skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
U-232: I'm not sure that's really the good argument. The better argument is that it doesn't matter whether it is weaspons-resistant, because it is much easier to enrich U 235, even for U-poor countries. Is that argument also flawed? Unfortunately, I suspect some of the relevant knowledge is secret.
So exaggerating for you is just highlighting the issue, but exaggerating for everybody else is insane. I see how it works :)
yes, the russians will on-sell to anyone:
its probable that australia's decision to supply russia, while not as politically charged, was a greater proliferation hit than any future decision on india :(
> It might finally push Glock into making single-stack 9mm

As a dude with small hands, I will write a personal letter of thanks to Andrew Cuomo if this happens: a modern polymer single-stack 9mm from a reputable manufacturer is long overdue.
Where did I complain about not finding candidates? Where did I whinge about a 'talent crisis'. Nowhere I'm aware of.

At a guess you're projecting other managers complaints on to me. I'm not in the U.S. and don't have these problems.

So you've got actual words from actual me:

* Those three people are worth the bidding war. They're worth 10 times the next rung down.

* I need to fill the position with the best possible person. It doesn't matter that Google et al have take the top people, I still need a new engineer.

* Universities generally suck time and deliver little. Spend the three or four years getting a ton of experience and participating in the community and you'll jump ahead of someone who's passed university, but doesn't have their own project.
One person's troll may be another person's market-maker. For a contrary view to the idea of patent trolls, check out this paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1534282
The richest tech entrepreneurs in Europe
Alex Vik?
Yeah, I'm pretty surprised that Her Majesty's government hasn't already raided the Ecuadorian embassy, taken Assange into custody, and handed him over to the Swedes. Ecuador is a pretty insignificant country, and it's not like they'd catch any flak from the American government for such a move.
I have no idea what your point is.

"Errr, without accepting it there wouldn't have been a Constitution or United States of America. "

Maybe this is also true about the second amendment?

"And it did provide a mechanism for outlawing it"

Maybe this is also relevant to gun control?
Please read my other replies on this thread concerning this.
CES: Worse products through software
And I should care why?

Those are very common and accurate words of art in the RKBA community; one of my objectives in writing mini-essays like the above is to expose others to our viewpoint and that includes the language we use.
Definitely think this is a bad idea. If the Royal Mail find out they might destroy the package.
Whoa! Nice! Gittip better up its game. :^)
I prefer to use the term 'anti-choice' for the other side.
Do this now, before Facebook’s Graph Search embarrasses you
Book of GIMP
Surveillance Strategy Is ‘Privileged and Confidential,’ FBI Says
Forgot which thread I was in. Either way, circular logic is circular.
If you put 35 dollar bills in a box in 1933 and open it up today in 2013, you still only have 35 dollar bills, physically in your hand.

You can look at the purchasing power of $35 in 1933 vs 2013, but you don't have $600 physically in your hands to spend.

If anything, the purchasing power shows that paper bills have lost value whereas gold has gained value. In 1933, $35 could buy you 1 ounce of gold, whereas today's equivalent of $600 only buys you ~1/3 ounce.

My original post specifically talked about locking $35 in a box, so conditions haven't changed. Also I'm not claiming that gold is the best investment over time.
>the planes can still fly, they just need to be serviced before the next flight.

Isn't that the same thing as grounding all the planes? They can still fly if they're already in the air, and they can only fly until they land. And then they need to be serviced, but Boeing doesn't yet know what needs to be done to repair the problem so they can't fly again until the problem gets solved and the plane gets serviced.
The fact that is handed down rarely does not mean it was not threatened. And the reason why it handed down rarely may very well be that others plead out, because they were scared of that maximum sentence - which was exactly the problem in this case, that he did not want to accept the plea.
Can be followed on twitter as well

https://twitter.com/bitnk/

also, e-mail sent to Assange informing him of the parcel:

http://pastebin.com/44m5UViP
I'm not qualified to give legal advice, so I'll just link Wikipedia and let people make of that what they will:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil
I don't particularly disagree with that. Background checks strike me as mostly harmless but probably ineffective. It could be worth trying.

