skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So many mind-blowing revelations in that TAL episode:

* The original filer of the patent featured in the story was not the inventor of the idea but rather a partner in a failed startup around the idea, which was never realized, he then later patented his former partner's ideas, and made a lot of money from that patent since

* Two defendants fought the patent infringement suit and won on a technicality: the patent was filed improperly due to random mention of another contributor to the idea who was not listed as a co-inventor

* ... BUT any of the other 16 infringements defendants who had already agreed to settle their infringement claims out of court are still bound to the terms of their license agreements forever because the language of the license agreement basically asserts that they have to pay the license fees no matter if the patent in question is still valid or not. So anyone that settled out of court are trapped anyway.

* There is an entire economy and market around reselling patents to the point of the current self-proclaimed owners of a given patent can not describe its origins.

After listening to this episode I couldn't help but think that patents can be fixed if:

1. You should not be allowed to sell a patent. The intent of a patent is to give the inventor(s) enough lead time to develop the idea, not to create a market for ideas.

2. A patent should not be valid unless you can demonstrate it. You shouldn't be allowed to own ideas that are beyond your means to execute.

3. There should be very low limits on patent infringement damage claims thereby removing the financial incentive of using patents and anti-competitive and extortion weapons.
To achieve great things you need a plan, and not enough time
Germany sets up a campaign to draw UK citizens for apprenticeships
>>It's interesting how you belittle me because my numbers aren't big enough on the Brabble app.

Sorry about that. It was uncalled for. Honestly I thought you were just making stuff up. You've certainly done more than most.
Having a full encrypted system solves all of those issues. If not, at least an encrypted home (such as what Debian provides with their default installation).
This speaks to something that has baffled me for a long time. If we have to bend/break the rules of REST to make things usable in the real world (and I believe we do), why have REST as an ideal in the first place?

Why work halfway towards A, when we could define a more realistic B and implement it fully? We spend too much time justifying which parts of the holy book to ignore.
Those possibilities are especially embarrassing since doing it a lot better takes little effort:

TrueCrypt container which contains sensible project-data;

.ssh somewhere on that container with ~/.ssh linking to it;

Keepass for passwords, it's quite convinient.

Maybe Pray or something similar, haven't set it up myself yet...
You should be using map[T]struct{} for sets instead of bool. struct{}s use 0 bytes and there will be no confusion as to what the value is for.
Yes. I miss hearing his private jets and helicopters scream over Redwood Shores in the 90s...
Looking for the post two days ago about a NYC startup job website
I can't find it, even after searching.

It was similar to nycstartups.com, but that is not it.

I'd appreciate the help.
No. but glad other people are thinking about this too. Curious to hear what other thoughts you have about this topic.
Also (d), it doesn't create a disincentive increasing one's income. It's pretty easy to get into a situation in the US where you have more money making 30K a year than 35K, just because you lose access to means-tested benefits.
Review: Avantree Hive Bluetooth Stereo Headphone, Experience High Quality Music.
Yes dear amazon. Being your Prime member, please let me order grocies online through you and hav them shipped especially for recurring items like Milk, Eggs etc.
This is really cool. How automated is it?
And in CPython it's less that the GIL is the flaw, but more the refcounted GC. Back in '96 there was a patch to remove the GIL, run of the mill single threaded python code ran 2-6x slower (largely dependent on threading implementation used) due to all the locking overhead around the refcount updates happening all the time. When you have a language that is perceived as slow already, making the vast majority of typical scripts of the time that much slower to allow MT python to be faster was going to be a very difficult thing to sell.
Also covered in the New Yorker yesterday: "How to Make War on Patent Trolls" -- an informative, thoughtful article, listing resources the government already has to defeat trolls but isn't much using, though it describes how Vermont is acting in at least one case.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/06/how-t...

From the article: "It is time to declare total war on patent trolls. The federal government, and the states, should do everything they can to exterminate them and to make anyone regret getting into such crooked work. The existence of trolls is entirely a product of government: they abuse a government program (the patent law), and continue to exist only thanks to government inaction."

It later continues...

"The one exception to the pattern of government inaction is Bill Sorrell, the Attorney General of Vermont, who, two weeks ago, filed lawsuits against MPHJ for exploiting Vermont businesses and nonprofits. He explained to me that Vermont is trying to attract new businesses to the state, and that scaring off trolls might help. “This is not anti-patent,” Sorrell said. “This is anti-abuse of patent rights. We don’t want people preying on Vermont’s small business.”

The Vermont story may help create a race to the top. If Vermont succeeds in scaring trolls away, it will give companies there an advantage. And as more states act, it will be relatively worse to do business in those that don’t."

It covers more than just Vermont and links to other informative resources.

On another note...

