skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here is why patent reform is a problem in US politics.

The Democrats are essentially the political wing of the American Bar Association. They are bought and paid for and represent the interests of trial lawyers. Lawyers make a lot of money from the current patent system. This is the same reason Democrats oppose tort reform to reduce frivolous class action suits (of course it's all in the name of the little guy getting his day in court).

The Republicans are beholden to big business (and the religious right). As much as big players are suffering the death of a thousand cuts in the current system no one is going out of business because of it. What's more arguably it hurts the smaller players more.

The patent mess is nothing new. Patents stifling innovation is nothing new. Benjamin Franklin was notably against patents [1]. The Wright brothers started a patent war [2] that completely paralyzed the US aviation industry to the point that when the US entered WWI it was completely incapable of producing planes and had to buy them from Europe. This eventually took Congressional action to resolve resulting in the system that exists today (aviation patent licensing).

Pharmaceuticals are the thorny problem here. It's true that it takes hundreds of millions to bring a drug to market and it's easy to reproduce so some protection is required.

But at the same time drug companies spend most of their money on marketing not research. Patents are effectively extended by slightly changing a molecule (sometimes making the drug less effective) and getting a patent extension, which they then push doctors to prescribe (over the generic) leaving consumers and insurance carriers to foot the bill.

But software is easy. Just get rid of them all. You can't patent mathematical formula. Algorithms, as all those with even a rudimentary CS education know, are just mathematical formulae. How the courts haven't worked this out yet is a mystery.

And of course there are the patents on "swipe to unlock" and similar obvious "inventions", which should never have been granted in the first place.

If two people can come up with the same idea independently then it probably shouldn't be patentable. The idea that you can write software that ends up infringing on any number of patents you know nothing about is beyond scary.

Yet the US continues to push foreign powers to tow the US line on software patents (with mixed results), which isn't helped by the current Obama administration, which has to be by far the most IP holder friendly administration in US history (between the original ACTA, stuffing the DoJ and the Federal bench with RIAA/MPAA lawyers, pursuing the Swartz case beyond all reason through the US Attorney, etc ad nauseum).

[1]: http://movingtofreedom.org/2006/08/31/ben-franklin-on-patent...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war
The type of stylus I was talking about involves an active digitizer and pressure sensitivity. You can draw and write pretty much naturally with them. Your handwriting with a stylus designed for a digitizer should be just as neat and fluid as your normal handwriting. The pictures you draw can be as rough or as finished as you want them to be. You are only limited by your own skill.

I agree that they are terrible for navigating an operating system.
No, you got it right (I'm not american, but I live here). And I absolutely agree with you - like caning, capital punishment has no place in an enlightened country, and I sure hope it is eradicated from the US, and throughout the world, soon.

I was merely disagreeing with the parent's assertion that Singapore has some form of enlightened government that doesn't trample on personal freedoms, and treats its citizens with respect.
A few month ago I tried brewing this stuff myself. It "kinda" works, but it tastes inmho very different from "regular" Coke. It tastes a bit more along the lines of RedBull Cola.
Apple's done plenty of patent trolling of their own. Remember the rounded rectangle fiasco?

That's all beside the point. If patents are reformed so that only big corporations like Apple can use them to attack their competitors, what really will have changed? Sure, the swarm of bees (NPEs) might be gone but we'll still have to deal with the angry bear. And what of small inventors without the means to capitalize on their innovations? What will protect them if their legal power to enforce licensing deals is removed?
This site has been a great resource for me in terms of startup material, also a good place to learn new things about 'computer stuff', and also occasionally read something genuinely new and interesting. I hate to see it dragged down into the mud of political debate, which tends to wreck communities such as this.
I am not saying society failure never happened. I am saying society failure because of improved conditions of life so far never happened - Green revolution did not actually led to something worse than widespread starvation. Like Rwandan genocide, most of current failures are designed, not just happening due to overpopulation - they are consequence of man-made evil designs, not development of society.
Yeah that's why OSHA puts responsibility on business owners instead of employees. People have cognitive biases that cause them to make all kinds of terrible decisions about safety, which is why leaving safety to "personal responsibility" is a horrifying idea with serious negative consequences. OSHA might be frustrating at times, but it didn't appear in a vacuum.
French 'three strikes' piracy law faces major reversal
Install mplayerplug-in, it plays QT as well as more common formats.

