skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
R&D costs money, and lots of it.

So in the end, patents provided the incentive to innovate and $spend on R&D in America, and now free for all to copy. Without patents, smart investors will start to look at where they can most cheaply copy American innovations.
A few points to help put this in context:

1. Technically, the USPTO hasn't yet "invalidated" the patent; it issued a first "Office action" in which it stated that all of the patents claims were unpatentable in view of varying combinations of prior-art references.

2. Institutionally the USPTO is very much aware of the significance of reexamination for a patent in litigation.

3. The Office action was signed by a "primary" examiner, i.e., someone who has been around the block a few times. Another primary examiner and a supervisory primary examiner are listed as "conferees." You would be right to read this as a signal that the USPTO takes these matters very seriously; the detailed written analysis (which I haven't studied) seems to bear this out.

4. The primary reference cited is a patent [1] filed in November 2005 whose lead inventor was Danny Hillis --- dare I say, the legendary Danny Hillis [2].

Another main reference is a Japanese patent publication from 2000, referred to as the Nomura reference.

5. In responding to the rejection, Apple can try to establish that their inventors predated Hillis's November 2005 filing date. This is referred to as "swearing behind" the Hillis patent's filing date [3]. But the Apple inventors' filing date is January 2007; swearing behind that far would be a real challenge. (I won't go into the details of the statute and regulation unless people are interested.)

Apple can't swear behind the 2000 Nomura publication because it was published more than one year before Apple's January 2007 filing date --- see 35 USC 102(b).

6. Paragraph 14 on page 34 is pretty typical: It says, in effect, "you'd better take your best shot at contesting this rejection now, Apple, because the next time around it will be a final rejection."

7. If, as seems likely, the USPTO does issue a final rejection, Apple can appeal, first to an administrative appellate body in the USPTO, and if necessary to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The Federal Circuit is required by Supreme Court precedent to be fairly deferential to the USPTO's findings in some respects, but it's not entirely clear to me how that would play out here.

[EDITED FOR STYLE]

[1] http://www.google.com/patents/US7724242

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Daniel_Hillis

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swear_back_of_a_reference
500 Startups-Backed Markerly Makes Content Sharing Easier For Readers
Use personal cloud like Tonido (http://www.tonido.com). With public cloud services, once data leaves your device there is no guarantee. Good thing is there are options.
I would be thrilled to pieces if either of you emailed me and let me know what you are up to, etc.

Thanks.
Yeah, problem is, not everyone can be a STEM major. Comp Sci degrees would be worthless everyone who failed to understand integrals in Calc 2 could get one.
You should also consider the pre-hospital field - a paramedic/EMT in the field with a Toughbook, etc (where they're not still with paper) is typically using horrible software, with little flexibility to what by nature can be a rapidly changing encounter. I see this every day, and hear the cursing that accompanies it, and think to myself that there is so much that could be done to improve this.
Hi - As a fellow med student I'm interested in what you mean here.. Are you suggesting that patients should be able to order their own tests?
As a result of this decision, could the holders of these prior touch-screen patents now sue Apple for infringement?

By the way, the "Hillis" in the Hillis patent[1] (filed in 2005) is none other than W. Daniel (Danny) Hillis[2], the founder of Thinking Machines.

[1] Patent 7,724,242: http://www.google.com/patents/US7724242?dq=7724242

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Daniel_Hillis
These analogies are stupid, but in your example it's more like you invite the store to send a driver and they say "sure, he's going to bring five people with him", you say "OK, fine", then when he arrives you forcibly eject the five people you agreed to ride with.

But like I said. Analogies get really dumb when you get too deeply into them.
I understand the free speech angle; I really do... but in what insane dictionary does protesting the funerals of murdered children count as dissent?
I'd also like to throw myself into the ring as someone with significant medical and IT experience curious and keen to do something here. Perhaps contact me (and anyone else is welcome to, too), if you'd like to talk further.
App allows you to stumble through friends Facebook photos
The article missed:

I found an eager soul in a foreign country with similar skills for less than half your salary.
Vitamin C was not known to prevent scurvy. Citrus fruits, which contain vitamin C, were known to prevent scurvy, but no one knew why. They had theories, but the theories were wrong.
There's no need for the spider to know what itself looks like. If it builds something that increases survival/reproduction, that trait will be selected for.

The spiders’ webs were crafted around face-height, near the trail

This makes me wonder if it was selected for stopping humans from wrecking their webs! It would explain why the decoys look like spiders, to humans.
How the U.S. gun industry became so lucrative
I don't find your objective fact objective at all, especially if the alternative is what I saw in The Hobbit, or 90% of what is implemented in 3D movies.
This isn't something that was initiated within the patent office. An external attorney filed a reexamination request, paid for it (thousands in fees), and included literally hundreds of pages of explanation as to why the patent should be struck down, with references to hundreds of pages of prior art. From that, it is much easier for an examiner to determine whether the patent should be struck down.

