skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The point of patents isn't to encourage progress. Inventors have existed and will exist with or without patents, and we will have progress with or without patents. The point of patents is to destroy trade secrets. The contract between society and inventors is, tell us how you did it, and in exchange we promise to not compete with you for a while. The word "patent" itself means open, as in the phrase "patently false", i.e. manifestly or obviously false.

This is an awesome patent:

http://www.google.ca/patents/US5255452

This is what patents are supposed to be about: a magician revealing his tricks. Without patent law, the public may have never known how Michael Jackson did the Smooth Criminal leaning trick. He would have taken the secret to his grave.

This is a ridiculously stupid patent:

http://www.google.com/patents/US5963916

Do you get what this patent is saying? It's saying "click on a button in a browser, and it plays music!" Here is a detailed analysis of it:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/trivial-patent.html

The problem is the vast majority of software patents are of this kind. They are not revealing any secrets. They're just making life difficult for everyone else. This is what needs to be abolished.
2013 Thiel Fellows Include A Fashion Designer, A Poet, And A Harvard Dropout
For internal purposes, you're probably right. For distribution and documentation purposes, I think it's much easier to understand "this plugin works on 7.3 or later" than "this plugin works on 2010-08-25 or later."
Pay bands. Loss of the love/age discrimination. Hours/screw your stress.

Sorry... we don't understand what you do enough to warrant paying you 2x-3x what we pay the grads and we pay grads more than other starters. Pay the programmer more than execs or non-tech with big degrees?

There are also a bunch of folks that ride out the tech that they rode in on when they started. PHP? Classic ASP? COBOL? If you don't love to learn and adapt in both tech and culture, you won't know what the cool kids know nor will you fit well with their group to tell stories about pointers and punch cards.

At 40, those kids of yours are just getting better and better and you might be feeling guilty about missing out on parts of those first years. You might have also done the math on how much of your surplus value you, as developer, are pouring into the sales guys' gas guzzler... You are there when something fails. You are there cashing the checks that the sales people write beyond scope, budget, and/or time. You see that gals' work-life balance compared to yours and say, f-it.

Also, as the guy notes... StackOverflow is a self-selecting group. Which of these highly-paid, older programmers are trying to build up virtual street cred or answering surveys?

Damn. What am I doing here, now? Gotta go.
"Most drug are developed for adults first and then tested in children."

It was also be unethical to develop drugs for children without first testing them on adults, since children can't give informed consent.
> Is it really relevant in this day and age ?

Yes. I find it quite inconvenient at times that my phone won't last two full days of normal standby/use cycles. There are times when it simply isn't convenient to charge the thing.

And these phones are aimed more at less affluent parts of the world, where access to power is not nearly as reliable as it is over here in the west - even those in cities with significant electricity distribution infrastructure often experience lengthy blackouts either due to under-production/over-subscription or due to failures within the grid.
I don't understand the value of Waze when anonymized cellular phone data provides real-time, high resolution congestion data for any place that has cellular phones, which is basically the entire globe.

Why do people use Waze?
I wonder if it would be possible to produce a journal that only released an issue when it has, say, 10 articles? No monthly/quarterly schedule, you could have an issue release next week, or next year.
If the government doesn't, peoples finances decide who is deserving of care and who is not, which more often than not means an insurance company decides.

Personally I'm far more comfortable with a board under democratic control setting rules based on clinical considerations for whether or not someone is suitable for care, than having someone with a profit motive to avoid paying for my care making that decision.
Quietweet-a read-only Twitter client, which ignores tweets with , # or links
I'm not thrilled to bring politics into it, but I have to. A ton of the naysaying on Tesla is influenced by the conservative media's hate affair with anything viewed as environmentally friendly. There are a lot of older Americans with tons of money in the market who watch nothing but Fox News, combined with the relatively politically conservative CNBC (not saying they are partisan, but they are hostile to "green" companies, and take a look at their Keystone XL coverage....). These older Americans who probably never would have bought Tesla stock when ahead and shorted it, waiting for the next Solyndra to unfold.

