skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a lot of guessing and conjecture about how IBM deals with patents, so I thought I'd write a new parent thread to discuss.

I worked at IBM for 7 years, leaving many years ago. I am an IBM Master Inventor, having 36 patents filed with the USPTO with my name on them (some are still winding their way through the system). I worked heavily on patents for 3 years, and the last 2 years I was there, I was on the Patent Review Board. I'd also estimate during my active time with patents, I submitted 250-300 patent ideas to the board.

The Patent Review Board is organized along technologies - so, mobile would have its own Patent Review Board. People on the Patent Review Board tend to be Master Inventors and others who are active in the patent process. Once a week, about 3-4 hours of presentations are made to the Board (which includes the patent lawyers as well). After a 5-10 minute presentation, they are asked to leave the room, and the Board votes whether it should continue to the lawyer, or whether to close it. Most obviously are closed at this step with prior art. If it's voted to go to the lawyers, in my background, there was a pretty good chance it was going to get filed.

If your patent got filed with the USPTO, you got a point. IBM is very generous with their patent bonuses. You get $750 per patent filed. You also get an additional $1500 on your first patent filing, and $1500 every 3 after that. So, effectively, about $1000 per patent.

Patent ideas could be anything and everything. If they could patent it, they would. I remember from my time on the board seeing ideas on everything from dog doors to server optimization techniques to music devices. Given the people who work at IBM, most tended to be tech related, but it definitely was not a requirement at all.

The stuff people have asked about royalties makes me laugh as well - I never got the feeling once they cared if your patent would make them $1B or $1. And they certainly didn't care about compensating us for an idea that could make $1B. I was awarded the Software Group Patent of the Year one year, and other than an email denoting that fact, nothing was different than some of the lame ones I had filed.

Overall though, I thoroughly enjoyed every aspect of the patent process at IBM - it was one of the few outlets that rewarded creativity and hard work at the company.
I did a little googling, but am finding it difficult to find good clear information - do you have any articles where I can read about first-class patterns?
Assange was fairly boring in the end (maybe due to the technical difficulties), I hope Snowden will be better.

I'm not sure it's worth going to the virtual keynotes if you are at SXSW, I would have prefered viewing the Assange one from outside in live streaming.

Neil Degrasse Tyson was magical though.
That's really cool actually.
Serendipitous ideas – The story of Muzei Live Wallpaper for Android
The bullshit patents that IBM threatened to sue Twitter over were for url shortening [1], inline user-customized advertising[2], and diff-ing contact lists[3].

[1] http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...
[2] http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...
[3] http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...
Thanks for posting that! I started looking for an implementation that I could embed/distribute easier just the other day. I didn't stumble across this one and it looks promising. This is one area tools built on Ruby, Node, and similar platforms often fall short.
The CUPID drone strikes with 80,000 volts to the chest
It's very bad trolling if all you get is an informational answer. The distance between Cunningham's Law and Trolling is measured in tears per fact.

As the fact drops to zero the ratio asymptotically approaches infinity, at which point you have entered trolling nirvana.

As the tears approach zero you have entered zen, the world where all facts are made plain and understandable, and problems no longer exist.
Thought about it a bit more (was actually convinced for a second) but then I realized that that would mean lots of the other plugins would be depending on the YAML/JSON plugins as well. And when you have dependencies between plugins like that things start to get too complicated for the benefits I think.
For fairly small values of "implemented in C". In CPython 2.7.5, the list comprehension

[doc for doc in all_docs if doc not in results]

generates this bytecode (output by the dis module):

0 BUILD_LIST 0
3 LOAD_GLOBAL 0 (all_docs)
6 GET_ITER
>> 7 FOR_ITER 24 (to 34)
10 STORE_FAST 0 (doc)
13 LOAD_FAST 0 (doc)
16 LOAD_GLOBAL 1 (results)
19 COMPARE_OP 7 (not in)
22 POP_JUMP_IF_FALSE 7
25 LOAD_FAST 0 (doc)
28 LIST_APPEND 2
31 JUMP_ABSOLUTE 7
34 (whatever comes next in the program)

