skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's very interesting that everyone appears to unanimously agree that Johnson is not a patent troll, but it's hard to figure out exactly why.

People said it's because he made a legitimate product. From what I can see, Johnson Research and Development Co. never shipped a single Super Soaker -- 100% of their revenue is from licensing.

People said it's because he had a licensing agreement first. What if Larami had refused to sign a licensing agreement with him in the first place, ripped off his design, and he'd had to resort to a suit to get paid?

People said that it's because Hasbro explicitly used his design as a starting point. What if they invented their own water guns after seeing his prototype at a trade show, and then thumbed their nose at him? What if they "independently" invented their own water gun without seeing his? If you're telling me that there's a difference between these two cases, then you're saying that the courts need to determine intent and foreknowledge. What if someone from Hasbro was at the trade show where he exhibited, but just claimed not to have seen his booth? What if he had approached Hasbro for a license, and they claimed that their internal team was not aware of those discussions?

People said it's because he is the original inventor. What if he'd despaired of ever beating Hasbro in court and licensed his patent to Acacia so that they could go after Hasbro?

Finally, people are saying that the problem is that the inventions of patent trolls are "obvious". Is putting a battery-powered pump in a water gun a non-obvious invention worthy of patent protection? Batteries, pumps and water guns all existed before this -- what's the innovation here?
Facebook chat general.
HackerDB was mentioned in the Q&A session after one of the config management talks at the Usenix LISA conference last week.

I'm glad there are tools like this being actively developed.

I think perhaps the reason they keep being redeveloped is that the current crop of open source CMDBs doesn't meet needs, so I gladly welcome projects like this.
Oh dear.. I didn't expect this here yet. Still have so much to finish up & a couple of bugs to fix.

Btw the aim is so you can push up to github and have it automatically update your main site using a hook. If for any reason something goes wrong it rolls back to the previous working commit.

If you're a windows user sorry about the font. Im fixing all this stuff now
I assume your post got killed for the more explicit words you used. There were some of them. Anyway, I enjoy your writings. :)
>the fact that facebook is completely free and optional and no one is forcing you to use it.

This is highly simplistic. Moxie gave a good talk a few years back that covered this idea that we have a 'choice' about using new communication technologies like smartphones, and the arguments apply just as much to social networks

Changing Threats To Privacy From Tia To Google (Blackhat 2010) by Moxie Marlinspike http://www.securitytube.net/video/1084

I've transcribed the relevant part[1]:

I think if you look at the way that people tend to organise in groups and communities, there are often informal communications networks that bind them together, that allow them to communicate, make plans, coordinate activities. If you introduce something like the GSM cellular network to this group, and if I start using it, I am subject to something that is very well known called the No Network Effect. If I am the only one with a cell phone it's really not worth very much. The value of the network is in the number of people that are connected to it and that if I'm the only one I can't really communicate with anyone.

However if I somehow manage to get everyone to start using my communications network it becomes very effective and very valuable. But there is an interesting side effect, which is that the old informal mechanisms people use to communicate and to collaborate disappear, that they are destroyed by the introduction of technology. The technology actually changes the social fabric of how people communicate and coordinate. Mobile phones, there are many obvious examples. People used to make plans, they would say: "I'll meet you on this street corner at this time on this day and, you know, we'll do something" and now people say "I'll call you when I'm getting off work" or "I'll text you" and if you don't have a mobile phone you can't really participate in this type of organisation and you begin to find yourself kind of alone. Because if I now make a choice not to be a part of this cellular network, there is sort of an interesting thing where once again I am subject to the no network effect. The network that used to exist, the informal communications channels, has been destroyed.

So yes, I made a choice to have a mobile phone, but what kind of choice did I make? I think this is sort of an interesting phenomenon. What happens is a choice is introduced; it starts as a very simple choice: the choice of whether or not to have a mobile phone, a simple piece of technology. But slowly things happen to expand the scope of that choice until eventually it's so big as to encompass not just whether you have a mobile phone or not but whether you want to be a part of society. In some ways the choice to have a mobile phone today has become not necessarily just whether you have a piece of consumer electronics in your pocket but whether or not you are even a part of society, and that's a much bigger choice. Maybe not one that we should have to make, or at least maybe one that isn't really a choice at all.

[1] originally transcribed for this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3451313
I read some glutamate metabolism papers last night and I don't think this is likely to be true at all. I think it's a manifestation of the naturalist fallacy: you believe the "free glutamic acid" released by the dissolution of MSG to be artificial and are trying to rationalize a distinction for the glutamates that the body produces that doesn't exist.

In reality, glutamic acid isn't simply an amino acid that happens to be present in the human body. It is fundamental to the way our bodies work; it's required for nitrogen metabolism! Glutamate toxicity seems very unlikely.
Secrets for him but not for us.
To put things into context. 1.3 million people die and 50 million people are injured in car accidents every year.

