skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No. The job of the government is to use patents "to promote the progress of science and useful arts." Says so right in the owner's manual. Patent trolls are exploiting legal loopholes to do the opposite of "promoting progress," so the laws need to be adjusted to fix this. As far as I'm aware, private entities cannot pass laws. So. The government needs to be involved. And they need to do a better job.
A new Babylon and the rise of the tech tycoon
The server is still really slow, so I made a mirror:

https://ubuntuone.com/5k7x6BwtO1g3i643pyxhnf

(sha256sum: 015e5a8b5b8a438a0c30558708b4d05e610f2ef152174555a9e791596b3dd980)
Ask HN: How can I disable/lock my personal karma?
I'd like to never go over 1337, hehe.
It distracts me otherwise, seeing it going up/down is not really useful to me. I would rather like to know, if a link was useful or not for other people, without getting up-voted just for posting the link. Kind of an impact ratio not tied to my account.
My comment wasn't to argue with you, just a comment on the situation. Sorry if it seemed like I was calling you out.
Hmm.. makes me wonder if things change is the first move is not allowed to be right in the center?
Adobe Lightroom is about 40% written in Lua (the stat comes from Wikipedia). IIRC C and C++ are used for image processing and compute-intensive stuff, but the rest of it is all Lua. I believe that would be the most widely used app written mostly in Lua, though Apache, Redis, Nginx, Vim and some other big projects support using it for scripting.
Ctrl W? That makes my day :-D
> I wonder if it is a rendering trick or something intentional for tracking.

How do you mean?
“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”
Bruce Lee
They are not the only group going after this development. Many smaller cities in the affected area also raised issues but their hands are tied. Even the Occupy movement doesn't like the PLC. Developer groups are against it in many areas as they have stated time and time again, high density housing of the type required is the domain of the wealthy and will not serve the purpose the PLC claims to address.

It should not get a free pass because it sounds good. It takes away the ability of local government to determine what best use the land has under their domain. It tells builders what they have to build. It tells owners what they have to rent/sell for. It an attempt at one size fits all for an incredibly varied landscape.

Let alone, the OP who brought up this groups complaint fails to address how the PLC would even begin to help the homeless in their cars. The PLC certainly isn't about fixing that.

If people want to fix the homeless issue they are going to have to look away from city governments, across the country they are going out of their way to hide the homeless, drive them into the subs. The reason is simple, they don't have the money to deal with it and they don't see any benefit in keeping these people in town. The very party that runs most cities across the country, the very party that claims it wants to help the poor, only wants to do so provided they don't have to see them or live with them
Contrast seems too low on osx+chrome, or maybe its just poor eyesight on my part.
Once again, I am not talking about the recent media fight about arguably-cooked statistics. I'm talking about reports from a variety of sources starting in about 2007, including nurses and doctors. If it was a disinformation campaign, it was curiously extensive for not having been used in a media campaign of the day.
I totally agree. I hate just about everything about driving: it's a time-suck, incredibly stressful, and environmentally awful (not to mention lazy). I live in a walkable and bikeable area specifically to reduce the amount that I have to be in a car. Rent tends to be a bit higher in these areas, but for me the tradeoff is completely worth it!
I'm not trying to represent the council's POV. I'm just asking if the opster above read the article, because s/he didn't address some of the specific things in it that seemed relevant.

That's what the state is: Legalized violence.

No, that's one model of the state suggested by one influential sociologist. I am sick to the back teeth of this trope being trotted out as if it were a fact. All it tells me is that you have an axe to grind.

sending men with guns to fine them or arrest them

Perhaps you should try a country without mass gun ownership then. I quite like that British and Irish cops don't carry guns as a matter of course, but then that's got something to do with the much lower rate of gun ownership. If you like the 2nd amendment, and I guess that you do, it's unreasonable to demand that the police don't wear guns, and to suggest that the mere carrying of guns mean they're violent by definition.
Unity is divisive among people who have used Linux before. Now that it has (allegedly) stabilized, do non-Linux people still have a problem with it?
I think we'll just have to disagree. It is my opinion that answers of the form, "well the only problem is that the laws are just a little off and it can all be fixed with a few tweaks," are incredibly naive. They've been repeated over and over as government has grown in size. It ignores the fundamental problem: at the end of the day, it's just humans making and enforcing the laws, and they are under extreme pressure by the system to become corrupt and bend the laws in their favor.

If you want a system of IP run by elected representatives, then you've got to accept the corruption that comes with it.
It also bugged me that different classes of attacks were grouped together to build a "case" against RSA.

Looking at the slides again:

"There is a small but real chance that both RSA and non-ECC DH will soon become unusable"

"key sizes may have to up to 16kbit" - "wildly impractical" (WHY???)

L(1/4) isn't quite enough to make RSA unusable with large enough keys. I ran the numbers for 64k but you don't need to go as large.