This is not something that a patent examiner has the tools, training, and, most importantly, time to do on initial application. So I wouldn't expect any changes from the patent office itself.
"I think that most of those people do want to prevent these tragedies...."

Well of course. But wanting that is not exactly out of the mainstream, is it? Who doesn't, besides the fantasies of NRA members and/or gun owners that too many gun grabbers hold in their minds?
I accept it.
> My job is to make patients pay as much as we can legally make them pay, using any mean necessary as long as it is legal.

> I did not explore that much, but there seemed to be a demand for a service to selectively reduce profits, to maximize government subsidies in some units - something utterly disgusting for a libertarian.

So your morality teaches that it's OK to scam patients, but not OK to scam the government?
I have to say that 'Indie Game the movie' is absolutely fantastic. It's the programmer's 'Jiro Dreams of Sushi'. (with added bonus points for their DRM-free delivery).

Well worth your $10 through http://www.indiegamethemovie.com/ or whatever you pay through this bundle. Go watch the trailer and then buy it in some form.

and for reference: 92% on RT

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/indie_game_the_movie_2012/
Technically it's delimited by whatever character is decided to be the delimiter, which is even better :)

Having said that, it still seems to get data between all sorts of systems in the hospital.
Shoot me an email. I paid health insurance claims for over five years and would love to chat, hear what you are contemplating and all that. (my gmail account: talithamichele)
The medical supply area is one that is -really- ripe for disruption, to the point of basically cartel-like behavior brazenly being exhibited:

* http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Experts-warn-of-medical-i...
* http://www.huffingtonpost.com/martha-burk/congress-should-pu...

This is one where, if you had the contacts, you could at least try to do a lot of good, for everyone - but definitely one where you should expect to receive staunch, and ugly, opposition.
Since your account is new, looks like banging on a keyboard, you provide nothing to support your arguments, and this has been debunked (specifically in the fields of interest here at HN) so many times now, I assume this is just a lame troll.
I've deployed it for a former company as well as personally for a variety of projects. It's extremely quick to get up and running, and as libcloud integration gets better, it's been providing me with a cloud platform-neutral way of deploying/maintaining systems.

It requires less time invested than fabric for me. Most of the time, the batteries included in salt are enough. When they aren't, it's the same amount of work to maintain as fabric, but salt tends to save me some time building pieces fabric wouldn't provide.

If you maintain multiple linux distros, the templated config files make smoothing over differences in package names or locations a breeze.

If you need to maintain Windows-based stuff, salt can be setup against Windows Server in a manner that wasn't too painful. This was extremely handy when consolidating management of legacy windows stuff with newer linux stuff from the same web gui.

Speaking of web gui, I don't know of any that have significant steam for salt. That said, doing "import salt" in django/flask/$framework and receiving json or pickled data is pretty easy.
The economic return of Iceland has proved that the joke was on Ireland
Every Enterprise IT Department is Like a Start-up
That's why I always tell people that gcc is mostly useless without --ansi --pedantic -Wall.
That's what I meant, as well :-)
Well, Minecraft is the one of the largest (if not the largest) indie developed game in the world. So there's that.
Sweet! That was one of my main gripes with the old policy: I should not be charged $15 for a chargeback ruled in my favor. Stripe has finally won me over fully. Keep up the great work.
That's a really great idea and honestly, our biggest problem now isn't a lack of work but rather a lack of programmers. The entire health care industry from the EMT's up to the hospitals really needs an overhaul as some of the software used is decades old.
THANK YOU! We moved from Paypal to Stripe this year for the lower rates and better interface but were bummed to find out that refund fees weren't returned as they are in Paypal and other payment services.

This change makes Stripe a total win.
Gimmicky might be a stretch, but I genuinely can't think of the last time I used pinch to zoom. When browsing a double-tap zooms to the width of the element you're tapping, which is perfect.
Except that's a procedural action and is being mis-reported, and that Samsung has yet to pay Apple anything.
Yes, that's the easy part - massaging the bill, testing.

Providing an accurate estimation of the expected gains however require both domain knowledge and statistical analysis.

Ie if your hypothesis is to add "morbid obesity", and you know how much it will gain in the bill, how likely are you to find that in the patient file, given the patient history and (hopefully) some text from the release letter?

Enough to send an unqualified worker who does not understand medical speech?

(you won't get paid for ideas, but for actual results - and too many false positives cost money, because humans have to do the fact checking)

Do you believe it's worth putting a MD on the case? It will cost more in fixed costs, and thus reduce potential gains.

Can you automate that for one patient file consisting of multiple inputs? Can you still do that for 100'000 files? How long does it take for your software to produce its result? Can it still work when it is missing some critical information you believed in your early development would never be missing - like the release letter?