The question is whether pushing criminals toward theft would actually accomplish anything. If they still end up with largely the same number of guns, all you're doing is increasing the rate of theft, which could actually be more dangerous (especially where the criminals and the theft victims are both armed). But I guess we don't know unless we try.

I would also be interested to know whether the repeat offenders are largely gang members, because that probably changes the outcome quite a lot: A background check is a lot more likely to stop an individual felon than a gang with the manpower to knock off a gun store periodically or intimidate the owner into supplying a stream of firearms under false documents or even set up a machine shop and manufacture them internally.
You're right. It is odd.
Not that you necessarily said otherwise, but just wanted to mention that I could definitely see this being used by individuals as well. I have used a similar service (echosign) in the past to sign apartment leases, etc. This seems like it may be targeting that crowd as well with "smart phone integration" and other features.
I've never really understood this argument, because it assumes that if a bad law is enacted, there is no recourse. In a system where a law could be passed in a few days, wouldn't it also be able to be repealed in a few days? Why not have formally-provisional laws: "try it, see if we like it, throw it out if it didn't work?"

---

Or, even, (tangent incoming): "try a new law on some [randomly-selected] subset of the nation at a time, record metrics, see whether the experimental population or the control population are doing better" -- A/B test the nation?

That's theoretically what the whole system of state law was for--let each state experiment with its own law--but this has been less and less tenable for generating scientifically-valid data as it has gone on, as the policies states have enacted have caused them to diverge (where instead "good" policies were supposed to be converged to as other states copied them, and "bad" policies eliminated from the "gene pool"), and has caused people who agreed with each policy to move there and people who disagreed to leave. Now doing an "experiment" with a new law in one state will tell you next-to-nothing about how another state would react to it.

Now (or soon), we can efficiently enforce [some forms of] law at the individual level--just mark people in a database saying "this person is legally allowed to smoke marijuana" where a cop can look it up from the console in their car, or "this person will be charged a VAT instead of an income tax" where the credit and EFTPOS networks can look it up and handle it. Law doesn't have to be all-or-nothing. But this is, of course, a silly pipe-dream to apply to a current, entrenched nation. It'll probably be one of those things some charter city could run with, though.
U-232: I'm not sure that's really the good argument. The better argument is that it doesn't matter whether it is weaspons-resistant, because it is much easier to enrich U 235, even for U-poor countries.

Yes, that's right. That's why the "debate" is spurious.
Absolutely correct. I was thinking of things along the lines of "use JDK 1.2, which still lets you turn off the garbage collector, and then spend 100% of your time after startup in a JNI module." That's the least scary version.
I'm told that Xe poisoning played a major role in Chernobyl. MSRs have a major advantage here because the Xe can easily be removed. In a solid fuel, it is not really possible to remove it, and it can cause instability because it causes time lag between control input and reactor response output.
Well then, just open a few more shells so that each only sues four!

We can keep playing definitions all day, but it's not going to help anything.
>I don't understand businesses that operate for years without turning a profit.

The article is just stating that StumbleUpon wasn't profitable recently but will be after making staff cuts. They may have been profitable at various points in the past.
You don't like Kahr's offering?

I get the impression they're good, but I myself can't get past the "no external hammer" for preventing accidental discharges when holstering.
"Not shit" is the way we get rid of 90% of people. "Superstar" is how we hire from the remaining.

We absolutely cannot bring in someone crap. Our job is to hire, so if we're hiring crap people, we're crap at our job.

See my comments elsewhere in this thread regarding learning fast, but basically I'm going to hire someone who can learn fast. But primarily I'm going to hire someone who doesn't need to learn the 'right now' skill.

I'd love to see a system that tied each of my hire's success to my success. It happens for the first three months: "Hey lessnonymous: this guy is brilliant! Good job!".

