skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for the link. The first comment on that version of the discussion is informative, and gets to the heart of the case, which is somewhat more specific than a lot of the commentary (though other issues are clearly implicated).

The core of it is whether the Supreme Court will read the patent-exhaustion doctrine narrowly or broadly. The traditional application of patent exhaustion allows you to combine a patented part with other standard equipment, if the patented part was purchased legally. So, for example, you can buy a CPU and then assemble it with other electronic components into a larger device, without getting a second patent license for the larger device.

The farmer here is arguing that buying a seed and having it reproduce should fall under patent exhaustion, because growing seeds and having them produce more seeds is something that, in farming, happens routinely by just adding "standard equipment" such as soil, fertilizer, and water. Therefore no second license should be needed for continued routine use of the legitimately purchased initial product. Buying a license to the seed should imply, by patent exhaustion, the regular use of the seed for all things seeds are normally expected to do, including planting them and harvesting their offspring. The counter-argument is that in the CPU example the original purchased part is still enclosed in the larger device, whereas in the seed case the offspring seeds are not a superset of the original seed, so the result is actually a copy, more like duplicating the CPU (which would need a new license). The troublesome part with making the analogy work either way is that the seed duplicated itself as part of its normal functioning, which CPUs don't normally do.

Viewed that way, the case has interesting implications for the future patent situation around self-replicating robots.
Right on!

I'm using nginx and thin, but I'm currently having to use varnish for proxying my websocket connections to thin because nginx can't do it. Then I have to use stunnel for ssl termination because varnish doesn't support it. I'll be able to cut both of those pieces of software out now.
Ways to boost MSFT stock in 1 hour:

1. Announce that Bill Gates is coming back.

2. Announce that Ballmer is leaving.
> So she says her site is 100% ad free. It is. Affiliate links aren't "ads" in any definition a reader would have unless it is somehow immoral to make a living.

I would disagree. The presence of the affiliate links within the articles effectively converts each article into an "advertisement". What is being advertised are the embedded affiliate links.

In this way there is created a self-reinforcing feedback loop that likely has a choice effect on what postings are written (advertisements) because there is an incentive to only write postings that will have the largest affiliate click through.
Boston hardware startup launchpad Bolt raises $3.5M
You know I wouldn't mind if they raised it 27% if they kept the desktop version up to date on the Mac side.
I was astonished to see that the editor's prior post linked to a discussion on reddit:

http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/conflicting...
Ah, this makes sense (sorry, Igor). It's not just that Makers has a choice between going upmarket or downmarket, but that the upmarket option has a penalty on it.

I'll reiterate though, this is not an uncommon position for a bourbon brand to be in. Bulleit is a Diageo brand; one can only imagine the crap Diageo might want to bundle. Even Sazerac has a bunch of crappy mixers and vodkas in their portfolio.
Except beyond a certain point it doesn't make it more expensive. Crack ROT13 or BD+ or AACS or whatever and what you have at the end is the plaintext, that then gets distributed around.

It makes it harder for a few people that crack it for fun, profit, kudos, whatever it is, but then it's exactly the same.

There is a reason for it, but mostly the reason is pretty misguided, and it absolutely does make the experience of the paying customer worse than that of the pirate.
The brain is made up of neurons. The neuron is a device that stores and processes information. Does it do so using a finite set of logical steps? We don't quite know yet, but it seems likely, since the behavior of the neuron has been shown to closely follow a known set of differential equations (the cable equations - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_theory). But using the broadest definition of a computer, a device that stores and processes information, the brain is most certainly a computer.
> not always

I think "almost never" would be more accurate here.

Mercator is only used because it's the projection you get when you don't apply any projection to longitude/latitude. It's a result of the map creator being lazy.
Thanks for the explanation pg. As you said in the original thread, "you know how these things go..."
i would start an isp
This is similar to the "while with timeout" that is common in embedded code (of course, watchdogs are better...)
The subject is, "The Brain is Not Computable". I too believe that. The article itself is quite vague in what particular objections the guy has. It doesn't actually state he thinks it is not computable in theory, just in practice

> That’s because its most important features are the result of unpredictable, non-linear interactions amongst billions of cells, Nicolelis says.

If he thought it was theoretically impossible, then the "billions of cells" would be redundant. It would only take 1 un-computable cell. Without a longer interview, we can't be sure what exactly he means.

My interpretation was "unpredictable, non-linear" (i.e. not computable by a simple algorithm, would have to be very complex, because of non linear interactions between inputs) amongst "billions of cells" = an obscene amount of computational data. I don't think he means unpredictable to mean strictly uncomputable.

