skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
[Edit: deleted parent asked: "May I ask why you include the word \"temporarily\" regarding prior art? ... Am I wrong? Does prior art now somehow not invalidate a claim/patent?"]

Usually a patent applicant can claim a narrow distinction between his claim and existing prior art. Consider gp's list of available distinctions from the Minority Report zoom feature; it's a litany of distinctions without any actual difference as far as the actual nature of the 'invention.'

It's a standard technique in patent law to apply for a series of patents around the invention of a competitor. The patent office can be persuaded to issue new monopolies over every kind of meaningless distinction. You can make it impossible for that competitor to make his invention by blocking every kind of trivial and obvious change and improvement in design, technique, and build. Then he will have to cross license in order to continue in business and you gain access to his patents. It's one of the ways big businesses continue to operate in the face of a broken patent system.

Apple recently overcame a post-grant rejection of their bounce-back patent on appeal. They argued that the prior art showed the technique to re-center the center of a fixed-size document so that it fit on the screen while their technique was completely distinct. Apple instead aligned the edge of a fixed size document to the edge of the screen so that it fit. The logical and geometric and mathematical and programming equivalency of those two did not overcome the PTO's affection for rhetorical distinctions and the patent was re-issued.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130509083407920

(Note that Samsung is very unlikely to get the re-trial in the story; the PTO's position on distinctions is widely approved in the bar.)

So, no. Prior art does not invalidate a claim in most circumstances.

In the most recent "When Patents Attack" episode, This American Life found 5,000 patents that covered the exact same 'invention.' That invention was online backup. The one 1990s patent under litigation could not be invalidated by the five thousand others between it and IBM's first implementations in the 1950s. (They eventually invalidated it another way, after trolls collected hundreds of millions of dollars.)
Indeed it was. Wang's breakthrough work [1,2] broke most of the common hash functions at the time, and later also SHA-1 [3]. The SHA-3 competition was motivated by this streak of new successful attacks.

[1] http://eprint.iacr.org/2004/199

[2] http://www.iacr.org/cryptodb/archive/2005/EUROCRYPT/2868/286...

[3] http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F11535218_2
I think the patent system, and indeed all intellectual property laws, give more power to big corporations.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Google Keyword Planner
It doesn't mention any negatives of requiring skin in the game. The most obvious is adverse selection: risk-averse people won't enter a profession where mistakes are severely punished, so you get only risk-seekers.
Well I've been pretty involved in storage for the last 10 years, 5 of them at Network Appliance and then later another 4 at Google dealing with their storage scale. And worked with both Seagate, Fujitsu, and to a lesser extent Hitachi as they have worked to increase the density of what can be reliably recalled. More interesting has been watching the struggle of thermal noise and the ability to push past areal densities of 300 - 400 Gbits/inch^2.

There are certainly nano-scale technologies which seek to store information in the 'spin' of electrons (I'd be hard pressed to see you get better than that) but may become impractical if the network bandwidth gets to the point where the size doesn't matter any more. Specifically, what matters to the end consumer is that they can get what they stored into something which can use that information. If it comes from disk across the room that is just as good as a local on board disk if the bandwidth is the same.

The effect this reality is having on storage is that fatter (and increasingly more fragile) drives, are becoming less useful to consumers than larger but more reliable storage attached via a protocol (be it iSCSI, iCloud, S3, or NFS).

So once people are unwilling to pay to carry it around, the ability to recoup your investment in making it possible to carry around a device that can read electron spin is less and less likely. And your s-curve will become clear, when for the last 5 years the drives have all been at most 6 maybe 10TB and the price of those doesn't seem to fall all that much.

I realize disk growth has been phenomenal "your whole life" as CPU performance growth was for most of mine, but CPU performance growth has kinda sputtered big time. We've been multi-coring for a relatively long time now. Storage systems (especially random access read/write systems) are in the same boat. But the glory days are over.

I am curious to see if storage will have its 'multi-core' moment. That will be interesting if it happens.
SA has been turned off, at least for now and at least in the US.
Instead, we have Instagram.

"Instagram is even more depressing than Facebook. Here’s why."
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/07/...
Everyone should have shitty jobs for at least a month or two growing up. When I was doing my degree in mechanical engineering after my first year I had to do this internship in this manufacturing plant in France. I was basically a factory worker. It really sucked. But it kind of put things in perspective. I knew that in a few months I'll be back in the school doing awesome stuff but for most of the folks there being treated like shit for next to nothing was pretty much everything life had to offer.

Then one day the entire plant and all the workers have been replaced with a few industrial robots.
People invented calculus independently at the same time.
...the guy uses the word 'wonks' in reference to those he disagrees with.

