skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not involved with the app, but there's no need for a hidden marker in this case -- the page IS the marker. It is a planar surface with one of a few known black and white images on it. So: Detect features in each blank drawing, store them in a database included in the app, then use the same corner detector and descriptor at runtime and you have a very constrained feature matching problem.

If you're not familiar with feature detection methods, SIFT is a famous one, though there are much faster methods existing today:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-invariant_feature_transfo...
It is interesting to see the electronics/computer science side of the patent debate. On this side of the argument there is a desire for a short duration, very narrowly tailored patents (for some that is even too much) because technology moves so fast. On the biomedical/genetics research side of the argument there is a desire for long lasting, broadly tailored patents because it takes so long to develop medicine, do clinical trials, get FDA approval, etc.

What I find most interesting is that I believe most (not all) members of this side of the debate 1) don't know there is another side and/or 2) don't care about the needs of the other side. This author makes good points, but lacks proper context I believe.

Statements like '20 years was set in the days of horse and carts, does it make sense in the modern age?' are great for pandering to an already complicit audience. However, the point is that for some industries 20 years makes sense, and for some of them 20 years isn't long enough.

I'd be willing to bet Myriad Genetics or Monsanto thinks 20 years is not enough.
Stop waiting to give back
You haven't worked in a big company so not sure if you are even qualified to comment on this post in such language. If you previously had the experience in working for a bigger company and then mentioned these things - your comment would have been a lot more credible.

You don't know know what you are missing till the time you experience it. Dharmesh Shah is one of the more acclaimed entrepreneurs in the industry and I do believe his words more than someone who doesn't even know what it feels like working in an environment he is commenting on.
Get everyone out in the cold air wearing kilts. The testicles hang on the outside for a reason.

BTW have my third kid due in a couple of months. So survival of the fittest is working out fine for me.
No, but it is comparatively easy to change this behaviour in hardware, so what's the point? Having an indicator that, "very often" works, is in some ways worse than not having an indicator at all...
Here:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights... That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men,
deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed
, --

And here's the important part, pay attention:

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it
Okay, sounds like an interesting challenge. Let's describe the problem and examine possible solutions.

Goals:
1. Securely login to websites.
2. Securely unlock a Macbook Pro.

Solutions to (1):
A. (1) Can be solved with a password memorization app, once we solve (2).

So let's examine 2.

Solutions to (2):

Seems like there are two parts to this problem: authentication and OS X integration.

OS X has a login API that can be used to build extensions, or since the adversary is unsophisticated we could use an input blocking regular application.

Okay, so the integration piece is possible, and we can flesh that out later. So let's look at authentication.

A. Use Physical Authentication: Bluetooth, RFID, and Wifi devices come to mind. All of these require purchasing additional hardware. Buying new hardware seems inelegant though, so let's table this option for now.

B. Biometrics: Voice print ID or facial recognition. More promising, but false negative rate is too high, especially for accessibility purposes. Really don't like the idea of a temperamental biometrics program keeping you out of your computer.

C. Speech Recognition: Get voice recognition working on the log in screen. Apple has APIs for dictation and log in. This one seems promising. But then you might need a rotating set of passwords or an algorithmic password,, as others suggested, to keep passers-by from overhearing your password.

One more thought. Is there a way to set up Dragon Dictate as a native input device? If so, Mac lets you access the input device switcher from the log in menu.
By far our most desired feature right now is to allow a single customer to have more than one subscription. It's crazy what we go through right now to allow people to have two or more recurring products on the same account. :-)
I agree.

I worked for a time in banking IT & development at two large UK banks - both as a full timer and as a hired gun from a consultancy. I never wanted to but it happened out of necessity/luck. It was pretty dull work. That said I got a valuable insight into how these huge organisations operate, what makes them tick and how to communicate with them.

I now work for a small web hoster that focuses on hosting for businesses (SME and corp) and have done for a few years.

The eighteen or so months on the banking gigs (despite being dreary times) taught me a lot of non-technical skills that allow me in my current day job to deal with and onboard some customers that are fairly large organisations.

Unless you know how to communicate with large organisations, and often on their terms and with their sorts of business protocols, then the chances of your startup or small company landing a nice steady earner/gravy train from BigCorp are minimal. The only way to do this is to go and spend ~18 months on corp gigs - either as a full time employee or contractor. I wish I'd done it earlier in my career.
How does a tech startup recruit a top notch designer?
Wall of code, baby!
> then you can remove the other 90 from your trusted list and make my (the attackers') job 10x harder

or possibly infinitely easier if the users become accustomed to accept ssl errors due lacking root certs.
Meet the Snowden of Swiss Banking
Ask HN: Applying with a NDA w/ noncompete clause
I was considering applying to Ycombinator in the next winter session.<p>I have signed a NDA w/ non-compete clause in California when I started working with my employer, The project would overlap in some ways. I have consulted an attorney and have been told that my NDA / non-compete would not be enforceable.<p>Would I have any chance on being accepted if I applied to Ycombinator?
On the other hand, it's quite annoying to have a website opening links in new tabs when you don't want it to, that would make it less likely for me to come back on the original site to purchase the book after that.
I'm not offended by it in the slightest. I swear like a trooper. My issue is that you're trying to pass off a generic insult as 'constructive criticism'. What is insulting is that you think I'm stupid enough to believe it - it's not the words you're using, but the underlying context.