At least they didn't upload it to some flash site.

EDIT: it seems that mplayerplug-in has been renamed/forked as gecko-mediaplayer.
Another very frustrating thing about open-office plans is that it makes me seem like an asshole. There are many days where I'll be annoyed or frustrated debugging something, and generally being a buzzkill while everyone else shoots the shit. I have no problem with everyone else shooting the shit, but I can sense people are afraid of the look I have on my face. Some days I just need to be away from people.
... and will seem fresh!
Also be wary of companies passively pitching work/life balance as a culture point.

I spent time at a company that superficially was very 'work/life balance'. When pressed on the specifics of what that ment to them regarding hours on call and in office They responded with a "We're talking more or a 'work/life harmony'" which ment your work should be your life.
Same here. Tried http://theoldreader.com/ too, but like NewsBlur more.
they talk a bit about Stuttgart-21 in Urbanized
I believe that much of the incorrect representation of impaired individuals in the way you are talking about relies on a description of impairments as 'not normal' or as 'less than normal' rather than actually describing how a person is restricted by their impairment or disability (disability defined as social oppression due to impairment).

'The history of the portrayal of disabled people is the history of oppressive and negative representation. This has mean that disabled people have been presented as socially flawed able bodied people, not as disabled people with their own identities'.

David Hevey, 25 March 1992
Skateistan
"When the root cause is focused on" is an extremely vague and non-practical phrase. You can always say "since we have people starving, root cause is not fixed, so we should leave them starving and not help them until it is". What is your method for making "less people"? We have population of 7 billion and growing, Green revolution technology can enable us to feed them. If you deny it, then what you propose to do with those people, where they are supposed to go?
Do you mean the son haven't completed the courses but his farther (unaware of it) done it for him as in the counting horse debacle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans

It would be sad.
Do you have any info or anecdotes about work actually being disrupted because GitHub was unavailable?
I guess there's a very simple test - get the 'facilitator' to leave the room, show or tell the autistic person a word, bring the facilitator back, and ask the person to spell the word. With the picture, and the lines about 'steadying his hand'... this just reads like a really dark Onion article.
That almost happened when my wife, my eight-year-old daughter, and I were playing Monopoly last night. I didn't think there was anything very realistic about Monopoly, but here it is.

We were adding houses without keeping sufficient cash to cover the possibility of having to pay rent on another player's house-studded property. Although you don't lose anything by mortgaging and unmortgaging properties, when selling houses back to the bank you lose 50% of what you spent.
I've had success doing that, while never having written in Python.
First of all, I don't mean to insult you or your expertise on the subject. I know very little about autism spectrum disorders and nothing about this "facilitated communication" debate.

However, that Daniel's parents are unconsciously inventing his written voice and, therefore, inventing virtually everything we know about his cognition seems to be a huge assertion to make with very little evidence. The article says the parents would "hold his hand while he spells" (emphasis mine). I could see parental bias (a la ideomotor effect) playing a role in guiding the subject when the answer is one choice out of several discrete options, but it seems impossible for that kind of placebo effect to play out in spelling words, where the sequence of letters would have no meaning to the parents until a word or morpheme was already complete or almost complete, let alone sentences. Has research indicated that facilitated spelling can and, as you suggested, normally does just result in the parent talking? I really hope the answer is no...
Turkey's PM Erdogan: Twitter Is Menace to Society
What if we just canned the politics so that people don't feel the need to defend a point of view for approximately the 13873878972616th time on the internet, in full knowledge that no one is going to change their mind? That means flagging articles like this.
I'd be very interested in giving this a go when you have an android version ready, what is the best way to get my email address to you?
Is there a Social-Media Fueled Protest Style?
Vector OpenStreetMap, no tiles
Don't try Japanese peanut butter then, I think it contains more sugar than it does peanuts... ><

