining ASICs are primarily purchased by people trying to attack the system?
Sony promises top-end handset to compete with Galaxy S III and iPhone 5
Secret Directive Fails Obama Transparency Goals
So, your reply 70 days ago was in reply to me regarding the ruby library Evan and I wrote.

Funny enough, this perl regex was one of the inspirations for the ruby library Evan and I wrote (though that uses a PEG for parsing)

Weird how things go around...
Technology Leaders Endorse Effort to Overhaul Campaign Finance
Just one little citation of the original article that demonstrated this hack would be nice. The guy references David Walsh's blog (a friend of mine), who even in the article cites and attributes the method, yet doesn't include it in here? Just a tad lame, that's all: http://www.backalleycoder.com/2012/04/25/i-want-a-damnodeins...
You need to get out more!
I suggest "infamous".
Customer Service - How It Should Be Done
> Union President Frank Hurt said on Thursday that the crisis at the company was the "result of nearly a decade of financial and operational mismanagement"

It's surprising that the union would actually let the company fall apart. Was there some lapse in communication? Did the unions think the company was bluffing when they said "we're going to go bankrupt"?

Also, their downfall probably had more to do with a change in social perception that they couldn't do anything about. Everyone knows that Twinkies are "bad for you". It's almost stereotypical for a fat person to be eating Twinkies, and this makes everyone want to avoid them.
Also, for my specific usage on an internal tool, the fact that it doesn't allow sub-minute (or sub-second) input is pretty annoying.
huh, thanks. i never thought my address was so exclusive.

(i was once asked to give my address here, started with 'europa', and got the reply 'no, your address here in chile'...)
How'd that work out with music and books? Amazon and iTunes became powerful players _because_ the DRM created lockin and they ended up controlling the customers. Publishers are stuck now that they gave control to Amazon and helped Kindle become a proprietary success.

The video producers seem to be running along, handing over the same control to folks like Apple and Microsoft. Not a good strategy long-term, when they want to make DRM go away and sell to any old platform. By then, people will be locked in via their collections on iTunes or whatnot.
It depends. It's unlikely that the entirety of Hostess' operation will go unpurchased. In a sell off of the assets, the matter of outstanding debt will be washed away. It may drive the sellers to hold out for a higher price, but by an large, the Hostess brands and capital assets will be separated from their debts. This gives any new owner a more flexible negotiating position from which to bring the workforce back in to the fold.

Then again, there's no guarantee that the unions will be welcome at the table. A new buyer may choose to use existing capacity to add Hostess brands to their existing product lines. No one really knows until it shakes out.

To more directly answer your question, I think it's hard to see this scenario as a "success" for the unions. The only clear positive outcome is that they set a precident of non-capitulation. In any future negotiations, the counterparty will have to acknowledge that this is a group who is willing to see an action through to the very end. Then again, this may lock them out of future relationships.

Uncertainty abounds.
Blaming this bankruptcy on strikes is so utterly, transparently horseshit. I hope pundits call them out on this.
Others here express a dissimilar sentiment: the only durable reason to start a company, is because you want to start a company. If you're passionate about that, you have a better chance of getting the business side right.
How Robots Saved an Artist's Sanity
Ah, thanks -- done.
There's a lot more detail on what went on behind the scenes in this article: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-11-16/hostess-liquidation...

(I'm not endorsing any particular political viewpoint expressed in it, but merely posting it because it has a lot of info)
:) Ramakanth here. We conversed in Google plus if you can remember.
Bug report: I just went to your home page and got the message "Put money in your seller's bank account by: UNDEFINED NAN/NAN".
I suspect you'd be able to style it using the shadow DOM.
thanks for the reply - its nice to get an insight on your perspective. My commentary above doesn't detract from my opinion which is basically: looks good, definitely didn't waste my cash. Inevitably there is stuff people disagree with - there isn't a worthy book out there that doesn't fit that description.

