skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The point made here is a very important one: those who are not trained routinely completely misunderstand what a patent is actually a) describing and b) actually claiming. It happens throughout the media on a daily basis, but is particularly bad when a website like PatentlyApple, who many assume know what they're talking about, get it so wrong.

Many people seem to believe that once a patent is applied for and/or granted, no one can patent anything using that invention ever again. But 99.9% of all patents are based on inventions already known, and those are not what is claimed. What is claimed is the inventive step above what the prior art had accomplished. If someone had a patent for 'a pen', a pen with a novel and inventive tip would be perfectly acceptable. The inventor may need to licence the use of the pen patent to commercialise their improvement, but there is sighing stopping them from getting the patent to an improved pen. I could probably go on for hours on the issue, but I won't unless asked. It's just so depressing seeing the media making such a dog's breakfast of an issue that's not inherently all that complex and leading to the devaluation of a system that works quite well.
There is a fundamental difference between conventions of notation, and properties of the thing being notated, in this case arithmetic. I'm frankly surprised that someone with a mathematical background keeps mixing up the two. There are a dozen people in this thread of comments posting different notations - prefix, postfix, what have you. Do you think these define a different arithmetic? Now of course it's stupid to ask people a question without defining what you mean by your notation - you might as well mumble something and expect them to decipher it. But that is in no way equivalent to asking a question which is undecidable in mathematical logic (which is not necessarily a stupid thing to do). And features of some particular notation do not in any way, shape, or form, or by any stretch of semantics, constitute axioms, or properties, or anything else which belongs to arithmetic itself. Do you really disagree with that?
Jack Dorsey: 60 Minutes Profile
You are right, of course. If it wasn't too late, I'd edit my initial reply.
UX and Product Designers of HN: Can you review my portfolio?
Hi all,

A bit of background... I'm 24, live in Australia, with a background in design. I graduated about 2 years ago, and it's my dream to move to San Francisco and work in a design/product related role at a tech company along the lines of Google, Apple, Facebook, Square, etc. As part of this, I require E-3/H1B sponsorship which adds another barrier.

I'd like to try and make this happen before I turn 25. Would any UX or Product Designers at a company like the above (or anywhere, for that matter), be willing to review my portfolio and suggest some areas that I should focus on? I'd love to hear any and all feedback.

I haven't submitted any applications yet, frankly I'm not sure if my work is up to scratch in terms of UX – so I wanted to see if anyone had any actionable suggestions about how to improve my 'hireability' for one of these companies.

http://areeve.com/

Thank you very much for your time and input,

Alex
DON'T WORK FOR MATASANO!!! Reasons below:

#1 Lack of honesty. Seriously, they promised releasing those crypto challenges publicly 2 years ago (Blackhat 11: Crypto for Pentesters) and never done so: https://twitter.com/matasano/status/101714851633700864. And now they're using them as a recruiting tool.

#2 Lack of humility: Matasano guys seem to disregard common tools like Burp scanner or Sqlmap. It's fine to cherry-pick tools to suite your needs; but if you choose to disregard them completely just because you feel they're associated with "Security Rookies" then you're more than likely to miss something, consequently disservice your client (they expect you, as a consultant, to find the most vulnerabilities regardless of tools used). Matasano may have better fuzzer/scanner, but since they don't publicly release them, I found that going around and bashing other security tools to position themselves higher than their competitors is a sign of arrogance.

Go work for other companies, I don't want you HN people turn out to be like them!

For those of you who emailed sean at matasano dot com but haven't received any response, go play with Trustwave crypto challeges: https://github.com/SpiderLabs/CryptOMG - And yes they don't have BS subscription model.
have a look at https://github.com/Doist/bitmapist - some more info here http://amix.dk/blog/post/19718
I tried both and NewsBlur seems leagues better. It guess it depends on what you want.

For me the interface of NewsBlur is so much better for getting through tons of feeds,
So far I am not a user of ANY reader. Between googlenews, twitter, and HN I get my daily digest.

