skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have not, but was on teams/worked with people that had submitted and were awarded patents. These weren't scientists or researchers. One was not even a developer. I hate to give too many details, as litigious as this "beast" (your word, good description) is, but I would say that a very large percentage are just junk/obvious crap. There are quite a few divisions within IBM and some are obviously very much dedicated to research and high-end engineering (e.g. IBM Almaden). You would expect patents coming from there. However, when practitioners in services divisions "reinvent" the wheel on something trivial, document it sufficiently and vaguely enough (especially after it has been through cycles of lawyer-ese) ... and patents are issued, it is laughable.

Here is an example of one that is not exactly it (for reason stated above), but similar enough to illustrate absurdity: Think of a Firefox plug-in that would let you right-click at a certain point on a long web page (e.g. on a word, a highlighted paragraph, anyplace .. that is a couple pages down on a long news article) and choose "Bookmark". This would save a "Bookmark" to your toolbar that you could later click and it would not only take you to the web page, but also scroll you to the exact spot you were at before on the page.

This type of stupid simple functionality ... would actually be patented by IBM. Yes .. that functionality had already really existed in one form or another, from multiple methods, yet ... no other company had the absurd gall and audacity to try to actually patent it. You would now search this patent # on USPTO.gov and read it and be amazed at how absurdly abstract and broad this vague function would be described. I would guess it would take you 10-15 minutes of reading and deciphering to even begin to realize what it was for (and would be as stupid simple as what I mentioned above). This is IBM's patent machine.

I can't speak for IBM's research divisions, but I know of no quota for other IBM practitioners (say in one of their services divisions). It is a "badge of honor" in someways (or so they think for some of those folks that submit this stupid crap) as you do have a "Patents" section on the internal profile intranet where it lists if you are a (co)-creator of any patents. Of they hundreds I've seen on people's profile, I don't recall seeing anything meaningful. Mostly of the type that we talk about in places like this as "Patent Troll" material.
This is one of the most disturbing and Orwellian articles I have seen recently. The only threat those people posed was to tell the truth about unethical and dangerous secrets.
author here. there is no transcoding. i wrote this to scratch the same itch. i have a media server which has a http interface too. plex somehow thinks it needs to transcode some videos despite chromecast being perfectly capable of playing them back as it is. i play such videos using this app.
I think that 'ninja/rockstar/ego-driven' technologists are sad in their own way. Somewhat differently than unseasoned MBAs though. There was a joke that was old even when I moved to the Bay Area in the 80's that you knew you were a 'successful' engineer when companies issued a press release that you had joined them, but they had no idea what you were going to do for them. And like most jokes there was a painful truth that for some people it really is all about them.

That said, I find it is also easy for me to fall into the trap of looking primarily at the excesses and sillyness and overlooking the cool things that get built. One of my long time friends is working at Intuitive Surgical and they are doing some really innovative and cool stuff that is not at all frivolous.
Sure, but a free market is utopian. Nobody wants to live in a world where the free exchange of money takes highest precedence.
"Incomplete" depends on the application. Markdown is intentionally a small and simple language, so it's fine for e.g. comments, but too limited for e.g. a full documentation.

(and as a result, it's tended up to spring numerous incompatible extensions e.g. TFA talks about Pandoc Markdown which adds tables, footnotes and a bunch of other stuff, not "Original" Markdown).

> somehow my AsciiDoc documents turn out looking better

Maybe it's just the default style of the Asciidoc HTML renderer, something like that?
True, but in a real free market monopolies and cartels quickly produce the same effect.
Casting a chrome tab typically means re-encoding your screen frame buffer, sending it to chromecast and decoding it there. Whereas this app merely pulls the video off the URL and decodes it in the chromecast. Your system has no load and it can even be turned off when the video is still playing back (although you'll have no way to control it).
There is nothing that requires Sass and other Ruby programs to be endemic to Ruby world. The programming language it is implemented in is an implementation detail after all.
Its just like the Stasi in east Germany.
can't beleive "liviva" wasn't taken as a mispelling of "Libia"
> ReST feels more well thought-out, generally.

It's certainly set up for extensibility, although some areas are a pain (e.g. blank lines may be ignored entirely, change vertical spacing or change semantics, that can be annoying).

The toolchain is also fairly complex and very badly documented (Sphinx itself is better documented than docutils, but either way you end up wading through piles of code to understand what happens, why, and what's available in the applicative context of your extension)
There's no lock in, but migrating away from Persona isn't quite that simple. You still have to educate users about the switch ("make a new password, and by the way, don't use your Persona password!"), then implement everything Persona provides: login form, password change form, email authentication, ...
For some reason, at width <= 480, it sets

word-break: break-all

which sets the character-splitting to CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean), where splitting between characters is OK. This should generally not be used on English text.