It's either that, or you don't actually understand what constructive criticism is.
I recognize that this isn't a pyramid scheme, but it does look a lot like a multi-level marketing structure.

MLMs can be viable, real businesses, but this may open the opportunity for abuse. I'm very interested to see how the SEC handles this.

I understand the founders want rapid growth, but accredited investors can make mistakes, and big ones. They are not professional investors, just accredited.
This parable bears repeating:

http://www.ckwop.me.uk/Meditation-driven-development.html
To stop other insects? Did people get bitten by the termites?
I'm not aware of any false statements that Snowden made, or any doctoring of the NSA documents he provided. (Senators and other officials have confirmed the legitimacy of at least some, as has a federal indictment.)

But journalists can and do make mistakes interpreting the documents. Here's one example of a report trying to set the record straight:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57588337-38/no-evidence-of...
A waste of space. It's just more "he said/she said" pseudojournallism. Well, sure the US government says "Terrorism!" and some folks (at this point, we have to believe they are propaganda shills) say "Crime!", and so we have to have surveillance cameras everywhere.

Why does every debate have to go to "the most X", in this case, "the most scared"?
Well hold on; that "asymptotically faster" part needs a bit more detail so people don't get wrong ideas. In a DFA-based regexp implementation (which, admittedly, V8 doesn't use) matching is guaranteed O(n), where n is the number of characters you look at before finding a match or deciding that the match has failed. There are DFA-based lexer generators, like GNU flex, which take regular expressions for your tokens, turn it into a big DFA, and spit out a linear-time lexer. This is the same asymptotic time as the hand-rolled parser.

The regexp-based version linked to in the article, on the other hand, has a list of regular expressions which are sequentially tried against the input to grab each token. For this particular lexer, a failed match will fail on the first character, i.e. in constant time. So this is asymptotically O(n*k) where n is the input length and k is the (small, constant) number of tokens.

Finally, most regular expression engines are not DFA-based; they use a backtracking algorithm which is, theoretically, exponential-time. However, with the particular regular expressions used here, successful matching will be O(n) for each one, and failed matching O(1).
Grand Expeditionary Forces
I learned about this a couple of years ago visiting a friend of mine who lives in the Tigre Delta. It's sort of like a suburban version of Venice, except with a jungle, and lots and lots of enormous black mosquitoes. After a while sitting in her living room talking to her, I wondered aloud why we weren't getting bitten by mosquitoes, and she pointed out the electric fan overhead and explained it discouraged the mosquitoes. Very useful!

And despite the danger of fan death when it gets hot enough, I think fans are more certain not to have long-term toxic effects than mosquito spirals or DEET.
Are there one or two things you would recommend to help bridge that communication gap between a solo person and a megacorp? One thing I've observed (possibly incorrectly!) is that megacorps seem to "like" to do business with other megacorps.
Texas mosquitoes laugh at your feeble attempts. Might work on sissy New York mosquitoes though.
What Base Text to Use for the Do Not Track Compliance Specification
Agreed. Seriously, what's wrong with text config files and a text editor?
Remember that Google is in the advertising business. If they can't scan users informations for showing context-sensitive ads, it would defeat their business model.
Great read. Some parts about the lack of permanence in our work, and how one deals with that, really hit home.

Steve Jobs reflected upon this notion back in 1994, and provided a great analogy. He said that each generation of tech, like sediments of rock, adds a new layer to our history. That's something I've carried with me through project cancelations and shifting in the industry, and has helped bring a lot of perspective to my career.

Here is the video, if you are interested. http://youtube.com/watch?v=zut2NLMVL_k
CUBRID open source RDBMS project is looking for a Fedora Package Sponsor
The greatest software product of all time
I like your rewrite, at least compared to the original. It's still furiously angry, which may or may not be appropriate for whatever situation, but it isn't abusive.

"What do you think of Linus' management skills?" would be an interesting interview question.
I was thinking of writing a small aplication, originally I was going to use Python... but might as well try this. Thanks.
Aside from technical difficulty, there's really nothing stopping the V8 guys from spitting out native code to match their regular expressions. And, in fact, they seem to do this:

http://blog.chromium.org/2009/02/irregexp-google-chromes-new...