[Seriously, the stuff is like candy paste. Although I grew up eating American mass-market peanut butter, I can't stomach the Japanese stuff; even in a sandwich with something sweet like jam/jelly, it just tastes wrong...]
Things like this are why projects like pypy use CPython's test suite whereever the behavior is not CPython specific, and have contributed many tests back to CPython as well. These aren't minutia of the language, they are well understood and tested features that most moderately sized software projects are likely to rely on at some point.
The mysql_* function API is part of ext/mysql and is deprecated — mysqlnd is a lower level library that basically replaces libmysqlclient in the stack (and is used from PDO and mysqli as well).

I'd be interested in a cite on the licensing issues, incidentally; I'm not aware of anything. (There _is_ an issue with the JSON extension at present, though, so it's not impossible.)
Actual song from PLDI'07 where she received the Turing Award, which we all sang to the tune of Take Me Out to the Ball Game:

Let’s all sing to Fran Allen
For the great things she’s done.
PTRAN and Blue Gene and E C S
Fran, we’ve gathered to toast your success.
As we ponder all you’ve accomplished,
Our colleague extraordinaire,
Here’s to you, Fran Allen, you’re truly beyond compare

Optimizing compilers
Parallel transforms too
Intervals, call graphs, and data flow
Keep our programs from running too slow
So we root, root, root for Fran Allen
Her heart, and spirit, and voice
For she’s won the Turing Award and we all rejoice!

She said that she believes functional languages and programs are key for scalable parallelism on massively multicore processors, because of the unavoidable performance problems associated with synchronization on shared data dependences in imperative languages.

The back story you quoted about C motivates her position a little, so thanks. It seemed like few of the hardcore compiler people that I spoke to at the conference seriously believed functional languages were going to be the future because of performance reasons, although personally it doesn't seem like an entirely unreasonable proposition.
"Do people actually work solidly for that time"

I've been doing four tens per week (plus occasional disaster overtime, etc) for many years now. The key seems to be exercise at lunchhour including hot shower (if possible/applicable). Then it feels a heck of a lot more like five hour days. I'll never go back to five eights per week unless I absolutely have to.
How do you achieve product market fit without validating your business model?
"people decide to just blow themselves up for _no_ reason" = they have established a coherent subsect of Islam which teaches that Islam requires they forever be waging war against the nonbelievers and which celebrates dying in such a war as the highest honor, giving them a very clear reason that anyone with open eyes is well aware of by now.

"Jihad means war only. Fighting, with the sword." - Abdullah Azzam.

"The Quran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope." - The Muslim Brotherhood creed

"We love death more than you love life." - Nidal Hassan

"We love death. They love life." - Azzam Tamimi

"We are going to win, because they love life and we love death." - Hassan Nasrallah

---

"installing the shah in Iran" = the West intervened after Mohammad Mosaddegh launched a coup d'etat against the Shah of Iran, this after Mosaddegh had dissolved parliament and declared himself dictator. Look it up.

---

"giving military aid in abundance to Israel" = the US gave anti-tank missiles to Israel in 1973, which ruined the Arab League's plan to finish the job that Hitler started. After the Egypt-Israel peace treaty, the US annually gave billions of dollars to both sides. Aid to Israel is given with the restriction that it must be spent on American weapons, making it both a subsidy for the US arms industry and a means of crippling Israel's arms industry.