This is a pretty mild epithet coming from NNT. He has described the same group in much less complimentary terms.
You can use PhantomJS for automated scraping. You have two options:

(1) Design your scraper is usually via a 1-to-1 correspondence with the routing logic and the client side templates. Create a new scraping module for each of the templates and use the scraping modules according to the data visible at each route.

(2) Another simpler approach is just to design your scraper to hi-jack the app's own XHR or Sockets module and collect the data directly via the API exposed to the web-app.

The latter approach is the really smart way to scrape client-side web-apps since you can get a lot of additional valuable metadata that may not be written to the screen.
>That's what we get for breeding a society of consumers. If you don't have a meaningful way to express yourself productively, you pour all that tension into the wrong things. You become a buly, a stalker, a heckler, you name it. You get worked up about your experiences with other people's creative output, instead of channeling all that energy into your own endeavours.

Citation needed, because the correlation goes in the opposite direction - to me it looks like as more people take up creative endeavours, the hate they face grows ever faster.
Zipcodes of wealthy, well educated in the USA using Scala
I could be wrong, but I believe the term "policy wonk" is not necessarily negative... I assumed it simply referred to one who is well-versed in policy debates and data.

For example: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/
Yep. But our benchmarks are from this year, and they show the same thing.

The situation might improve when Linux gets support for hugepages on (regular) file-backed mmaps.
The difference between the boat and a cell phone is that the boat is automatically steering a course based on the GPS. It's also relevant that it's a boat because the open ocean provides 2-dimensional movement without obstacles.

Let's say a captain enters a course to stay 500nm offshore of a pirate-infested coast (btw, after Somalia, West Africa is now a pirate hotspot[1]). By interfering with the GPS, the ship could be turned imperceptibly towards shore, and after a day be within range of pirate boats. The GPS display on the electronic charts would still show the intended course, because the GPS thinks it's on the right track. And without any land for reference, the captain or crew might not notice. If GPS is the sole position-finder, the fake coordinates would also endanger the reliability of ship-to-ship collision detection such as AIS[2].

With a cell phone or any consumer device, the user has to constantly read the GPS output and then react to it based on the roads or other physical landmarks. You couldn't just "steer" a person to the wrong place by making the GPS believe it's in a different location. And then I can't think of any other "exploit" that you could do with the GPS on a phone.

As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the solution to the boat navigation problem is to have alternate sources of position info (Loran, GLONASS, etc.). Alternatively, the error introduced by the fake GPS could also be detected by weather info. Any deviation from the dead-reckoning course (heading and speed) can only be accounted for by wind and current. I believe wind and current forecasts are fairly common for all areas of the globe now, so the calculated values could be compared to the expected values and raise an alarm if they are far off.

[1] http://gcaptain.com/tag/piracy/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Identification_System
I think part of the problem is that the bullying/intimidating/smear campaign business uses the same communication channels as the supportive/constructive/engaging comments.

And, even if you can thicken your skin to the point where the horrible insults don't wear you down, how do you feel about physical threats? Against your loved ones? This stuff is more terrible than you can expect a reasonable person to just shrug off.
The take it or fork it mentality is pretty entrenched in many opensource projects. So that is not really surprising. (Of course this is not always practical; but hey, people online argue philosophy over practicality, right :P)
I'd be interested to hear examples of professions where you think we want risk-averse people involved in inherently risky activities without skin in the game. Are these activities beneficial to society?
Could you spin up a griefer instance of the MUD?

So all they interact with (and can disturb the world of) is other griefers?
Sad though it may be, it's near enough unskilled labor, with easily measurable performance indicators.
> I was shocked beyond belief at how employees are treated as machines and worse for not much pay.

My brother is a long-distance driver, and while on a short vacation (I'm a programmer) I took the chance of accompanying him in one of his job trips. While you sit in the right-sit as a passenger everything seems nice and beautiful, but then you notice the driver's stress of not making it in time, or how he just tries to "trick" the system "just that little" so that he'd make to the destination without exceeding the allowed gas limit, and lots of things like that. For comparison us programmers have it relatively easy.
How selfies became a global phenomenon
I've implemented ASN.1 BER from scratch before (don't ask). If "three different string formats" doesn't say designed by committee, I don't know what does.

Sounds like OSI would have been an internet built on what is essentially binary-encoded XML. I'd say we dodged a bullet.
But it is a double standard. The RRP is up to %50 higher, but at the same time there are restriction on parallel importation that price cuts the RRP.
NIST-certified USB Flash drives with hardware encryption cracked (2010)
Why WordPress has made it
>I believe that individuals making death threats or rape threats on the internet are generally making individual choices with full knowledge of the repercussions. I do not believe they have any reasonable excuse justifying their actions. The responsibility for understanding and identifying how deeply they can damage another human is solely theirs.