I would like to try Newsblur but it seems that to get immediate value I have to have been some reader user: I can migrate my googlereader account or upload an OPML file.

What I would like to see are different versions of OOTB "skins". I can sign up as an "HN-lover" and it seeds my account with 50 blogs I should follow. Then I can actually evaluate the product.

Also note that free accounts are not actually disabled. If you leave the session when you hit the paywall and login from the homepage, you now have a free account.
This is something I'll be working on soon enough. There are many, many dependencies (not only for the web app, but there are three DBs that you have to have installed as prerequisites - mongo, postgres/mysql, and redis).

The real problem with setting up your own instance of NewsBlur is that you'll have to do your own feed fetching. This is effectively what you're paying for when you pay for NewsBlur. Let me break it down.

500 feeds updated once every five minutes is 144,000 feed fetches a day. Couple that with the original page and icon fetches, you're looking at almost two feeds every second just to keep your feeds up to date. And the average feed takes 5 seconds to completely update (feed, page, differences in stories, updating unread counts). So you have to run 10 processes in parallel, and that's already beyond the capabilities of most single machines. Then good luck keeping your DBs running clean and backed up.

Or you could pay $2 / month and never have to worry about setting up a very big stack. And you get the social community of shared stories on newsblur.com.
Chart.js - open source HTML5 charting library
Sigh...

Thanks. I was starting to feel optimistic about the world.
So, I'm ex-Matasano and now work for Accuvant LABS (a competitor). While I'd love to snag awesome people to join up on my side, I completely disagree here. Matasano is a great company and they do do good work. #1 they should remedy for sure, but #2 I disagree with -- they hold the same opinion I've found in other high-end consulting shops, just more vocally.
So, silly idea here: would reducing the government guarantee improve anything?
I agree the culture in EG is probably fairly stunted at best, and probably inadequate to the task of self government (once the ruling elite is gone). However, Obiang is an outlier. Getting rid of him is necessary but not sufficient to fix the country, and it's one thing AU won't do (because they're afraid of slippery-slope), and something the people can't do themselves.

The "stratfor" "geography drives political destiny" thing isn't predictive for small oil-rich countries. I mean, look at the smaller Gulf states. The issues in small oil-rich countries are essentially down to leadership. A broad democratic government is probably not the achievable goal, but something like Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, most of the Emirates, or Kuwait is far superior to EG.
Loren Brichter, a High Priest of App Design
+1 for an interactive shell.

Something like http://repl.it/languages/Python :)
I agree it's not a 1-to-1 analogy, but the idea is the same. Knowing you're free to come back to Lotus by using Excel frees you from the chicken-and-egg constraint of waiting until your entire office is on Excel. With NewsBlur you know that you can host your own instance if your dependency on the newsblur.com hosted instance breaks.
Best wishes with everything. I admire how brave you are to take responsibility for what's not working in your life. So many of us can't do that.
I said you can't decrease net emissions 100%, you just rephrased what I said by omitting that part.
As I mentioned on Twitter, if you want a free account but can't get around the paywall, just know that the paywall is extremely leaky on porpoise...
There are very few things that people in power hate more than someone else succeeding at something without consulting them first. I'm afraid you organization would need to be almost all military.
How wrong he may or may not have been on other issues doesn't make him wrong on this one. Here, he's right on the mark.
Lobster: the new Comic Sans
I honestly wonder how people define a "third-world country" these days. Cold War's over, guys.
Not sure if this is feasible for you, unless you are comfortable with getting your hands dirty, but I decided to forgo the use of a 3rd party library and write the WebGL code myself for my latest project. Other folks mentioned geometry merging, and for me, that has been the single biggest performance booster on my current project. We were hitting a wall with some models that had 30,000 individual objects (several million verts, 10 million indices).

But since we were writing the WebGL ourselves, I just added a bit of code to batch up all the objects into as big a bucket as WebGL could handle (up to 65k verts per draw call), thereby reducing the number of draw calls (drawElements). For our larger models, we went from 1100 ms per frame, down to 1-5ms per frame. We've done other things as well, but none had so large an impact as merging the geometry into larger chunks.

