skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Even for mechanical patents, say, you could "implement" a mechanism in any of a thousand different alloys as long as they provide the appropriate physical properties required.

That's not really what I'm talking about.

Maybe an example would help. Suppose you're the first to invent disc brakes and you get a claim something like this:

A device for decelerating a vehicle comprising:
a rotor affixed to a rotating axle of a wheel;
a stationary brake pad; and
a hydraulically actuated caliper compressing the brake pad against the rotor.

So now you want to talk about doctrine of equivalents and say that it doesn't matter what material the brake pads are made of, and maybe you're still covered if the calipers are pneumatic instead of hydraulic, etc. Fine.

The problem is that software patent claims don't look like that. The equivalent ends up looking something like this:

A method for decelerating a vehicle comprising:
an interface allowing a user to request deceleration;
a means for converting kinetic energy into thermal energy; and
engaging said means for converting kinetic energy into thermal energy when deceleration is requested in said user interface.

Do you see the difference? The latter covers disc brakes, it covers drum brakes, it covers drag car parachutes, engine braking, dragging a stick against the ground etc. etc. It covers implementations that have exactly nothing to do with the patentee's invention other than employing the same law of physics in their operation in order to achieve the same result.

The way the patent system normally deals with this is that because the second claim covers everything, it doesn't get granted because of prior art. You can't invent disc brakes and get the second claim because drum brakes already exist. The trouble comes when the problem being solved is itself novel, because there is then by definition no prior art solution, so the first person to get to the patent office can get a patent on every possible solution by proposing any possible solution (even if their implementation sucks), since any solution gets you enablement and there is no prior art to invalidate the exceptional claims.

So that's half of the issue. The other half is the zero reproduction cost of computer software. Once a problem is solved it's over. You have a good solution and the solution costs nothing to copy infinitely, so soon everyone has the good solution and further solutions to that problem are no longer anywhere near as interesting. In consequence software development is dominated by the process of creating solutions to novel problems -- exactly the scenario that the patent system allows the first mover to massively over-claim. Hence the enormous trouble specifically with software patents.
That's not a joke - it's true... The joke part of it is in: there are two types of systems at Google, the ones that are deprecated, and the ones that are not yet ready for production.
50fps vision sensor raises 150k on kickstarter
Is there any doubt as to the fascist nature of the USA now?

Call it "corporate cronyism," or "corporate fascism," but whatever it's called, it's no land of the free anymore.
> Median world income is $2/day.

I think you should be using average or mean, in particular because you're comparing a median to a mean (the U.S. poverty level). What's the point of choosing the middle value in a billion income figures when the average produces a more meaningful result? Just look for the point on the distribution that has a first derivative of zero.

Also:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17512040

Quote: "so the average income is heading towards $10,000 (£6,273) per person per year."

That's an average of $27.37 per person per day. Which means the US poverty line of $46/day (an average value) is 1.7x the world average income level.

Also:

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-median-income-worldwide....

Quote: "The median income worldwide — the amount that is dead middle between the least and the highest amounts — is $850 US Dollars (USD)."

Which works out to $2.32/day.

Also:

http://money.cnn.com/2012/01/04/news/economy/world_richest/i...

Quote: "In fact, people at the world's true middle -- as defined by median income -- live on just $1,225 a year."

Which works out to $3.35/day.

I'm not sure the median is what you're after.
KlixPlus is a profitable and growing company that is hiring a developer / sysadmin with experience in high-traffic websites. (the websites you will work on currently serve ~500k visitors a day)

Some things we use every day and love: Linux, Git, GitHub, Vim, nginx, Varnish, Memcached, Rails, Python, PostgreSQL, Redis, Javascript, also a plus if you have experience with TDD/BDD.

You should be fluent with linux server administration, Rails development and be comfortable working with adult material. We allow full time telecommuting. We pay for coworking/office space if you want it. We have offices in Las Vegas and Queensland, Australia if you want to work on-site. We allow our developers to contribute to open source. We get to pick our tools and technologies on new projects. We take you to RailsConf if you want to go. We pay competitively. Our company owners are technical and understand how development works (refreshing!). This role will work closely with our product manager in the EDT (UTC+10) time zone.

We would prefer that you start work around 12-1pm PST and it works out even better if you are already live in Australia.

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Try using some real numbers if you're going to actually try dismissing an argument with an appeal to numbers. Are we talking about guaranteeing that every child has $1,500/mo, too? I don't think so.

Based on Census data, there are about 240 million adults ... so $4.3T, using your $1500/mo figure.

