skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fair points although I didn't say Lodsys wasn't a patent holder ('generally' meant 'mostly' not 'universally') I think you overstate the density of patents in general software (at least of valid ones without prior art).

I agree expense of the US legal system that makes settling vexatious (Lodsys etc.) suits financially attractive is a real problem.

The 1.36% of revenue is for an aspect of the product that Google were not happy to remove or change sufficiently following a loss in court and includes an increase for willfulness. If I understand correctly it includes the key revenue maximisation process. It is not just for a minor UI feature and that is presumably why Google didn't just work round it. Yes the stacking of percentage royalties could be a real problem but that would mostly happen on standards if FRAND wasn't enforced and everyone stayed outside patent pools and claimed 2.4% of final retail price (Motorola/Google).

Regarding your article that does sound troubling although a large part of the problem seems to have been a dependence on winning some big deals. I do suspect that speech recognition is one of the patent heavy areas along with codecs as I mentioned, probably autonomous cars, audio and video tagging, watermarking and recognition. In these areas I would definitely want to be careful and perhaps apply for patents before proceeding too far (this would both mean patent searches were conducted and give something to defend attacks with). Alternatively I would be studying the literature and material that was 20 years old and documenting the process of obvious steps when combing approaches. Most software is not in these patent thick areas.

A proper list of dangerous areas for patents would be really quite useful...maybe an Ask HN topic?
Windows Azure, but it doesn't offer everything AWS has (though it does offer some stuff AWS doesn't have).

It's not cheaper though.
4 million songs on Spotify have never been played. Let’s change that
Completely disagree with nmc. They offer only basic (useful) services, don't touch investment banking at all, and in terms of success already contribute to a fair share of La Poste's overall revenues. Which doesn't mean they don't have room for improvement, to the contrary.
To me, pegging a bank to postal services is a no brainer given synergies etc.
Can someone explain the concept behind this? Some hosting providers are selling VMs which are already inside a VM for some reason?

That sounds odd, but I guess it makes their management easier, though tools to balance VMs between machines should negate the need for that.
A tool to ensure you get the correct (semantic) version for your project
Why Emacs Lisp is awesome for coding extensions
> 1958 - John McCarthy and Paul Graham invent LISP.

I can't stop laughing.
Italy has also slowly morphed its Postal Service into a financial institution. The Italian Postal Service allows to open accounts and issues credit and debit cards.

I can't judge the quality of the service as I do not live in Italy any longer, but I know that they have an advantage over 'normal banks': they stay open on Saturdays!
Looking for contributors to an open source ESB for node.js
And also previously on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3504010
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1327881
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5804907
To speak of evolution when your time frame is 2008-2012 is somewhat far fetched. But I believe I see a reassuring trend here:
http://porngram.sexualitics.org/?q=erlang%2C+clojure%2C+Ada%...
I don't mean to be pedantic; well actually I do. The spacify solution is incorrect as the sample suggests that a blank space is not replaced with 2 blank spaces.

A correct solution would be:

function spacify(input) {
return input.replace(/([^ ])/g, '$1 ');
}
Evolution of names.
That'd be great actually. Especially for those who're not able to reach Coursera because of the stupid laws.
This comment made my day :D
SwarmESB have a new and simple programming model. With swarms I'm hoping to make ESBs mainstream to normal programmers.