Nature disasters are just side show in human life at this point.
Isn't there a service that could handle signup/registration/mass emails for startups?
Android Weekly is an excellent newsletter to stay on top of Android Dev news.

I have read each week's newsletter so far and always look forward to the next one.
I used to say the same, and was a staunch advocate of that. However, it was pointed out to me that virtually every. single. website. that does this still leaks that self-same info during registration: i.e. what do you do on your site to prevent "existing account discovery" when someone tries to sign up with an email address that one of your users already has?
For those curious, here is the labor force participation rate graph that she's taking data points from: http://data.bls.gov/generated_files/graphics/latest_numbers_...

In particular, the LFPR was on a continuous roll from 1965 to 1989, and continued to rise through the "dark years of oil shortages and stagflation", as she called them.
Are these really named pipes? And if yes, what are the names?
Kinda looks like anonymous pipes to my untrained eyes.
Generating web traffic summaries from nginx logs for a CDN with 150 servers, 10-15 billion hits/day. Summaries then stored in MySQL/TokuDB.
An express design goal is to not bake in assumptions about an editor. Programmers really like their editing tools. I've lived through the waves from vi to Emacs to vim to Sublime Text to what-have-you. We'd really, really like to make the language pleasing to work with without depending on an editor (indeed, each of us seems -- perhaps by accident -- to be using a different editor for Pyret, which may be influencing our decision).

When editing/copying, it's not typing skills but editing skills, which are arguably subtler and even harder.
Does this get easier or harder in python 3?

I like the explicit separation that Racket has between "here is a buffer of binary data" and "here is a sequence of Unicode characters," and (looking on the outside without working with it), I'm glad that Python 3 began to adopt some of that.
Could you be any more edgy?
Depends on geographic concentration and many other things though.
> And it is widely agreed that Scala is much less verbose and easier to work with than Java.

> ...

> - it [Scala] can be verbose sometimes,

> - Second problem is its learning curve. Scala is not easy to learn: the language has a huge feature set.

> - Scala’s IDE support is much less mature than Java.

So maybe Scala is not that less verbose nor that much easier to work with than Java after all.

I think the article contradicting itself on these points is a great illustration of why Scala never became mainstream. Scala certainly offers advantages over Java (I love the traits, the implicit conversions and case classes) but it also comes at a significant cost (feature set and surface area of the language, mediocre IDE support compared to Java, slow compilation, terrible backward compatibility story, feature creep, etc...).

Also, these arguments do not support just the idea that Scala is not a glue for Java but the more general idea that Scala is not intrinsically superior to Java, which is why it still has a minuscule mind share on the JVM[1].

[1] http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/scala%2C+java.html
Depends, if you can live as a hermit, then maybe yes. But my circle of contacts for example communicate with Facebook only, and I am already a not social person, if I deleted my Facebook I would spend months before getting. Invited to a party or funeral
It doesn't cover the angle symbol with a small "s" in the angle. Never known what that is!
so was selling yourself into bondage in the Middle Ages, after all you always had the choice to starve to death.
I am waiting for a good explanation as to why they haven't started an Adsense competitor yet; seems like it would be a goldmine
I completely agree as well, but I don't consider myself much of an expert in NoSQL technologies (which is why I read up on threads like this to find out).

Does anyone have a use case where data is on a single machine and map reduce is still relevant?

(I am involved in a project at work where the other guys seem to have enthusiastically jumped on MongoDB without great reasons in my opinion).
In January 1958 Walter Reuther gave testimony at a Senate subcommittee hearing, and he shared this anecdote;

In 1951, the Ford Motor Co. opened up a new engine plant in Cleveland, Ohio, adjacent to the municipal airport. It was the first fully automated engine plant. … I went through that plant many years back…

So they said to me, “Aren’t you worried about how you are going to collect union dues from all of these machines?”

I said, “the thought never occurred to me. The thought that occurred to me was how are you going to sell cars to these machines?” You know you can make automobiles, but consumers are still made in the good old fashioned way.”