But I want to see a system where each pay-rise or promotion the engineer ever gets is recorded against my success too.

"We see your hires got a salary increase of 10% on average. Here's your 10% increase." (It would need to be waaaay more complex than that to look at churn, promotions, firings etc.)
Why Are Y Combinator And Andreessen Horowitz Backing A Toolbar/Adware Installer?
> I'm not afraid of having rigorous scientific study of any links between video game violence and real violence.

When advocates of something oppose rigorous scientific studies of that thing, I become suspicious. For instance, if I were to see either a gun ban or a fracking ban on a ballot, I'd be inclined to vote for it just because major proponents of guns and fracking have tried hard to stop research. It makes me wonder what they are trying to keep us from finding out.
Because car rental companies exist to provide a service to the people who walk into them, so we walk in expecting to be served, providing we can pay. It's a simple transaction; they get money, you get use of a car. Everyone is happy. If they start giving you the third degree, you'll be inclined to respond, "Geez, do they want my money or not?".

To walk into a job interview with the same expectation of being "served" is ridiculous. It's true that if they're smart, they will try to entice you and provide a nice experience, but primarily they are trying to decide whether to spend large amounts of time and money on you versus someone else. Most companies are not in the business of quickly and efficiently hiring as many people off the street as possible. You can be flustered by an interviewer's poor technique, but don't be impatient to receive the job offer you feel entitled to.
I really like my 1911 (Kimber Target II, so ready for arguments about metal injection molding...), but it's really an enthusiast's gun at this point. I would not recommend it to a non-expert looking to use it for actual protection. I usually suggest moving, a dog, a shotgun, and CZ 75-B or Glock 17/19 (in that order).

An early-to-mid-20th century American soldier (US has always emphasized pistols as actual combat weapons more than other countries[1]) or a modern shooting sports enthusiast has the time and skill to clean one periodically (as to keep it in working state) and perform adjustments to prevent jams.

It's not reasonable to expect this of someone with no previous experience of firearms, but looking to protect themselves after receiving a death threat or seeing too many home invasions in their neighborhood. Doubly so if it's a Kimber or other model made to far tighter tolerance than was possible or intended in 1911.

These laws tend to benefit hunters, hobbyists, and target shooters like myself (who prefer muzzle brakes to flash hiders, match-grade full-length barrels to tactical coolness, etc...), but hurt people who want to use these weapons for self-defense.

[1] First trophy my grandfather (artillery captain in Soviet military) took during World War II was a Walther PPK in .32 ACP. Not ideal for defense, but far cry from a Nagant or a Tokarev TT (based on the 1911, but unsafe for carrying with the hammer cocked). Never heard of an American officer trading his 1911 for a Walther/Nambu/Luger/etc...
Twitter upgrades break our product 2 hours before primetime - Build'n Run
$50k? They've probably already paid far more than that on lawyers by the time they get to court.
Or, instead of having the government grant monopolies on production left and right, and then using the legal system to create a market in these monopolies, we could..... skip this whole process, and let the free market operate properly from the start.
PS: I am not pro-patents.

Per Wikipedia [1], the definition of patent troll itself is unclear, creating an important first roadblock to implementing something like this. Just for example, if a company files a patent, and manufactures/sells one device using it, is it still a patent troll or not? What happens if the troll intends to, but at the time, is unable to manufacture or sell the product carrying the invention?

>> Patents cost $195 to file. $1,500,000 to defend against in court. As a result, Patent Trolls collect inane, invalid patents ...

Isn't the purported troll also risking their time and money in the lawsuit, going well beyond $195? If so, the $195 to $1.5 million comparison above is clearly weak.

>> The patent office has approved countless ridiculous patents that are clearly non-sensical or based on obviously long-known ideas, making it easy for trolls to collect ridiculous patents and use them as their flimsy excuse to file outrageously expensive lawsuits.