An ESB is a big and complex project and you can contribute in many ways: code new features, examples, documentation, tests.
HN Meetup  Shanghai
yes but this approach means the Pin code has lifetime of its card. If my girlfriend peek at me typing pin while paying in counters, I have to hide my card from her reach for 3 years just to avoid extra charges or ordering new card. :D

On a serious note, the bank staff who packs my Pin to send again will already know my Pin, how come this be secure. Shouldn't bank encrypt the Pin codes in their database? so, if I lost my pin they will issue new one and store its encrypted value in database?
The NHS has a lot more experience of anonymising data. They employ real scientists and statisticians. When they take pseudoanonymous data and anonymise it I am confidant that it is going to be hard to turn it into identifying data. They release it to approved researchers. And someone who deanonymises that data risks criminal prosecution - depending what they do with it.
If you eat a lot just few times a day here what is going to happen:

1) you stomach size will increase
2) you will eat less often
3) but you will eat more
4) you body will detect inability to get food often and will start storing fats just in case
5) you body won't be pooping incopmletely-digested food out. It's just insanely ineffective for survival. (unless you get diarrhea)
6) you will get fat

Please resume your regularly scheduled insane internet pooping conversation.
Meant to reboot my desktop...

[root@importantServer]# reboot

"Hmm... This is taking a while..."
Hmm. Interesting. I remember when I recently registered with a new doctor, I was asked directly if I wanted to opt out from my medical information collected by my GP being digitally accessible by hospitals, etc. I'll have to admit: I chose not to opt out. Thinking "it's about time they join us in the digital age!" Plus, from the perspective of my health, this seemed like a positive move overall.

Of course now that I read a bit more into it, I am less sure. But I do find the above link a little fear-mongery.

Incidentally, this document has some interesting insight into the position of the hscic. http://www.hscic.gov.uk/media/12931/Privacy-Impact-Assessmen.... I am a little tickled by this statement about preventing the data falling into the wrong hands: "The Government itself could be considered a pair of 'wrong hands' with questions raised over whether it would have access and therefore would be able to misuse or exploit the data".

Not sure how they're mitigating against that risk...
This reminds me of some people who try to do ASCII art in a proportional font in a plaintext email, which then looks completely munged on everyone who uses monospace fonts or a different proportional font. IMHO plain text files should always be read/written in a monospace font, as otherwise you limit the expression of the medium unnecessarily since ASCII art becomes no longer "portable".
The conversation seems easily solved: you just need to be able to raise the Glass screen/camera, like you would with sunglasses.

Seems like an easy design fix.
Turbo CORS – bypass preflight requests
Large testicles are linked to infidelity
You can vomit and get rid of extra calories after. This of course can cause much more issues in the future.
I found this blog post from the NHS chief data officer useful to understand how they view patient data
http://www.england.nhs.uk/2014/01/15/geraint-lewis/
One thing I've learned from jsPerf is that this sort of micro-tuning tends to be particularly fruitless in JavaScript. Even if a tweak increases speed consistently across the target browsers, there's no telling which will optimize what cases in the next few versions.

Basic things like caching DOM lookups are always good, but not so much the little things.
Lexbase goes offline following hacker attack
We need collaborators native English speakers, capable to create real hype around swarms by writing nice articles, showing proof of concepts. Also, we are open for collaboration with academic researchers to publish new articles on swarms!
Yes I appreciate that a service like AWS can't give you HIPPA of 21CFR Part11 compliance, only supply tools that can be used that way. What I'm looking for are examples (e.g. white papers) that describe how people have done it, preferably having been audited too.
Give www.draw.io a go. I have used it a few times at work.
I wish smartphone makers started embedding serial information in the EXIF too.
Obligatory link to http://funroll-loops.info/
> privacy is going away

The argument that fundamental civil rights will simply disappear in the face of "technological progress" seems utterly vapid to me. In fact, it sounds like a fundamentalist ideology. This argument is a thin is "we have nukes, so let's blow up stuff".

This is not technology that will make certain jobs or products obsolete. This is not technology that will simply change the way we do things. This is not technology that merely affects our social interactions.

This is technology that robs people of fundamental freedoms, freedoms that we've not only had since home sapiens first appeared, but freedoms which we have explicitly protected through laws and constitutions as technological progress has made it easier to take away that freedom.

A society where everyone can be recorded on video 24/7 without restrictions is not a free society.

If this is truly the "inexorable march of technology", I might consider becoming a Luddite after all.

