skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fair enough, I've got a couple of questions for you though.

First, and perhaps most importantly, how did you arrive at a cost for filing a patent? I ask because there is a lot of mis-information out there spread mostly by patent attorneys that try to make this case. The actual fees for filing a patent are not all that high, however attorney fees are astronomical by comparison. Also did you know there are people who are registered patent agents (not attorneys) who can help you file a patent at a much lower cost? I guess the real question is how deeply have you investigated patents with available online resources before deciding they were not worth pursuing?

I've got just over a dozen patents issued to me, they range from the quite simple (protecting a laptop screen from onlookers using lcd glasses) to fairly complex (protecting executable code with bi-directional authentication). I've also been the advisor to a number of startups which have filed for and received patents. The most expensive cost was probably the bi-directional authentication one because it got the department of state involved (long story) but the first one was quite inexpensive, about $15K from deposition to issuance. Part of the expense can come from trying to patent something really broad (like "breathing air") which gets a lot of 'office actions' from the patent office for prior work and restatement of claims. That burns a lot of attorney hours and that is a lot of cost. For things that are narrowly claimed and there is little to no prior art in the patent database, they are very quick to patent and thus very cheap.

Now a patent attorney will advise you to "get as broad coverage as possible" to maximize the "value" of the patent. Which is good, but somewhat self serving advice. They will start with something really broad and the repeated office actions will pare it down into something much less broad, but arguably "as broad as possible." Also "as expensive as possible."

Not a lot of people who argue for or against the patent system have been through it, I've been through it as an inventor, an acquirer (due diligence), and expert witness (defender) of various patents. That experience has helped me get to the point where I've separated my opinions about patents and patent administration into two camps. The latter is problems with how they are vetted, prosecuted and defended, the former is about the concept of protecting the person who did the work from exploitation.

Given changes in the JOBS act there was some additions more cost effective ways to file patents that made it easier for folks in your position to file them. There are also systems like provisional patents, where you put down that you're going to file them in a durable way, so that if you go talk to BigCorp and tell them what you are doing, and they "steal" your idea and implement it, you can "steal it back" by asserting your patent rights to it.

I guess my point is that it is a lot more complex than "good" or "bad" and the information that is readily available may not always come from a disinterested source.
The Parable of The Mashed Potato Police
Your argument begs the question.

> Ultimately, I'd rather society cope with the human potential that occurs without the limitations of patents, rather than society coping with the human potential that occurs with the limitations of patents.

The use of patents in pharmaceutical research enhances human potential. Perhaps that is not the case in other industries, but that was not what I was talking about.

The pharmaceutical patent system creates an incentive structure such that companies see it as rational to invest billions of dollars over the course of a decade or more, with the expectation that they will enjoy a period of time after completion (funding, research, approval, manufacturing) where they can enjoy a return on their investment.

Without patent protection, when the research comes to fruition- all manufacturers can produce the drug at essentially zero cost (the actual industrial/manufacturing aspect of cost is a trivial fraction of total cost). Since the barriers to entry are so low, the product can be commoditized and the researcher's profit will be cannibalized.

> Given less control by corporations, I imagine time-to-market, mover advantage, and trade recognition would still be enough to create a very fertile economy.

This market is enabled by patent protection, not hindered by it. Without patent protection the pharmaceutical industry would be left with a free rider problem of disastrous proportions, risk aversion would sky rocket, and research will drift towards a race to the towards the bottom.

There is a more insidious consequence as well. No patent protection will decrease humanity's net scientific knowledge. Or at least massively retard its growth.

Without patents, companies are forced to rely on trade secrets. Secret formulas. Proprietary lock downs into perpetuity. There are no expiration dates on trade secrets. There is no scientific knowledge to be built on a foundation of trade secrets. This is almost like a bizzaro version of the software patent world-- where patents increase human knowledge, or at least put a down payment on it (relative to the alternative).
If you don't control them, they're not yours.
Its cute you link to status quo bias, then immediately state, like a fact from god that "braces and parenthesis _do_ become awkward (...) Coffeescript solves that problem."

It's your opinion that coffeescript solves the callback and parentheses issue. I'd also call your argument a bit of red herring.

... FWIW? I think futures do a mighty fine job of solving callback issues; no coffeescript needed. Design around them, don't make a whole new "dialect" for it..
I think the discussion would have been more interesting if Chad and Mitchell had been given the opportunity to rebut Dr. Burgess.
You have the same problem with historical global temperature data: weather stations tend to be in or near populated areas, which excludes oceans (70% of the earth's surface area) and huge, sparsely populated regions like the Arctic, the Antarctic, deserts, rain forests, remote mountain ranges like the Himalayas and Andes, etc.
Economist believe in the free market as long as its not the price of new money ie the interest rate. Then most economists believe in that a central planned system is better via central banks. That is strange to promote that the free market is best in one way but not pricing another goods.