---

"giving guns to Osama" = The US once was nice to Osama, and this therefore justifies him ordering the 9/11 attacks. The specific choice of which parties to distribute weapons to was mostly made by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

---

"giving guns to Saddam" = The US sold weapons to Iraq in the Persian Gulf War, and this therefore justifies the 9/11 attacks by a completely unaffected third party.
Looking at it from a class perspective:

"Erdogan’s vision of Turkey is one full of citizens who piously pray in the country’s ubiquitous mosques and then go shopping at one of its equally ubiquitous malls, which are frantically being built in urban areas.

As long as the imports, credit card, and debt-driven Turkish economic bubble remains intact, the government will continue to pursue these and other neoliberal policies to the great praise of western think-thanks, private equity firms, and politicians who all repeat the fallacy of the ‘Turkish [success] model’.

Notwithstanding these neoliberal economic policies, Erdogan is still extremely popular among Turkey’s poor and working people in both urban and rural areas.
Most western observers have missed this crucial fact and are, therefore, quick to enthusiastically compare the Gezi Park protests with the ‘Arab Spring’.

One has only to speak with blue-collar workers in Turkey to understand popular attitudes toward the government.
Whenever I am in Istanbul, I engage in political small talk with people from various walks of life, including waiters, construction workers, and young men working on the ferries crossing the Bosporus. I also frequently visit my family members, who are from a poor Anatolian background.

In my conversations with these people, I have heard nothing but firm support for Erdogan. When asked about Turkey’s unemployment rate or the Prime Minister’s nepotism, most of these individuals do not hesitate to say, “I know that Erdogan is also ‘siphoning the cash’ (hortumluyorlar). But good for him (helal olsun). At least he is leaving us some crumbs. The previous bastards never gave us everything.”
Memories of many decades of economic and political oppression by secular elites are still fresh for many Turks. Because of the AKP, these people now have access to things like privatized health care, credit card use, and unprecedented infrastructure development."

http://muftah.org/why-the-gezi-park-protests-do-not-herald-a...
> So shouldn't the use of macros be reducible to ordinary code?

No, because it's a matter of performance. To avoid code duplication, without macros, you use routines. To get the same performance as with macros the compiler needs to inline them - which only works up to a certain point. If you can't compromise on performance (for example for HPC or low power purposes) you can't replace macros/templates with anything but copy pasting code.
Anyone having a breakdown of the data? Like which courses, which instructors, etc?
In my opinion, the reason people choose San Francisco is for logistic reasons. It makes more sense to be in a city where many other businesses/startups are growing too, and it is easier to connect and network.
Swyft to use scooters and beat every lyft/sidecar on the road
www.swyftme.co

would you use it? Think: lane-splitting.
Internet Blocking Begins In Jordan
Trakt has a decent API

http://trakt.tv/api-docs
> Mental health is full of '6 out of 10 symptom' checklists;

Yes. Normally they have to be stable over 6 months. They also have to be affecting the person's life significantly.

It's very frustrating hearing people read DSM on the various personality disorders and saying "lol that's Bob" or "look, I have most of these", and misunderstanding the severity of the symptoms described.
Excellent analysis! Penetration of Facebook and Twitter in Turkey among the highest in the world. Due to autocensoring in main Turkish media channels about the protests, these channels, as well as media sites such as eksisozluk.com has become the shaping factors for the protests.
To be fair to Homebrew, the reliance on GitHub is probably what makes it so accessible: easy for others to add formulae, and no hosting (and lessened security considerations) for them to worry about.
Standing ovation model and user acquisition
While it may be the case that this version of their homepage has been tested to yield the best conversion, that seems completely irrelevant to my point: "the Basecamp homepage does a very poor job of communicating what it is".
I found that when reading my textbooks for class, it helped a lot to take notes and try to apply when I was learning. It helped me get a deeper meaning and retain the material much better.
No, that's not the norm, at least not in SF. I work at a later-stage startup and do 8 hour days with the occasional crunch period at 9-10 hours. That's not to say shops with crazy time requirements don't exist, but it's definitely avoidable. Companies with older senior management are more likely to have sane work schedules.