The technology of Google Glass is technological progress, just like printing a gun with a 3D printer is technological progress. I don't think that automatically means that in 10 years time we'll be walking around shooting at everything that moves with either.
I live in Italy, and I would avoid anything and everything to do with Le Poste Italiane. I don't think their financial services are all that great either - the same long lines and unmotivated employees from what I can tell.
Yes. I have 10 people working on a code base. It's been more than a year since we started. Your hunch is correct, keeping a neat namespace is the job.
At least here in Germany, we had some scandals around organ transplantation. It's big business. And there is a difference between recovery treatment and organ preservation treatment. The emergency team could be under economic pressure when doing a triage.
My take on questions like these are that they most of the time focus on putting the focus on some niched skillset of the interviewer and has very little to do with real life problem solving. If a company hire based on how well a person scores on some niched test, I guess they will end up with a lot of internal nitpicking among the developer on who solves some obscure array sorting algorithm the smartest way instead of focusing on getting shit out the door.
The article also gives a possible explanation to why humans have oversized brains. “Just as the elk measures the size of antlers, we humans measure each other’s brains before we mate,” Peter Bøckman at the University of Oslo explains.

Two years ago the University of Oslo had an exhibition made by Peter Bøckman about homophilia in the animal kingdom. The new exhibition, named Sexus, about sexual behaviour is probably going to be an even greater success.
That's one reason I'd prefer that academics just put data into some kind of local university archive, where possible. Many universities provide resources to host scientific data (and have done so for decades, since the days of ftp.dept.university.edu servers), and putting it there makes it more likely that it'll still be there in 10 years. Torrents by comparison tend to be: 1) slow, as you rely on random seeders rather than a university that's peered onto Internet2 or the LambdaRail; and 2) unreliably seeded, as people drop off. Plus the workflow of "curl -O URL" is nicer than torrenting.

Universities typically have great bandwidth and good peering, and already host much larger data repositories than this seems to be targeting (e.g. here's a 30-terabyte repository, http://gis.iu.edu/), so they should be able to provide space for your local scientific data. Complain if not!
For me, it's the fact that tabs don't behave like single characters in an editor, so instead of moving backwards a single character-width when you delete one, there's a sudden jump, which I find rather disorienting when I'm editing code (or text files) that uses them.
Tease? I was just wondering if you'll improve the mobile experience - because now I have to scroll through a big header, newsletter signup, tweet button, the voters avatars and related links before actually viewing the comment thread.
I'm not convinced. I think not knowing that apply() and call() exist would lead to unnecessarily clunky code, but even after over a decade of using them occasionally I still sometimes have to look up which is which. My use of them tends to end up deep in library code rather than everyday functions.
The something else is: someone is lying, or she's two-fingering in between takes (likely).

At my peak, I was consuming 4000 calories a day doing some pretty hardcore construction work for 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. Even then, I could only eat 3/4 of a large Pizza Hut pizza for dinner (and not all that often).
Francis Maude vows to buy more IT services from small companies
"I think that courts, government, the NHS, and UK society at large would come down VERY heavily on any company contravening their contracts."

Supposing a leak happened. What makes you think you'll be able to tie it down to a single company? The data could be leaked anonymously, and the risk of such a leak becomes higher the longer this care.data scheme carries on for.
Bootstrap and the like made HTML/CSS a second class citizen for business apps for a while now.
Finnish way of IT ads: Heavy metal video filmed in 4K
And now, instead of 4 persons dedicated to postal services, we have 3 for banking and 1 for posting. So. Great.
Yes, yes, and one more emphatic yes. Mint.com never satisfied my needs. I'd like a double-entry ledger, and proper non-USD asset support[1] please.