> Opponents of your viewpoint argue that you simply can't imagine the state of technology in 50 years.

Yes, but at the same time there are things we thought we would be able to do 50 years ago that there is no way we can do now. There are physical constraints to the universe, and we can't just assume "technology" will overcome all of them. Nobody can imagine the state of technology in 50 years accurately, but I am still willing (and have done) to take bets on this 50 years into the future.
We have a bottle of Pappy 20 at the Chicago office and it's our least favorite of our collection. We're told the 23 is the "real" stuff, but, whatever; I think you're right that most of the value in Pappy is as a social signal.
Tech Bros' Google-Sponsored Trip to India Turns Into Naked Beach Romp
I do this a lot too. In fact more often than not I end up not posting the question because either I solve the problem or I think of a possible solution I should go try first. I think we should start calling it Digital Rubber Ducking.
Totally agreed:

- car lane? now you disrupt cars.

- bike lane? hope no one does something crazy.

- sidewalk? swerving all over to avoid people/poles & likely illegal.

Not a great set of choices.
Chaoyang, but almost daily in zhongguancun. Mail me if you wanna meet up...
Microsoft's got a weird dual personality in that regard. There are plenty of smaller units within Microsoft that manage to do really great things. At the same time, oftentimes when the Mothership decides to try and get involved, what ensues frequently looks more like meddling than coordination.

For example, look at how their mobile offering's .NET-based APIs and "WCF lite" GUI toolkit lasted for precisely one generation before someone got the bright idea of yanking it and replacing it with a whole new system based on a gussied-up version of COM. I have a really hard time believing that's an example of coordination. From the outside, it looks a lot more like someone from the Windows division becoming jealous of what folks from the other divisions were accomplishing, and deciding to horn in on that game while simultaneously reasserting the old Win32 technology base at the expense of newer technologies.

It's also a spectacular waste of effort, and left a lot of us developers feeling like we just became collateral damage in an internal power struggle.
Try running it on chrome. I had the same experience with FF
I would not use a rocket. If you can see or hear that drone, you can fly your own drone into it, or have it explode nearby it. Such a attacker drone would not need 20 hours endurance, so it would be a lot cheaper.

That "If you can see or hear that drone" probably is where the problem lies, but that might be solved by having your drone listen for the distinctive hum of the drone's engines. That way, you don't have to be able to continuously see that drone from the ground. Just launch your own drone; if it hears another drone, it will home in on it.

Alternatively, I would try jamming the drone's signals or taking over its controls.
I asked this before, but does anyone know of other companies like github?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5182145
I'd expect the ip_hash directive to work as usual http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpUpstreamModule#ip_hash although it's not exactly sticky sessions. There's a separate module for that https://github.com/michaelneale/nginx-sticky-module
Point-blank: I see the entire social media ecosystem (not the individual social networks but the businesses that thrive because of it or cater to it), including Singly, as part of the problem: It stretches the definition of "making" and basks in the frivolity of reality shows etc. And I think you are talking out of both sides of your mouth by promulgating this conscience while taking millions of dollars of VC money and focusing on the exact problem you are lamenting -- I bet you dollars to donuts that your investors ultimately want you to focus on profit.

Solving problems in the realm of ad optimization, for example, are as much making as any of the projects you see on github or any of the arduino projects you see mentioned here and elsewhere. In fact, in many ways those ad problems are harder, usually involving more advanced math or clever data analysis techniques to deal with large amounts of data.

'Also, show me a modestly talented developer in today's tech economy who is "strapped for cash" and I will show you someone who choses to not help themselves.'

The joke here is that the developer who is choosing conscience over profit is the type of developer who would be working at a nonprofit or other context that wouldn't be paying nearly as well as a vc-backed startup.
Almost exclusively due to the data collection method. Specifically, only recorded strikes are shown -- someone had to find the meteorite and publish its existence. Hence the dense jungles of Congo are relatively empty compared to the well trodden plains of Kenya.

Also notice: the only plotted strikes in Antarctica are right near the scientific stations -- but the intensity is very high at those points.

If you plotted theoretical meteorite distributions, there would be more strikes at the poles than the equator (due to the Earth's rotation, the poles receive many more meteorites) but at a given latitude the distribution would be even.
"you could get the very same item through your own affiliate scheme"

FYI. The Amazon affiliate program does not allow you to purchase items via your own referrals. To do so is a contract violation and they will terminate your affiliate account.
Australian court supports patents on human genes
totally agree with you about actively choosing things that dont make the world a worse place. great point.
Moneyball for the NBA anyone?
Wish I had found this before I paid for Glui! Oh well.
This statement by the New York Times public editor certainly reads like a rebuke of reporter John Broder for how thoroughly he (didn't) take notes during his reporting drive, and suggests that reporters will have a responsibility to bring along more electronic data-recording devices in future reporting. The latest blog post by Bruce Schneier

http://schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/02/automobile_data.ht...