Let's go through it. Instruction 0 (BUILD_LIST) makes an empty list and puts it on the stack. Instruction 3 (LOAD_GLOBAL) does a global variable lookup and puts it on the stack. (If this occurs in a function it would be a local variable lookup, but this isn't important.) Then we start iterating over an iterable with GET_ITER and FOR_ITER. In the body of the loop we use STORE_FAST to set the topmost stack value to a local variable "doc", then LOAD_FAST to grab its value and put it atop the stack, then LOAD_GLOBAL to get "results", then evaluate the "not in" with a single COMPARISON_OP bytecode, then either go to the beginning of the loop, or load doc onto the stack again and then append it to the list we're building. And then go to the beginning of the loop.

Now, let's compare with the obvious non-list-comprehension version:

docs = []
for doc in all_docs:
if doc not in results:
docs.append(doc)

This generates some similar bytecode:

0 BUILD_LIST 0
3 STORE_FAST 0 (docs)

6 SETUP_LOOP 42 (to 51)
9 LOAD_GLOBAL 0 (all_docs)
12 GET_ITER
>> 13 FOR_ITER 34 (to 50)
16 STORE_FAST 1 (doc)

19 LOAD_FAST 1 (doc)
22 LOAD_GLOBAL 1 (results)
25 COMPARE_OP 7 (not in)
28 POP_JUMP_IF_FALSE 13

31 LOAD_FAST 0 (docs)
34 LOAD_ATTR 2 (append)
37 LOAD_FAST 1 (doc)
40 CALL_FUNCTION 1
43 POP_TOP
44 JUMP_ABSOLUTE 13
47 JUMP_ABSOLUTE 13
>> 50 POP_BLOCK
>> 51 (whatever comes next in the program)

The main difference here is that there's a lot more loading and saving of variables (e.g. the "docs" variable which was implicit in the list comprehension version), and things like the docs.append() method have to be loaded each time through the loop and then called, which slows things down some compared to using a single LIST_APPEND opcode.

I'm not really going anywhere with this; I just think that interpreter internals are fun.
Maybe the persons who downvote would love to comment on why?
Feedback and criticism are helpful..
Austin Police Department Warns SXSW Attendees Not To Use Uber
There Is No Time For This
The reason for that is that under the prevailing caselaw, companies can't be "inventors" of things, and therefore they don't fit under the clause of the U.S. Constitution that authorizes patents, which specifically mentions securing exclusive rights to an invention to its "inventor". Hence the legal dance where the inventors (specific humans who invented something) are named in the patent, but then they assign their exclusive right to the invention to another legal entity (their employer).

I think that might be a bit of a historical anomaly, though, related to when different doctrines were developed. Nowadays legal personhood is personhood-enough for most areas of law. One could imagine a court in 2014, looking at this issue for the first time, deciding that when a company puts a bunch of R&D money into something, and an invention results, through the actions of perhaps dozens of people working within the company's structures and facilities, it is in effect the company as an aggregate entity that has invented the invention. That might even fit a bit better (though still imperfectly) with modern scientific/historical understanding of invention, which generally views single-person "eureka!" moments as the exception, and collaborative efforts where some R&D "system" can be reasonably credited with the invention as the norm.

But this particular body of law was settled back in the days when the prevailing legal fiction around corporations was a bit different, so only humans can legally invent things. Due to the common dance around assignment, it doesn't make much practical difference anyway.
When patients are having MRI scans I ask them what they would like to listen to. Everyone says they don't mind. I usually reply "Excellent, Meat Loaf it is!" And surprisingly often get a positive response. That or a specific request.
You're right; I failed to consider the possibility that this website stores integers in the unobservable universe. My bad.
"DEC64 is intended to be the only number type in the next generation of application programming languages."