A major problem infrequently mentioned is that a lot of people, especially in parts of business far from R&D, see patents solely as a way to recoup private investment, not supposed to be balanced with public interest after limited times, and they use number of patents as a proxy for amount of innovation.

They honestly see the system as it is now as functioning great. Many see objections to patents as objections to capitalism and business. Many of these people aren't stupid, malevolent, or self-serving. They believe in a model that no longer functions, but haven't realized that model no longer applies.
Completely OT, but what was the original line? I don't recognize it and it's making me feel like I'm letting down my Browncoat cred. :(
So basically, you didn't lost it. Good for you.

Yet using full drive encryption + daily backups (or dropbox or google drive or whatever webfs) + having a spare machine at home (so that you can spare the trip to a computer store and have a machine readily configured) is necessary if you are a professional.

You seem to have underestimated this last point, with your estimation of a full day to have a new one ready.

Having a machine setup and ready can sure take hours - which might not be ok if you have a client waiting. Also, anything else may happen (car broke, computer shop closed / out of computers). I have noticed that when bad things happend, they tend to spiral out until sh*t hit the fan.

Your $1k is a lowball estimate. Better have a spare one ready and waiting for you.
By the way, here's an article about the effect of corruption on foreign aid: https://www.devex.com/en/news/30-percent-of-aid-lost-to-corr...

An interesting article about Chinese foreign aid to Africa: http://thestar.blogs.com/worlddaily/2013/05/new-report-detai...
http://www.indiana.edu/~rccpb/pdf/Cheng%20RCCPB%2029%20Aid%2...

In my wife's country, you can see the effect of Chinese investment and aid every single day, it's tangible, and affects people's lives. People are employed because of Chinese investments, goods are transported on roads and ferries built/donated by the Chinese, and promising students are given scholarships to study in China.

Now this is not to say that we are bad and the Chinese are great, but rather to compare the impact of charity vs. investment.

Investment leads to self-sufficiency, charity leads to dependence. Investment leads to a permanent influx of wealth, charity is temporary. Allowing people to earn a living, be self-sufficient, properly nourished and healthy is the end goal - this can only be achieved through investment and economic means, charity cannot accomplish this.

Anyhow, I do think the young man described is doing a great thing, however there's a reason the hedge fund pays him so much. His algorithms and know-how will make them alot of money. Alot more than they pay him. Which in turn is more than he'll give away.
What's the culture like in Salt Lake? I visited there once a few years ago, and there seems to be a nice pocket of liberal open minded people and artist-types living there.
Amazon : More Prime Instant Video exclusives for kids
Don't bother. There's a significant segment of the population who can't escape the egocentric mindset others grow out of. They can't (not won't, can't) understand that others think and feel differently from them. They can't imagine others wanting to fix an injustice which doesn't directly affect them.
Perhaps it will at least help to restore the area...
The amount of FUD in this article, and on this thread are amazing.

The folks who claim it is more expensive to run AWS over on-premises infrastructure are either not counting their total costs (power, staff, off-site data storage, co-location) or not architecting things properly on AWS.
The sushi chef in question was beaten and terrorized by his drunken war-hero father as a child. He was conditioned from birth to deal with terrible men who had great power over him.
Would you read / inspect each letter going out?
What would stop a bad guy from sending a threatening letter to the President using a fake name and return address? It'd be postmarked outside of their actual city, with no link back to them unless you're logging IPs.
Given the success of FreshDirect, I really like Amazon's chances at nailing this vertical. After all, they are experts in shipping logistics, managing distributor-relationships, and handling payments/customer service.

I trust them to seek out high-quality partners and suppliers, deliver with reliability at low-cost, and make the entire thing as seamless as possible.

Will be interesting to see how transparent (or not) they are about their suppliers as it relates to GMO's, etc.

This will be a great tie-in and supplement to their "subscribe and save" (usually) non-perishable line of products.
See Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of our Nature"(http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/014312...) to see why I remain much more optimistic than you.
I'm wondering about the automation as well -- this is something I would use, between buying/finding stamps, envelopes, etc...I rather pay a premium for the few times I need to snail mail something.
"REST doesn't expect a "document-based API". It expects a resource based API. Commands, collections of commands, and endpoints which have collections of commands as well as other subordinate resources are all, themselves, valid resources, whether or not they are sensibly described as "documents"."

Ah, well said. It's so hard to find good examples of this though. Most REST tutorials focus on simple nouns that happen to map nicely to tables. But you're suggesting that "resources" could be far more abstract. But, if I were to treat Commands as resource and perhaps make it my only resource, isn't that essentially RPC?
Lots of drama about this! I guess that goes along with being high profile.
Ing in the US was bought by Capital One, and neither use key fobs (if that's what you meant). Are you in the EU?
There are a zillion people trying to get into games. This actually makes it hard to find those who have actually made games. So when a (relatively) known quantity becomes available, there are immediate opportunities.
Many software vendors do very similar things: by entering a different registration key (that costs more money) you can unlock features of the existing software that were previously unavailable to you.