When an patent invention is filed, a prior art search is generally performed to see if the claimed invention already exists or not. If no prior is discovered in spite of it existing at the time, how and why is this considered to be a fault of the purported troll (and not of the patent office for example)? No one can possibly know what all exists already, which is part of the reason why patent office ends up approving the patent to begin with.

From the best I understand, it is now becoming easier to invalidate a patent, showing prior art at during litigation.

The real thing at issue with patents is non-obviousness, due to which a patent may wrongfully stand in spite of missing prior art. Obviousness is so hard to define because what is obvious to someone is not obvious to another. Add to it figuring out whether it was obvious back when the patent was filed.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll
Well, based on your response to it, I guess it at least it has the desired effect. I find it absolutely flabbergasting that someone so smart would take the oldest political trope, "think of the children", to such an illogical extreme.
Why does your app require permission to look at my phone calls?
I haven't seen it before. Good enough reason to me to have it reposted.
> Isn't this an act of espionage?

I'm no spook, but I'd be surprised if the usual protocol for such situations is to advertise the presence of a camera on a high-traffic website.
The diplomatic fallout in the event of a raid would be huge. There was a meeting of all foreign ministers of South America who issued a joint statement to condemn the UK for threatening to raid the embassy.
Does anyone know why the 787 seems to have gone so wrong? Wasn't it tremendously delayed and then it seems like I'm hearing about problem after problem?

Is this a sign our civilization is in technological decay and we're losing our ability to build advanced machinery?
Looks like the signup form (which asks you for a password) does _not_ use HTTPS -- beware of exposing a shared password.
Patents cost a lot more than $195 to file. Even the filing fees are more than that -- you're just quoting the Provisional Patent cost, which doesn't actually result in a patent issue. The actual cost of filing and successfully getting a patent to grant is in the tens of thousands of dollars, and possibly more depending on the art and office actions.

So, the cost comparison here doesn't hold. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that successfully defending a patent against a patent troll intent on taking the case to court costs at least ten times as much, and possibly up to a hundred times as much as the cost of getting the patent granted in the first place.

But I'd eliminate the $195 wording as that's a straw man argument that can easily be refuted.
(I work at Artsy, but not related to payments)

I think it's worth shouting out that I'm really impressed by the help system over at Balanced. Being able to see the IRC logs at the top and knowing that I can just jump in at anytime and talk to either the devs or a good support team, really gives me confidence in their product. I wish anyone with an API learns from this and adds support like that.

https://www.balancedpayments.com/help
The bracket highlighter is awesome. So simple, yet powerful. I've been using it for the past 20min and I'm not sure how I survived without it. ;)
If you want effectiveness, though, I only recommend the NRA (reluctantly, details upon request) and the SAF, since the latter has been the major driver in the lawsuits that started with Heller. The JPFO has done some good propaganda, but the last time I checked went off in a bad tangent with L. Neil Smith (who got too extreme for me not too many books after The Probability Broach). The GAO is too partisan and into conservative and Republican causes beyond the RKBA to be of much use even in their ratings, and they have very very little influence.
Great theme, installed!
Yes this is what I don't understand, are they expecting to charge a subscription fee or how will they maintain revenue from a one time $50 computer.
I agree somehow confiscating all guns (or even just handguns) would be a lot more effective than background checks. It's just not going to happen, though.

The repeat offenders are mainly gang, mainly drug gang. Most gangs have some sort of hazy membership procedures compared to other organizations, so you've got a lot of affiliates. (the irony here is I know about US gangs primarily due to talking with FBI/police people who were working with the US military in Iraq/Afghanistan to teach them how to go after crime/terrorism/insurgency using police tactics...)

Robbing gun stores is actually a fairly unsuccessful crime. Outside MS-13, virtually none of the street gangs operating in the US has any degree of tactical proficiency; they can't go toe to toe with police patrol officers, let alone the kind of people who tend to own gun shops (in their own territory...)