Perhaps the author meant to use

word-wrap: break-word

Which allows it to split a word that is too long to fit on a single line, instead of stretching/extending outside of the text area.
> He provides a reference implementation. That means this and many other details are defined by code.

I dream of a day when we stop thinking of "reference implementations" as proper specifications. The whole concept of a "reference implementation" leads to an entire class of nightmarish problems.

What happens if there is an unintentional bug in the reference implementation that causes valid (but incorrect) output for certain inputs? What if feeding it certain input reliably produces a segfault? Does that mean that other implementations should mimic that behavior? What if a patch is issued to the reference implementation that changes the behavior of certain inputs? Is this the same as issuing an amendment to the specification? Does this mean that other implementations now need to change their behavior as well?

Or, worse, what if there is certain behavior that should be explicitly left undefined in a proper specification? A reference implementation cannot express this concept - by definition, everything is defined based on the output that the reference implementation provides.

Finally, there's the fact that it takes time and effort to produce a proper specification, and this process usually reveals (to the author) complexities about the problem and edge cases that may not become apparent simply by providing a reference implementation.
Not a spec, but the reference implementation here: https://github.com/douglascrockford/DEC64
The best courses I took were ones where the lecturer published lecture notes. That shows the professor actualy created lecture notes!

Andrew Ng's Machine Learning lecture notes are world famous.
Pandoc and ReST are extensive, flexible, and simply complete. They are great. I have never understood the fetish behind Markdown and the cult-like fan-boyish approach to it. It was not needed. It would have been rather good to standardised an existing markup (or a combination of them) than copy the existing one and pretty much release it with a different name.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7366185
The last on the list, counterrevolutionaries.com, seems like it could be a useful site for some. First, start with bios grabbed from Wikipedia, then use it to enhance your opposition of your political enemies.

Cubadebate, for instance, could list twitterers as "necrophiliac counter-revolutionaries".
A straw man proposal is different than a straw man argument.
I guess I've a better chance at lottery
it's a prelude for hn for aviation, coming up soon.
Does anybody know the etymology of "Kriegspiel"? All I find are references to "Kriegsspiel" but nobody explains where the 's' went. Was it just a misspelling by those who popularized it?
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We are looking for engineers who take pride in writing reusable code with an emphasis on quality over quantity. The ideal candidate will be innovative — interested in applying new techniques and design patterns, but also fluent in current best practices and standards. We embrace the best open source, commercial and custom built software to help our development teams flourish.

As a part of our team, you will enjoy a vibrant culture that promotes innovation nestled within an established and respected institution. Inside our midtown building, you will find floor-to-ceiling windows, plenty of whiteboards, a sushi chef and a staff with a sense of humor and a passion for beautiful software.

If you are interested, please submit your resume below:

http://jobs.nytco.com/job/New-York-Android-Developer-Job-NY/....

http://jobs.nytco.com/job/New-York-iOS-Developer-Job-NY-1000....
Its a feedback loop, they make it to the front page, the submitter thus gets a bit of karma, so other folks hunt around and submit stories they think are cool. If you plot front page stories over time you can see this effect in action. If the topic is interesting to you, its "cool" and if the topic is not interesting its "annoying" :-)
It’s seen wider acceptance. Some argue even more so than LESS. Sass is very popular in the Drupal community, for instance.
There is a meta-issue going on in this discussion. Funnily enough, it has to do with nomenclature, but not of people. Specifically, the meaning of the word 'discrimination,' and how it can refer to two different concepts (intentional and indirect). I think this problem merits direct discussion on its own. I don't expect a comment on HN to solve the issue once and for all, but I would like to hear people's opinions.

So, I think it's a fairly common thing that people, with absolutely no intention of doing so, accidentally create a system that disadvantages some group of people compared to others. My question is, what term should we use to describe this action? I want to be able to bring this problem to the attention of the people performing it, without making it seem that I am accusing them of ill intent.

Quite a few people (myself included) are/were of the belief that "discrimination" is the correct term to apply in this context. (To us) the word "discrimination" is a description of effect, not intent. In a technical sense it only means treating two groups differently (it's a common term in systems analysis), without implying judgment.

Apparently, some people think that the word "discrimination" does imply intent. That's fine, words mean different things to different people, and I'm glad I learn that. But, that leaves me in a bit of a quandary: if discrimination is not the word to use here, than what is?

Right now I'm leaning towards compound terms like "accidental discrimination." I've seen "indirect discrimination" used elsewhere (as a UK legal term), but I don't like that one. If "discrimination" implies motive, adding "indirect" to me implies being sneaky about it as well.
Create your own responsive chatroom (chatcloud)
Why are you teaching a class for students who don't want to learn the material?
The blog theme was made by a Chinese developer, which is probably why that is set the way it is.
There are several good ones that I could see possible businesses wanting, such as "surfboarded"
Great hack!

