skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From my intro-college-course understanding...

The problems they're solving are different. Patents exist to incentivize people to create new technology. If there were no patents, it's hard to justify spending lots of time and energy on new technology -- it'll just get stolen. So, the deal is that if you invent something, you get solid industrial use out of it (20 years sounds look enough to build a career), and in return, you publish comprehensive documentation about it. Contributing your knowledge to society is part of the deal.

Copyright is different. Copyrights are granted to unique, creative works -- art, that holds no value other than the value in the thing itself. There, there's nothing that would otherwise need to be hidden and protected to get use of the art. So, no need to publish docs, since you're exposing the whole thing when you disseminate anyway. But, it may be your life work, or something like that. So, you get protection from people ripping you off for your lifetime, plus long enough for people to forget about your person, leaving only the work.

Long story short, they're different processes with different societal impacts, so they get fundamentally different protections.
Yeah, you can edit CSS with Inspector, change background-color for <body>.
Daily Report: College of the Future May Be on the Internet
I've work (and continue doing it) on quite big and complex projects in Python, and it works really well for that.
Of course, it can depend of the context, but in general I don't think that safety is much more and issue on a dynamic language (and in Python in particular).
Yes. Being able to do something isn't the same as actually doing it though.
I've never understood Apple's willingness to bend over for carriers. Its always seemed to me that they've tried hard to foster an image of a company that exists to serve the customer as best they can (though, sometimes they think they know best.)

It would seem to me that Apple would have the upper-hand in these negotiations. The carriers, at this point, need the iPhone. AT&T, and Verizon simply couldn't afford to not offer the iPhone anymore and expect customer retention/satisfaction. Why doesn't Apple throw their weight around and go to bat for the customer?

Is this some relic of a contractual obligation with AT&T? What part of this story am I missing?
CSEdWeek
Human Rights Watch: Stop killer robots
What is it about global warming links that bring a deluge of totally stupid fallacious postings on Hacker News every time? There's almost not a single good comment here that would show even rudimentary understanding of the subject. I thought this was better than Slashdot.

- "Climate has always changed." check.
- "I live in a cold place, I welcome warming." check.
- "We can just adjust." check.

Maybe check if your insightful argument has actually already been debunked here:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php
Petition the RSC to reinstate and support Khanna's copyright reform paper
I don't think I'd define Facebook or Google as something "few others realize are worth doing". Facebook launched around the same time as a score of social networks, so lots of people realized it was worth doing. People also realized search engines were worth doing (Google was probably not even among the first 20 launched) they just didn't realize Yahoo was beatable. Or how lucrative they could be.
Certain people rejoice AC/DC finally available on iTunes
I'm just stating facts. The prosecution is required to prove that the defendant not only exceeded their authorization to the application in question, but that they did so knowingly.
(also, I am no longer the party leader of the PPSE; I led the party through its first five years and the election where we put our first people in the Europarl. Today, my focus is international)
If this upsets you, you need to contact your representative now and complain, especially if they're GOP. If they're a good one and they hear some noise over this, they'll take note of it.

http://house.gov/representatives/
This is also a problem with Simple Mobile (a MVNO that I'm trying out with a carrier and development unlocked AT&T Branded HTC Titan). Repeatedly, it will default to T-Mobile or AT&T APN and Cell settings, causing me to lose cell service and internet access. Oddly enough, when they've switched settings and cell/internet is supposedly down, I will get MMS messages. There is no way to set the settings correctly and lock them down from an end user perspective. It's pretty much a wash when it comes to service since there aren't enough T-Mobile towers where I'm at, and after the amount I've already paid for is up, I'm switching to Straight Talk to give them a shot.
Keeping our cloud afloat during Hurricane Sandy
We already know that Mars is lousy with water. For most of the surface all you have to do is dig down maybe a meter or so and you'll find permafrost everywhere.

I suspect it's some sort of sign of complex organics, which would be a strong sign of past life.
>
If he was there to wield influence, he's not done very well this time - otherwise why would the BBC report on possible foul play by his former company

Well it such a big story now, they can hardly not run with it can they?

> Why would they explicitly mention his connection with the BBC?

Again, because they have to. I find it fascinating that private industry leaders would be involved, non-executive or otherwise, in the running of a state broadcasting company. The BBC is spending British taxpayer's money after all. Does not seem impartial.
There is a petition to the Republican Study Committee to republish and support Khanna's report on copyright reform. I've signed: it's at https://www.change.org/petitions/paul-teller-and-the-republi...
Monopolies, Commoditisation and Centralisation
This does not fix MMS.

