skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 2. For much of this, we can thank the loosening standards imposed over the past two decades by a specialized patent appeals court that has given overblown...

No, this is just a common misconception. If you look at the history of rulings from east Texas, you will see they invalidate a higher percentage of patents than other courts in the US. East Texas just implemented rules on length of filings and length of arguments to cut out most of the crap out of patent cases, making the process cheaper and faster for both sides.

So, if you have an iffy patent, and you want to have the best odds of winning, don't file in east Texas. But expect to pay a lot more.

I guess the east Texas model is bad for lawyers who file thousands of pages of "supporting material", and then get paid $200/hr to read it. But how much of this supporting material was actually relevant? Not much, which is why the judge in east Texas was able to enforce page limits.

The east Texas model is the right way to rule on patent cases. But the patent system needs to be supported by better laws.
More or less, yes.

In the original TCP implementations from the early 80s, performance was (understandably) not the main priority.. they just wanted to get it working first. Also, nobody was sure what networking protocols would become popular (IP? OSI? XNS?) so a lot of work went into making everything as flexible as possible. This reached an apogee with AT&T's "STREAMS" subsystem (a competitor to the sockets API for writing networking code on UNIX) which was very flexible but also extremely complicated.

What Van Jacobson's work was saying is "look guys: by paying close attention to the fastpath you can saturate your 10Mbps network with TCP traffic" I'm sure everybody who has written a TCP stack has seen this email and has taken the tricks to heart.

These days not all of the tweaks might be still relevant. For instance, the hardware is probably doing the hardware checksum for you. However, the spirit of "do as little as possible in the fastpath" is certainly still followed in modern stacks.
You're not a Platonist, are you?

Regardless, it would be plausible to imagine a character conceived of by an author, who has curious behaviors in early stories, the motivation for which is only revealed in a much later story. This would be an example of a process of "discovery" about a character, but this discovery is happening in the form of revelations in the text rather than by the act of the author.

If you wanted to make the analogy more precise, you could imagine a character created with peculiar traits, and the author later realizes a single explanation for those traits which they had not originally conceived, which they then write into a story. In these two cases, the effect on the reader might be identical, but in one essential information about the character was held back and in one it was developed later.

All of this is a little academic, though, since none of the information about Holmes & Watson in the post-1923 stories has a material effect on their characters, as ACD's estate attempted to argue.
Which is the problem with Linux as a whole for me.

WiFi configuration is a particular problem where everything has awful documentation so when you need to set up your WiFi without NetworkManager or some other behemoth, much eye poking and googling on other devices is required.

FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD: man ifconfig (and dmesg)

As a rule, and this happened to me more than once, you might need to configure your network connection without the aid of Google and online documentation. Either that or you're stuck on a train in the middle of nowhere with no WiFi and no 3G and you want to read the docs.
Absolutely. Private salary data is mostly to the advantage of the employer. When you negotiate your initial salary, you are at a disadvantage because you have less information than the employer. At the start of your career you have very little information about the job market and what your position is worth to a future employer. Your initial salary is often the base for future income.

There's obvious problems when people don't know how much they should be paid. I need only point to the history behind the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 as a real-world example.

Moreover, public salary information is not inherently corrosive to a job environment. Public service salaries (like when I worked for a university) are public in the US, as are all salaries in some countries (I'm thinking specifically of Sweden).
If they were truly growing consistently at 20-30%/mo they should never have quit. 20%/mo is almost 9x a year. That's a fabulous growth rate. I'm guessing they meant they grew at 20-30%/mo for a while and then things slowed down.
I find the Spotify Android app to be a pain. I just opened it and it took literally around 15 seconds to show my playlists. I kind of have a good amount of playlists, but that is basically the only way I've found to keep track of things I want to listen to with the exception of starring (so yay for having an unholy mess of playlists for which there doesn't to be anything like filtering or what have you for actually dealing with a large amount of playlists manageable). And there is no obvious way of having different playlists for mobile and Desktop/browser, although I only want some playlists for mobile so that I can use them offline. Some times it also takes literally 30 seconds to load a playlist that I've selected, and up to 12 seconds from starting a song until it actually plays. There is also no way for me to turn off 3G streaming SPECIFICALLY, so it's either offline mode or I have to be careful not to play a playlist with some offline tracks if I happen to not get WiFi unexpectedly for some reason (and WiFi goes out unexpectedly and without warning because wireless is volatile like that, plus no app ever will tell you that you have no WiFi specifically, it will just say "No Internet"). Also a lot of nuisance with Spotify claiming that I'm "offline" when I know that I clearly am not, though that has gotten a lot better. Desktop Spotify is totally fine, though. But right now I'm really craving going back to a 16 GB iPod Nano when it comes to listening to music wherever I want. Downloading and "undownloading" and the clusterfuck of playlists is just a big hassle for something that is supposed to be a lot more convenient than an mp3 player.