FFS, just because the designers of JS couldn't numerically compute their way out of a paper bag doesn't mean that FUTURE languages should be saddled with that mistake.
I will check them out - thanks.
That was never my intention.

My goal was to actively discourage all kinds of rote learning, and require real understanding instead.
What other 'better than TCP' protocols have been tested in very large scales ? Just curious I never hear of any real competition for TCP. (and the few times companies, say Google, attempts to upgrade one, it doesn't end up that much better)
Needed: Markov-chain creation of Bitcoin articles as-a-service.
Yea the college campus/alignment requirement is tough, but the "be able to create jobs in the first year" excludes many tech startups. Many won't need a non-founder employee for several years.
Well they are both designed to be knocked down/beaten up. The straw man proposal is your offering to the forum to beat and the argument is your twisting/manipulating an opponents position or argument to enable you to knock down the straw man and claim a win in the argument.
Containership.io – Simple docker container management
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Sorry about that! Just updated the Readme and website to hopefully make that clearer. And I've added Readme's to all of the examples[1] now too, some of which use the Javascript API and some the CLI.

[1]: https://github.com/segmentio/metalsmith/tree/master/examples
No .fm necessary for sextettes - the online dating site for music professionals.
This format is suicide from a numerical stability POV. It will lose 3 to 4 bits of precision for an operation with mixed exponents, whereas double will only lose one. Any kind of marginally stable problem, say eigenvalues with poorly conditioned data, will yield crap.
Wouldn't a secure cookie be enough for this?
I'd l̶i̶k̶e̶ t̶o̶ will drink beers with you someday.
Quantum timekeeping
Saw this about a planned successor called the SR-72. I wonder whether it is a serious project?

http://theaviationist.com/2013/11/01/sr-72-unveiled/
Not all microcomputer versions of BASIC used the percent sign to designate integers. The one I grew up using (Microsoft BASIC on the TRS-80 Color Computer) used only one representation for numbers, floating point (5 byte value, not IEEE 754 based).
Besides the MiG-31 and the JAS-37 Viggen, there are persistent stories about the gun camera footage from a Royal Air Force English Electric Lightning that bounced the SR-71 that set the trans-Atlantic speed record on its way into the Farnborough Air Show in 1974. (The RAF knew its flight plan in advance, so they sent a particularly "hot" Lightning F.3 out over the Atlantic: it tanked up, climbed on a ballistic trajectory, and bounced the SR-71 from above and behind. Much sniggering allegedly ensued, behind closed doors.)

The Lightning was a world speed record holder in its day, and had a ridiculous climb rate and service ceiling -- the RAF admitted to "over 60,000 feet" in the 1960s: they made intercepts on U-2s on a regular basis, and are confirmed to have hit 88,000 feet on ballistic profiles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Electric_Lightning#Clim...

(It's only with the introduction of the Eurofighter Typhoon II into service that the RAF has fielded another aircraft with the high speed performance of the Lightning, after a gap of more than 20 years.)
Believe it or not, it's actually deliberate. And not that uncommon in other languages too. The only way you can realistially have 'unlimited' recursion is to use tail call optimisation, which is deliberaterly not implemented in python:

http://neopythonic.blogspot.co.uk/2009/04/final-words-on-tai...

Is Guido's take on it.

Essentially, as I understand it, his take is that massive recursion is confusing, and 'unpythonic'. And with the whole 'explicit is better than implicit' thing, I guess there is a point.

Some times recursion is the best/most obvious solution, and then it is a bit annoying to not have TCO, but you can usually work around it.
Too bad you didn't finish it :)
If you sent me the email you drafted in #4, I'd ignore it. If you sent it again, I'd mark it as spam. Don't do this, it's a bad approach.

