skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good news, but the last sentence of the article made me curious:

> The total median awards to trolls is now nearly twice as high as those to legitimate patent holders, whose median reward fell about 30 percent to $4 billion, according to a 2013 report by PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

I was wondering how they estimated this, so I checked out the report:

> We collect information about patent holder success rates, time-to-trial statistics, and practicing versus nonpracticing entity (NPE) statistics from 1995 through 2012.

> Damages awards for NPEs averaged more than double those for practicing entities over the last decade.

Note: PWC does not use the word "patent troll" - that is entirely the interpretation of the article.

So, just to play the devil's advocate: are NPEs by definition patent trolls? I can't think of a counterargument, but maybe someone else can?

EDIT: Thanks for the enlightening examples so far!
It does, in that it allows business agreements to be signed. Without DRM, old content industries aren't interested in playing.
I've just checked and the content is still there, so he clearly hasn't stolen it.
Yes. We reason about infinities. But when it comes to result we are always interested in with what's well before it.
Of course. Interesting also is that the Nest Protects form a mesh network to set off the alarm across all of them, even if the wifi is down.
Sulking because you don't want to join in a game is the epitome of childish behavior. You might want to think about that.
To remind you to be careful when doing any kind of series expansion. It's more important than it sounds.
and we aren't interested in the old content industries. they are "considered harmful" at best
Terminology: Parallelism and Concurrency
They arent definitionally "trolls" but they cannot be Using the patents (deriving value from their being patents in the fist place). So it's still a useful metric.
Similar, but ratpoison for me.
Germans abandon hope of US 'no-spy' treaty
I don't know of any use behind the calculation of the value for this particular series. But Ramanujan summation (and other summation methods for divergent series) show up in the renormalization calculations in field theories. So this might sound like a random combination of fancy sounding words,but to give an idea of the connection: imagine you have some kind of integral that you want to evaluate or ODE you want to solve and you have some expansion that turns it into a series. But then you notice that a naive grouping of the terms in the series makes the sum go to infinity. But there are other ways where you can cleverly rearrange the grouping of terms so that it converges. So choosing a method for which this works (and gives a results that makes sense physically or agrees with other known exact results) is a serious business.
But is it, or is not?
I think the canonical example of a NPE is ARM. They don't fabricate their own chips, but they license out their designs.
>For me, Maps gives me eerily accurate drivetime estimates whereas Google's times are utterly useless.

Fascinating. Apple Maps is always wrong for me, with the estimated time of arrival constantly changing as I drive, while Google (and Waze) are spot on.
I feel oppositely. If someone sends me a letter, I consider it to be an unnecessary inconvenience. If they want a letter in return, that's almost asking too much. It feels rude. You're taking up my physical space and cluttering my home. You know what I get in the mail? Advertisements that get tossed into the dumpster on the way back to my apartment and physical notices of bills from companies that won't keep up with the times. If you send me a letter, you're placing yourself in the same categories.

I don't keep stamps around. I don't keep envelopes. It's the same as if someone wants me to give them a money order. I have to go out of my way to get one, when I could just as easily do a bank transfer or PayPal et al. My mailbox is a long walk from my apartment, and when I check my mail (once a week), it's all just advertisements addressed to "current resident".

So I guess the point is, don't assume a letter will be well received, especially by the younger generations living in apartments. I don't want you to call me, I especially don't want you to leave a voicemail, and for all that is holy, don't send me a letter.
It also was added just recently (relatively). So not necessarily it's the hardest one.
JetBlue Fly-Fi Test
I'm trying to go through this with Ruby right now and having a lot of fun. Being a bit rusty on basic algorithms and higher algebra has not helped much, though.
Things I Learned in 2013
Resources to learn about cybersecurity?
Hi,

I'm taking a test on cybersecurity soon, but I am a complete novice in the field. Does anyone have any recommendatns on how to quickly get up to speed on basic competencies, like the ones listed here: http://www.fbla-pbl.org/docs/ct/FBLA/fbla_cyber_security_13-14.pdf
The link: http://www.fbla-pbl.org/docs/ct/FBLA/fbla_cyber_security_13-...
Project Euler is great. Another one, but more algorithm and CS oriented: hackerrank.com
Ryan Bates, where are you?
Ryan, I owe you so much, I hope you are well! Please let us know where you are!