But I can't speak to doing that in Three.js, since I didn't use it. But you should easily be able to handle the geometry you've got at 60 fps.
i can't be sure you're not serious

really?

...
Afghanistan has high amounts of mineral wealth locked away, but while it had decent irrigation and farming in the pre-Soviet period (near Kandahar; it's really shitty to fight in btw due to old irrigation channels and just enough cover/concealment to hinder UAVs), decades of war have really hurt the agricultural sector.

More importantly, decades of war have also essentially eliminated any societal reserves of trust, so corruption at all levels is the default. The only functional unit is the family or clan, and very minimal ties to higher units of a tribe -- not to the state. Individual governors, mayors, and police chiefs rule by personal charisma and graft, and bringing their pre-existing tribal relationships in. Organs of the state end up used to settle personal vendettas, too.

There's a lot of literature that national resources (extractive, with low local labor involvement) are a curse -- the "resource curse". Norway has done ok with its oil. Gulf societies have in some ways succeeded but in other ways oil has crippled them. African countries with mineral wealth usually end up relatively fucked compared to countries with productive agriculture or a vibrant commercial sector (Nigeria minus oil is actually pretty decent; Kenya is great. Ghana until recently had no resource based wealth and is basically the Chile of Africa).
Yes, "get over it."

Oil is non-renewable; it's getting much more expensive to find ; and the US (my country) spends a huge portion of its tax revenue financing a military to ensure a constant supply of said oil.

The shift to renewables is already well underway, whether the OP wants it to or not. I'm not being combative. On the contrary, I'm simply stating they should accept the inevitable.
"MEN WANTED FOR HAZARDOUS JOURNEY. SMALL WAGES,
BITTER COLD, LONG MONTHS OF COMPLETE DARKNESS,
CONSTANT DANGER, SAFE RETURN DOUBTFUL. HONOR AND
RECOGNITION IN CASE OF SUCCESS."
Well, you're definitely a loser.
I used to think people actually wanted privacy. (I did, why wouldn't everyone else?) But the data does not support that hypothesis -- in fact, I think the exact opposite is true.

People's personal information is not being stolen from them, it is given away; and not even for free -- more than 70% of the US population [1] pays an ISP a monthly fee in order to connect to Facebook's servers and upload their data. That is how the Internet works -- it is not Facebook sending the SYN packets.

In general society (outside of our tiny bubble), not having a Facebook account is considered strange. It is even seen as grounds for suspicion of criminal activity. [2]

Everyone says they want to eat right, exercise and be healthy, but more than a third of them are obese. [3] The surveillance state is not happening despite us, it is precisely what the majority of people want, even as they deny it. If you wish to change this unfortunate fact, change the culture.

[1] http://www.onlineschools.org/visual-academy/facebook-obsessi...
[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/08/06/beware-te...
[3] http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html
Yeah, look at how we were greeted as liberators in Iraq! The folks over there sure appreciated us going in to solve all their problems.
Earnings calls and earnings press releases have an optimistic bias. Technology companies tend to be more zealous still. The experiment in the blog, while illustrative, could have been made more rigorous with a control.

A 2006 paper out of the St. Louis Fed investigated "whether managers use[d] optimistic and pessimistic language in earnings press releases" between 1988 and 2003 "and whether the market respond[ed] to" this variation [1]. It found an optimistic bias, with optimistic words appearing nearly three times as frequently as pessimistic words.

Given that "levels of optimistic and pessimistic language used by managers in earnings press releases reliably predict future firm performance" and the "significant market response" to this variation, investors believe "that managers credibly communicate information to investors via optimistic and pessimistic language usage". But the market is Bayesian; "managers have reputations" that investors use as their baseline.