Textual analysis, datamining, Bayes, even sentiment mining (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4908056) etc - everything is fair game (ex: "the patient did not seem morbidly obese, but upon calculating BMI score, was")

Then you have to convert the lead to a sale. I'm talking about having money in the bank. This requires more than a nod and a signature for hospitals. I know firsthand - in the end, only one hospital paid.

Interest and traction are irrelevant. What matters is how much money you get in the end, and how satisfied the customer is to recommend you to others (it's a small world, especially in the health-IT field)
Vinci vs Notre Dame Des Landes (France) : Callout for occupation
USPTO trying damage limitation exercises against their awful prior art screening. Pretty pathetic, really.

Software patents should not exist, period.
The best part of FundersClub is a clean cap table because all the small investors are grouped together. Will this be the same? If I understand their partnership with SecondMarket, my guess would be no.

Any more data on this?
HL7 v3 is xml: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Level_7#HL7_version_3
USPTO can't do much about it.

Correct me if I am wrong but if the USPTO is the one granting the patents, then they can do something. Almost immediately they could instruct people reviewing tech patents to err on the side of not granting a patent or taking more time if the patent seems kind of obvious. If the folks are not in a position to tell if it is obvious, they should not be evaluating the category of patents.

Unfortunately, I get the sense that USPTO is in denial for the most part and does not believe, at least publicly, that there is a problem.
I think it's a case of not having the compiler warning level set to it's highest level (which it should be) or the bad habit of some programmer's ignoring warning messages.
This is true, although I find the default body text size in Bootstrap way too small, and often wonder if others do too. It seems to fit the "text wedged into elements of a Web tool" use-case it originates from better than longer body text.
In my experience with HL7 it's a standard, but every single system you talk to you need to write custom code to handle them, because everyone talks the "standard" a bit differently.

[edit] and as for the XML v3, nobody uses it. Nobody.
They mate somewhat directly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider#Reproduction_and_life_c...
which element do you want me to support?:
1) R&D costs money
2) investors look for return on their investment
3) corporations continuously look to reduce costs

Perhaps it is you who is continuing the echo chamber.
There's a lot more to enterprise than being "big, fat, old, cynical, rip-off artists". It seems like a lot of people are underestimating the sales/decision cycle of the enterprise market and the effect this has on costs.

This model of the consumerization of enterprise where users will just come and sign up has been far from proven at this point. People keep talking about "disrupting the enterprise space" but it's really a very conservative space. People with regular jobs tend to be very risk averse (in my experience). They don't want to make the wrong decision, and are willing to spend a lot of money and TONS of time to try to mitigate that risk. They also have lots of weird little requests re: functionality, so enterprise products kind of do need some kind of platform around them that allows heavy customization (and that takes tons of time to develop).

So, while I certainly agree there's plenty of money to be made in this business, I'm finding it more and more unlikely that a truly different business model is the way to go about making it.
Apple Allows Google Maps back into iOS
I almost fell out of my chair when you said "government people who can't control their own computers". That's just so wrong. No they refuse to change. Administrators have no excuses anymore.

If they literally couldn't control their computers, they would have to be terminators.
Plenty of films do seem dated in a negative way to me, and I can get that someone expects carefully mastered soundtracks with impressive thumpy sound. But I think there are some films were well made that stand the test of time.

The LA Times ran an article[1] arguing lack of interest in old movies stems largely from new films having a social function that is similar to fashion. I'm inclined to agree.
Therefore, while 48+fps might become the fashion, I doubt it's required to retain interest in new movies as referenced in the great-grandparent post.

I certainly wasn't around when The Seventh Seal was filmed, yet I find it astonishingly beautiful and impressive (which makes the parody film De Düva even better.) Of course, I can't talk about it the way one talks about the weather or of theater run films-- "Did you see Argo yet? I want to check it out, the trailer looked cool."

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jul/14/entertainment/la-ca-...
That I think is the key distinction: HL7 works okay for a group of tightly coupled systems, usually internal to a single organization. The biggest problems today are with data interchange between providers, networks of providers, 3rd party vendors (cloud based or whatever) and the like. The finance and insurance industry have, I think, figured this out. Healthcare has not.
hey robbie, don't know what year you are in, but basically yeah. a physician in a hospital basically looks at data on a patient to assess the state and then make decisions on management to affect the state. the problem is that these tests are hard to find off-the-shelf and often costs an obscene amount of money as well. i would look into the efforts of companies like scanadu, alivecor, cellscope. once we can get data to the consumers, then us developers can immediately start creating knowledge based systems that utilize the data to give the patient a clearer picture of their internal state.
I'm not sure what the difference is between "Firefox Nightly" and regular old Firefox.