Without good wages to provide the populace at large with cash to buy things growth will stagnate and wither. One of the big reasons that growth was so good during the 50's and 60's is that income was spread more evenly between capital and labour. If the trends that favour capital continue in the way that they have since the 80's then for 99%+ of us our children will have a much bleaker existence that we have had. Bringing back much higher income taxes for the very wealthy is one obvious way to rebalance this inequality.
I put it down to experience. It sounds great, until you actually try to live it for a lengthy period. Ayn Rand, after all, eventually collected social security.
> that the economic recovery hasn't come for most Americans even as high-level averages such as GDP and stock markets tell us otherwise

So you're saying trickle-down doesn't work
> are black-box learners. Any AI built out of a white-box learner

To have a white-box learner would imply that humans were smart enough to build it. Yet it's unlikely that humans can build something significantly smarter than a human, so this AI would have the same limitation: It's unable (not smart enough) to build a smarter AI.
It’s also available in porcelain :)

http://www.unfold.be/pages/5/items/85
It's not Hedy. It's Hedley!
This is exactly the question. If the channels of democracy still exist in any form (and the alternative is unthinkable), then we have to take control of them and put forth real statesmen to answer this challenge. The consequence of failing to do so is a society that steadily descends into complacency and despair.

EDIT: BTW, I've no idea why your comment is not higher. Anyone downvoting it is not paying attention imo.
The "synthetic" MSG you're referring to isn't synthesized, it's cultured by bacteria in sugar. There is a chemical process to create MSG, but it is significantly more expensive; the shift to fermentation happened in the '70s, so you may never have had chemically synthesized MSG.
While I agree with most of those, how many of the points are just a matter of author's preference? Is there any data behind it?

> Important step here: Once I type the new password and click “OK” you automatically log me in. I don’t have to go log back in again.

I actually prefer to have a chance to log in using my new password so that I can save it in the browser. If it logs me in automatically, I need to log out, and log back in. Or worse, I forget to save the password and have to do the whole reset password dance again next time.
Hey there, I just used it to deploy my Telescope app, and it worked like a charm. Will let you know, if anything breaks up. Thanks for this awesome creation.
Are you sure that it isn't something somehow related to Facebook which makes those site to use Facebook login, and not, say, its own?
We use MR using Pig (data in cassandra/CFS) with a 6 node hadoop cluster to process timeseries data. The events contain user metrics like which view was tapped, user behavior, search result, clicks etc.

We process these events to use it downstream for our search relevancy, internal metrics, see top products.

We did this on mysql for a long time but things went really slow. We could have optimized mysql for performance but cassandra was an easier way to go about it and it works for us for now.
That doesn't make this any less significant. Besides, something in the neighborhood of 9.5m were affected by this typhoon and the season isn't even over.
Of course teens are leaving Facebook. I'm pushing 30 and use Facebook to share pictures of my kid with my parents and my wife's parents and my wife's grandmother (all of whom are active on Facebook). If I were a teenager, I wouldn't use it with all that parental oversight.

If there wasn't all this youth worship in Silicon Valley, nobody would see this as a problem for Facebook. We have a lot more disposable income than teenagers do.
Don't they just handle the "send mails" part though?
Pyret looks very promising. Keep on the good work!

But please remove the minus sign from identifiers! I am concerned that people may abstain from Pyret for this simple reason. It is really annoying to embrace every operator with blanks. That should be an optional job for the IDE to increase readibility.

By the way, is there already a raco exe for Pyret?
Yes, but the result was "we couldn't induce headaches at all, except in subjects who had in fact consumed a placebo". Studies have decisively refuted a link between MSG and CRS.
One Connected Home Hub To Rule Them All
I would think the standard would be a breakup fee. The fee can be orders of magnitudes larger than any time involved (see AT&T & TMobile acquisition)
I am an example of this trend, having dropped out of a physics PhD program to pursue programming, and feeling great about the decision. There are two points which are not made by the author and which I think deserve to be mentioned:

1.) Scientific research is hard. It is very frustrating to spend all day working on something you can't be sure is going to even work. On the other hand, programming is easy, it's mostly monkey work. Sure there are places where you have to be clever and think things out carefully, but at the end of the day, when you write code it just feels like you have so much more to show than when you do research.

2.) In research, you need to get grant money to do anything, because research is expensive. So much time is then spent writing grant proposals, and even when you get money you still can't do everything you want because it's just too expensive and/or time consuming. I'm not talking about LHC money here, but just the standard money for a professor running a lab in a university.

In programming, you can work on (I'd estimate) 95+% of problems with nothing more than your computer and some old fashioned hard work. There are so many good, free to use open source libraries out there, making it pretty easy to jump into whatever field is interesting to you. Best of all, when you finish a project, there is no need to spend weeks writing a paper about it or any of the nonsense associated with that, you can just publish your code.
You can save the password from that form just as easily. Its just a matter of the webmaster labeling the field correctly so your browser recognizes it as a login form.
If every <x> years a typhoon is going to come along and wipe out <y>% of your infrastructure putting the affected regions of the country back to square one yet again, coming up with a workable solution to that should be a super high priority.

This is correct. Yet Miami is hit by a hurricane every seven years on average, and they don't manage to move the power lines underground, instead preferring to hang the wire above ground again every time it's blown down, and charging the population for the privilege of having electric power. They also rebuilt New Orleans in areas where they shouldn't, and still cannot put proper sea defenses in where they ought to.