We've needed a book like this for a while :)

I look forward to future editions as well.
That's a really good and evenhanded review. Thanks for spotting it.
CONTACTS WITH GAYS OF SPAIN
> Whatever happened to just returning the device?

That wouldn't protect future customers who fall for this false advertisement and never realized they paid for 32 GB of storage but got only 16... False advertising is serious. We HN'ers can see if a device we bought has half the storage we expected it to have, but most people can't.
I think calling these people lumberjacks is a bit off, since lumberjacks actually love trees and want to see more of them as well.
I'm not so sure about the advice with PayPal, according to this article PayPal only sends out the 1099-K to vendors making over $20k or 200 transactions http://www.etsy.com/blog/en/2012/the-paypal-1099-k-dont-fear...
Interesting enough. Perhaps 3.9% of the respondents didn't like having their time wasted with a survey, so decided to be deliberately awkward in every response they made. This would seem to fit in with the 'lumberjacks' being older and having a lower income than other respondents: both characteristics can be associated with a kind of hard-nosed practicality and a disdain for treehuggers and silly surveys.

I'm sure there's a law somewhere that says that no matter how completely indefensible a position, there is some contrary-minded group who will loudly proclaim allegiance to it. And if there isn't, there is now.

(Edit: OP, not suggesting your survey was silly, just that the 3.9% might have thought so.)
A Moving/Adaptable House Based on The Haberdasher’s Puzzle
Unfortunately it doesn't work on the iphone because the input field doesn't call up the keyboard. Probably pretty easy to fix this.
I posted an updated Risks section and will be continuing to add to it and edit. Any feedback very welcome!
That is not the case here. In fact, they are already in bankruptcy. The judge had imposed a new contract on the union that didn't accept, so they went on strike. The company claims they cannot whether the strike and instead are completely liquidating all assets of the company. They are closing down, not reorganizing.
The world is more complicated than "all corporations are inherently evil."
There seems to be a regulatory black hole here. Government quickly needs to lay some ground rules.
Cancerous cells are part of your body — they've just mutated such that they don't respond to signals that tell them to die or slow their rate of replication. The reason your immune system doesn't recognize them is because they are literally part of you. This is why specifically targeted cancer cures are so hard: there's almost nothing that distinguishes cancer cells from normal cells.
> you can't undownload it.

You can, however, call your ISP and tell them to turn it off, just like you would have told them to turn it on to start with when signing up to the service (you'd be given the choice whether to have a filtered connection or not when signing up).

The linked report also includes quotes that points out that there are substantial limitations in this type of filtering that means people might still want to choose other options - e.g. it's a single setting for the entire household, so if that is not appropriate for you, you still need to download separate filters, whether you ask for your connections to be filtered or unfiltered by default.
I tried to get service, but I'm 15k feet away, so it was unbearable. I'm calling them before I sign my next lease I think.
Australia wants $29M in back taxes from Apple
It takes 18,500 people to make Twinkies?!
Having just completed a large project with Lua, I have to say that the indice/ordinal notation thing is something that we quickly got used to. In fact, some nice succinct idioms work because elements run from 1 to arraySize (inclusive).
"Culturally Idiomatic"?
I am a casual pirate. The last time I pirated stuff was torrenting some HBO shows, which promptly got me an email from my ISP.

At that point I could have done one of two things

1) Start spending $10 a month or so on an SSL Usenet provider, a VPN, or any of the other various tools that would allow me to keep pirating without getting caught

2) Start spending $10 a month or so on HBO, and watch it from the comfort of my couch on my flat screen without messing around with any of that stuff.

There are always going to be ways around whatever system they put in place, but the more obstacles they put in the way the more people will decide its no longer worth the effort.
Obscure being the key word. There's no proof of security there, right?
There was an 'or' clause in the preceding definition.
My background is in technology. I've built a few software companies. I focused on understanding the manufacturing process, designing the first line, sourcing materials, finding partners, working on fit, thinking about how to market the company in the future, etc. All the things you'd expect. It has been incredibly fun.
"the vast majority of the people for whom trading in copyrighted material has become a social norm, over many years."