If you managed to get me to meet for lunch, didn't have anything built, but asked me for $1000, I'd ask you to pay for lunch and get back to me when you've built something that I could use for free for a month. Caveat - if you're the former founder/co-founder of Dropbox, Square, Twitter, etc... this rule doesn't apply. You want to be in the position where someone offers you money (without you asking) because the product is so great.
I didn't downvote either comment, but complaining about downvotes is typically the very most effective way of ensuring your comment blends into the background here. :P
So given Lockheed's track record on the F-35, we'll see this finally cancelled around 2040 (the first $1 trillion aircraft program) when everyone else has built similar planes better, faster, and more reliably.
"The company filed a document associated with a Series D round worth $150 million in Delaware this week"

I wonder what that $150M will be worth in Chicago next week.
Totally agree, however most of the times people designing programs can go back and fix what they did, while a chess player can't. So one may try to understand what's all this focus on getting it right the first time when the topic is programming? I mean, it is not a good idea to do the first silly thing, but something that looks pretty sane after some non trivial analysis, is probably a good path. Well IMHO the reason most of the times is "fear". Fear of wasting work, fear of other programmers looking at our code and realize it is suboptimal, fear of not being totally "Right". However because of this fear what gets lost is huge.
> The Apple v. Samsung and Microsoft v. Motorola cases also recently demonstrated that vague garbage patents are much more useful in court than technological patents. Juries and judges understand them better and are inclined to award hundreds of times more damages.

I don't think that I agree with this part especially if you are equating Standards Essential Patents with "technological patents" and all other patents as "vague garbage patents". If that wasn't what you meant I misunderstood.

The reason that SEP are worth less (than other valid patents) and not entitled to injunctions is because commitments were entered into by their owners to enable them to be included in the standard. And some SEPs are pretty low grade too and alternative approaches are often only prevented by the standard itself.
NY has recently taken up arms to make itself a more attractive destination for businesses and entrepreneurs. One of the largest strides that has been made aligns with this link, and is a marketing strategy that makes NY seem more startup friendly. It's unclear whether it's being targeted towards tech/software, which recently has become synonymous with the word "startup", or how much substance there is behind the cloak of marketing.

An interesting and relevant read is Paul Graham's essay on recreating Silicon Valley: http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html
Directory.io is not phishing. The chances of someone finding an adress that has ever been used by anyone ever, (aside from people sending coins to the first one for fun) is impossible.
Question - is it possible to have Chromecast play urls directly to flash files? For example youtube gives out embedded links such as "www.youtube.com/embed/26UvdxUII-0". I realize that isn't a .swf file url, but it works in my browser. Since youtube already has an app that plays to chromecast.. I'm more thinking of random flash players on websites.
I mean hey if we're going to be throwing away huge sums of money on useless military gear, it may as well look cool. OTOH maybe we'd be better served by underwriting all college tuition?
But this is Google, they don't need to make up a ton of fake names. They index the contents of the web and surely can see a ton of vcards and addresses on contact pages to run through their name rejection algorithm. Some of those have Native American names.
I've been using Python and Ruby on and off for a couple years (largely because I haven't found the need to use it seriously day job or side projects).

One thing that strikes odd for me is how people describe Python/Ruby are way more readable than Java.

I felt that Python, while more readable than Ruby (because Python uses less symbols), still contain more nifty tricks compare to Java.

It's true that the resulting code is less code but behind that less line of code bugs might linger around because there might be plenty "intents" being hidden deep in the implementation of Python.

The Python way that is touted many times is "explicit is better than implicit" seems to correlate better with the much maligned "Java is too verbose".

Anyhow, the other day I was refreshing my Python skill and learned the default implicit methods that I can override ( those eq, gte, gt, lte, lt) and I wonder how overriding those resulted in less lines of code compare to Java overriding equals, hashCode, and implementing one Comparator method than can return -1, 0, 1 to cover the whole spectrum of gte, gt, lte, (and even equality, given the context).

I suppose everything is relative...
“At this speed, the aircraft would be so fast, an adversary would have no time to react or hide.”