Basically, "Firefox" is the stable release. It's the one most people use, and should use. It's currently at version 17, for people who actually still care about version numbers :)

On top of that there are three release channels that offer preview builds of varying levels:

* Beta -- is exactly what it sounds like. Beta builds of what will become the next release of Firefox. Beta builds currently are version numbered 18.

* Aurora -- stable but pre-beta. Is two "versions" ahead of mainline Firefox, so Aurora builds are currently version numbered 19.

* Nightly -- the bleeding edge. Rebuilt every single night from latest code, these are three "versions" ahead of mainline, so currently carry version number 20.
I think this is actually a bad thing because at a certain point it discourages innovation and the creation of new things because competitors will just copy whatever you create. I'm not for patent trolls making money for simply owning someone else's invention, but I feel like if you invent something, patent your invention, and build a real product around that invention, then the patent should be upheld.

Otherwise, you might as well cut most R&D spending and focus on reverse engineering. Getting really good at following fast is probably a lot cheaper than getting really good at inventing new things that turn into products.

Also, then you could spend a smaller fraction of money to "acquire" (through various means) the schematics and trade secrets and produce your own version of the next big thing. Sure, that is probably unethical, but without any semblance of protection via patents, trademarks, other IP law, it seems like that is what you would get.

That being said, as it gets cheaper to distribute information and turn that information into physical goods, the amount of value in the production of physical goods is going to approach the cost to manufacture those goods. There will always be some money in service, repair, etc. but a lot of things value will be destroyed along the way and it is not yet clear if that is a net positive for society at large.
I see a lot of hate online for Homefront but personally I like the online play quite a bit.

It's entertaining and has decent maps. It's just too bad no one plays the DLC maps.
Very true - on a slightly different note, my company cleans up in the insurance / claims management side by implementing a system of policy management not based on table lookups but by allowing our providers to build rules and flows of their own. You wouldn't (well, perhaps you would) believe how many claims processors rely on database tables hundreds of columns wide to cover every permutation for a policy possible, and how (relatively) easy it is to convert those into boolean logic and simple rules along the lines of "IF AmountPaid > Deductible THEN" etc.

We achieve auto-adjudication of claim rates into the low-mid 90th percent, whereas most of our competitors are in the 60s to 80s (and some clients, inefficiently using those competitors, are as low as 30% auto-adjudication when they come to us).

But working on the insurance side of things increasingly tweaks my moral compass the wrong way...
Additional data point for all the people arguing about it deeper in comments: Firefox 3.6 had its last security update 9 months ago (2012-03-13) and hit official end of life from Mozilla a month later.
I do the exact same thing and it makes for a nice, modular setup. I have a site.less that imports bootstrap.less and whatever other "legos" I need.
There are legal exceptions for unaccredited family members. Soliciting their money does not complicate subsequent fundraising at all.
I'm so tired of writing this. Gay guy, lived in Topeka for 22 years. They don't give a shit if you take down their Twitter feed or their website. It's immature, it's childish. It puts more of their rhetoric in the minds of more people.

It's what they want. I'm glad that we all think they're despicable but I'm kind of tired of the circle jerk of people thinking they're actors of social change by laughing at their online presence being hacked.
Very cool. I clicked around a bit and then watched the video which I found to be very informative after you started playing with 'In Motion // Josh'. I wanted to play with that track as well so I immediately started looking for it, but since it's not on the home page I couldn't find it. Can you post the link?

Since you only have 84 projects, why not either put them all on the home page (although its already laggy) or paginate? It seems that you're already showing 66 projects on the front page as is.
correct link: https://github.com/mlarocca/Dynamic-Charts
If it is legal it is no scam. Making patients pay as much as legally possible is legal.

For ex, on preexisting conditions, the burden of proof is almost reversed. I'm simplifying, but more or less in an audit the opposite party has to prove the charge could not have been caused by the preexisting condition. It is almost impossible (good luck if you are trying to prove say that the chest x-ray had absolutely nothing to do with a physician making sure a cancer did not relapse - so I'll add that preexisting condition to the bill. it has a multiplier effect on the whole bill after a threshold)

This is also moral, according to my beliefs, since it helps improving reliability (here, giving a financial incentive to always check for relapses) and efficiency.

Reducing profits by accounting trickery is illegal. Reducing profits is also immoral in the belief system I have.

You have different beliefs - good for you.
You could start by backing up the statements patents provided the incentive to innovate and $spend on R&D in America, and and now free for all to copy and especially Without patents, smart investors will start to look at where they can most cheaply copy American innovations.

It would be especally impressive if you could show that all these putative benefits were, in fact, a net gain over all the very tangible downsides of this idea monopoly casino that is our patent system.
No true scotsman, good to see that's still being touted. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you've never even bothered to read their FAQ because no one would make the silly mistake of implying that their preaching comes from anything but religion.