Solyndra sold a highly fungible commodity in a saturated market. Tesla is selling a machine that, when any skeptic sees it in a showroom, starts to impress in a way that is visceral. My conservative, rural father got in one at a showroom I took him to. He was blown away by the build quality. He knows cars, he knows metal, and he knows engineering. He told me that, mechanically, it is the best built car he has ever seen. He is a car guy, and used to drag me to car shows constantly as a kid.

His only objection was that he couldn't use one where he lives because of the two miles of dirt road he has to traverse to get to his home. I told him they were coming out with an SUV. He now owns stock.
With companies like OSH Park[1], the cost barrier to getting a bare board professionally manufactured is so low that you ought to just try it sometime. If you already sketch schematics, go through a basic Eagle tutorial or two, then try laying out a simple board based on your schematic. If you keep it small, you'll only be out $15 or so!

[1] http://oshpark.com
Plenty of people say that the most productive time is when there's no one else in the office. Four hours of overlap should be enough for a range of jobs (at least software development). At the very least, it will force those people who need to work together to plan. I agree that there should be a routine and there probably is. I would think in general young urban folks would prefer to come to work at 11am or noon while family and older folks would prefer 8 or 9am.
You can also just read the code (the third parameter is the decimal representation of the 'password'):

ww.mode.register("home", ww.mode.HomeMode, null);
ww.mode.register("cat", ww.mode.CatMode, 231, 8);
var isAndroid = navigator.userAgent.match(/Android/);
isAndroid || ww.mode.register("space", ww.mode.SpaceMode, 42, 8);
ww.mode.register("pong", ww.mode.PongMode, 129, 8);
ww.mode.register("bacon", ww.mode.BaconMode, 144, 8);
ww.mode.register("simone", ww.mode.SimoneMode, 211, 8);
ww.mode.register("eightbit", ww.mode.EightBitMode, 83, 8);
ww.util.getAudioContextConstructor() && (ww.mode.register("song", ww.mode.SongMode, 219, 8), ww.mode.register("synth", ww.mode.SynthMode, 136, 8));
ww.mode.register("ascii", ww.mode.AsciiMode, 127, 8);
ww.mode.register("bowling", ww.mode.BowlingMode, 117, 8);
ww.mode.register("rocket", ww.mode.RocketMode, 69, 8);
ww.mode.register("burger", ww.mode.BurgerMode, 57, 8);
First, thanks for trying to add to the discussion, I appreciate it. I disagree on two points:

1. I make no judgement about whether or not CO2 causes global warming. It may cause it, it may cause it but to a lesser (or greater) effect than sun cycles, cosmic radiation (and it's effect on cloud formation) or natural variation in the climate. I'm just asserting that my confidence in knowing one way or the other when you can't create control experiments is low. Ultimately proving causation instead of simple correlation is something that I believe is near impossible for something as large and complicated as the climate. Especially when the data being analysed for correlation relies hundreds of thousands of years of extrapolated proxy data (tree rings, ice cores, sediment, etc).

2. (this is tangential to the discussion of reproducibility in science) I think there is something lost to going to green energy - cost and power density. The unfortunate fact is that fossil fuels are incredibly cheap compared to green energy and they are more easily transportable. Carbon regimes threaten the ability of the third world to build itself out of poverty and threaten the global economy in general. I'm not saying we shouldn't invest in new forms of energy (especially wind and nuclear), in fact I think we certainly should. But I don't want to hamstring economic progress for some calamitous event with something I have low confidence will actually happen.
WePay Debuts Veda, An Intelligent Risk Engine Using Social Data To Prevent Fraud
You can open up the console on their site and change the scroll distance between noises.