Fine. What are you going to do about it?

Imprison them? Highly counterproductive. Complain about them on the internet? They live for that. Sit back and do nothing?

Grandparent proposed a positive course of action that they believe will effect change. Asking whose fault or responsibility the problem is is missing the point; what we should focus on is how to solve it.
Neither of you guys invented these concepts:

1.) Using a padlock to represent computer security.

2.) Using a cartoon chat bubble to represent a way to chat on your computer.

3.) Using a little oval on top of a bigger oval to represent a person.

Is it really that much of a stretch to combine the three? I would think that this concept would be pretty standard output from someone with even a moderate amount of visual communication skills.

It's a rather simple visual sentence and I can easily imagine quite a few people having come up with this concept.

Please realize that both logos are built on top of an already existing visual language and that neither of you are really all that original to begin with.
I haven't read the paper yet but I remember reading someplace that the fundamental of economics is that if you introduce costs into a system, you should bear them.
I didn't work for a top tier company. Both companies I drove for had incompetent management all the way up to V.P. level. They were petty, stupid, and they sure as hell will use GPS tracking as a punitive tool.
Try to talk to someone at the API provider. Get their blessing.
It's a line that lies somewhere between senior and staff where you are allowed open allocation (choose your projects and whatnot) instead of closed allocation (you will work on what your told and for who you are told to work with)
Use of SHA-1 for digital signature generation has been deprecated by NIST since 2011. It's disallowed after 2013-- which is important for software aiming for government use.

http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-131A/sp800-13...
Fair enough. But there's so much unproductive real estate that could get full-spectrum solar cells put on it, and generate a lot more power per unit area. I just think there's a lot of lower-hanging fruit.
It's kinda interesting that the modern corporation was explicitly designed to shield the decision-makers from risk. Without it, many of the large industrial & trade breakthroughs of the enlightenment wouldn't have been possible, as nobody would've been willing to take the personal risk of venturing to the Indies or setting up a cotton mill when the downside of failure was perpetual indentured servitude.

I don't think it's bad to require some skin in the game, but require too much and many risks that are quite beneficial to society as a whole just won't happen.
That's fascinating. I'm another undergrad here and I didn't know that! I'm going to look into what you've mentioned, thank you for the information!
It's very important to be allowed to say publicly that things suck. I would argue that more people should do it.

I'm not sure that's anywhere in the same league as what's being discussed here though. His comments in the video were harsh and opinionated and the questioner was disappointed with the answer, but as the same time he was being asked for an opinion and gave a fair one.

That isn't necessarily what he does in his own twitter feed though and it's certainly not like the personal abuse described in the original article.
the skin in the game heuristic relates directly to the virtue of being such that the system will not only survive uncertainty, randomness, and volatility but will actually benefit from it.

Doesn't Taleb mean that the 'skin in the game' heuristic will prevent uncertainty, randomness and volatility in the system rather than bring benefit? Within examples such as the 07-08 financial crisis, which he must be referring to indirectly, 'skin in the game' would have meant less risk-taking, therefore reducing volatility. But I can't see how the system would have actually benefited from volatility.
This doesn't have anything to do with anyone's "war on creatives" (ugh, I hate that word). Anybody who rises to even minor prominence on the internet is going to get abuse. Sure, it's game creators, but it's also cat bloggers and people who make instructional language videos. It's athletes and politicians. It's anyone who whose name has bubbled to the top of a news cycle.
I think it's incumbent on reasonable people to occasionally leave a positive comment, or send a short thank-you email to developers or creatives who have made something you've found enjoyable, useful or helpful.

I do.

"Do unto others, as you would have them do to you" is sage advice that's often forgotten.
That's simply an inaccurate interpretation of the facts. People lashed out at and abused Fish, and then he responded negatively. That's TOTALLY DIFFERENT than him going out there and finding random people to abuse, which isn't something he has a history of doing. Period. The fact that he 'seems like an asshole' or his public persona was unlikeable doesn't excuse the shit people did to him.
Careful relying on Gmail when sending bulk email. I have seen a lot of cases where that does not end well — your recipients won’t always get those emails, and your account can be automatically suspended.

⁂

That said, I think it’s a useful thing! I don’t know why mail merge isn’t a lot more readily available. I don’t know why my email clients don’t allow me to list a bunch of email addresses as if they were all in their own “To:” fields; that is, multiple recipients with BCC-like blindness to each other.
Honestly, this looks very complex. I don't see why someone would use this over a tool like Toutapp.com ?
Except there's no humor, implied, or otherwise, there. Just malice.

And honestly, the phrase "nuke it from orbit" is a rather exaggerated phrase. Unless the speaker is Barrack Obama or Vladamir Putin, it's a pretty good assumption that they are incapable of performing such an act.