Basing this off existing tax revenues is somewhat foolhardy as that system is gamed like crazy. Forcefully confiscate? No. The US would have to alter tax code to increase revenue by closing all the loopholes used by those who exploit them to avoid taxation of their incomes and assets.

Beyond that, this would not be a simple program to implement--which, I think, is actually your point. For starters, BGI would have to adjust based on where a person lives--someone in NYC or LA has a higher basic income need than someone in the smaller, cheaper Southern and Midwestern towns. This makes a bit more difficult equation for determining exactly how much this would cost, but there's enough Census data available that we could roughly estimate it with a bit of effort. The tax system would have to be modified, making appeals to current tax revenues a rather moot point.

So, you're right that it's not a trivial proposal, and it's unfortunate the other commenter suggested such a trivial solution. However, we do just give every member of society X amount of money per T time period in the form of various tax breaks and write-offs, etc. So, the other commenter is not too far off that it can be as trivial as agreeing and deciding to just do it--and then get on with the hard work of figuring out how to implement it.
You've been contradicted a number of times now so sorry to pile on but here's a nice webpage about a classic videogame (in the UK in the 80s, at least) with an example halfway down the page of (literally) hand-written/assembled code: http://sandywhite.co.uk/fun/ants/
Also Bruce Schneier - http://www.schneierfacts.com/
The main value one receives from buying a lottery ticket is not the statistical expected value of return on investment, but the sense of hope for a better life that you get when you but the ticket. This hope is much more valuable for someone struggling with poverty than for someone who's relatively well off.
Therefore, it's perfectly rational for poor people to put a higher dollar value on a lottery ticket.
SEEKING WORK - San Francisco - Remote - Travel Possible

Experienced pair of software developers with a history in startups. Proficient in:

* Python ['django', 'bottle', 'google.app.engine']
* Ruby [:rails => 'heroku']
* Javascript ['angular','backbone','node'];
* Clojure '(Compojure)
* Haskell, Go (and other esoterics)

We've helped entrepreneurs develop their MVP, as well as large companies develop core features. We provide services such as feature development, product management, and software auditing.

Previous engagements include Getaround, Codecademy, Factset, Wakemate, drip.fm, and Swiftstack, among others.
For more info see our page at http://turbines.io, or talk to us at hn@turbines.io
We also love talking to interesting companies, regardless of development need.
The Most Surprising Things About America, According To An Indian Student
Dead Presidents' Last Words
The cap is not 1 hour ... it is MUCH much longer. At one point I had gotten ahold of my friends phone while he was passed out drunk. He slept pretty much all day, every time the counter ran out, we locked it again. He ended up having to wait 18 hours to finally get to it, since he didn't have his computer with iTunes on it with him.

He'd get text messages/calls and he wouldn't be able to answer them!
Could you elaborate on what you think that difference is?
SEEKING FREELANCER - Miami, FL (Remote OK, but preference for local)

Location based video sharing project ommageo.com currently in web beta/MVP. Seeking freelancer to:

1. Improve overall existing performance/speed (ex. Home page takes 4+ seconds to load, should be improved to 200-300 ms)

2. Develop Mobile App

3. Redesign web UI

Interest in this contract work or the project generally please email ommageo@gmail.com
There was a related joke the author made about Office API redrawing each and every change. Just to speed things up He would keep moving the window around, and suddenly things would speed up.
> The median is not found by (H-L)/2+L. Read that Wikipedia entry again.

I really did read it, but I managed to take it to mean the midpoint of the range, all evidence to the contrary. It seems I tripped on the words "middle value", which is ambiguous.
5 reasons why Foundation is better than Bootstrap
You are proposing QA as an alternative to writing tests. That makes no sense. They serve different purposes.
'On the job' for OSX. Create clients, jobs for client and easily create invoices. Love it.
Mobile Pi-to-Go: miniature Raspberry Pi laptop
If they were asked to comment on Sunday (on a weekend), then it's probably more likely that they wanted to confer with their legal departments before denying with any confidence.

This is especially in light of the recent public/media PR confusion with technology companies around PRISM.
Well, unfortunately the word "fascist" isn't particularly meaningful anymore. But there certainly isn't any doubt that Fourth Amendment protections for documents in peoples' homes haven't been considered to be extended to digital communications moving through various service providers' pipes, and that various government agencies have been having a field day with surveillance data they've been able to legally justify collecting based on that lack of Constitutional protection. It seems largely like a widespread failure to create language protecting digital privacy in the same spirit as analog privacy was originally protected. Maybe that's fascism, but it seems less useful to use words without agreed upon meanings.
I think this was excellent observation - one that I did not make the first time around.