Their site simply constructs the same kind of configuration file that Apple's official iPhone Configuration Utility generates. You can override an APN in those configuration files...the internet APN, and ONLY the internet APN. There is simply no place in the iPhone Configuration Utility to specify an MMS APN, and there is presumably no field in the configuration file itself for it to go.

iPhone Configuration Utility, unlockit.co.nz, and all their ilk ONLY fix internet data, and not MMS.
Could also be a lot of some other important element or molecule.

Or could be a scientific whiff. Looks like they're keeping their mouths shut until they can scientifically confirm the data.
Curiously, I am working on a company now that has gone the other way around. They started with a design in C++, then moved to a Python code base to be able to adapt it faster to their needs.

The system serves a massive number of users in real time, so I don't think that the speed is necessarily an issue. Of course, it can be different in other cases...
I look forward to a world in which more politicians participate in sites like Hacker News.
And so it goes. I have a feeling many people on here would be singing a different tune if the EU suddenly decided that it was a "right" for people to use their software no matter who they are. Think of it this way. Would anyone truly benefit if the EU decided that Hacker News was "a valve of free speech" so it must not discriminate who uses it? I think this is a terrible decision and a massive overstep of the state into private affairs. As an aside, I'm not so convinced that wikileaks is as noble an organization as many on here seem to think it is.
But it's not determined by the highest bidder, because money is not the sole driver of politics, despite what many think.

Do you think Chris Dodd made more money as a Congressman, or do you think he makes more as the head of the MPAA?

A Congressman would make a lot more money being a lobbyist. Most of the money they get goes towards reelection campaigns, which are wildly expensive, and deplete a large percentage of their funds. They are not Congressman because it pays a lot of money personally. If that was the goal, they'd all do short stints and move to being lobbyists. Instead, they stay in Congress for a long time.

Don't get me wrong, i'm not defending anything. I'm more trying to get folks to see that it is dangerous to equate money with power in America. Power is power. Money is money. Some of one may get you some of the other. But they are not the same, and until folks get around to realizing this, they'll never change anything.
I understand where you're coming from, but that logic doesn't really work, does it? I can tell you that somewhere there is indeed an application that will respond to an unauthenticated GET request by transferring funds between accounts. You and I both know that. Deliberately loading that URL on planet Earth to effect funds transfers will get you charged.

So it's obviously more complicated than just "any unauthenticated URL must be fair game".
Is HP in an unrecoverable death spiral?
Nope, it increased because people actually started to use the forum :)
Unless you're google, I would much prefer to have something I can read the source code of and install myself.
Rebuilding After Hurricane Sandy: Flat Roof Repairs for Commercial Buildings
The sort of forums you're talking about won't be what spammers really care about. If they can hit a small forum with no work needed they may as well but the targets that they'll work for are the high traffic forums that can't sacrifice usability, SEO or accessibility in any meaningful way to stop spam.

If you want to stop spam on a small forum you don't need to break usability because nobody is going to spend time looking at how you're doing things to get around your spam prevention.
In southern europe that'd actually be a fair offer.
I can't comment on the 2 companies financials, but as an ex-FAST employee, I can vouch that working there in a pre-sales role was fun times for me. I have only heard of people saying it's horrible to work in Autonomy, but it might be selection bias.

If anyone of you are in the enterprise software space as an engineer, you really ought to consider working in pre-sales. You get to build a highly valuable skill set that compliments what you know already.
They're better about it than the other phone manufacturers. Before the iPhone, it was more or less impossible to get a smartphone that wasn't loaded with non-removable carrier crapware. Apple's refusal to let AT&T do the same with the iPhone during their initial exclusivity deal was a big step.

But now, Apple doesn't have as much leverage. If they walk away from negotiations and say "Sorry, no more AT&T iPhones," they're losing all of the customers that stay on AT&T and buy Android devices. And AT&T loses all of the customers that switch to other networks so they can get new iPhones.

Apple did try to do something about exploitative text message pricing when they introduced iMessage. AT&T's response was to stop offering anything but unlimited texting plans.
New start-up hubs challenging Silicon Valley - study
"Maybe I could see using something like that" is equivalent to "no, I won't use that."

If they were a "yes", they would take out their wallet and offer you money. "Something like that" means "not what you are offering".

"Maybe I could see using something like that" is what people say when they want to be nice to you. Even "I would use that" is basically a "no".
> Many posters even here, however, seem to be unaware of climate cahnge.

Based on what?

I grant you that many posters - even here - think that the science is uncertain or that the economics of trying to prevent it as opposed to deal with it are other than the press suggests.

...but I find it utterly wrong to say that people are not aware of the topic.
Further along these lines, as a publicly traded company, isn't any cooking of the books a criminal act, regardless of the HP/sale angle?
<RANT>

I find this very frustrating. As someone steeped in engineering and the sciences, I am used to working with unusual, unexpected and/or exciting results and I am used to those results being confirmed, revised, denied, etc.