However, "look at my life and go kill yourself" is much less exaggerated. Bender gets a pass when he says it because it's used in a comedic context. In real life, there is just about no point where that is a socially acceptable thing to say, except, perhaps, in a Futurama quote competition.
He says "Japanese games suck", and he's grinning, while the rest of the panel cracks up. Then Jonathan Blow explains why they do, and at the end, Fish says something about Zelda. At no point does he attack anyone personally, not even a whiff of it. Then the panel including moderator end up agreeing on Japanese games being "joyless husks".

If that's what it takes "to be hated", the question to me becomes "by whom?" And why are they not hating the panel for those belly laughs, too?
Such a simple heuristic, but I think with far-reaching consequences. Last week, NNT posted a link to a news article with talked about a new law in an Indian state that required headmasters to taste the food that was served in the school cafeteria. This was initiated after a bad case of contaminated food and deaths resulting from it.
This is unfortunate.

FWIW, InoReader is a great old-style, no-frills, non-"intelligent" RSS reader. https://www.inoreader.com
Monogamy May Have Evolved to Prevent Infanticide
Shouldn't DARPA being funding this sort of thing?
It's not immediately obvious there's anything new or interesting in there: how is this heuristic different to a classic Hansonian bet [1]?

One potential advantage is that having "skin in the game" has a more positive connotation than betting on outcomes, to the general public at least. Regardless, Hanson at least deserves a mention.

From a stylistic point of view I'm not a big fan of the appeals to authority (e.g., "the ancients were fully aware" ) either.

From a startup perspective it's worth mentioning that mentorship or advice is also generally more confusing and less useful when the mentor lacks "skin in the game". Hence mentor "whiplash".

[1] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/07/bets-argue.html
They're not abuse victims because they opted into it by going out of their way to harass the guy in the first place. Is that hard to understand? It shouldn't be.
> Those who vote in favor of war should be required to enlist in a draft.

The same as those people that were counting bananas or such after the Fukushima incident should have been given incentives (including financial ones) to move close to the affected area, with their families and kids. You either trust your words and computations or you're not.
TO be fair, Andrew wasn't claiming 0.2mm accuracy in position measurement - he was quoting the devices ability to resolve phase difference in the carrier wave (and noted that is an order of magnitude or so better than the resulting position accuracy).

Having said that, I wonder what the magnitude of ionospheric changes have on the phase difference of the carrier signals from satellites in different directions?

(Even though I know how it works, the idea of getting millimeter precision in measuring distances to something that's at least 20,000km away and traveling at almost 4km/sec seems like very black magic to me… Surely that can't actually _work_ in practice…)
> significantly more bug reports than could ever be handled by their volunteers

Maybe I misunderstood this. So are you saying that the same volunteers can handle a total rewrite of the module maintaining its specified (hopefully) behavior, while remaining incapable of fixing its bugs?
Oops - it's actually a single tap with two fingers...
Everybody [at Apple] loves Bob [Mansfield]
I gave the paper a quick skim. My thoughts:

As they point out in the paper, there are some cases where risk is intentionally removed, such as through bankruptcy for businesses to protect entrepreneurs. I think that can have positive effects.

I'm not fully convinced that "academic economists, quantitative
modellers, and policy wonks"..."have no disincentive and are never penalized by their errors." I believe their reputation is at stake. The authors may mean they have no financial risk, but their reputation is tied to their future earnings. I'm not sure that's a bad thing as long as it's considered.

Overall I'd say there's nothing surprising in this paper, nor any specific proposals (as I hoped) but mostly a philosophical argument made in reaction to the current financial and political environment. I do agree with their premise. As a political view, I think "Skin in the Game" would make a pretty good slogan.

It would be interesting to implement distributed trust networks around this concept. If there are clear failure/success signals, you could have nodes present a bond which is destroyed on success and paid out on failure. Automated damages collection, I suppose.
From other comments, it seems there are a number of basic physics and materials challenges involved in reaching orbit. However, this sort of technology used with self-guided projectiles could produce the UP/Ex launcher described by Vinge in Rainbows End, used for very rapid local and interstate deliveries. It takes much less energy to hit the next town over than it does to reach LEO.
Could you move your popout sidebar to the other side? It's interfering with the scrollbar, which is very frustrating.
New Gradient iPhone is announced in Brazil
The Noise Protocols - a "cryptographic core" for communications
Finland’s Next Gaming Phenom? Grand Cru Raises $11M
> "nobody would've been willing to take the personal risk of venturing to the Indies"

Made me think of this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM-igYjn6E4

The corporation sheilds from financial risk, thus enabeling an actual risk. When latter is missing the problem of lack of skin may appear.
Caterpillars as a strategy case study