(also just submitted to HN,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5241508

moments after this story was submitted) suggests that even with a journalist leading a quantified life to submit quantified stories, there will still be issues of interpretation of the data that will be very hard to resolves, especially when a corporation wants to sell cars with a public subsidy while a news organization wants to preserve a reputation of hard-hitting, non-toadying journalism.
In climate modeling studies where the Gulf Stream was artificially swept out of existence, the temperature differences between eastern Canada and western Europe persisted.

Okay, so the Gulf Stream does not play any role. But then, in the very next sentence:

So what’s really going on? According to Riser and Lozier, the cause of the temperature difference is likely a complex interaction between the surface ocean, the Gulf Stream, massive upper atmospheric currents and differences in pressure on either side of the Atlantic.

So the Gulf Stream does get in the equation. One of these two sentences is incorrect.
Interesting stats. I'd be wary however, of prematurely drawing any hard conclusions.

For example comparing vim to emacs, one should rather look at whether the bash history indicates a predominantly emacs or vim user, then isolate or compartmentalize that as a single vote.

Even then we can't be sure that it supports any grandiose claim, but it should in theory be a little more accurate.
Wow, Bleymaier comes across as really butt-hurt. There's a big difference between outright advertising on the site / newsletters, and revenue from affiliate links.

(disclaimer: I'd never heard of either person involved in this story until I read the article)
"vim users are more likely to pop in and out of vim"

I suspect this is the case. I leave my emacs running for the entire work week. When I need to make a quick change and go back to the terminal I pop open vim.
This is how I learned to do it.
Program tiny microcontroller ATtiny85 with an Arduino UNO
Oh dear god. One more hypocrite makes illegitimate gains and has whistle blown by jealous, over-zealous loser who believes themselves to be the moral judge/jury/executioner of us all. Next
Or they work together, Beat this new level, and earn a coupon to try new SURGE™!
Was on a tablet and page timed out... Didn't feel anything different than nytimes. And another page also didn't load as if new records were added.

But you could have easily met me. Mostly Linux events... mail me if you want to know
Who says employees don't have the full picture? The reasons are even stated in public.

Why would they be terrified of speaking in public -- and if they are, why are several people doing it?

You say that speculating is not particularly useful, and you still speculate that people are terrified of Opera Software, and that the company is lying to its investors about the number of employees?
Evolve to a new kind of developer
Search for 'body tune-ups'

http://edition.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/07/24/paranoia.id...
What makes a website fast?
Yes, exactly, running Opera extensions on top of Chromium is precisely the kind of stuff Opera should add on top. Not that hard to do too, and does not require a fork.

It won't be exactly like Chrome, I never said it would - it will add stuff to it and remove some stuff. And I do think that can be a viable product that keeps many of their users.

I agree Opera might be more different than Chrome than SRWare for example. But it will still be 99% chromium in the core engine. To make significant changes in there would mean forking chromium and not being able to easily update from upstream - which would be silly.
This is exactly right. There are two ways that Monsanto can sustain their business. One is technological and the other relies on the courts. Monsanto is called evil, either way, often by people who just get some vague icky feeling about GMOs, even if they understand very little about the business or the technology.
This is based on the idea that the sum total of what the brain does can be explained by and represented by neural network type models.

The conventional neural network model neglects the interior of the neuron. Gene regulatory networks for complex eukaryotes are on the order of neural networks in complexity and involve quantum-scale interactions, which opens the possibility of quantum effects being significant. Gene regulation within the neuron affects neural firing behavior and, more importantly, profoundly affects neural growth patterns and thus learning and longer term forms of cognition.

This also neglects the possibility (now considered probable) that more cell types than just neurons are involved in brain activity:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliotransmitter

In short: the brain is not a neural network. Rather, those mathematical connectionist models are just that: models of aspects of the brain. We do not yet know to what extent these other mechanisms play a role, and what their role is. Given their nature it seems in both cases that their role might be more long-term, affecting long duration learning, planning, etc.

It really seems to me as if the most ardent and enthusiastic adherents of the Kurzweilian vision are computer scientists who don't really respect the domain of biology and like to hand-wave away its complexity as "background noise." You can't do that. I say this as a lifelong computer programmer who has studied biology. Studying biology really blew away any notions I had of simple, classical computer programs becoming movie-style AI.