It really seems like they should add some lorem ipsum text to give a better representation of farts in the wild.
But how much was "too many"

I believe the current lack of programmers and number of openings is bigger than the values around that time
"Thank you for calling BigCo. Unfortunately our call-centre staff are all afternoon people and won't be in until 1pm. Please call back then."

"Sorry bud, the loading dock staff get in at 5 to finish early. Can you come to pick up the packages tomorrow, a bit earlier this time?"

"An ISP technician will come around to your house to fix the problem between 1am and 4am. He's a bit of a night owl"

Of course, all the people in the comments that are for the abolition of set hours would likely change their tune if the employees decide to shorten their weeks. "That project can't be done by then".
This reminds me of services which offer business leads. The hard part will be creating a marketplace for casual (and inexpert) sellers and weeding out shoddy products - I have collected about 150 connections on Linkedin. Since the initial buzz most have been accepted connections from "friend sluts".

If I wanted to be bothered, I could sell you my connection to "real-estate Bob" but, I don't really know him. More importantly, he doesn't really know me. My introduction might have no more value than a cold call, but how would a buyer know.

On the other hand, why create a casual marketplace? The sales lead model is based on directly collecting and selling knowledge. If there are buyers for introductions, produce the introductions directly rather than brokering them.
NIP Tip – iOS Kid Mode
Online gambling in the USA
There are many reasons so many papers are not reproducible.

1.) The prospective data collection methods used in a lot of studies are deeply flawed and worse aren't documented.

2.) The retrospective data used in many studies is poorly validated and the quality is rarely a concern for most universities.

3.) The people who publish these papers are very intelligent, most far more intelligent than I am, but you'd be surprised how many of them don't have a very good handle on basic statistics. Not because they aren't smart enough to learn but mostly because they have no interest in it.

4.) There is a lot of pressure put on researchers to publish papers even if they aren't ready and as a result mistakes are made, there really needs to be less of an emphasis on the quantity of papers that are published and more emphasis on quality.

For anyone who might be interested in such things, if you ever find yourself locked in a dungeon with nothing but a computer loaded with every journal article ever published you can find articles involving similar cohorts from the exact same universities that have different results.
My visit duration to the fartscroll page was increased by about 1000% because of this plugin.

I normally would have clicked away long ago, but now I find myself wanting to just leave it open in a side tab all day long.
Nah, it filtered out the meaningless buzzwords.

It's a dashboard for online content. That pretty much implies the picking and finding of said online content to be displayed on the dashboard.
All of the fart apps in the App Store are now ready for that transition from native to multi-platform web based applications.
In practical terms, reproducing someone else's work most of the time boils down to redoing someone else's PhD thesis. Which is both not very interesting and doesn't help getting your own research done.
I was thinking about absolute numbers, so 5% of a lot can still be a lot.
But.. but.. disruption good!

Some things have already been disrupted. The 40hr working week being a great example.

I'm really beginning to wonder if our industry's fascination with young, gullible and naive staff is actually healthy any more.
Unions were created to counterbalance corporate power. To say we should get rid of unions because they're not perfect is just idiotic. Ever since unions have been all but crushed in the US, labor protection laws have disappeared, strikes have become mostly illegal, staff can be fired at will and union members are intimidated. Maybe the answer is to get rid of corporations?
The reason there are multiple exchanges is the same reason you can buy the same pair of shoes at 10 different places: it is competition.

Also, what is the social cost you are referring to? There are a lot of people here saying that HFT doesn't provide "social value". Does it somehow provide less social value than traders screaming at each other in the pits? Similar types of trading always existed, except now it's done by computers. For what it's worth, HFT provides well-paying jobs for a lot developers and ops people and often is very supportive of the engineering community.
$1B in Facebook stock, it's like monopoly money.
>In the end, you can compute anything compuatble with any Turning complete programming language

Well it's this defeatist position i'm arguing against.

> you should be using some university ressearch language

I'm largely a PHP developer / "architect" by trade; I'm not in the business of pushing Haskell onto CMS developers.