My frustration is not with the scientists; I'm sure I'd do the same thing given a possibly groundbreaking discovery and an inability to discuss much about it. My frustration is with us, the public, and with the fact that we can't be trusted as part of the broader team in this exploration. And I guess I'm frustrated with the media for feeding us with hyped-up-everything, since, even though we seem to demand it, it keeps us from being able to be involved in these conversations/discoveries.

</RANT>

edit: added tags...
That does suck, but if it is an AT&T-branded phone, it is less surprising (although no more acceptable) that you've encountered this problem.

If you go into an Apple retail store and buy an off-the-shelf carrier-unlocked no-brand-stickers-anywhere-on-the-device Apple iPhone 4 or 4S at full price ($450/$550), you will still run into this, which is ridiculous.
Does this actually surprise anybody anymore?

Guess what! Don't trust apple's updates! They have a LONG history of breaking your functionality when you "upgrade" them that goes back to the original iPods.

(A la blocking gnupod)
Show HN: User Authentication Without a Server
Sounds like the automobile recall algorithm from Fight Club. Sadly, you're probably right.
http://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology/scientists-create...

Seems like a promising approach. Does anyone know about this?
Show HN: Smart Domain Search Engine - Review NameMesh
Hi Everyone,

I recently launched - http://www.namemesh.com and would love to have your feedback on it.

Briefly:

NameMesh is a smart .com domain search engine which quickly creates, ranks and checks names.

It's

1) Complete - checks for lots of things like synonyms, antonyms, related words, portmanteau, misspellings, phonetic variations, short url, acronyms, suffixes, prefixes etc.

2) Relevant - ranks all the names based on quality metrics. supports ways to do complex queries.

3) Simple & Fast - single step process taking only seconds.

Thanks
Outbrain Purges Customers Who Abused Platform, Takes Hit on Revenue
Apple had a delicate relationship with carriers when it started making the iPhone. The carriers could dictate what they wanted. This has changed, as you state. These carrier-favouring measures could very well be contract inertia dating from that era.
Not really. From the top article:

> Apple won't help me because they agreed to block on-device APN editing for certain carriers, including AT&T, even though this negatively impacts people who are not direct customers of AT&T, and even though there is not one single other unlocked GSM phone model on the market besides iPhone that imposes this restriction on users or hands over this kind of control to carriers.

Unless I'm misunderstanding your argument. Are you suggesting that Apple is beholden to _all_ of the carriers severally now, because of risk of losing their dominant slice of marketshare?
OT: why wouldn't a client have their own Google credentials? What happens when you sever the relation?
UK's 'last typewriter' produced
I've seen people act like this, and kind of understand it, but it's a high investment for a very low payoff. It reminds me of people who fight for position by lane changing in cities with big commutes.

Or being determined to get off the plane a bit earlier of being aggressive at baggage collection. The petty gains don't begin to compensate for the energy loss, and the effect on your personality.

Over multiple rounds of play it's highly unstrategic. The only way to win is to identify losing games, and avoid playing them. I have built a habit where I always stand unless the carriage is practically empty, and then I never have to interact with the situation.

Generally English commuters are a respectful bunch: reserved, quiet, they let people off the train before trying to get on, there are still plenty of men (who want seats) who ignore it if ladies are standing. Celebrate it. It's nice not to live in Italy.
Amazon Offers ‘Amazon Pages’ For Brands To Customize With Their Own URLs
For me, this highlights why tech investing is so frustrating.

I saw this coming and would have shorted Autonomy if I had the money. But guess what? I'd have lost a fortune even though I was (allegedly) right.

DHH has been shorting Salesforce for a good while. He's losing that bet as well.

Equity investing often bears no relation whatsoever to reality. The "bigger fool" element is huge.

That said, I think this may be the end of HP. A bold claim, but they are going to have to fight some serious allegations of corruption, incompetence and negligence.
In 1.5 years, $41 M gone. This company was full of so much drama. It's a shame that really good investors had to deal with a lot of grime.
Current thread on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/curiosityrover/comments/13i2z4/it_is...
I agree with your conclusion.

As an example of early disclosure of unconfirmed results, I am fairly confident many members of the public still think we have evidence that neutrinos travel faster than light..
Well, 4°C temperature change do not sound scaring, you have that between night and day. Usually the majority estimates consequences of climate change from their past experience. The thing is nobody ever experienced a +4°C anomaly driven by CO2 in 200 years (probably even not this planet).

So, forget about what you've learned about weather and expect the worst and multiply this by two. In other words our uncontrolled experiments with the atmosphere do not lead to a weather upgrade, it is more of a system change - introducing bugs and BSODs.
> We were swamped recently with spam when our page rank recently hit 6 (I guess spammers target sites with higher PR)

We have really good search engine rankings and if you post a topic on our forum you'll be available in all the search engine results within minutes. The funniest thing I've ever experienced was discovering when a spammer will submit a post about a live stream for a football match 15 minutes before kick off that we'll see ~3,000 people browsing the forum all from google because they searched "watch barcelona vs real madrid" and our ranking is being abused by spam bots.