[1] Not even GNU cash gets this right. See: http://www.mathstat.dal.ca/~selinger/accounting/gnucash.html
Respectfully - that's an EVEN LONGER message. You need a sentence. Ten words, tops.
Yup, I just ran the tests again and the results are completely different and what difference there is is basically negligible.
Interview with Ake Sellstrom on Syria Chemical Weapons Attacks
The patient identifiable needs explicit permission from the patient in order to obtain - please could you link me to the official document that states this, specifically in the context of care.data?
But bids can be done by anybody. Without any confirmation. So I'm still not sure about price.
For really good programmers, with passion on distributed systems new implementation for bus communication (now based on Redis pub/sub) or mechanisms for fail recovery,etc.
There are Google Edition devices from many manufacturers. Just keep those coming. It seems unlikely they would all choose to discontinue. Surely Google provides incentives.
True. I guess ppl of academia are used to "different" quality/snappiness levels ;)
I'd rather we turn some banks into postal services, personally.
Is this like the Japanese eyeball-licking trend? Find one or two weirdos and assume all the kids are doing it?
This is working quite well for the swiss postal system. Amongst other services (notably: public transport and a business solutions division), PostFinance provides financial services. Out of 6 divisions, the financial one accounts for about a tenth of manpower, a quarter of revenue and 60 percent of profit.

Such a combination opens up awesome opportunities for supply chain and working capital management: merchants in e-commerce can offload great parts of their business: Goods are received and shipped by mail anways. If you throw payment in the mix, as a merchant, all you have to do is guide customers to your electronic checkout. Let the postal service worry about payment, storage and fullfillment.
We have a Postal Bank here in Israel. It's generally considered the most honest, but simplistic, bank in the entire country.
with_bigfloat_precision(500) do
BigInt(1)/BigInt(9998)
end
I found this one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXl0HY3ujqA
The Belgian Postal Bank is like that too: http://www.bpost.be/en/index.html
Clearly, golang is getting traction. http://porngram.sexualitics.org/?q=erlang%2Cclojure%2CAda%2C...
This'd do better perhaps on the day of the talk, rather like the space launch streams are popular when they are actually live.
No investment banking? Good bank! Modern "investment banking" is just playing around with numbers, nothing which provides real value to the world economies.
The Pros and Cons of Development on iOS 7
As far as I understood it, Bill Gates was arguing that the worst of poverty is vanishing surprisingly well.

Kay says this is wrong, because the countries with intermediate economies aren't on the top yet.

I think the basic misunderstanding is that economic development - if it works - is a stochastic exponential process. Humans tend to underestimate this function badly. On the one hand it is very fast - after the US went from where Turkey is today to its current economy in "only" 50 years, but in every particular year, looking into the future, progress looks like a painstakingly slow crawl.
Actually, there are two spaces in the given example output as well.

Additionally, you could also use,

function spacify(str) {
return str.split('').join(' ').replace(' ','');
}

to remove the additional space.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=hardcore%2Clov...

Not the same dataset though...
In case you don't get much discussion, it may be because some of us have seen this before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2484160

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2500556

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4083115

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5162117

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5549393

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5612606
i only get Indian music :p
I would be terrified if "brainfuck" had a nonzero frequency.
Which is exactly the kind of attitude that gives nerds a bad reputation for lack of economic understanding...
"I could only eat 3/4 of a large Pizza Hut pizza for dinner "

When I took a vaction in the US the huge size of all things food suprised me a lot. I'd rather eat something of good quality than a lot of stuff of poor quality. (And I never should have tried fried pickles at BB Kings club).
No company is going to resell medical data. We have laws to protect personal information and they are very strict for medical information.

http://www.connectingforhealth.nhs.uk/systemsandservices/inf...

Have a look at some UK medical information and see if you can de-anonymise it.

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/subnational-health4/suicides-i...

Here's some data for suicide.

There are problems with confidentiality in the NHS - people leave patient records on monitors or send letters to the wrong address. But this kind of project is very different.
12 Useful Terminal Emulators for Linux
Omg, look at C. It outperforms everything... http://porngram.sexualitics.org/?q=erlang%2Cclojure%2CAda%2C...
Postcode, gender and birthdate are enough; not to mention NHS number and full medical history...
The python's one was my favorite :D.