You have thousands of people that are waiting after you ;-)
> What good is protection against piracy from people not willing to pirate?

It's about business. Protection that works for 99.5% of the population is good enough for the old content industries. Netflix couldn't exist in its current form without DRM -- Netflix does not succeed because of novel technologies, but rather because of successful content licensing.

To be clear I'm not a fan of DRM, especially not when it's baked into the HTML standard.

> And no, pirated content is far more convenient than DRMed content.

I didn't say that - you're arguing against a position I didn't state.
Only for people who are comfortable speaking, have no speech impediments, communicate linearly (no backtracking), and are communicating things that resemble natural language. Good for grandma writing an email, bad for a lot of other UX cases...
I tried deleting an account recently. It was surprisingly easy. You just had to find the right page and push delete.

Now, my account hasn't gone poof yet (it takes 2 weeks, they say), but I'm optimistic.
Have you looked into Prismatic's Schema?

I fully agree that if you're working on a large project, you'll need something that is "type-like" in terms of enforcing interface integrity. Where there's an open question is how necessary compile-time typing is for most problems. (Few would disagree with the claim that types are a good thing.)

Clojure (esp. without types) seems to favor smaller projects (libraries over frameworks) and modularity in the extreme, almost implicitly. When you get "into the large" and need checks like types or contracts, there are various libraries that are available.

I like Haskell a lot, but my experience going between the dynamic and static styles of programming and languages (these things are as much about coding style as the language itself, which is why Scala can be beautiful or horrid depending on how it is used) is that the grass often seems greener on the other side. Haskell's great in many ways, and designed by some of the most brilliant computer scientists and logicians alive right now, but it's not without some painful warts (although my knowledge is 3-4 years out of date).
Ah, it sounds like what's happening is this: joomla is a large piece of complex PHP code and you don't know how to figure out how to integrate the changes you want to make into it. Also there may be a lot of code in the framework that looks strange and you're having trouble figuring out how it works.

I've never worked with joomla myself, but I'll try to give you a few ideas about how I would approach figuring it out if I had no clue and the documentation wasn't helpful.

The steps I would take are:

1) Get a local test instance of your site setup.

2) Figure out how to insert a line of code that generates some sort of output that you can see as soon as it's executed (ie. a "print statement"). Usually this will go to some server log file. There should be something in the docs, hopefully an example, about logging.

3) Make a guess about what code gets executed when a page you're interested in gets rendered. Most likely this will be the php file that you see in that page's URL.

4) Once you've got a first message to print out try to reason through the control flow of the code, adding print statements here and there to test your understanding of what gets executed when.

By following this approach you should start to get a feel for how the joomla code works and eventually you will find out where code for your new feature should go. If you still have trouble figuring that out try to find a similar feature already implemented in joomla or some add-on or extension and see how that was implemented.

If you want a recommendation for an IDE I've found that Eclipse with the PHP plugin works pretty well, but for this process of understanding the joomla code I would just use whatever text editor you're comfortable with, an IDE will probably only get in the way of your investigations at this point.
The "art of summing up divergent series" is a well established technique in quantum field theory (not only in string theory). Briefly, the underlying mathematical description of quantum field theory produces singularities. The latter are not physical (so their existence is due to our poor mathematical abilities) but they still contain useful physical information. This information can be extracted by "correctly" performing divergent sums. And its results are verified by experiment, e.g. in higher order corrections to particle masses.
Opinion on a good CRM that isn't Salesforce?
Actually, it's worse than that. The interop between the browser and CDM isn't standardised at all. The only thing this standardises is the browser API that websites should use to request that the browser communicate with the CDM on their behalf.