[1] http://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/2006/2006-005.pdf
Great project. Looks really nice.
What is the benefit of your server over just dumping the static files to S3 and letting Amazon serve them?
Another Vietnamese here. I have been oversea for a while so I don't know how exactly things have changed over the years, but in my time things were totally different from this. When I was in primary school, they didn't teach anything related to programming. Only when I got to grade 8 that we got to learn Pascal (which I decided to pick up myself since grade 6). Most of my friends struggled big time with it in the next 5 years. They didn't even understand the basic concepts. But I guess the one to be blamed is the way programming was being taught back then. It did not create any motivations for people to study. So I'm glad that it has changed, for the better.

Regarding the part where author said "Vietnam is a 100% Windows XP monoculture" is not quite true. Especially in the recent years. Many people have adopted Windows 7 and even Windows 8, and stuff like Android smartphones or iPhone are getting more and more prevalent. I guess what happened is that schools don't have the budget to upgrade both software and hardware. That will take some time.
I will create one and share.
"We avoid tools like sqlmap"

"I wish Burp didn't have a Scanner. I might pay $25 more for a branded version of Burp that specifically didn't have that feature, so I could reassure clients I wasn't ever using it."

Tell me, how do you expect to find MOST instances of SQL Injection or XSS without using tools? Do you manually tamper with every cookie parameters? Unless Matasano has better tools and release them publicly, then I am interested in hearing about them.
Most of these countries have fairly ineffective militaries, though, so even a lightly armed force could deter them. Blackwater and at least 2 other PMCs in Iraq could hold their own vs. any failed-state force or militia. It wouldn't need to be like the US Army or USAF fielding high-end weapons where a huge tail to tooth ratio came into play.
Aw, I was hoping you wouldn't notice! :)
I disagree. Well, ok, I agree that restaurant chains serve boring food, but I don't think that is a -bad- thing for the healthcare industry.

Here's a real world example: Three weeks ago I slipped on some ice and I sprained my arm. Hundreds of thousands of people sprain their arms every year and go through the same process:

1) Go to a doctor, 90% of time they will recommend an xray

2) Get an xray, bring it back to the doctor

3) Go back to doctor, who 90% of the time reads back what the xray tech, radiologist or whoever said on the notes.

4) Pay $800-$1200 for four people to 'investigate' your arm when in reality they just passed confirmation down the pipe

Here's what I wanted: I wanted to start with the xray and have a radiologist or nurse practitioner read it back to me. I WANTED to go to the McDonalds of Arm Sprains; a low cost clean environment that serves one job with a 99.999% success rate.

I called dozens of places and only one was be willing to do the xray first. All of the other places said the same thing (yeah you'll probably need an xray, no you'll have to visit the doctor first, yes it will cost around a thousand dollars).

There's times you want a doctor and there's times when you just want a problem solved.
He specifically accounts for this by stating that Apple is and ought to be held to a higher standard because they were previously the overwhelming hegemon in the industry. I don't necessarily agree with him, but the fact that Google also uses exclusively positive languages does not by itself invalidate his point. What he is attempting to point out is that Apple, who is now ostensibly under siege and on the defensive (which, although probably true, is being overrepresented and exaggerated by the media) seems illegitimate and or disingenuous when they remain so overwhelmingly positive: the whole world "knows" that they're screwed and their language seems like a facade. Google and Samsung, on the other hand, are the new dominant companies and thus are justified in using such language.
Black, female, and a Silicon Valley 'trade secret'
Google Fibre is totally awesome, but it's also completely unnecessary
Does S3 remove the .html extension from URLs? I can't stand dirty URLs.
Does NB fetch feeds that have no new articles?
/dev/zero is plenty fast... :-/
Indeed. If one were wise, you could stalk Google/Yahoo/BigCo properties that are being neglected, launch a paid competitor and reap the reward when they shut down.

Pinboard and now Newsblur.
Dribbble.com would be a good starting point for finding a decent designer
Exactly -- I was benchmarking a disk that was having a performance problem. and I did something like "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda" instead of "of=/testfile".
"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity"

Congratulations.

This is why I love SaaS. 6 figures revenue in a couple of days, and I can only imagine how much more will be made in the next 3 months... and beyond.