It's not clear that this sort of linear progression presented is real. Some math problems don't see any progress in a long time and some see big progress rapidly. Seems to me like it's trying to find a pattern where there isn't one necessarily.

To conclude. RSA may fall tomorrow. ECC may fall tomorrow. AES may fall tomorrow. I agree with the principle we need to have some agility built in to cryptosystems (though if it falls we're kind of screwed). Maybe we need to combine cryptosystems such that one breaking won't take us down. Added complexity and changes create attack opportunities (at least current implementations are battle hardened).
I used to be against class names that are descriptive of their layout effect, but honestly, it's the simplest way a lot of the time. You can't always think up the exact right name for a random element somewhere on a site, and getting into the habit of using sane oocss can save a bunch of time.
"elementary OS sets out to settle the number one complaint casual users have of other Linux distributions: design."

In this regard Elementary seems to be part of a larger trend in the linux desktop world, rather than unique. GNOME 3 has been heavily influenced by designers, to the point where there's been developer backlash. [0] Canonical employs thirty people to work on the design of Ubuntu and their other products, and they're still hiring. [1]

[0] E.G. https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2012-Apri...

[1] http://design.canonical.com/team/
From their blog post about window controls [0], it sounds like they are taking the iOS approach to application close / minimize, but I can't find any technical description of how they plan to accomplish that without forcing applications to implement additional event handlers, or something fancy with preserving memory and file handles.

[0] http://elementaryos.org/journal/whats-still-window-controls
I am not saying you can't focus on a single language. But for example, if you know c# than you basically know java, and you basically also know php. You could easily pick up a pretty good understanding of these languages in under a week.

If you know c++ you could basically roll right into any of those languages I named above in under a week as well.

It is sort of difficult to do anything worth doing on the web unless you have experience with at a minimum Javascript, a serverside language(php, ruby, python, c#, whatever. You could maybe do nodeJS but if you are doing that you are probably already rolling deep in knowledge anyway) and have some experience with some kind of sql like database language. I'm not even counting html or css which aren't real languages but are still things you need to have some understanding of. Also there is a good chance you have a basic understanding of setting up apache and a linux server in a cloud environment.

If you're doing any of this stuff you have probably tinkered with mobile and maybe have some obj-c experience or at least java on android.

Everything is just so tied together these days unless you are just like, a day job programmer you probably have experience with a ton of languages and could get some code going in a bunch of others very very quickly.
What I know of patents is that they need to be sufficiently novel in order to be valid.

The challenge the patent office has is being able to effectively ensure that a patent is novel - it is simply not possible for them to determine if an innovation is truly unique and sufficiently novel, so they grant patents on the basis that they can be disputed if the idea is proven to be not sufficiently original in the future, after doing as many checks as reasonably possible internally via their examination staff.

We need a crowd-scale community who can tap into its broader knowledge to prove these patents are invalid before they are granted, ie at the patent pending stage. This isn't an easy task, but I would imagine that once it is working effectively it would be sufficient dis-incentive for trolls to bother lodging dubious applications in the future.
But is that the attitude the community should be taking? Why can't it be both? In fact it would doubly-awesome if that were the case because having a language that has great support for C but can still be used with ease is a gap most languages fail to close because they choose the binary one or the other.

What can be done to address that?
I'm not even talking about the little languages that just come in and out of fashion all the time.

If you know c++ you could basically roll right into C#, Java, PHP, etc in under a week and be doing real work in them. Maybe you wouldn't have the intricacies down immediately but you could be doing production code level work very quickly.
Wait times are dependent wholly on how the those medical professionals you first encounter deem it. Come in walking and generally looking fine, you go on one list. Come in with obvious; read visible; issues needing immediate treatment and your going to get it. Come in with issues that can be easily detected; blood sugar, heart rate, etc; and your going to get seen.

Still my experience has been that far too many people are in there that should not even be there and worse most of them are rude as all get out, the common decency of giving up your seat for the elderly seems to escape them. Got to love it when they put their junk in a chair alternating with each other so they can step outside and smoke. Yeah, been there and seen it.

Perhaps with the rise of more localized clinics some of these numbers can be cut down on, but when the only admission area of the hospital for issues is emergency people are going there. They really need an admission area for non emergency but require medical attention. Somewhere that the medical staff can quick assess the situation and perhaps use RNs to dispense non addictive corrective medications or items.
The one that doesn't require months of training to get at a productive level.

/ducks

All editor-fanboyism aside, who cares? I spent $59 on ST2 and it was, by far, the best $59 I've ever spent. But if someone is more comfortable with vim or emacs or nano or gedit, I don't care. It doesn't bother me, as long as you're making something.
The target platforms are iPad, Android Tablets and Web - so Racket cannot be the runtime platform without a lot of tangential work.