But when Bangladesh, then East Pakistan, was hit in 1970 by the great 1970 cyclone, the incident that triggered Independence, they managed to put in concrete storm shelters. These things helped to save many lives in the subsequent years.

Guys, anyone at home? Civil defense is a political problem, it seems.
Sorry that it could not add value for you.

I have the second part (for publishers) coming out next week, so, would take this as feedback for the next one.
Heineken Makes Beer Bottle a Connected Device
I presume authentication (at least currently) is not an important issue for unsubscribing. For example, bad people are not unsubscribing users from their competition as yet...
I wouldn't learn it unless you're interested in learning new languages already or suspect you'll wind up at a job where it's necessary. If the former, that's a long road and my suggestion there would be to first learn languages that will make you think about programming differently and second learn languages that make programming fun -- C++ is neither, though perhaps for some people they start thinking "I don't want to program anymore", and I guess others who are exposed to C++11's new features for the first time in any language can get excited about them...

If you are going to learn it, learn it in full. Understanding most of http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/index.html ought to be a requirement to put "C++" as a separate item from "C" on your resume; people who put "C/C++" on their resume make me more likely to believe they only know C++ as a kind of super-set of C and they will likely program C++ code in a very Cish style, also they will likely make more mistakes caused by a faulty assumption that C++ does the same thing C does -- like a keyword means the same in C++ as it does in C.

A lot of places have sane requirements and restrictions on what you can do in your C++ programs there. e.g. http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.x... But to understand the decisions you probably need to learn about the thing being discussed... And then learn why other programmers want the thing to be enforced or restricted so much. A lot of times it's just so even C++ programmers whose C++ knowledge is summarized as "C with classes!" can still be effective programmers.

I wouldn't suggest learning C++11 specifically. Learn C++98, then learn what new features C++11 has on top of that (there aren't that many).
Well all of those solve concurrency and scale problems in the VM and build a language on the top.

I think you're quite mistaken here. These languages solve concurrency at the language semantics level, and then, some of them implement the semantics in a VM, but the VM (in case of Erlang, no Go implementation in use has one) is a tangential issue. To say that these language "solve concurrency problem in the VM" simply doesn't make sense. Languages are languages, they are not implementations.

C++ is just a language in which you are free to build those abstractions into in any form you choose.

Well, there's Turing completeness, and then, there's actual usability. Consider transactional extensions, for example. Haskell gives you a type system for that. In Lisp, you could achieve the same using a code-walking macro library. C++ gives you...what, pattern-matching based template metaprogramming? Ugh! The "language" for that, while Turing-complete, isn't even identical to the one used for run-time code. I've seen a factorial written that way. I don't want to imagine how more complex code like that must look like in C++. Even D is better at that!

If that wasn't possible, then our SQL server installation (all c++) wouldn't quite happily run a single process on each of our 48-core nodes with 128Gb of RAM, nor would it cluster and replicate amongst all 8 of them and deliver 10,000 queries a second whilst yawning.

I didn't say it's impossible in C++. It's just that it's masochistic, that's all. You could easily argue along the same lines that COBOL is a well-designed language because millions of applications have been written in it that power the reliable day-to-day operation of banks you've invested your money into. Yes, they have been written, but at what human cost?

Rob Pike is pretty cool but has blinkers on as he's a captive research executive rather than someone with dirty hands on the ground in some enterprise outfit.

"Captive research executive?" What does that even mean? He certainly has more than enough of his share of dirty hand, while continuing doing so even today, and I won't even comment on that "enterprise outfit" nonsense.
Might be fun for charting a DDoS attack timeline, start with a kitten.jpg ;)
functions are fun
Do you really think that all terrorism can be explained through mental illness solely? The IRA and ETA are both extremist movements with well defined goals, and structure. They wouldn't disappear through more mental care (maybe you're confusing this with school shootings?)

These groups are like the militias that plague countries in civil war. They have chains of commands and objectives and whatnot. This isn't like bullying in schools, this is more like rival gangs , or maybe rival gangs vs. the school administration. The fact that you think it's about "destroying America" proves your point.

Out of curiosity though, can you point out the hypocrisy in US foreign policy? Almost all actions taken in the past half century have been done with explicit American interests in mind, just like any other country's. You'd probably find that a lot of American resentment is consequence of economic policy (crushing local agriculture with subsidized products doesn't make many happy campers) more than foreign policy. Granted, countries that have been invaded by the US are probably the exception.

EDIT: I don't necessarily disagree with your thesis though, any time this sort of thing comes up (is the "battle for intelligence" a thing), I think of this article (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/BUGGER) which basically answers 'no' in a much more convincing way than anyone on HN has ever been able to do.