The interface between the browser and the CDM is proprietary and unspecified, so browser vendors and CDM providers have to negotiate that themselves. The format of the encrypted binary messages passed to the Javascript API is proprietary and unspecified. The API used to communicate with the license server is also proprietary and unspecified, so it doesn't even provide much interop from the media provider perspective - they still have to write a whole bunch of DRM-provider-specific code for every DRM scheme, and it looks like every browser vendor will have their own one.

Basically, it standardises just enough to give media providers the ability to claim they're using pure HTML5, without offering any more interoperability than if every browser vendor just had their own proprietary HTML5 extension for DRM. It's a PR stunt rather than a meaningful attempt at interoperability.
Lawsuit targets NYPD sting tactic which tempts people to steal (2013)
What the... I tought http://xkcd.com/1294/ was a joke.
Sure. But I doubt that said law firm would agree to cover GiantCorp's legal costs should we lose.
How does it work? Do you submit code or just input your answer as a number?
They've apparently been targeting ads based on things said in private messages. http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/01/facebook-sued-for-al...
I think this is wicked cool. Is the underlying desktop mouse based or optimized for touch?
Is there anything innovative or just fun in those?

For example, Gobolinux (now dead) tried to restructure the filesystem. NixOS (pretty obscure) tries to innovate with package management. Vyatta (dead, don't miss this one) tried to bring Cisco-like look-and-feel CLI for GNU/Linux based routing. And so on. What's fancy in those mentioned distros - I mean, except for the packages they have installed and/or pre-configured by default?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monstrous_moonshine
Thanks for the suggestions. This is our first AMA so it's a learning process for us as well. I didn't have any problems with Disqus' speed, but I agree it's not the best UX for reading comments (we'll be releasing a PDF with a summary soon), and dropping guest's comments is awful. We were able to retrieve two comments (they were initially flagged as spam). I'm not sure wether any other comments were lost. Looking into that.
You're lucky, I wrote a "DHTML" game in 1998 and it won't work today (although I didn't do anything fancy, just DOM manipulation).

I was thinking about exactly that a couple of days ago trying some WebGL. The web is a moving target and you're not guaranteed that anything advanced today will last :(

On the other hand I wrote a shoot'em up in C and SDL in 2003 and still compiles and works as well as it did back then.
Interesting insight on the design behind the Wii U.
You are NEVER forced to steal bread. Don't want to participate in gathering seeds and wild fruits for free legally and choosing to steal bread, not ok, ever.

I guess "essential" has many definitions, huh...
A New - And Reversible - Cause of Aging
I guess she's not important. What let you to suspect her?
Input your answer as number. There are people who solve problems by hand.
Certifications are nice, but that does not necessarily make people a good IT security specialist.

There is no clear path, but there are many facets to learn about:

* Web application security and popular attacks (such as https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_Top_Ten_Proje...)
* System and network security (learn to use BackTrack http://www.backtrack-linux.org/)
* Understand and learn how to use crypto: e.g. known crypto algorithms and what they are good for, learn how to apply disk crypto, learn how SSL works, know how you should do password hashing.
* Learn about phishing and social engineering
* Learn about malware, botnets, and zero-day exploits.

Learn about all of them but try to become an expert on just one of these subjects by playing with tools. For example, set up a honey pot system to capture malware. Then try to find the malware on it, and then try to reverse engineer it.
I cut-and-pasted the original title, which now appears to have changed.
the answer is a number
Cannot copy files into VM with Allow Enhanced Session Mode in Hyper-V 2012 R2
Digital Tools May Soon Make Business Cards Obsolete
Honoring robots.txt isn't a legal requirement, and I don't think a crawler can read or agree to TOS. Personally I'm in favour of anything publicly accessible being fair-game for indexing purposes, but this kind of news about database access makes me uncomfortable.
Is the math here sloppy, or is it just me? Third equation they're bringing out B(i) and K(whatever).