I am interested in the programming language debate, and I'm not convinced "the market" is the best judge of what the most useful language is. That it happened to be, for example, the internet was coming of age during PHP's invention which gave us a generation of script-kiddes (98 - 06) seems to me an accident of history. This accident is being corrected by Zend Framework and corresponding language changes (06 - 13), so by today PHP is a language which resembles a pythonized java, rather than a javascripty perl.

The market in this instance is doing precisely what has been recomended by the leading theoretical voices in this area: coming from Zend, Sympfony, etc.

My intended contribution is to provide a conceptual framework in which to make sense of these changes, to advocate for these changes, and to compare potential changes. Mailing lists are abound with favorite features, I've yet to see a feature suggestion with a complete argument of the kind I would advocate.

Though some of the very best do actually get 95% of the way there (ontology: showing the new feature in other languages to "get a sense of what it is"; epistemology: showing how to reason about it in different areas; abduction: showing how it represents problems better than current technologies): if you look at a modern high quality PHP-RFC today you're getting very close to what i'm proposing.

The open source market of merit is putting these individuals in positions of power over the evolution of languages, it would be useful - i suggest - if we could have a standard which provides the means for establishing good arguments from bad arguments in this area.
> In math there is only black and white, provably true and patently wrong.

You'd probably be interested in Godel's incompleteness theorem.

Also, exact reproduction of other people's experimental work is highly unusual in CS, despite the theoretical possibility. Usually the materials and methods sections of papers in hard sciences like physics, chemistry, and biology are much more detailed, to the point of being recipes.

Finally, CS is not really a science. It lies somewhere between math and engineering, which are also not sciences.
And if you are in the financial industry you often need to be in the office when relevant markets are open.
For some NLP, I really suggest using OpenNLP (http://opennlp.apache.org/) from Apache. It has libraries that can be trained to do different NLP tasks like sentence splitting, tokenizers, POS tagging, and document classification. I still didn't manage to use all of them but in my experience, it's very easy to use. Documentation is good too!
A solution for designers who don't know Wordpress
No, I'm implying that society in general appears to find this to be unacceptable. Whether or not you or I agree with that is basically irrelevant.
To get the perspective of different participants in the market watch this video from The Milken Institute featuring Bart Chilton (regulator), Terry Duffy (exchange), Jamil Nazarali (retail execution), and Lou Salkind (proprietary trading).

They address a lot of the common criticisms of modern markets discussed here. It provides a good perspective of what people within the industry see as the current state and future of trading.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icNGvgd27-A&feature=youtu...
What I do support charging for (in event of not getting the job, which hasn't happened yet) are reference checks.

This sounds like a serious long shot.
How is a one-sided contract legally enforcable? If you put in your email signature "By reading this email you have agreed to mail me $5", the nature of that one-sidedness is much clearer.

Besides, 'risking professional reputation' by calling referees and then not offering a job? Risking it to whom? Only the referees will know, and if they were the deciding factor, then they already have a particular opinion of your abilities.
one feature..... police trap reporting.

With some of the recent updates, mapping and routing has just gotten worse and essentially useless, so I just use it to tag and be warned of cops checking speed while using Google for actual directions.
Sure, if you assume everyone has the amazing ability to do decimal to binary conversions in their head.

Also assuming that everyone has the skill to dig through javascript files.
One major complication with that for modern web applications is that many don't consider sending javascript to the client as distributing the software (as it is not distributed as a whole) which most putting such software out there under the GPL would assume that the client side code counts as distributing the library to the end user just as much as sending it in a compiled executable would.
actual Americans

Like Native Americans? But seriously, if you are a true libertarian and believe all humans are equal, why does it matter if someone is an actual American?
This, to me, is the epitome of sleaze. I would want no part of it as either buyer or seller.

If I'm the buyer:
Pros - I get a warm intro to meet with people I otherwise would have had to have a cold intro with

Cons - The people know that I've paid someone else for their time and thus would feel standoffish, upset, etc.