They also used to have a horrific splash webpage with autoplay IIRC, but thankfully they seem to have changed that.

Maybe there is some obvious way to fix all of this such as by reinstalling the Android app (did that about half a year ago I guess) or googling (though I've been mostly dissapointed when googling issues, ending up at the Spotify communit/support forum and basically finding out "yeah that's not possible/you have to do this tedious work-around"), but I mostly wrote this because I saw the opportunity to vent, so...

EDIT: Also, when I first wanted to use the browser version, the actual webpage/URL for the player was so hard to find it was almost as if they tried to make it a secret on purpose. But I'm happy that there even is a browser player in addition to the desktop app. And the Linux version of the Desktop app is very good (on Ubuntu at least) so I don't need to use Wine.
That's an interesting argument, but I guess it fell flat because the work itself is subject to copyright, and someone else can now "invent" a Watson that never played rugby.
Finally I agree with Marco completely.
Apple’s Newest Mac Pro Costs Less than DIY PC Build
> I see no reason to support any small developers who file for patents.

So, what if Apple, or Google, or Microsoft, or Oracle decide they like feature F and implement it in one of their applications that compete with whatever the small patent holder does?
> Why bother with exponentially increasing costs? Even a token fee would ensure that copyright expires on abandoned/orphaned works.

A token fee would do that for abandoned works, but it wouldn't do it for works which weren't being actively used but which the owner also didn't want others to use -- an escalating fee would be better than a token fee to discourage such buried works.
I think the unix design (particularly as implemented in GNU/Linux) sacrifices coherency for flexibility and customizability. There are some nice integrated features you can get if you have e.g. an OS-native command shell that understands the kernel; features like DTrace become much easier, and you can get better interactive performance when the scheduler has a deeper understanding of what's going on. I'd say linux's KMS is a move away from being unix-like; likewise ALSA is a very ununixy API, the whole udev/hal kerfuffle was not unixlike, and network manager is the antithesis of the unix philosophy.

(Myself, I moved to FreeBSD a while ago).
Seeing a fervent Apple supporter cry foul over iA even though Apple does the exact same thing all the time is... Beyond belief.
That could be. At least at YC there are comparatively few misunderstandings about what's expected of companies that take various kinds of investment. But if there are people out there who are unclear about what kind of company they want to create, or take money from investors without understanding what the investors expect in return, I could imagine there would be trouble down the line.
I may just be a bit slow today, but I fail to see how a patent obtained by a small company can not also be defensive.

Also, note that they've recanted, as the linked article states: http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/21/5234580/patent-pending-ia...
Disconnect counts 45.
In this case the thing iA tried to copyright was one of Apple's own APIs.
My bro-psych take, Dreaded Personal Anecdotes division:

In sports, prior to big games, I tended to doze in the locker room; my brother threw up. He'd be hair-on-fire ready for mortal combat; I hoped the other team wouldn't show up. But I was 'cool' and he was considered half-crazy.

I'm the worst procastinator I know, and it really kicks in when a project is 99% complete. A deadline extension is almost as good as an orgasm for me. Without an extnension, I'll estimate the remaining time needed to finish the job, then calculate what time I have to start to hit the mark--then set an alarm and hit the rack. Hugely painful and I hate myself throughout the process, but I cannot make myself work normal hours during crunchtime. Maybe my brain is processing final steps, but I doubt it.

Related? My memory of personal events has always been very good. Now I find myself more and more distracted, anxious, sleepless over trivial matters going back to my youth: a/the missed spelling word in 3rd grade; a stupid comment on a junior high date; a missed shot in a meaningless high school basketball game. The list goes on and on.

Yet I function.

But now my teenage son won't leave the house, resists therapists and I don't blame him. I just happen to get paid while living on largely on the Net.

Just sayin'.
This is a long-time favorite effect of anime studios: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ReflectiveEyes
this is awesome. the annotation makes this way more clear cut than reading javascript.

however, I'm still confused is
@semisync(callback=output)
mean it's asynchronous and that the output will be called after it finishes?

say I implement this in Flask, what would be the outcome of this code?

# a demo callback function
def output(field, value):
print field + ": $" + str(value)

# simple callback syntax
@app.route('/revenues')
@semisync(callback=output)
def revenue():
# simulated api call
sleep(random())
shared.revenue = randint(1, 1000)
return "Revenue", shared.revenue

If I navigate to 127.0.0.1/revenue, what would be the result? Would it output "Revenue" immediately and than a couple hundred milliseconds later print the dollar amount (from output method)? Say revenue() takes 5 seconds in total to finish (grab data, crunch numbers, finish), would it immediately show an output followed by output being called after the job processes?