The author is not making an anti-scientific "magic" argument. He is simply pointing out that biological systems are analog, embodied, electrochemical (and thus physical and possibly quantum), nonlinear complex systems, and he is being skeptical about the idea that such a system is going to yield readily to digital computer simulation. I agree with his skepticism.

Prediction: brain simulations will simulate superficial brain behavior but they will not become sentient. More specific prediction: they will get stuck in closed cycle loops. They will not exhibit the higher order motivation, creativity, or learning behavior seen in brains, which is probably because these behaviors emerge from all the real embodied biophysical stuff the CS people are ignoring.
Looking for a guru in CSS/HTML/Twitter Bootstrap
Need a resource for 25 hrs to translate illustrator files to css/html and twitter bootstrap. Pay well.
Microsoft invented their own troubles in this market. How many parallel mobility teams can one company reasonably sustain -

a) Windows phone 6.5

b) Windows phone 7.x

c) Windows phone 8.x

d) Project Pink / Kin

e) Danger

f) Windows 8 RT

g) Courier
Fortunately their website doesn't redirect you to the canonical URL of the article, so you can change the URL and still access it. Like, http://www.careers360.com/news_3067-screw-censorship
From an earlier Hacker News comment

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5196734

on a submission from this blog:

> > It appears you've made some sort of resolution to publish and promote a blog entry per day in 2013. 40 entries in 41 days this year vs. 46 in all of 2012. You should reconsider - whatever your reasons were, I doubt they included a desire to develop a reputation for presenting topics that were sensationalized and thinly researched [1] produced with a pace that ensures discredited theories dont get reviewed.

[1] http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/02/drug-companies-stop-h...

> Wow, nice spot and they have all been submitted to HN. I have never seen anyone's submission history be so hell bent on self promotion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=techdog

The Hacker News welcome message

http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

gives an overview of the community experiment here, summarizing the site guidelines.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The Hacker News FAQ

http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

gives some additional details about how Hacker News is administered. The welcome message distills the basic rules into a simple statement: "Essentially there are two rules here: don't post or upvote crap links, and don't be rude or dumb in comment threads."
What to do? Clear your calendar for an afternoon and think about your business - look for weak spots to see if Amazon is going to blow up part of your business plan and adjust.

Read Jeff B's letter to shareholders from year one... it's not fluff and will tell you loads about how Amazon thinks.

Realize that Amazon's main goal is to drive revenue, they'll be fine not making profits off your segment for years or maybe never. They may be public but they're playing a LOT game.

Realize that Amazon doesn't tell anyone anything unless it is to their advantage. When you see the press release that Amazon is moving into your segment they HAVE a working product and likely other related projects underway.

Realize that there are some thing Amazon is not great at. Examples: Taking to the press, there are states they can't work in, face to face selling, working with open source etc.
Mixed secure/insecure causes the page to display without any CSS for me.
Burger King Twitter Account Hacked to Look Like McDonald’s
Following your analogy, trying to understand the brain by putting a few dozen electrodes in it is like trying to understand the economy based on watching people interact in a few dozen rooms.

Like you, I am skeptical of the explosion of human neuroimaging, but I think that, as a technique for determining where to drop your electrodes, fMRI can be a very powerful tool.
I don't blame him for being a bit frustrated though. I doesn't say anywhere that it doesn't support firefox. Was only able to move around and kill things when I switched to chrome.

OT: Gamers tend not to have a lot in between hatred and love to begin with, and if you're at all familiar with the current Diablo community, well, Diablo 3 hasn't brought out the most civil side of the fans.
it would be interesting to overlay geography and population maps on top of this data. It seems as if the most density comes in areas with flat, unobstructed land, but also with relatively high populations. Assuming random strikes, mere desserts or population centers do not seem enough to generate density, it must be a combination of prairie/desert and people such as Kansas or Northern Texas
Targeting the short attention span immediate gratification market is definitely a win.
It is by no means clear that this is the accepted view of the mainstream of climate scientists - the linked papers seem to be the work of a couple of groups banging the drum against the Gulf Stream. I'd wait a while before accepting this as the new orthodoxy.
Yes it's completely broken but its rarely the best point of attack anyway. Dealing with uncompressed video input is hassle and needs significant hardware compared to a way to capture the compressed data from a Blu-ray. Plus there is a generational compression loss of quality.
The question is, how do you get the the point in your career where you can put stuff like this and people laud it?

If I went to a gallery and offered this up I'd obviously be laughed out of the place.
JOURNALIST ORDERED TO REPAIR $2-MILLION PORSCHE 917 REPLICA