I made it through multivariable calculus and grads and so forth, but the computer scientist in me gets upset when I run into undefined or poorly specified notation.

"Oh," someone will reply, "You didn't know that B(i) is the Frogglegoop function for ..." and I'll say, "Nope."

I rage quit denotational semantics after failing to find definitions of the hieroglyphs in two different textbooks. If you're going to bring greek and single letter function names to the game, you could at least provide a symbol table, eh?
The number of programmers back then was much less than now, but even then I don't think Smalltalk was a top 10 language. I guess it depends on how you define mainstream, Smalltalk has/had its niches, some of which are still active. But there is nothing wrong with using research languages like self (which was never mainstream) to explore and develop new tech that can be applied to mainstream languages.
How to market your startup like Noah Kagan
Thanks for doing this. I agree Disqus isn't ideal for reading this many Q&A's. I think there's almost 50 questions and over 100 comments. Didn't see that coming.

We'll be releasing a PDF soon with a summary of all questions and answers. You kinda beat me to it hehe, but the format will be different anyway, more close to the original (giving question askers credit as well, etc).
I really like http://www.karmacrm.com - probably should have included that in my list
Show HN: Appiterate - Real time publishing on mobile apps using visual editor
Try it out and let us know how does it look!<p>You can signup for free to check the web dashboard as well.
Out of curiousity, why did it have to run in the browser?
> But I don't understand why you use the properties of the image creation tool to refute runtime properties of docker images.

I'm not, my concern is that the language used suggested that having a Dockerfile meant that if it builds for one person it would build for all when this isn't the case.

That's not a problem with docker, as it's not something docker is trying to (or claiming to) solve. I'm worried that some people might think it is, so thought I'd post here to clarify things.
Were they able to secure such a treaty, why would there be any expectation that it'd be meaningful?

After all there's and obvious disconnect between the various spy agencies and political process, with the former typically giving less than lip service to most treaties/laws in the past.
Swiping and reordering in lists of elements on touch screens
Motorola not withstanding, Google has a history of killing/closing well-loved products (profitability aside).

While I am not upset by this acquisition, I can certainly understand the sentiment.

I can't speak to validity of the top comment being only that aforementioned opinion, nor am I suggesting that sarcasm was inappropriate, but I think this only highlights the upvote/downvote mechanism as an I agree/disagree button more than a add to/ doesn't add to the discussion button.
Microsoft to kill Windows 8?
I view this as no different than backng up phone calls. And most people don't care to back up their phone calls. Just because you can doesn't mean it's always worth it...
Another good one for (more general) programming problems is Programming Praxis: http://programmingpraxis.com/
A long, long time ago when I was learning C++, I remember the Gobolinux folks were always happy to make new packages ("recipes" as they were called) for me and add them to the repo. In particular, I remember them kindly adding Code::Blocks. The people behind it were truly generous with their time, and Gobo had, in my opinion, absolutely outstanding ideas.

I do wish it took off.
These are a lot of fun to do, especially in a new language you want to play with. However they are as much an exercise of your math skills (mostly basic number theory and combinatorics) as programming. One thing I'd suggest is that you pick an algorithm reference and stick with it, if you google anything too specific you will come across one of the many sites where people have blogged about thier solutions.
So where, exactly, in China is The Island?
Ori -  a distributed file system built for offline operation
A dozen Project Euler solutions in a given language can be an excellent pre-interview candidate screening technique. Quite simple to check for plagiarism too, within reason.
Thanks for the note. I did try and optimize the site for phones and tablets, but wasn't able to test it extensively. Will look into fixing landscape mode shortly.
My fiance and I recently went through a bunch of our first emails and chat logs and laughed about it. The effort needed to keep this stuff is almost nil, so why not?
It's pretty unreasonable to claim fraud (charge back) if you buy a game and then someone gifts you...
English is not a strict requirement for programming; lots of people in countries where English is not so common, still manage to program perfectly fine. English does help to engage with the international community (where English is the Lingua Franca), though.
so far i've only tried free stuff like OWASP WebGoat, and some online hacking challenges (hackthisite, hellbound hackers, ...)