This is great stuff.
Perhaps you're being down-voted because this thread has drifted off-topic.

It's a security issue related to bitcoin, which in turn is related to Namecoin, which in turn affects DNSNMC. Seems fairly on topic to me, but others are welcome to disagree (just explain why if you do).

No one has the time to hand-hold each and every person who learns about it and freaks out, especially if they come off as demanding and abrasive rather than inquisitive and helpful.

Sorry, I did not realize that I was coming off as demanding and abrasive. I can see how "demanding" might have been seen now, and I apologize for that. Abrasive though? I don't see that, I was just asking questions and for help understanding the BTC dev's thoughts on this.

Note that I also asked whether there was a document (perhaps on the bitcoin wiki) that had all the explanations on it already. The response was less than helpful.

Your proposed urgent deployment of "fixes" carries enormous risk and so it absolutely will not be done.

I think this was simply due to misunderstanding. It was never my intention that any one "fix" be adopted immediately. I was just looking for reassurance that something is being done about this, even if it's just the reassurance that the devs acknowledge the problem and are investigating methods of addressing it.

Your specific concerns seemed to be mostly related to mining pools engaging in this activity without the consent of their hashers, this particular threat is eliminated completely by hashers that use GBT and submit blocks themselves— as you were pointed to.

And as was pointed shortly out by gmaxwell, that doesn't matter for those who choose not to. If it's a certainty (or highly probable) that the network will adopt GBT, and that somehow implies that the problem is fixed, then that could have simply been explained. Instead, I was kicked from the channel and then my posts here were downvoted out of spite.

In any case, in the future when you find yourself sending demands to volunteer developers asking them when they will solve your pet concern you should first ask yourself when _you_ plan on solving it.

I'm sorry you perceived it as me "sending demands to volunteer developers". For any part of that that is true, I apologize. Like I said at the start of this reply, all I wanted to hear was that something is being done to address this problem, and if not, why not.

As for me solving it, I had pointed out a solution that I thought was helpful (Stephen's), but folks chose not to discuss that in any calm sort of way. I don't know why. Perhaps you may want to re-evaluate the way you (and others) reacted toward someone approaching the community with a concern and asking questions. I am not some type of thing for you to feel threatened by. My intentions were benevolent. I come in peace. ;)
Whenever I felt overwhelmed by my workload, I found myself fighting the urge to just give up and sleep. The result was a great deal of assignments in college that I had left only partly done. At the same time though, I found my most productive moments to be at the times just before a deadline. I would finish work in a fraction of the time it normally took me.

I think the difference between the two situations is the feeling of hopelessness. When there really is no way to finish everything, it's hard to do anything other than just give up.
That's a simple description, not a simple explanation, and yes there's a difference. An explanation has the additional burden of being easy to understand, which your "simple" explanation is not unless you already have a background in category theory or other relevant experience. What's an endofunctor? What's a "natural" transformation? Is it something more specific than "just a transformation"? What in tarnation is a Kliesli construction? I'm sure you can give good answers to all these questions, but at that point your explanation is neither simple nor easy.

I'm not saying they're bad, I'm saying they're hard, and your pitch needs to be that they're worth the effort, not "come on, they're not that hard". Until I saw your reply to your other reply, I truly thought this was a joke. In fact, the "monoid in the category of endofunctors" "explanation" is a classic joke about haskellites.

edit: typo
Ask HN: How to break into banking with CS?
Background: I'm a Junior in pursuing a B.S. in CS @ a top CS school. I've previously interned at a startup in SV and also a large well-known company in SV. This year, I interviewed for two top investment banks but only for technology internship positions (software development basically).
To me, the startup culture is becoming rather mundane - the banking lifestyle seems appealing (thought it always has). I've been investing for a number of years, and have written some automated trading algorithms, and I've realized that I might want to make a career out of this. I'm confident I have the skills and dedication to make it in business.

So, to any engineers/people in finance: how did/do you break into banking as a CS major? (And yes, I know how much HN hates bankers.)
Except Apple uses their patents offensively, even trolling with them, but he prefers attacking a small developer since he may be affected this time.
How do you handle bus factor and what not? Or are you just saying... they're responsible, but other people are helping them?
BMW Drifter Chases Down Cars
"How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did" --http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targe...

This event is referenced in TFA. I remember reading it when it first came out and was (a) amazed at the ability to analyze purchasing data and come to conclusions such as this and (b) worried.

Previously, I never really cared for carrying cash so I used a credit card for almost everything I purchased -- online, of course, but also in person. Nowadays, I pay cash anytime I can: at the gas station, the supermarket, at restaurants, etc. I also stopped using my "loyalty" card at the supermarket and obtained a new one that was not connected to me in any way.