Most of the robberies for guns seem to be burglary (and in places where people are morons and leave truck guns visible in their vehicle...), or might be faked somehow (like a way to transfer by calling it a "theft", but actually being compensated). They're not against gun stores usually.

In-house manufacture is definitely a thing (and ironically you can make a full-auto open-bolt weapon more easily than a normal gun), but not generally done as much in the US due to easier availability of other guns, and brand/hollywood preference for specific types of pretty guns.
Copy that. I wrote something like this over bonded GSM links (1G) in Australia circa late 2000/early 2001. Also carried a GPS feed. 10 seconds was about normal then for a CIF JPEG over 2 x ~8kbps links (very lossy and unreliable though). This is higher res, but then data speeds have improved.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swissair_Flight_111
Hey Strawman! Let's not compare investment in new, non-mature businesses like dot-com businesses in 2000 for which almost none of them had any sound profit building plans, with the energy market, which is a very well known industry with clear, regular paying customers.
Wouldn't it be nice if defending against frivolous patents didn't cost $1.5M. Unfortunately, it does cost that much.

There are 3 problems that make this so:

1. The courts are unpredictable. You can be right and still lose. The cost of losing is typically huge, else the trolls wouldn't have bothered you. So you have to prepare with quality counsel and pay them to do it right.

2. Settlements are entirely predictable.

3. Based on what #1 costs and #2, the troll simply negotiates to settle for less than just appearing in court for #1.

Last time I was at a company that was sued by a troll, counsel said it would cost us $1M to prepare for the first day in court. The troll had a bogus patent that basically said any application that applies business rules to a database infringed--I kid you not. I think we settled for circa $600K.

It sucked and wasted everyone's time like crazy, not to mention the wasted $600K.

Something needs to be done to either eliminate software patents or get rid of this ridiculous asymmetry of costs where trolls are rewarded for playing as many cheap lottery tickets as they can.
SAF is probably my favorite. Firearms Policy Coalition (which seems to be Calguns + SAF) is also nice, and new.

My big problem with NRA is how spammy they are to members. NRA-ILA is one thing, but being offered overpriced auto insurance, etc. all the time was really annoying. I eventually got off all the marketing lists, but it took a few tries.
I've seen a number of people call CSIRO ( http://csiro.au ) a patent troll based on the wifi case.
It depends on the "troll." If you're Intellectual Ventures suing Microsoft over arguably legit patents, then you have put a lot of money into the case. But that's not "trolling" in the same way as in the X-Plane example, and it's arguably not something that needs any particular deterrence. There are valid economic arguments to be made in favor of NPE's in that context.

Th X-Plane case, however, is what I think most people on HN tend to be worried about. An entity coming at you with an obviously invalid patent, and going for volume: hoping to get a few hundred people to pay a few thousand in fees each hoping nobody will litigate. It doesn't cost anywhere near $50k to throw a quick, cut-and-paste lawsuit together.
I am not telling anyone that being anonymous is itself a crime.
"They're worth 10 times the next rung down"

So you will pay 10 times more salary, rather than waiting a couple of months for a new engineer to get up to speed?
You must be in a hurry. What about all those other employers doing enterprise CRUD apps, are they in a similar hurry?

"I need to fill the position with the best possible person"

I assume then you are not working on enterprise CRUD or dinky mobile apps like everybody else. Are you competing with Unreal's next game engine? Or working on a rocket to Mars? Because your peer employers are NOT.

Yeah, those guys who complain about not finding candidates.
That would roughly be the cost of the deductible on an insurance policy you can buy that covers defense against intellectual property infringement (assuming infringement was not intentional). You can buy this sort of insurance. It's not cheap, but it can cover both defense costs as well as a certain amount of damages.

I'm expecting this to be common course for software companies in the near future.

More information on patent defense insurance:
[1] http://www.psfinc.com/press/defense-against-patent-infringem...

[2] http://www.mazeyinsurance.com/patent

[3] http://www.patentinsurance.com/products/insurance-policies/d...
Can anyone explain the URL to me?