i also took a couple of CS security classes in school but they were not really "hands-on"
Stuff You Should Know is a great Podcast
That's true, but I think you can also differentiate between ARM and the more trolly NPEs in the basis of how much ongoing original work they do. Not all trolls are NPEs either. Look at Apple. I wouldn't say the whole company is a troll, by any means, but they've certainly done some trolling.
Checkboxes and radio buttons customization (jQuery and Zepto) plugin
The slowness problem when making an hybrid app (at least on iOS) is entirely caused by the javascript engine, since the webview doesn't use Safari's Nitro, so I don't see how rendering the page that way would make it faster...

Unless they are purely talking about websites, then I don't see why would they even bring app native/hybrid apps...
Mozilla Calls On World To Protect Firefox Browser From the NSA
Why not? - "we did not want to write a desktop app just for these features"
> So, just to play the devil's advocate: are NPEs by definition patent trolls? I can't think of a counterargument, but maybe someone else can?

There are lots of counter-examples. E.g. Mojave Aerospace Ventures (MAV): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojave_Aerospace_Ventures. It's the patent-holding company that owns all the patents for Spaceship One. It's a vehicle to intermediate between the major investor, Paul Allen, the inventor, Burt Rutan and Scaled Composites, and the various companies that will be commercializing the technology, namely the Virgin Group and any special-purpose joint-venture entities created by it.

MAV (and ARM, mentioned in a sibling comment), is a great example of why NPEs exist.[1] There is a lot of value in being able to take the products of expensive R&D, like the Spaceship One effort that won the X Prize, and being able to package that into a set of property rights owned by a holding company that can transact in those rights. It allows a division of labor that's very hard to achieve otherwise. And division of labor is a good thing, because it allows everyone to focus on their core competency.

For example, in the case of Mojave, you have the separation between the people doing the R&D (Scaled Composites), the people bankrolling the effort (Paul Allen and other investors), and the people doing the commercialization (Virgin, etc). In the case of ARM, you have a separation between the people doing the R&D (ARM), the people making SOCs using the basic cores (NVIDIA, TI, AMD), the people manufacturing the chips (Samsung, TSMC, GF), and the people using the chips in finished products. It's economically valuable to facilitate this sort of separation.

[1] Indeed, MAV is a better example than ARM, because it's purely a holding company. It does neither the research nor the commercialization, but rather exists to facilitate the involvement of the independent investor in the whole process.
Signify - openbsd sign & verify tool
I think the level of detail you have worked fine for the writing style, my comment is somewhat nitpicky. Your statement is generally true, if they use the dockerfile they posted then it's extremely likely to work for you too.

It was mostly a clarification for people reading that the dockerfile doesn't guarantee repeatable builds.

Thanks for the post :)
Official port of Bootstrap to Sass has been released
It was when the article introduced "Lebesgue measurable periodic functions" without any explanation whatsoever that I realized that I was not going to understand this article at all (at least not without spending a day on Wikipedia).
Welcome to Zappos-Style Health Innovation
Yeah, that sort of makes sense. But if that's the angle then web browsers are just another app accessing the internet. I don't think any of it is going anywhere.
Ask HN: Prominent Investor Same Name
I don't, but if I did, have a friend with the name "Ron Conway", could I have them invest a $1 in my startup so I can have their name in the list of investors? Or, would that be a death sentence?
GNU APL 1.2
A lot of Facebook users are making public posts without realizing it, and a lot more don't understand the ramifications (difficulty traveling, job risk, stalkers, ID theft, etc.)
A look at learning to program self-learning to bootcamps.