However, you'd struggle to find a job with European levels of vacation. Most jobs will start out with 10-15 days of paid vacation, plus ~10 holidays.
What is happening in İstanbul?
I read, listened hundreds of things about events, but honestly, all I see is vague hand wavy things about the real cause. "Lack of adequate response.. No official plans to celebrate May 19.. No alcohol sale after 10pm.." Seriously? I maen really?, To me this this whole mess seems to be reduced to "Hey police pepper sprayed my friend yesterday, and btw I also hate this government and PM. I am going in." reaction.
Yes, Moses built many things in the park. But more to the point, the many famous and well-heeled mothers and residents of west 67th street involved in the protest listed at the beginning of chapter 42 of "The Power Broker" makes your comment particularly odd.
They can't change that at this stage without breaking the Go 1.0 compatibility promise.
>>> This is partially because of corn subsidies by the government (which makes HFCS cheaper than its "actual" price).

Both sugar and corn are heavily subsidized, but sugar AFAIK is subsidized by tariffs (i.e. higher prices for the consumer) and corn by transfers. I have no idea why - probably "biofuels" fiasco has a lot to do with it, but not sure if it is the main cause.

>>> for the government to stop making drastic declarations in nutrition that can lead to these really strange and unexpected consequences.

You mean, the government to stop regulating what we eat and trying to protect us from ourselves? Fat chance.
Who Needs Reporters?
Regular inspections and certification.
I wish they would go after copyright trolls too...unfortunately most of them depend on copyright trolls for their reelection.
If neroli oil is so expensive, why add it at all? There are so many different oils in it, is a single one of them that important for the whole taste?
That's why I suggested the customers mandate safety. If Walmart/Nike/Apple/etc required safety it doesn't matter where the factories move.

Western nations could incentivize this by not assessing fines for firms caught producing their products in unsafe factories (I assume a couple billion dollar fine would be more impactful to Apple than a scathing NY Times article).
product-market fit = building something a market wants

business model = how to sell it higher than production costs

One way to see if the market wants what you've built is to charge for it, but there are other ways, especially in consumer web.
San Francisco, CA. H1B other visa support is ok.

I'm the CTO at Change.org we are looking for a range of engineering, product and design roles. We just raised a round to fund growth, but the company has mostly been self-sufficient. We have millions of monthly users that use our site to help them change the world. We've played instrumental roles in everything from the boy scouts changing their policy about gay scouts to helping reinstate high school chess clubs.

We have a range of engineering roles but everyone must be:
- An awesome person
- Care about making the world a better place
- Be really interested in learning and growing themselves

Our culture is really important to us and regardless of where someone fits in terms of technology we want to keep building an engineering team that has an amazing culture and is driven to improve the and ourselves.

Job wise we need:
- Frontend->Fullstack Developer
- The FE->BE code mix tends to fall on each engineer
- Know HTML/CSS/JS + Web langaues (Ruby,PHP,Python,etc)
- Our stack is a mix of RoR and Node.js
- Mobile
- iOS, Android, and mobile web expertise are all welcome
- "Big data"
- You can do ETL and work EMR/Hive/Redshift, etc
- You might like monkeying with math and doing ML too
- Writing web services (restfully) a bonus
- Devops
- You know lots about making systems run especially automation of metrics and sys-admin
- Ideally you have application experience

You can apply via: http://www.change.org/hiring or just email me directly tom at change dot org
It doesn't sound correct though.

I lived in the Seattle area for many many years, and it got plenty of sun, summer and winter, and most of the non-sunny weather was best described as "mild." Moreover, on sunny days, it's not oppressively hot most of the time. The area's rep for bad weather is pretty undeserved (yeah I know the joke "shhh, don't tell, some Californians might hear!").

I don't like Seattle for cultural reasons, but the climate is very nice.