Prior to realising that this happened I'd always viewed spam on forums as a sort of "hope people click the links" thing but after discovering just how much traffic people like those mentioned in my example can drive... these spammers must be making a lot of money. The forums are used as their quick way to get into search results for a term they know is about to blow up, I think it's pretty clever and obvious in hindsight.

http://rmbls.net/post/21518498093/barcelona-vs-real-madrid
Letter to a Would-Be Startup Founder
I agree. I'm not sure how this is at all like Instagram. Is it because there is a feed? Then why not the Twitter for pixel art?
Seems to me this is really ATT's customer abuse than Apple's. I suppose Apple's main fault here is not putting more pressure back on ATT.

Albeit, downgrade seems like a reasonable request to me, although they may have security reputation concerns to be considered.
Loved the tutorial ... True, there was nothing new here ... :)
I do agree that we're making the same point, and I wrote my response to you in the mindset that I had poorly communicated my initial conclusion. Your point compliments my own. The difference we may have is that I don't view intent in the highest importance when someone visits a public server. Intent will only get you so far as long as server, configurations, permissions, and other technical aspects are in order. The reason he was able to copy restricted data is because the technical aspects were not in order. That's where the muddiness comes in; you wouldn't need intent to make unauthorized copies in this situation. The Googlebot could have made unauthorized copies. Your browser's cache could make unauthorized copies. Archive.org could have made unauthorized copies. Googling for plaintext and valid credit card numbers might shock you in what Google is finding on public servers.

His intent comes into play only secondarily in my opinion. I might enter a store with intent to steal something, but if a security guard is standing next to me and a camera is watching, I'd walk right back out. The lack of security is what allowed him to complete his intentions of unauthorized copying. It does not absolve him of his crimes, but thinking about the potential for unintentional restricted data access tells me that his crimes sit in line with the failed (non-criminal but out-of-compliance) policies of the host.
Nassim Taleb talks about this phenomenon in Fooled by Randomness, in a chapter titled "If You're So Rich, Why Aren't You So Smart?"

Namely, we can't judge a person’s intelligence by their wealth. Just because someone is successful now doesn’t mean that success wasn’t generated in a risky, inconsistent manner.
We should all support this at: http://www.csedweek.org/forms/sign/pledge-step1-2012

The most interesting thing to me now in Education reform is that it seems to be less of a technology issue and more of a bureaucratic issue. I have yet to see any of the amazing edutech platforms implemented at anything other than a novelty level.
What's new in Firefox 17 (shipping today)
"Clever" use of misleading scale and baldfaced assertion, there. Many people believe the trick of dilating an axis to make perceived changes smaller is on some level dishonest.

I'm sure your argument is that: well, on the scale of hundreds of thousands of years, you can see temperatures vary on that scale! Sure. But we are talking about anthropogenic climate change. Even the worst case scenario--which everyone agrees would be bad and people spend a whole lot of effort arguing it can't happen because of that--would barely show up on the graphs you linked.

So they're of little value, and I recommend you take them down because of how they might be construed to mislead.
Also Firefox 17 Changes for Web developers

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Firefox_17_for_deve...

The sandbox support for iframes looks particularly helpful.

Sadly this is the first version of Firefox in a year or two that actually breaks things for me: the "animate once" setting is no longer being obeyed for GIFs in some cases and the
"secure login" plugin seems to have stopped working despite a recent update.

Mostly intact though and I've finally turned off Flash completely since enough of the web and youtube supports it properly with pure html5
I have the exact opposite point of view. If you do not reserve a seat, then expect to stand.

I reserve seats because I often make 6-8 hour train journeys and want a seat with my wife the whole way. I bother to organise a booking and get annoyed when people won't move out of it.
> People, you are some of the brightest and cleverest people walking the earth.

Oh, please. It's exactly this kind of self-congratulatory bullshit that produces this community's inch-deep intellectual culture.
It's not as simple as that. What's actually happening is that Congress is extracting campaign contributions from large donors by threatening to push legislation one way or the other.

No legislator can get reelected without a multimillion dollar campaign fund. Threatening to tweak the laws one way or the other allows legislators to extract funds from both sides - "Hey, you want this tweak? Pay up! Hey, you don't want this tweak? Pay up!" Depending on who actually pays, the tweak may or may not get made, but the important thing is to revisit the issue often and to revisit the donors with outstretched hands.

In some sense, the corporations are as much victims of this scheme as the public is.
Wikileaks was only an example that drew attention to a wider and more serious problem.