I am unsure if I find it compelling that there is some utility in having a person there for the human contact piece. If you were able to remove the person and retain the usability within a non-human interface (to an equally useful or better replacement) would people say "I wish there were a person here?"

I would like to say no for most cases, I think there are a few people who would prefer that almost in spite of the efficiency gain.
Well it sure doesn't rhyme with 'Shmerner'.
Some people sip espressos in North Korea, too.

Meanwhile, we (Americans) have more people living in cages than North Korea, China, Iran, and Vietnam combined. Most of them citizens, incarcerated after being subjected to extremely dubious trials for crimes related to drugs -- and whoops, look at today's latest headline: Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove Eclipsing N.S.A.’s

Relatively free states slide morph into corrupt police states precisely when the people sipping coffee with their luxury computers refuse to notice it happening.
No, people engaging in voluntary exchanges is a market, the building block of an economy.

Capitalism has no claim here.

Capitalism is, put most basically, a system under which trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit.
I once used a Golden Ratio to space out a bunch of overlapping rectangles. Each one was put 1/phi of the total space away from the last. That gave me the least probability of rectangles overlapping.
Look up the luddite fallacy.

When we, as a society, reach that point, goods will be so cheap that people won't need to work to live.
I like it - its pretty much my current app set-up for backbone + marionette, but done in a better structure.
You seem to ignore the extremely important point that the government contracts its innovation out to corporations as a means to keep the economy going. That's what keeps the machine turning, friend.
Yeah! Modes of centrality can mean lots of things. It's why it can be so frustrating when media folks casually toss out "average" for long-tailed things that require way more specificity.
wal-mart (and the market at large) doesn't value their labor at what it would cost to survive

You're assuming that wal-mart (and the market at large) values their labor incorrectly. What if that assumption is wrong? I.e., what if the actual value of their labor is lower than what it would cost to survive?

I know that sounds harsh, but that doesn't mean it has to be wrong. I don't see any reason why every job must automatically be worth enough, in actual value added, to support the person doing it. (For one thing, many jobs at the low end of the wage scale are not intended for people who have to support themselves. When I worked jobs in high school and college, I was being supported by my parents and financial aid; the money I earned went towards luxuries and savings, not my support.)

if enough charity was going on to uplift the impoverished from poverty, there would be much lower than 15% poverty

Maybe for a short time. But here's what I expect would happen if widespread "charity" in the form of BI or something like it were instituted: within a year or two, there would be a significant percentage of people who were squandering their BI ($10K a year or whatever) on anything from junk food to lottery tickets to drugs, and who were therefore still in poverty, despite receiving BI.

Then the news stories start on how you can't fix fundamental problems in society by just handing people money: you have to teach them how to handle it, what to do with it, etc., etc. Then the government gets pressured to offer "life coaching" and other services along with BI. Then we end up with all the same bloated government bureaucracy we have now, plus the extra expenditure of BI.
Theory #1 – Because deleting stuff at scale is harder than you think. If you've got structured data (think "relational database, much of which is pretty much guaranteed to be append-only") and you've optimised it's on-disk structure for reporting (think "highly indexed, possibly even with both the index data and the transaction data being stored in ways that take advantage of known query patterns and physical disk geometry) – removing data from it is likely to be _much_ more effort than just flipping a "deleted" flag and continuing to expand your storage pool. This is even more true if you'd also need to consider replicated copies/archives/snapshots/backups. Facebook/Google/Twitter et al store everything, not just because they think it'll make them more valuable to advertisers, but because deleting data from distributed/sharded/backedup/archived databases is more expensive than just marking it "deleted" and leaving it in place.

Theory #2 – The NSA (or it's predecessor or a related agency) have been paying them to store whatever they can since whenever it became possible. If you're prepared to ignore the privacy implications, it's obvious that some _tiny_ percentage of that data will become useful for law enforcement purposes. Unfortunately – when the "privacy implications" are considered in terms of "Is _your_ privacy more important than _my_ career?" – it's pretty clear that a very powerful cohort of law enforcement and intelligence agency decision makers say "Hell no! I just need one or two more big successes and I'll get that promotion I want! Of course it's worth monitoring every single person on the planet to give me a shot at the executive bathroom and an office with a door!" (or, less cynically but equal in consequence "Should I listen to every phone conversation in America, if it might possibly mean we can stop the next 9-11? Yeah, I think it might be…").
"Living like an animal" sounds like an exaggeration. Yes, it's probably most appropriate for a single, hipster 20-35-something, but it's an interesting lifehack.