Haven't it become the social norm because it's the easiest way?
I've long thought that machine learning would be a great tool for detecting cancer and other diseases. There is a small but growing body of research to support this idea, but very few practical implementations. [1] [2] [3]

Ultimately detection is an issue of pattern recognition, and computers are really good at that. The two biggest barriers are the amount of data that needs to be collected and annotated, and the sensitivity of medical data. If someone reputable were to start a large scale data collection effort, we could make huge strides toward identifying some of the key cancer indicators. It would even benefit people who can't afford top quality medical care (servers are cheaper to deploy than doctors).

Cancer is the ultimate medical opponent. It comes in so many forms and can change into so many more. Many cancers spend 10-20 years as harmless lumps of cells before doing any serious damage. It seems like the best bet is to every tool available to find them long before they become a problem.

[1] http://cs229.stanford.edu/proj2011/Planey-Machine%20Learning...

[2] http://www.mendeley.com/research/data-analytic-strategy-prot...

[3] http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-11/new-computer-m...
Obama's Approach to Big Data: Do As I Say, Not As I Do
I agree, the support has been fantastic as well. I see so much potential in their offering, I keep hoping they'll open a way for others to contribute modules/libraries in a kind of marketplace. Good tech/product/market fit like this always causes me to get a bit swept up in the excitement - well done guys!
Should have used mailchimp...
Good read, a few things to add:

- Even when you think you are getting a great deal by buying something on Amazon and not paying taxes, you still owe the state those taxes. Your accountant will know more, but you should be filing a Use tax at least every quarter. Easy to get burned if you are buying tons of equipment for new hires and the state anything on it.

-Vacation policy: The 'take it when you need it' method works great. If you don't think it will work, be ready to keep track of all employees used days (it's a huge hassle) because it is a liability and you will owe them some cash on unused days if they split ways with the company.

-If you are going to fire someone, talk to your lawyer or HR connection first. The law can be strict on making sure that the employee is paid on the day you fire them through that time period. It's good to have a check ready for this before you sit them down.
I'm going to buy a few boxes then give them out as Christmas gifts in 10 years.
If you have details, please share.
I don't see why it would be banned. F1 is all about pushing technology to the limit. In fact, the DeltaWing did not qualify for the 24 hours of lemans but it was provisionally invited to compete due to it's radical design.
A thorium market would open up development of Monazite sands, which right now are uneconomic because of the cost of thorium disposal. This would give the US a supply of rare earths as well as solving global warming without introducing nuclear proliferation risk. The same technology could also be used to reduce the lifetime of radioactive waste from 10's of thousands of years to under 300.
Fair point. Any suggestions for a sorta silly label for a group that genuinely doesn't like trees? Went with lumberjacks to avoid saying anything overly disparaging, but it's not great.
What Happens When A Twitter Client Hits The Token Limit
While that might not be the best of advice, I think the point is that people need to apply themselves. Just throwing up your hands and saying, "I don't understand," is shirking your responsibilities as a parent.

Ask around with friends and family. Surely someone knows a person that has reasonable technical competency. If they don't know the answer ask them to look for you, or hell pay them a little bit to spend some time researching for you.

If that fails, call up your local technology writer/reporter. I'm sure that if they don't already know of such things, it would make a great story/article for them to do (because surely there are a lot of other parents in the same boat as you).
Is it possible to run the netflix app in an android emulator on an average machine?
I've been working from home now for 6 years.

I agree with all that you have said, but I do see negatives more prominently, so I'll list those as a balance point. Keep in mind as you read these that I live more than a day away from where I work, so that adds an isolation factor that not all home-workers will suffer.

1. Probably the biggest thing I miss is the informal conversations. The hallway conversations. I've become very detached from what is going on in my department, and I no longer have the pulse of what is going on.