With a sufficiently smart regular expression engine and JIT, they should be able to do about as well as an equivalent hand-rolled thing.
Make, buy, or partner mobile app?
There is an mobile app I want to create. There are a number of apps that offer a good portion of what this app would have but not the key functionality. I could make this from scratch which would be time consuming, I could offer to buy an app from someone else, or I could see if they want to partner. Has anyone acquired an app from someone? Did it work out. Has anyone partnered with a developer and changed that person's app? Thoughts would be appreciated.
I didn't say they were guilty of anything. I mentioned them to establish the nature of the market dynamic. Without some sort of protection for IP, product companies rule. And when it comes to hardware products, that means companies that have manufacturing/logistical expertise rule.
Ah it's good to see that the colossal mistake of historic proportions (http://baselinescenario.com/2012/03/19/a-colossal-mistake-of...) Just Open Bucket Shops (JOBS - http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/15/opinion/collins-the-senate...) act is in full swing and that the exploiters of it are already out there having at it with gusto. I'd like to propose a toast to the forthcoming increase in financial fraud, cost of capital and stupidity. Can I get a hip-hip-hooray for a reduction in investor protection?

More seriously, this entire situation feels eerily similar to the repeal of Glass-Steagall protections with GLBA back in 1999 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_Act).

The negative effects will take a decade or so to be felt, but felt they will be. It's probably hard for people to see it now, but this really is dodgy as hell.

Here's to another bubble.
While I'm not claiming that the US is currently close to totalitarianism, there are some comparisons that have become quite disturbing:

1. A regime that justifies itself by claiming to protect the populace from a vague but grave danger. The USSR had the specter of returning robber barons; Nazi Germany, the Jews; and current-day US, terrorists.

2. A secret police that collects everyone's metadata and uses it to investigate suspicious activity. (Stasi didn't record everything all the time; they kept files of who communicated with whom, and assigned surveillance assets to the most promising leads.)

3. A heavy-handed, militarized regular police that apprehends nonviolent suspects with overwhelming force.

I could go on, but the combination of these three is more than enough cause for worry.
A cheap idea I've had is to file only a "provisional patent application". Much cheaper e.g. $110 AUD for Australia (unless you're paying an attorney). I haven't checked other countries, but believe it's similar.
You must file the actual patent application within a year. But, if you haven't disclosed it publicly yet (which includes commercial sale), you can just file another prov.
http://www.ipaustralia.gov.au/get-the-right-ip/patents/apply...
http://www.ipaustralia.gov.au/get-the-right-ip/patents/time-...

So it's something to offer to investors/dissuade competitors... within a year. That mightn't be enough time of course.

OTOH, though there is a zero-sum aspect, seeing it as war takes all the fun out of it :/

EDIT a prov just secures a priority date - so you can defer national vs. PCT an extra 12 months. It's confidential, so doesn't constitute public disclosure in itself.
But... you're saying PCT members (eg USA) don't recognize an Aus prov priority date? That's a shame. If so, I guess one could file an individual prov in each nation of particular interest (eg USA), cheaper than an actual application, and then go the PCT route. But complex/hassle for just an extra year.

(also IANAL TINLA - but useful to hear!)
Um, the above is the Sunday School version of U.S. politics.

In reality, the executive has a tremendous amount of discretion. Just look at the Obama admin unilaterally extending an Obamacare deadline that was set by Congress -- and which did not give the executive branch the ability to alter. Didn't matter.

It's true that Congress is also responsible for NSA domestic surveillance. But every branch of government has a duty to ensure their conduct is constitutional.
Governments can't resist mission creep.

True, but it's not like people or corporations are that much better at resisting it, is it? Show me a big organization, and I will show you a whole lot of fingers in a whole lot of unrelated pies.
Hacker News Kansai Meetup: July 26, Osaka
Hey guys I just released the rails gem for those ruby devs https://github.com/IcaliaLabs/furatto-rails try it out!...I need to add some more doc! enjoy!
Agreed.

However, government is a special case: it reserves to itself a monopoly on violence and the ability to set the rules. Special cases deserve special treatment.

edit: it's a small world, I recognise your username from LP.
I struggled with this early on. When I was in high school, I went to a college program and realized all my friends sucked, I wanted to have friends who would actually talk about important things not alcohol or parties, so I left them and started looking for better friends.

As I got older, I looked for and found great friends outside of school, friends I made through tech meetups and my job (friends of friends as well). I now have about 10 close friends who I try to talk to at least once a week and schedule some sort of way to get together. I have a few friends with whom I go out to eat with at least once a month and others who I try to go to meet ups/events with.

If you are looking for friends in your area, I would suggest using http://atthepool.com and http://highlig.ht. You can meet some cool people that way.