For example, by entering a registration key, you can upgrade "Windows 7 Professional" to "Windows 7 Ultimate" and get more features. It only takes a few moments to do, so it's clear that little or no additional software is being installed on your machine.
There is a difference between a machine that is ready to help a client and one that has all my favorite xmonad hot-keys setup.

Now a web-based ssh is enough to do 99% of the work.

But true comfort takes time
You should probably write a letter to the editor of Wikipedia with your question/complaint, and perhaps threaten to cancel your subscription if their writing doesn't improve to cover what you think it should cover.
Notably though ARM could survive under a regime with dramatically shortened patent protection (5 years), which would be an unsatisfactory but necessary compromise until we can work out a system for prior art, examination, and code that doesn't destroy innovation.
We value security and privacy and no letter is read. We can track payments through credit cards so the sender is not anonymous.
Post-mortem of the June 3-4th DDoS
So that's what all those blogs were about! Remarkably similar to what Paul is doing with Dashboard.io except he's been doing it for a while. Not that that's a big negative, I think it's good when smart people are seeing similar opportunities at the same time.

Best of luck!
Has anyone from the Seattle area used this service regularly? I'd imagine after 5 years it's become pretty polished. That seems like an eternity to improve their business model and get the economics right.
UC Berkeley's Little Legged Robots Grow Wings and Tails
Full disk encryption. This is the first thing I do as soon as I get a new computer. The thought of losing one of my work systems terrified me before. Now I have peace of mind.
Amazon could be very successful if they setup "grocery warehouses" in local areas and just delivered groceries to people. It's not a wildly different model than the current grocery store, just with less need for prime real estate and you'd be paying delivery people instead of checkout people.

It can be done and it can be done profitably, it's going to be more about finding people who don't want to spend their time going to the grocery store.
The Pyed Piper: A Modern Python Alternative to awk, sed etc.
> BTW If any company started holding up salaries of their employees dependent on profit, nobody would join that company !

That's a pretty bold statement. Any particular reason you think that's true? I don't think profit sharing is that arcane of a concept. Unless you're talking about the extreme of no salary, only profit-sharing, in which case, yeah. But that's not what execs get, either.
> IP doesn't (I think) and shouldn't ever stop you from doing whatever you want for yourself. I can infringe all the patents I want if I'm using my matter and energy to make stuff myself. When it becomes commerce, that's when the government steps in.

Whether IP should stop you from doing things for yourself is of course a matter of opinion. But the brute fact is that, in the U.S. and most of the rest of the world, IP laws do indeed prohibit you from doing a great many things for yourself, without regard to whether "commerce" is involved. (You may be thinking of the Commerce Clause of article I of the U.S. Constitution, whereas the congressional power to enact patent- and copyright laws derive from a separate provision, the Writings and Discoveries Clause, also in article I.)

For example:

- Patents prohibit you from, among other things, making or using the patented invention, unless you have permission of the patent owner. There are no exceptions for personal use. As a practical matter a patent owner might not bother coming after someone practicing a patent invention "for himself," but your definition of the quoted term might be different from the patent owner's definition.

- Copyright law prohibits you from making or distributing copies of a copyrighted work; from creating "derivative works" based on the original work; and from publicly performing or -displaying the work (among other things). There's an exception for "fair use," but as many college students have expensively learned courtesy of the RIAA, you might not want to roll the dice on that.
It is fully automated. Sign up for the alpha if you are interested. You can print: letter, postcards, etc on various paper types, colors, and sizes.
It always amazes me how we like to talk about Tiananmen, but never ever mention Tlatelolco ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tlatelolco_massacre ).

Maybe, because a week after the massacre, and only 2 km away, we happily inaugurated the Olympic Games.

And not one Western country even got upset about what happened. After all, the Mexican one-party-state of the time were one of "our bastards".

(The same party that governs Mexico today).
Prey really takes seconds to setup. No excuses ;) Don't forget to set it up so that a guest account is created as well.
It's one thing if you own the land and do everything right, including following regulations and correctly managing the land... another if you're dicing and slicing haphazardly and especially modifying waterways, which are a very complicated ecological and ownership maze, especially in California.

Thanks to one environmental science class I took, I know for example that erosion upstream, even slightly as they've done here can modify the downstream water quality significantly, and have an impact on whole populations of fish and wildlife. They had no right to do what they did, even if they thought the regulations were pointless or dumb. They are not.
Test Driven Development with Meteor
I don't think there's a fascination, I just think that's where most VCs invest their money, and it can be a compelling investment for acquisitions.