I used to occasionally stop by my manager's office and chat for a few minutes, just an informal query of how business is going, what I've been doing, toss out some wacky ideas for improving things, etc... A phone conversation is simply not the same.

2. I miss going somewhere else to work. I can occasionally rectify this by going to panera's or a coffee shop, but it's not practical to do if I'm going to be having meetings that day. And I do get random calls from coworkers and managers...

3. I have become a bit of a recluse. I have this as a natural tendency to begin with, but now that I work from home, I don't even have work to get me out of the house.
Secretaries of State are not intended to be authorities on their respective subjects. The decisions they make are typically completely abstracted from any technical matters, and they have a wide range of expert opinion to call upon when necessary.

You could apply the same criticism to pretty much anyone in a managerial position.

I can guarantee you there are high-ranking executives in leading IT companies who have less practical knowledge of computing than the average 13-year-old.
Design matters more than the feature checklist

Not in any enterprise I've ever serviced.

What enterprise people really need to know:

I already know from existing reporting that 984 orders (18% of our backlog) are already past due. For those
984 orders:

- How many are for one item and how many are for multiples?
- Do we own what we owe those customers?
- If we do own it, is it in the proper warehouse?
- If it is in the proper warehouse, can we find it?
- If we can find it, is it undamaged and certified?
- If it's shippable, do we have enough labor to ship it?
- If it isn't certified, how soon can QA certify it?
- If it isn't in the right warehouse, can we move it?
- If we don't own any, where can we get some?
- Which vendors have it on the shelf?
- Which vendors do we have blanket purchase orders with?
- Which vendors do we have contracts with?
- Which orders can be split to satisfy a partial?
- Which orders are for customers already on credit hold?
- Which customers are threatening not to renew with us?

and (ironically) the most asked question of all:
- Which orders must be shipped to hit our quarterly numbers?

Enterprise solutions better answer these questions. If they're pretty, that's a bonus, but well designed tools that don't answer these questions are just lipstick on a pig.
As a seasoned ruby developer working on my first ios app in Objective C, I'm intrigued by RubyMotion and would be very interested to hear about the experiences others have had in using it, and whether it's a legitimate, production-ready replacement.

I've resolved to finish my current app in Objective C to be sure that I have a decent grasp of the standard stack before reaching for a higher level abstraction, but it does feel pretty painful at times to slog through some of the language's awkwardness and verbosity after using the likes of ruby, go, and clojure. This isn't to say that Objective C doesn't also have its bright spots, but I tend to feel that they mostly end up getting buried in unwieldy syntax and the bulkiness of xcode.
Quite a list. Kinda makes me feel bad for all the people writing HTML sanitizers :(
Try the piece using 'these respondents' in stead of 'lumberjacks'. Virtually unreadable and dull.
I don't believe for a second that this lawyer was simply a naive consumer who was misled by Microsoft, but having said that it isn't always as easy as people think to return things. The majority of retailers out there have pretty hostile return policies these days, and it can be difficult to actually return something like this without a significant "restocking" fee or such.

tl;dr -- always buy expensive electronics from a retail whom you know has a reasonable return policy and/or use a credit card with strong consumer protection.
Great! Happy to take a look at a pull request if you have one
Cheers Scott, fix on the way :)
We're using Balanced @ our startup - Really great integration, and support is crazy fast. Keep it up guys!
'Fresher' & 'Twinkies' is an oxymoron.
>>>> their downfall probably had more to do with a change in social perception that they couldn't do anything about.

Agreed. When I was growing up, I ate a LOT of these snack foods and regularly had twinkies in my bag lunch I brought to school.

Nowadays, there's a much better emphasis on nutrition and making sure kids avoid getting obese.

Back in 2005, the same thing happened to Krispy Kreme. They flooded our city with stores, but within a few years, they were all gone. There were a victim of the health food craze taking off.

As much as I hate to see them go, it's a good sign.