I didn't know that, but as another commenter point out in another thread, part of he humor about pearl is that Larry Wall is really religious:

While in graduate school at University of California, Berkeley, Wall
and his wife were studying linguistics with the intention afterwards of
finding an unwritten language, perhaps in Africa, and creating a writing
system for it. They would then use this new writing system to translate
various texts into the language, among them the Bible. Due to health
reasons these plans were cancelled, and they remained in the United
States, where Larry instead joined the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
after he finished graduate school.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall#Education
Well, current postal services revenues (and outlook) mean that anyway you'd have to fire the 4th person eventually given high cost base etc. There's not enough work nor revenues for 4 people.
So diversifying is actually a good thing...
Perhaps if universities would robustly seed their staffs and students torrents?
2008 - John McCarthy and Paul Graham invent LISP.

:)
.. but check your registrar security, as it was only yesterday we had the story about godaddy allowing a domain to be stolen.
Bingo. The first consumer computer glasses may not be a mass hit. But persistence, innovation, tweaking, and competition will sooner or later hit on a design that sells.
Never mentions 'Web' in the title.
Still, when performance matters, C is the blows all the others away by large:

http://porngram.sexualitics.org/?q=erlang%2Cclojure%2CAda%2C...

Disclaimer: all puns intended
Aargh! Why doesn't it warn you if the link has been posted already..? Is there a way to check? I totally missed it.
Izu Islands – Gas Masks Obligatory (2011)
Dawkins in "the Extended Phenotype" argues that manipulation such as 'Sexual Mind Control' is very common in nature. One of examples that he gives is a female cricket that is 'programmed' to react to a male song. He writes:

'The object's internal chain of command — sense organs, nervous system, muscles — may be infiltrated and subverted. A male cricket does not physically roll a female along the ground and into his burrow. He sits and sings, and the female comes to him under her own power. From his point of view this communication is energetically more efficient than trying to take her by force.'
http://porngram.sexualitics.org/?q=btc%2Cusd
If they're a front-end developer and they don't know at least JavaScript, CSS and HTML, they shouldn't really be calling themselves a front-end dev.
http://porngram.sexualitics.org/?q=iphone%2Candroid
I never had the click about pointers, I guess the way they were introduced to me just made them feel intuitive.

I'll never forget the time when programming changed from mechanically entering statements, to controlling the flow of data through a program though (also in C). Definitely a brain-expanding experience :)
Let's be clear, the intention is for the UK Government to make money off your medical data.

If Seagate wanted to make money off your RMA'd hard drive and they thought the data on it would do the trick, you can bet it would be for sale on the open market.

If the law says that is illegal, Seagate does not have the option to change it. However, the Government can simply change the law to make whatever they want to do 'legal' and their problem is solved. That's essentially what they've done here.

Large 'healthcare' companies interested in this data are more than just health providers, they have multiple divisions with multiple competing and tangential aims and targets. Just because a piece of paper says it can only be used in one way, that is not going to stop the re-use (and leaking) of the data.

Remember the UK had bankers totally screwing the country and got rewarded with massive bail-outs - I don't recall any jail time for their bad behaviour [in the UK]; quite the reverse. Any social science student will be able to cite many examples of companies shielding individuals from the consequences of their bad behaviour - it's a whole subject area.

The UK government sets up QUANGOs specifically to shift liability and risk to prevent consequences; a Scottish care home where elderly people were burned to death escaped prosecution as the legal entity was simply shut down and dissolved prior to the court case starting [this did bring about legislation changes to close that avenue in Scotland http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-17740645]. There are dozens of ways to get away with abusing the data and walk away free - if you're going to make a lot of money, you can afford good lawyers to help you prepare well ahead.

Why would it be different for your health data ?