I'm hoping that the prototyping can lead to Racket being the tools and authoring platform.

Racket is a great environment for developing DSLs and graphical tools.
Thx for feedback -- just increased the contrast of the boards.. waiting for GH to update the page
I have never heard anybody say Linux doesn't look sexy. Remember when we were comparing Compiz to Windows XP, or Enlightenment to Windows 2000? Ubuntu is one of the few OSs that can pull a black theme.

Linux problems include:

1. Hardware compatibility

2. Office compatibility (also Adobe + games)

3. Easy to mess up your system with no hope of fixing it

I don't see how any of these address the problems with Linux.

I run Gentoo with XFCE as my main OS, SUSE at work, and Windows to make presentations.

Fun things to do include: tight WINE integration, better genkernel, modular configuration structure so that it is harder to mess up and easier to restore.
Even the Occupy movement doesn't like the PLC.

The Occupy movement doesn't like anything except the sound of its own voice, which is why their internal meetings require 90% majorities to decide anything. Even semi-anarchist unions like the IWW don't impose such unworkable restrictions on their internal governance.

I'm not sure what this 'PLC' you're referring to is. I'm talking about Plan Bay Area, which was put together by the Association of Bay Area Governments, an umbrella group of the 9 Bay Area county governments. It's not some external agency imposing its mandate on local governments, it is the local governments.
Sure, the NextStep Dock... :)
Ubuntu is only slightly better, because at least it allows those who are not pleased with their "innovations" to run Xubuntu.
OK, sorry if I seemed prickly.
It breaks my heart when I see a comment like this because I know how much hard work goes into the design, but I can't blame people for not seeing it. It's sad. I wish they would differentiate even if it's just for the sake of differentiation.
You appear to be reading rather a lot between the lines. I am not, and nothing in my comment suggested, that government involvement in health care is inherently bad. Nor was there any mention of conservatism, small government, etc.

I merely pointed out that nationwide programs tend to go horribly wrong. Obamacare in particular failed before it was introduced since American health care is already cheap, and any good ideas it might have incorporated were destroyed by its secret process of creation and lack of feedback.

Incidentally, defense workers are ideally positioned as experts on national health care schemes. We have seen exactly how large one-size-fits-all programs almost always destroy themselves.
Gaurodan for Windows, Ubuntu, Ouya
Compiz is sexy, with it's sexy animations, and it's sexy rotations, and I still couldn't get it as usable as I had windows be. That's the point. Sexy is secondary to utility. They appear to be basically trying to copy the good parts of OSX.
Well, I can't tell if you saw this coming, but posting on HN is probably not a great way to "lock" your karma.

As of my reply, it's at 1339. Sorry, buddy.
> they've built a new desktop environment from the ground up

by ripping off osx as much as possible.
Update on [Xerox] Scanning Issue: Software Patches To Come
That's not true - the largest "megacorp" in Palo Alto is HP and they only have around 2000 employees. The only employer with more than 10k is Stanford, and the only employer with more than 5,000 is the Stanford hospital.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Alto,_California#Top_emplo...
You're right, my phrasing was unclear. Specifically, the Fifth Amendment clauses the right to silence in the face of an accusation unless you're at a court proceeding ("grand jury") - this ties in to not necessarily needing to respond to law enforcement questioning. I could have just stopped at due process, I was rambling :)
Go read it in a book, or consult a lawyer and pose questions to him/her. Most cities and countries operate free law libraries where you can peruse these topics in as much detail as you care to. Like most things these days, it's incredibly easy to look it up online if you don't feel like going to a library.
I don't follow. Are you arguing that the FISA court is a real court, because it shares certain characteristics with other courts?
Agreed. My sister is an IE for a major hospital. This is pretty much what she does all day every day.
Link to the original article that this is based on, which is much more informative:

http://blog.museumofsex.com/the-internal-clitoris
I would venture to say that making an example is a time tested tradition.
Here I was wondering if your statement was FUD from someone who revenue comes directly from the game industry, or if the statement was based on facts.

To that, I went to the old hidden service url, and looked at what kind of ads was presented[1]. Did I see any spyware? No. Did I see any scamware? No. Any toolbars? No.

What I did find was sex ads of plenty. That makes sense. What other businesses would risk being accessory to copyright infringement, but an industry that often need to hide themselve (unjustly, but that's an other story)? An obvious observation from the trial is that any kind of trading with the TPB, be that bandwidth, hosting environment, electricity or anything whatsoever can be enough to land you in jail for accessory charges.

Conclusion. benologist comment was FUD, likely influenced by his own revenue source. However, if he provide a source for his statement, I am fully willing to change my opinion.

[1]: (first time I ever went and looked for ads)
Within reason, people should be able to live however they choose – but frankly I do feel that this kind of 'hacker' mentality in relation to food is unhealthy until we have a far greater understanding of the potential long-term effects.