If I'm the seller:
Pros - I get to sell a contact one time.
Cons - Once my friends find out that I sold them, they will cease being my friends and will actively avoid me

I don't see how it could be any other way for the casual person.
This has always interested me. I vaguely recall hearing somewhere that Gmail sells contact info to LinkedIn? Can anyone confirm or invalidate this?

I've had countless cases similar to the Craigslist one that seem uncanny.
But getting location information on a facebook app user requires like two lines of code. I'd do that for a mere 1/4 billion!
Adobe acknowledges critical hole in ColdFusion: will fix CVE-2013-3336 in a week
re: TFA, legalization of gambling in the USA has increased drastically over the last 15 years. Mostly starting in native-american reservations, and then trickling into other areas wanting to cash in.

Though I personally love playing poker for cash, legalization should be reversed, not expanded. Being a tax windfall for governments isn't a justification for the ruin it brings upon families (ignoring the idiot actually responsible).
You're more optimistic than I am if you think that a government committee will be democratic, or that such a committee (democratic or not) would base its decisions on clinical considerations, or that people would not be outraged at rational clinical decisions.

In general, I think this kind of decision is highly personal and dependent on circumstance, and cannot possibly be regulated at the federal level.
PyPy on Pi
The main problem is that most employers with expectations around work hours enforce the start time but don't adequately support a reasonable end time.

This is our fault, as we've basically let this happen. I've personally told developers on my teams to go home on time and I get excuses like "well I'll just end up watching TV or wasting time."

To this my response has always been "save that energy for when the project really needs it, because it will. When things are calmer, go have a life."

Unfortunately, I think most business leaders are ignorant about the urgency of work, or they take the attitude of "push until they push back". This leads to the burnout, apathy, and overall lack of commitment over time from their employees.
poor people might find better services locally if the Federal government allowed insurance across state lines. This would increase competition and bring costs down. With lower costs more money would be freed up to service those who cannot pay.

I have not heard of my local hospitals refusing care. If anything the ER seems to be majority sniffles or need a ride people.
People want offers. We're in the process of helping them clean up their mailing list at the moment, and the open rate is rapidly getting to the 30% range for ordinary offer e-mails and coupons, and much more for "special" offers (like 50% off vouchers).

Especially since the financial crisis, people have been very budget conscious, and a lot of people are on these mailinglists to get offers for lunch etc.

We actually have a nice timeline of the crisis: When Lehmans toppled, bookings at the restaurants of our clients near their building shot through the roof. And looking back at bounce stats, we can tell which firms had large layoffs when, as we suddenly had 30% of addresses at one city firm bounce, 50% of another, and so on.
Screenshots of mostly-text web pages, compressed to JPEGs, pasted into a Word document, printed to hardcopy in two-level greyscale, annotated with a rubber stamp (or typewriter?), scanned again at low dpi, converted to PDF (39 MB), and drop-published into an unnavigable /_files/ folder, all towards its goal of teaching internet literacy to others.
Yeah, that's going to be the first feature removed when someone buys them. Also not worth $1B.
I'm not sure about IDE features. The whole reason I use vim in the first place is precisely because it's not an IDE. I don't want integration, I want unix instead. It's the same reason I use dwm for my desktop setup and configure everything by hand as opposed to using a desktop environment. I want technically simple software. Right now I could already easily configure/integrate vim to use gdb, gcc, git, jshint, etc. using vimscript. I prefer that over hardcoded integration. I'm just curious what's meant by IDE features. Maybe I'm misinterpreting it. At the end of the day, I trust Bram. He's created an amazing text editor and maintained it for more than 20 years.
The novelty of the fart sounds is funny, but the JS implementation is fascinating.
Some reports said the main thing delaying the deal is Waze's reluctance to move to Facebook HQ.
Air? sure. Fresh? Probably not. ;)