The larger issue is that short term profitability is not the only thing to look at. It should certainly be one thing to consider, but there are lots of examples of companies that became enormous after a long period of unprofitability. And since ET has so much revenue and only 7% loss compared to that revenue, I can totally see how this would be a good investment for Salesforce.
I think it's a testament to how quickly the business is changing and how increasingly broken the conventional wisdom surrounding investment and acquisition is becoming.

If you look at the way business worked in, say, the '80s most companies that became big did so by selling stuff, and having positive rates of return. And the general trend for a company that was growing was for it to maintain that growth for several years, or at least retain that level of business. But today business is far more ephemeral. Revenue can be far more sporadic, monetization can be far more complex, and the valuation of a "customer base" can be much more difficult because of that.

So you can get these flash in the pan products that produce millions of dollars in revenue for a few months but then maybe they go away just as quickly and aren't worth anything later. It makes for a weird market, and it makes for an even weirder industry, especially when things tend to be organized around "empire building" and such-like.

I suspect that in the future there will be more and more of a focus around project-based business services rather than organization-based services. Kickstarter, I think, is an example of this.
I realize I'm catching this a bit late, but I wanted to thank you for the tips! This is exactly the kind of thing that I was hoping to learn, thank you!
Recycle cars. End of Story.
Careful there- "mommy bloggers" are both your target market and a prime marketing channel. (Case Study: Purex Crystals, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/business/media/06adco.html)
Title is misleading. That's not excess. Excess is dropping $20k on a wedding when you have a mortgage and are only making $50k/yr.

What Parker did was tasteless, but not the worst thing people with money do sometimes.
If you remove the "stealing" part, re-birthing is about creating value and recycling.

People are spending their time and skills in creating good cars (ie that the market is willing to buy) from unusable cars.

They take say 5 bad ones and make 1 good one. That's like a 20% recycling - and the bad one can be sold for parts.

Why exactly is it a bad thing???

EDIT: Yes, I would be comfortable driving myself and my family in such a car. When I buy a car, I take it to a professional I chose (not one that the seller chose) for a 2nd inspection - one that I pay for myself. If the market can provide me such a car and a professional to evaluate the car, yes, I am quite comfortable with that.

Would you prefer "brand new" cars that have unknown defaults that can be fatal? (but that you will learn about only after N people died) These new cars passed all the government tests after all, so do you trust them more? A used car has an history - a professional know the defaults of that particular brand and model, and knows what to look for.

Maybe it's my own biais (aversion to uncertainty?), but everything fails. I prefer things (cars, computers, prescription drugs, etc.) which precise failures are known in advance, thanks to say 100k people having use that same thing for 5 years.

Unfortunately, that exclude most "new" things, since the models are constantly "upgraded".
Code Red: Struggling for Wellness in Computer Science
The only thing I can see proof of here is that Intel is a monopoly, as they wouldn't be able to get away with this if they were actually competing against each other.
Does setting a Mac OSX(10.8) FileVault full-disk encryption + strong password obviate most/all of those issues? I have been somewhat cavalier when it comes to laptop security because of that...
GreyCoder: How To Be Private and Anonymous Online
Restating your numbers in consistent units (number per million) for easier comparison:

Median 1

Texas 20

Ok 25
This is a thinly veiled censure of the kid for being too weak. In Brooks' opinion it is apparently a weakness to sacrifice one's self for the sake of others.

A huge portion of the US would agree, which seems extremely confusing to me given that this is tends to be the same segment that is highly Christian. Their Bible must have been different from the one I had growing up.
"Press" coverage does not a success make. It does, however, buy a lot of cheap VC money for later investments. One thing to learn from this is that media coverage won't do much for you if the business model is skewed. Still, there is always Cherry.
Good point. It seems like a non-starter all the way around because I'm sure grocery stores have thought about running this operation themselves.

References regarding the Borders comment:

- http://money.cnn.com/2001/04/11/companies/amazon/

- http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-19/borders-champagne-t...

- Google Trends showing Border's demise? http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=borders%2C+amazon.com...

It's still amazing that one can't go online to order groceries and have them delivered from a local grocery store, especially on a recurring basis. It would be a nice amenity.

Does it really boil down to grocery store + eCommerce = politically/financially/practically hard problem? Seems like there must be some solution that would work.
I don't really mind this, as all it means is that I have to download a program of some torrent and -viola- better performance.
Analog Camera on iOS App Store
You have robotic parts that will physically stuff a piece of paper into an envelope?
The controversy of this survey [1] could have been avoided if the survey authors had used the coin flip algorithm in Chapter 2. (Navigate to Chapter 2 on Github and Ctrl+F on "Example: Cheating" without quotes. Maybe someone should submit a pull request to add anchors to the HTML output.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5777578