Compared to what you'd get for the same price in SF (e.g. a tiny bedroom in a shared 6 BR house - student-style), it looks like an interesting alternative.

(edit: very hipster / maker indeed - this is from Tynan, one of the guys mentioned in the article http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjiQFCunJqk )
The title is misleading. Verizon is buying out Vodafone's part of Verizon Wireless. Verizon Wireless is owned 55/45 by Verizon and Vodafone.
man, that makes sense. nice call.
Revolutionary Gesture Control- Share your thoughts abt its future
" … let's say a friend of mine from school, who I spent a lot of time talking to on the phone a decade ago, decided this year to become a drug dealer. The government could start investigating me based on this stale data, despite not having any reasonable suspicion that I was involved in any crime."

Next time you're pulled over for a "random traffic stop" or some inexplicably-enforced minor violation (brake lights out, rolling thru a stop sign, singled out in a stream of traffic doing ~10 over on an interstate), I assume the words "parallel construction" will loom large in your mind – along with the memory of that old girlfriend's junkie ex, and your college room-mate's best pal who used to deal weed…
Someone by the same name ('fka') has been posting stuff about Koding today on r/programming as well as a few other nicks. To me it seems like a bunch of shills trying to promote this crap project.
Also, Jon Skeet (specific to Stack Overflow) - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-facts
Your post contains no arguments, just a straw man with some accompanying unsubstantiated statements. No one is suggesting that any single measure will solve all the world's problems. But might we not solve one, or two?
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Grindr is among the top highest grossing apps in the iOS app store and boasts some of the most engaged users across all social networking apps. We are looking for DevOps Engineer who can help build out the future of the Grindr system and while maintaining the existing infrastructure.

Responsibilities include:

Develop the next batch of systems and infrastructure to support the growing and highly engaged Grindr user base.
Help improve ops automation and monitoring throughout the system

Required Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

Strong general programming skills, especially Java and Ruby
Strong scripting skills
Experience building and maintaining high volume, large scale networks
Strong hands-on experience with JVM, Rails, MySQL, and NoSQL technologies
Experience using AWS technologies such as EC2,RDS, Cloudwatch, and Elastic Beanstalk
Passionate about technology and enjoys challenges
Able to contribute and work independently on a small team
High tolerance for ambiguity and an ability to clarify such situations

Bonus

Knowledge of Erlang, XMPP, eJabberd
Experience with mobile platforms and technologies
They cause quite a few Internet outages too. We have a lot of change management tickets filed under 'squirrel damage' so at some point I started using it for some of my change management requests. BGP blip? God damn squirrels.
I don't see what your point is.

Maybe you aren't aware of the meaning of the term "perverse incentive." A "perverse incentive" is when you are incentivized to do something that doesn't make sense. It's not the same thing as "incentive."
Good work so far. I just uploaded my band's album and hoping for the best :)
Some posit that given what they assume to be an inevitable loss of the majority of jobs to robotics/AI at some point, a basic guaranteed income is going to be essential to ensure continued consumption and growth.

Paul Krugman wrote an opinion piece with his thoughts on this earlier this year[1]. As one commentator noted on the piece:

If the fight is between capital and labour, and capital is winning, it seems subsidies in the form of some basic type of income may be called upon.

As Krugman notes, the issue relates to the fact that it is now jobs on all fronts that are being jeopardised. Highly skilled, unskilled not to mention the professions most suited to little grey matter.

The new inequality we are seeing has little to do with how well educated you are. It’s hard to penetrate beyond the barrier on education alone. The new inequality is about capital owners and non-capital owners.

An alternative of course, is the continued rise of "bullshit jobs" that was highlighted in a post a few weeks ago.[2]

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/opinion/krugman-sympathy-f...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6236478
The new IT slum of the world, Finland, is buying a new system that is based on MUMPS. It's almost amusing to think that only a decade ago we were thought of being pioneers of IT. sigh

In a sane society, this would mean that there're lots of business opportunities in Finland to fix this. Alas, the widespread stealthy corruption prevents that.
I've never understood why they don't simply structure those things to supply benefit reduced by the amount you make over the benefits maximum until the benefit no longer applies.

A person who receives $100 worth of benefit so long as they make make under $200 faces a harsh cut from $299 to only $200 should their income surpass it. Simply culling overage from the benefit, on the other hand, would mean they would reach a plateau in which they are adjusted to $300 from $200 to $300 worth of raised personal income, which while not be greatly encouraging, would have none of the damning nature of the strict cutoff approach.