There is so much that we simply do not understand about the human body; it is an incomprehensibly complex organic machine. Ask any medical specialist: the fact remains that many functions of the body with regard to diet are still not understood, and two months is not an adequate time-frame on which to base any conclusions. The thing about an unhealthy diet is that it may not have immediately evident negative effects, but over long periods of time (i.e. 10 years, not 2 months) it can cause major damage to your health – this is what makes this so insidious.

"I never feel as good as today."

When you live primarily off simple carbohydrates – as the author stated they had in the past – anyone will feel ten-fold better by improving their macro/micro-nutrient consumption through eating more proteins, healthy fats, et cetera. And no organized person spends 30-40% of their time on buying, preparing and eating food. No way. Today, you can have groceries delivered at the click of a button – and you can learn to cook quick, simple, healthy meals with a Google search.

Mark my words, until we understand far more about the way that the body processes food, this is not sustainable nor healthy in the long-term.
I think the complexity class of discrete log or integer factorization are not known. No one has proved there isn't a polynomial time algorithm but if one is found it does not mean P = NP.
He said it's not time for the average programmer to switch to a new and untested ECC implementation, not that ECC itself is new and untested. By the standards of any of the common RSA libraries out there, their ECC counterparts would be relatively untested given how much comparative use each has seen.
> Instant coffee will give you roughly 12mg of caffeine

I just looked it up and this seems to be inaccurate. The instant coffee I have has about 74mg per cup according to the Folgers website. This of course varies depending on how you make it. I, like many people I suspect, like to put in more powder to make it darker.

Honestly, I think if people sold instant coffee with only 12mg of caffeine per cup, people would find that coffee disappointing, as they wouldn't quite get the buzz they're used to, and they'd stop buying it. I can tell you that I once drank some vegan energy drink and I could immediately tell, before reading the ingredients, that it contained no caffeine, I felt like I'd just thrown money away.
The one that is installed by default for free on every computer I ever use (except Windows, where it gets installed 5 mins after I start using it).

For me, given that Vim is easily powerful enough to compete with any other editor, the benefits of ubiquity override anything else.
That isn't an umlaut: it is a diaeresis.
Awesome! Could anyone explain or provide resources for how the micro projector technology and virtual screen work? I find that tech simply fascinating.
> The ecosystem of Lua assumes you eat C for breakfast

That's a bit of an exaggeration. There isn't anywhere near the number of libraries that Python and Ruby have, nor anywhere near the general level of quality, but you can do an awful lot without ever touching C. Reams of Lua code have been written to script WoW by people who have no idea how to program in C. In fact, one of the primary design objectives of Lua is to have a language that's simple for non-programmers to learn.

> you're going to be looking around for easy, plug-and-play libraries and wondering why they don't exist.

That's very true. I spent the better part of a year working on open source web development libraries in Lua but eventually gave up because nobody was using them. There are fantastic libraries in Python and Ruby, at this point it's not really worth reinventing the wheel just to do the same stuff, but in Lua.

The interesting thing about the Lua community is that very few people use Lua as their primary day-in-day-out language, which leads to a distinct lack of fanboyism. I think that's in part why so few libraries exist. The typical Lua programmer attitude seems to be, "Why should I rewrite that in Lua when I can just use the one written in <insert language here>?"
Bitcoin? SPDY?
It's been common for a while. I usually do it too. Or if there are two unnamed people, I usually make the higher-status one "she" and the lower-status one "he".
Totally agree. While it's true you won't master every language you learn, I find I transfer little gems and idioms from one language into the languages I use on a daily basis. I pretty much ignored the dynamic programming available in C# until I worked with Perl for a year. I've also transferred some functional programming idioms into my Perl and Objective C.
You need to get hellbanned on exactly 1337 which is going to be very difficult, but good luck!
Simple checkboxes work really well. Get fancy with an addon if you need more than just a label http://jsfiddle.net/Ah6dz/
Applies to ANY Alarm tune. Rule # 1 of Alarm Tunes: Never ever use a song you really like as an Alarm Tune. You will hate it for the rest of your existence.
Rubbish. "Leveling" done in userspace (e.g. libraries) doesn't create a fundamental step back. The browser is just a horribly designed, and why, in spite of years of procrastination and denial - and HN is no exception - it has ultimately ended up as a virtual machine combined with basic primitives (albeit years too late and not done very well at all). My hellbanning on this site is a great example of why this site sucks. How many of the losers who hang out on this site all day collecting karma (as opposed to.. programming) called these problems? Practically nobody, and yet HN is deprived of my wisdom because I am too blunt and don't have an established account.
FWIW, I didn't read your post as being antagonistic. I was actually posting a reply to your comment originally (about the one guy attacking another, and the threat towards a police officer) but chose to chuck most of it and put the shorter version here instead.