I'm not buying anything I shouldn't be, of course. I'm just of the "it's none of their business" mindset. This has carried over into other parts of my life as well, such as logging as little personal information as possible at work (ISP) and retaining it for as short of a period as possible.
I think he meant $5 * 2^n
Not all linguistic nuance is syntactic. For example, the semantics of object models can contain a lot of nuances, as can the lifetimes of variables, visibility of identifiers, etc. While there are ways of encoding semantics (denotational, axiomatic, etc.), the size of the encoding will depend a lot on how closely the language's semantics resemble the semantics of the encoding you choose.
The first section of the manual for the LaTeX Memoir class used to be an extended essay on book design and not at all LaTeX specific. I'm not entirely sure why the author removed it, but here's a link[1][large PDF] to a version with the section intact. If you're looking for more extended look at the concepts in the OP, check it out.

[1]: http://wwwcdf.pd.infn.it/localdoc/memman.pdf
This might be stupid but where do you go to find local groups? I don't find satisfaction in work but maybe I can help some people and in turn help myself.
It doesn't really matter if a small player holds a patent as they won't have enough resources to start fighting against big guys. Patents don't protect products, good products and brands do.
I literally cannot tell whether you're still being funny or serious. Poe's law is in full effect. (It's still pretty funny to me either way.)

That said, try:

Haskell tries to be a language where all code only does this: Take input, produce output from it; whenever input is the same, output needs to be the same, nothing else may happen, no exceptions whatsoever. Since this forbids things like printing to the screen, reading from a network connections and other useful things, there needed to be a single construct that is excempt from these rules, so Haskell can be useful. Monads are these constructs.

Monads are the house rules you bring to your Monopoly game to make it fun.

(Yes, that means Haskell is not a fully functional language, it's just more functional than most.)
2013: Both a ho-hum year for tech, and a great one.
> what if they refuse to work? Do they just get to walk away?

Nope. Then you can send them to prison. But at least give them a choice.

> people who commit things like large-scale fraud are usually psychopaths to some degree

Large scale fraud is rare. You want to send those people to prison, fine, but it'll be in the hundreds on an annual basis.

Small scale fraud is common. The motivation here is purely financial. They will want to keep out of jail and pay you money. It makes no sense to spend money to keep these people unproductive in prison. In fact, it's just outright crazy.
"I'm pretty sure that, given those instructions, young Boz would build a social network and make it immediately available to everyone. It would obviously seem like a mistake to him to limit membership to a small subset of the population. Some other social network might come along and just open its doors to everyone and he would never overtake them!

As you probably already know, the situation I describe actually happened; there was one social network that grew incrementally while another opened its doors to the world. Fast forward five years and things haven't turned out the way young Boz might have expected. As it turns out, the path Facebook took to connecting everyone in the world was not the shortest and that has made all the difference. By starting small and expanding outward we built a community. By integrating networks that had originally been separate we had to focus on privacy. By throwing open the floodgates of growth in increments rather than all at once we were able to focus on keeping a consistent design and building scalable infrastructure. These things are now part of the DNA of our company and they affect everything we build." - Boz

https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=82081294140
I have another idea. buy hundreds of drones, attach american dollars, attach non perishable food, guns, communication device, ammunition, manuals for guerilla warfare. drop that shit all over North Korea outside of Pyongyang. It'd be Kim's worst nightmare when civilians are armed and not starving and have suddenly very motivated. The North Korean army is weak and starving, they have no fuel reserves to power their tanks (apart from shitty military parades), jets, navy. Only a matter of time. Just need funding from the CIA and we are good to go.
I completely disagree with this sentiment and find this "article" to be a huge turnoff. But, thanks for making me aware of iA Writer Pro, you just got iA a new sale.
Talk to a recruiter. Banks are large and slow-moving, and have procedures and policies; someone with experience sending candidates to the same bank will do better than you could on your own.

It's probably also much easier to get a position aligned with your degree initially, and then move horizontally within that bank, than to get a position you're less qualified for off the bat.
Distinguishing lexical tokens is a red herring. Nuance has more to do with giving multiple meanings to tokens, depending on context, like maybe if the colon also worked as a statement terminator, but with slightly different semantics.
I'm not sure I understand why characters themselves are copyrighted. I get why its bad to just copy someone else's work, but if I go to the effort to write my own book about the same character, who cares? The world isn't worse off for fan fiction.
I've not yet committed to the project, but I'd like to make a portable raspberryPi server that will connect with nearby, likeminded servers and provide a wifi-mesh for anybody in range. Users on the network should get chat + filesharing services. If I can get that to happen, I'll try to make it battery/solar powered.

I'll be headed over to SudoRoom (Oakland) in the coming weeks to get input on the project. If anybody's interested, please reach out.