Deeply trying to resist buying shlocky.com
Start-up NY
The boy with no eyelids
Ronison suffers from a rare condition known as the Fraser Syndrome. One of his eyes does not have an eyelid. He stays all day and night with his eye open even if he goes to sleep. The eyelid is very important to the eye since it covers and protects the eye. The other eye was covered by doctors when he was born with the hope of getting a surgery to give him an artificial eyelid which has not happened up to now
not sure if it helps, but have you try lawdingo?
I think I'm a pretty hard worker, I definitely feel the need to be productive, but every few weeks or so I have a moment where I say to myself, "You know, its just a friggin computer program, who cares?" And then for a day or two I coast a little bit, and try to get away from my laptop as much as possible. I guess this means I'll never be as good as John Carmack. Oh well, its worth it for me if I get to slow down and enjoy life every once in a while.
And with a little bit of trigonometry intuition on top of this, powers of i and Euler's formula become much easier to understand as well. Great ways to think about it!
Nobody reads Joyce anymore.
I suppose that Crockford is just tossing around this idea to test the waters. If he were serious, he would have to deliver a written spec of course!
Ask HN: How did you overcome your limiting beliefs?
All great people overcome their limiting beliefs on the way to becoming extraordinary. I notice this in just about every biography I read or biopic I watch.

So my question is, how did you overcome your limiting beliefs ? I have made a lot of progress in the last few years but still not where I want to be in life.

Thanks for any feedback.
Python list comprehensions are not lazy, though. If you generate [for x in xrange(1, 10000)] you'll get 10000 elements in your list. My understanding is that LINQ list comprehensions are that.

> I believe Python supports pattern matching other than Regex as well.

That's pattern matching on strings. The kind of pattern matching being discussed here is pattern matching on data types (see [1]).

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_matching
I agree with you, but the original description was that of a cargo plane turned into an assault platform. I was assuming the intention was creating something more along the lines of the Flying Fortress, but the AC-130 was the closest thing I could think of that's still in service.
Ars Technica just spun one up recently. It's for research and fun only. In fact they didn't publish the origin block so you can't solo mine, and they have the only pool! They have very interesting articles on the creation http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/03/behold-arscoin-our-o... and public launch http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/03/the-ar...
1. No. Assumption being that any thing "invented" while working for IBM, belongs to IBM. The developer does not "own" it. He/she is only listed as basically the "(co)-inventer". He cannot go to Google and "use" it with out licensing / agreement from IBM. Now .. it is plausible that an employee invented something totally on their own time while an employee of IBM. That said, if this had any value (now or in the future), it is entirely likely and plausible that IBM could make a case legally for having rights to said invention. This is especially true if your "invention" is in the same domain you work in for IBM (e.g. if you are a middleware developer for IBM Software Group and you make a new type of messaging technology .. on "your own time" in the evening/weekends).

2. This is a grey area that will ALWAYS be open to legal interpretation (enter the lawyers). There are different things involved in your question: Are there non-competes in your employment contracts?, are they actually enforceable legally?, will they be enforced legally?, what specifically is the "technology"? So .. this is not possible to answer beyond just saying: It depends. It is case-by-case and is balance between an business' intellectual property, any contractual agreements (non-compete) you may have signed, and your right to work / find gainful employment.
Generate random string from a canonical form useful for responding like humans
Airspace over private property is still public right-of-way.

Deliveries by pneumatic tube would be pretty great though.
Was looking for an excuse to play with Haskell threads, so I read in the dict, put it into groups of 500 words each, and then distributed each group to one of 200 threads to whois everything.
Was this sweeping pronouncement approved by the Central Committee for the Design of Future Programming Languages (CCDFPL), or is Crockford only speaking for himself?
Average SAT scores by family income
Ha—I think it's relevant information because it tells me to discount his ideas about numeric types in programming. An Appeal to Lack of Authority.
Assange Says NSA Holds The Power In The Obama Administration
>"Have they solved the 'you need the whole blockchain' bit?"

Yes.

Ripple servers only need the current state of the ledger (as opposed to requiring the entire history of transactions, as Bitcoin does). This eliminates the problem of needing to download GBs of history to run a server. You can optionally download the full ledger history if you want access to the data, but it is not required for your server to participate in transaction processing. It's a much lighter weight design in general.
A new Cold War is unthinkable, but much colder relations are very likely. This is a real pity.
> The comment that object pointers can be stuffed into the coefficient field (usually called 'mantissa') is completely non-sequitur.