Once you find a couple awesome friends, schedule dinner or lunch with them on the first/last day of every month, that way you have something to look forward to and you know for sure that you will see your friends at least once a month.

Hope this helps!
Around Alone
I really hate the implication that end users are obligated to pay or "tip" open source developers.

How can a software developer be butthurt that he didn't make money off his product when it's his own fault for giving it away for free? Every organization you listed would have gladly paid money for the requests package, had the author not chosen to give it away for free. Just like they paid for MS Office, Windows, Photoshop, Oracle, and countless other software products.

It's almost embarrassing that there are software developers so clueless that they'd give their product away and then whine about how they need money and deserve to get paid. Not that I'm implying that's happening here.

It's so silly that open source advocates will demonize Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, ... for making money off their software, then turn around and whine that they're not making money. Who's fault is that? Nobody forced them to opt out of the economic system.

I release a lot of my code as open source under a very permissive license. It's perfectly clear to me that anybody can take my code and use it to make a ton of money and not owe me a dime. If I weren't okay with that, I wouldn't release the code.
I've been toying with the idea of recording an open-source album, or at least recording the entire album the way I want and source-controlling it on Github at first. After the initial launch, I'd open-source it and start a whole remix side adventure with the album to see what happens. My only problem is lack of serious recording software, as all I have is a USB Blue Yeti mic and Garageband.
Show HN: GMerge, a quick and simple mail merge on Gmail
Politicians like to speak in generalities to justify mass overreach in terms of law enforcement:

1) think of the children

2) think of the movie/music industry jobs

3) think of our national security

4) think of common decency (lenny bruce/george carlin were persecuted for their raunchy comedy for example

5) the sanctity of marriage

and so on.
Thanks -- apparently I have not been getting enough sleep. That explains how they can get distances to increase, then decrease (as noted nearby in this thread).
1984 was written about Russia... Your telling me that apparently that doesn't discredit his position. REALLY???
The problem is that you need either to file everywhere at once, or file through the PCT process.

If you just file in one country, once the patent is disclosed, it's disclosed everywhere. You lose your opportunity to file in other countries.

I chose the PCT process. It costs more up front, but it gives me significant flexibility in terms of timing -- up to 30 months from initial filing date to begin national applications. That means I can see how the US application goes. If it is accepted, I will then file elsewhere.

In particular, a provisional application in Australia would give me no priority over a similar filing in the USA. But the PCT process gives me a worldwide priority date.

If I'd gone for the national-only route, I'd have had to file in all the countries of interest up front. Overall it's a cheaper option, but I don't have the kind of cashflow needed to file in a dozen places simultaneously.

Before I forget: IANAL, TINLA.
zram in its various incarnations is awesome and has been available in Linux for a few years at least now. It's interesting that Apple is copying it.

Linux gives lots of tuners to adjust swappiness. As far as I know, Microsoft assumes that one (conservative) setting fits all, in typical Microsoft fashion.
A thought that is worth possibly spreading: despite protests to the contrary, terrorism does not pose an existential threat. Governments use terrorism to justify almost anything, on the basis that if they don't then the terrorists will destroy everything.

This is ridiculous. They're criminals, and should be treated as such. This modern security state is ridiculous.
The most critical (of the government) education I have received was in government schools (that was in Europe, but anyway).

I cannot point out what is factually wrong in a statement that is actually void of any facts.
Yes, soon! Android too!
Great insight from the physical world. I really liked economies of scale points.
It's important to note that none of this decline was attributed to medications which are meant to manage the symptoms. These medications are, IMO, largely useless.
JSON Mask - Google API's Partial Responses for your Node.js Services
If you had gotten the patent, would you have had the
$500,000 to take your competitor to court? (The only upside of victory being that they would no longer make the clone?)

Patents don't keep competitors from stealing your work, they just give you access to a (expensive) right to sue them to get them to stop.
OT, but personally I am thinking of tracing this one:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3891677&cid=44076497

An important information from the "confidential" studies here for example would be what kind of monitors were tested.
I enjoy statistics :)

Toddlers Killed More Americans Than Terrorists Did This Year.

http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/guns/toddlers-killed-...
Yeah, I'm sure there actually are lots of UI problems, and you could generally design a UI that is better for controlling the effects and levels than the physical analogy used here.

But it's hard to beat a UI that not only feels accessible, but is accessible if you've used the (often famous) hardware in real life, and not only that, teaches you how to use it so that if you ever encounter that specific pedal or this effects unit in reality, you have some clue of how it works. Maybe it's not a concern and I'm making this shit up, but it is at least a cool advantage.
Without some sort of protection for IP, product companies rule. And when it comes to hardware products, that means companies that have manufacturing/logistical expertise rule.

Well, how is that unfair? Or are you saying it isn't? If it isn't unfair, then why bring up unfair competition?