“Hypersonic aircraft, coupled with hypersonic missiles, could penetrate denied airspace and strike at nearly any location across a continent in less than an hour”

… sounds lovely.
Yeah, but you need that to do anything with binary floating point numbers, like a simple addition.
wish I could contribute. i got my wings (just a PPL) 4 years ago and the craziest two manoeuvres I've ever flown were: 1. a recovery from a spin. 2. turning back to my local airfield because my 2-year old son was puking like crazy in the back... now all these blackbird stories make me really, really jealous.
Using the passphrase as both the salt and password for the PBKDF2 step strikes me as suspicious, but as I don't do crypto for my day job I'm not sure how bad this is (or isn't).
You could just expand the mantissa to account for the base providing more range, though I do agree using a small base is better in general.
By principle, I noticed something that looks like selection bias: she seems to only criticize the decisions on wrong moves without comparing them to when he did well. After all, maybe he just spent one second on the good moves because his instinct is very good?

I know in practice he should have used the available time, but I wanted to underline the one flaw of the article; the rest is pretty good.
No, not at all. Where in my post does it say that?
Drive for efficiency has created drone economy
That's disgusting. They have stolen entire articles word for word. And received upvotes in the process.

In a way, they are being rewarded for stealing other peoples work. Sad.
Hacker News – HTML5 mobile friendly layout
C172 Skyhawk
But it can still bite you. I got hit with an IEEE 754 implementation detail that took me two days to figure out (http://boston.conman.org/2014/03/05.1). The same problem would exist with this proposal as well.

The summary: RLIM_INFINITY on a 32-bit system can be safely stored in a double. RLIM_INFINITY on a 64-bit system can't. I had code in Lua (which uses doubles as the only numeric type) that worked fine on 32-bit systems, but not 64-bit systems. It took me two days to track the root cause down.

(Edit: added summary)
Could this be used for space launch?
I'm not that familiar with military aircraft development timelines, but this stuck out as my favorite part:

A hypersonic plane does not have to be an expensive, distant possibility. In fact, an SR-72 could be operational by 2030.
If you like this story, check out Brooklyn Castle- a really great documentary about that school and its chess program- http://www.brooklyncastle.com/
(Paraphrase) "The technology underpinning the web pretty much sucks at this point"

Yes! I agree! I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

"This is my last column!"

Fuck!
But they both had some sort of breakthrough (which is exactly the exemption I laid out above).
Digital surveillance: How you're being tracked every day
Seems like a great way to widen the size of the city. Startups in the Bronx!
They expect delivery 'by 2030'.

I wonder if satellites and newer weapons wouldn't be able to intercept its flight path by then.

You probably wouldn't have to match its speed to bring it down, just throw up a cloud of junk in its way.
That's basically how I go with links posted on Hacker News or Reddit. Often I can save the burden of reading a terse article by reading the comments. There is always someone who has only read the title, who says something dumb; he is then quickly corrected by someone who did read the article and explain it thoroughly.

On the one hand, getting first to the comments is also good when the source is dubious. On the other hand, some article are definitely worth reading (which is usually easy to guess from the title or first comments), and it feels good to give back when you know what the article is about and can contribute to the discussion.
HN Turning into Aircraft News ? #SaveHN
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-Must be local to bay area
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" I have never understood the fetish behind Markdown"

For one, there are multiple (and good) implementations of Markdown in Javascript, so it's trivial to embed Markdown in web pages and do all the processing client-side -> faster and better user experience + much lower server load.

Pandoc a) only runs locally/server-side and b) requires a 200 MB Haskell install before it will work.
Part of what made the SR-71 incredible was Kelly Johnson's ability to keep the team small, fast, and focused in designing it. Not sure if that's the case here.
How else are we going to keep those efficient, upstanding private contractors in business?
Pronouns are fine. Substituting 'the first' and 'the second' would be an improvement. It's specifically 'former' and 'latter' that should be deprecated. I'd be interested in seeing a study comparing readers' comprehensions of the various phrasings. What cost in clarity would you be willing to pay?