Why? A similar thing is being used by some JavaScript and Lua implementations. It's called NaN boxing.
In the spirit of this law I just added Russian translation to the end of English article in hope that somebody competent would move it.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham's_Law#Russian_Tra...
Indeed, that is way smaller than planks length: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=is+2^-160+smaller+than...
The alt-coin NXT has a big problem with this. They pretty much _only_ support brain wallets. The clients have these giant warnings if you use a pass-phrase shorter than 30 chars, but it still happens and a lot of new users get their money stolen 3 seconds after they get it. Some new clients use a real wallet, but that move can't come fast enough!
Bitcoin whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto.
Best one I saw in here was "pledges," which is screaming for a fraternity-run social network.
I would hate if this became the only numeric type available in JS (in fact, I don't want it at all), but it's dishonest to quote "specification" as you have and then dismiss it as such, as it doesn't claim to be one, the word doesn't appear a single time in it, and if you go through to the github repo, the readme explicitly refers to the page as a "descriptive web page".

In fact, the only line of actual substance in your post is "For example, rounding modes and overflow behavior are not addressed", and it turns out that's only true for the descriptive web page, not the reference implementation.

> I imagine this project is inspired by the sad state of numerical computing in Javascript, but this proposal will surely only make it worse. The world certainly doesn't need a new, incompatible, poorly-thought-out floating point format.

I'll just quote pg here:

Yeah, we know that. But is that the most interesting thing one can say about this article? Is it not at least a source of ideas for things to investigate further?

The problem with the middlebrow dismissal is that it's a magnet for upvotes. The "U R a fag"s get downvoted and end up at the bottom of the page where they cause little trouble. But this sort of comment rises to the top. Things have now gotten to the stage where I flinch slightly as I click on the "comments" link, bracing myself for the dismissive comment I know will be waiting for me at the top of the page.
I really would suggest you look at Steve Blank's work.

You can take his online course (for free I believe) at:

https://www.udacity.com/course/ep245
A music notation startup's field-day Multiple music terms: Decrescendoes, diminuendoes.

What's your retention rate at decrescendoes? <add joke here>
I am sure they ran some sort of simulation first.

However, "the right engine inlet's automatic control system malfunctioned".

That probably wasn't part of their simulation. While it sounds like they could have erred on the side of caution and cancelled the remaining tests after that occurred, they must have been confident in their manual control abilities.

Even if they had simulated with the inlet(s) under manual control, real life airflow and reaction times are going to vary.
InstantClick seems to be using pjax? at http://instantclick.io/:

InstantClick uses pushState and Ajax (a combo known as pjax), replacing only the body and the title in the head.
I don't think this is necessarily an appeal to authority, for two reasons.

First, because some people will treat that authorship credit as a warning label rather than authority; that would make it ad hominem, not appeal to authority.

Second, because it actually gives useful context to some parts of this spec: "Oh, it makes sense that the author of a language without integer types would propose a spec that claims you don't need integer types". That's not a logical fallacy at all; that's perfectly reasonable reasoning.
Any one test this with any ad networks running? Clearly you don't want non-visible ads being called.
mocl derives from some past academic work, although not ECL. In spite of this, it is very much a new and unique implementation, and I have sunk years of dev time into making it a reality.

I may or may not be in the office Sunday... feel free to reach out (call/text the number on wukix.com).

The talk I gave at ECLM 2013, in Madrid, may be informative. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l44kiFp1EJ8
"An appeal to authority is an argument from the fact that a person judged to be an authority affirms a proposition to the claim that the proposition is true."

I don't think the person you replied to was claiming that DEC64 was good or bad because it was written by Crockford? Didn't feel like he was passing any judgement, merely pointing out who the author was...
Show HN: Social Share Counts: Add-on for Firefox
<same program returns empty list tomorrow>
I prefer to stay out of the legal cross-hairs of Big Blue ... thanks.
Nice! Just a reminder of what's not here (and thus is registered):

All but one of the English words in a 100k word list that is less than 6 characters long. Average English word length is about 5 characters. Kind of mind boggling.
http://www.logicalfallacies.info/relevance/fallacists/
Said reference implementation is written in x86 assembly. 1261 lines, 650 lines sans comments and blanks.

To be fair it is extensively commented, but the comments describe what it does, not why. And for fuck's sake, hundreds of lines of assembly is not a spec, even if it is most readable code in the world
Never attempt to intentionally invoke Cunningham's Law with a solution you wouldn't be happy with. Which is a more specific form of "never propose something you wouldn't be happy with", or "be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it".
I was planning on running it again tonight just for fun. There were 2024 to start with. We'll see what happens.
Domain Name: PLEDGES.COM
Updated Date: 19-feb-2014
Creation Date: 11-jan-2000
Expiration Date: 11-jan-2014

So it's probably in redemption