But it's not a once-off payday. This is recurring. 7 figure annual income is yours, Sam. People slave away for decades trying to reach a tiny fraction of this amount. Put it to good use, brother.
I've found Wikipedia's list[0] to be both more complete and more Ctrl-F -able, but this is certainly attractively laid out and has good descriptions.

0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
And for this one too:
http://soleun.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/brad_holden.png
I studied formal Logic in high school (sadly, we were the second last cohort before it was discontinued due to lack of interest). Undoubtedly one of the best decisions I ever made, for examining my own thinking and arguments as much as those around me.

Logical Fallacies was one of my favourite elements. (Deductive logic is fabulous as well, but of limited application in a real world of probabilities.) If I could wave my magic wand and change education, logic would be right up there with entrepreneurial economics as a mandatory class to support kids understanding how the world works (and how it can work in their favour).
Where would people from Croatia go? All the ones I've met have been either KBR people in Iraq/Afghanistan or people in the US, and they seemed smart, but they were probably outliers. Germany, or US, or elsewhere?
Take note: this kind of thinking is what being purely an "ideas guy" leads to.
In other words: does anyone with a reader setup they love want to share their OPML file so I can try out Newsblur?

Thanks!
I want to live in a world where conversations can be had, where we can all sit down as a species and say, "Yes, this is what we want" or "no, we're going to pass on this." Unfortunately, there will always be people you will be unable to win over, unable to change their mind, even if the proper direction is a known. What then? We continue to argue? Forever tied in discussions without any forward progress?

The downsides of petroleum are clear. Its polluting, its limited, and we fight regional (check that, global) conflicts over it. Electricity is cheap, it's price is dropping quickly as more capacity comes online (solar, wind, natural gas where fracking is occurring), and its able to be moved across wide geographic areas extremely quickly. There is no reason oil shouldn't be taxed and those funds driven directly into renewables and electrified mobility.

Now, if you want to argue with me on facts, I am all ears. But until someone can prove we're not running out of oil, prove that we don't need a military to patrol the regions we extract that oil from, and prove that our economy can continue to function with a cartel controlling the literal fuel of the world economies, get the hell out of the way.
Slightly related:

I think the "You'll love the iPhone..." campaign Apple just launched is a little tacky, and un-Apple-like. It reads like one of their Valentine's Day or Back to School ads... except there's no holiday or event to back it up.

Except, of course, it coincides with the S4 reveal. Even if unintentional, it's poorly timed.
You are probably a wonderful person to work with and any team is really lucky to have you. Having someone who is deeply passionate about these problems is very important and these are important problems!
Space colonization is an unmitigated Good Thing for the indefinite future, assuming you're okay with the human species existing after our sun explodes.

Mars is the first step for dealing with that problem.
I like the analogy (and, of course, the content which has been read and bookmarked!). I'm co-launching a business into this sphere next month, though with a niche focus on young women - not sure how the OS analogy will work but so many other tips are universally applicable.
Not all eBay cases have the same outcome. There are even online sites dedicated to putting together counterfeit claim documents for Chanel, Hermes, etc for eBay. They usually charge around $100 for a document.
I think restaurants would be ok with just $10/mo for a website. Most restaurant owners aren't too web savvy but I doubt they have a social-media-only policy when it comes to web presence. How you reach restaurant owners at scale is the hard part of this business. Same for any idea targeting local businesses.
Show HN: Bootstro.js, intro.js for Bootstrap
Relevant:

http://www.startupsanonymo.us/

Yesterday's discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5388219
I realize this is pretty much irrelevant, but I just wanted to point out that Blackwater has changed its name twice, and is now known as Academi:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academi
Use our Tonido server instead (http://www.tonido.com/ios/).
Less adventurous though :-)
Mentor's Thoughts Week Week 43: Wisdom From A Billionaire
With currently only 3400 paying users it's only 80K pr. year of revenues (and the profits are probably much lower). It's still far from a good business and this kind of money does not have any kind of guarantees.