I think that central banks manipulation of the interest rates are creating the boom and bust cycles. Like Hayek and Austrian economics. When the price of new money is wrong it will be wrongly allocated which in turn creates economic bubbles.
Ignoring some of the more ridiculous excesses, child safety measures are a balance that, obviously, shift as society becomes more risk-averse (puts a higher value in lives and safety). I enjoyed a very free childhood. One of my friends, in a similar situation, was killed (age 10) by a car when riding his bicycle home. For my own children, I try to err on the side of freedom, but stupid opinion pieces pretending the safety measures are all silly nonsense don't contribute anything useful to the discussion.
crypto cat requires a plugin to be installed in your browser. it's a good close option but not exactly one link away.
I see this assumption a lot in regards to Carmack's early work at ID. How do you know those marathon coding sessions didn't go like most do, where after 4-8 hours you start making more mistakes that you have to fix later? He seems to be able to churn out just as much code of similar quality now, when he only works a normal work day, as he did back then when he worked around the clock.
The smooth way would obviously be to invalidate all patents exactly 20 years from now. That's how long patents last. You don't take away anything from anyone. The only drawback is that it will take 20 years to implement. However, it will already have an effect much sooner - why filing for a patent in 2030 when it expires already in 2034?
Some people make (one sided) bets with their friends; if I don't follow through with this, I will give you X£, or something like that. That kind of commitment probably won't leave them feeling complacent.
They use the same logic to save time when uploading a file that has already been uploaded by another user. Check hash of large file, see if it is already on the server and then just link it to your account.
I live in SF and have a friend that lives in oakland. Always interested in possibly moving out there or getting a work space out there.
Most of the rise in commercial rents in SF is related to the non-linear economics of the top tech startups. If your business model is scalable enough (and you're executing properly), the vast amounts of available capital mean that rent is a pretty negligible expense.

The trend we're seeing in the prices of things that software startups need to pay for-- primarily talent and office space-- is that they're also starting to follow a power-law distribution.

I wouldn't be surprised if, in future, the most desirable commercial real estate and the most desirable employees start costing an even larger multiple compared to the median.
In javascript*

I think this highlights a problem with javascript more than OOP: We're trying to fit it into uses cases that are simply too complex for its design. It wasn't made to build your goddamn bank accounting system, it was made so that "nonprofessional programmers" could animate things on websites.

But it also highlights a problem it doesn't take about: Language in computer science and how it affects how we think about things.

In this instance, public and private are terrible names. They had to tell us in programming classes that they're not related to security, which means that the privacy metaphor is a terrible idea because it's not instinctual.

This in turn causes us to shoehorn class design into things they perhaps shouldn't be. At this point, for complex programs we should be describing things in a much more complex way than "accessible from the outside or not". As the article points out, it doesn't matter that the classes are external, because you can just as well break things from the inside.

This is a complex problem, but I think the beginning of a solution is to a) Depend on meta-information (or better implement a flexible, non-arbitrary "access" structure) and b) Use the right tool for the right job, in this case not JS.
This argument makes no sense. The only way that an ISP could rip people off this way would be if the standard unit of measurement across the ISP industry was e.g. bytes per second, and one rogue ISP listed their figures in bits per second. Thus, that one ISP would misleadingly appear to be 8 times faster than the other ISPs.

But in reality, all ISPs measure their bandwidth speeds in bits per second. Thus there's no ripoff happening -- if you compare the speed numbers from two competing ISPs, and they're both in bits per second (which they are), then everything works out fine and you can choose the faster of the two.

And anyway, it's not just ISPs or whatever. Basically the entire networking industry measures speed in bits per second. It is totally standard.
The crime problem is overstated. While it appear high on a per capita basis, cities are dynamic. The cancers that plague the city will be forced out of downtown and Jack London once business activity picks up, because that will coincide with an increased presence on the street of people doing things as well as more police (the force is less than half of what is needed).

Oakland has this very unique history of activism that really scares people into not investing here and even that is changing -- for the better.

Funny thing about $1,000/SF apartments in the city though...people start to re-evaluate their options. Even if you do not move your office space to Oakland, you can't beat the 15 min commute from downtown Oakland into the "city". Oakland will never really rival SF but it does not have to. Today, without much of a tech scene, Oakland has many attributes (big city amenities with a small town feel) that allow it to trump the city, including better weather.

I will go on record by saying that Oakland (core, around lake, downtown, Jake London, Uptown, etc) will become one of the most desirable place to live in the Bay Area within the next 10 years.
You can use GADTs for this. For example:

data Showable where
Showable :: Show a => a -> Showable

This allows you to create a polymorphic container like [Showable 5, Showable "hello"] where the polymorphic type is constrained to be a member of the Show typeclass.
The impression I have from reading the comments, seems to indicated that many believe Common Lisp not to have types !

With CLOS (and :before methods!), and optional type declarations, and the awesome implementations which do type inferencing, you tend to catch far more bugs compared to say, something like Python.

Yes, dear brethren, Common Lisp code (with SBCL) will not compile if the ftype conflicts with the inferred types of the arguments.

Edit:
Besides, the author, does not seem to have the same opinion about Lisp vs Haskell today.
They are _scanning_ your content!! Mobilize the "scropboxed!" campaign!
It is true that Haskell is about denotational safety (correctness) not operational safety (performance limits).

You do not need IO limitations for logging. You can use Debug.Trace

Haskell does have a heap analyzer. Like C, you can choose to compiler an instrumented binary with debug symbols.

There are a huge suite of tools coming around this year. Debugging and analysis has been a huge theme recently. Simon Marlow's recent book gives a taste, as does the latest Communities And Activities Report.
In that case, one should require working source code to be filed along with software patents.
I think you might ultimately have to explain and defend these ideas together. Bitcoin proved that a purely digital currency could have value alongside government-issued currencies.

To create a viable Strangecoin network, you'll need to demonstrate how a more cooperative economy can come into being and retain value within a more predatory, zero-sum society, where corrupting your network and exploiting it may yield rewards in US dollars.
Linux is used by 1.2%? That is a lot more than I expected.
So Haskell will eventually be able to do everything lisp does, but it's impossible for lisp to do everything Haskell does. I smell bullshit.

Both languages have their place. Sometimes functional and type-safe isn't the best way to go about something. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it depends on the programmer.

There is no One Right Way or One True Language.
The title is really misleading, he's saying it doesn't make business sense to make ports of games to Linux, and it doesn't... It's penetration in the market is very low.
A 31 Year Old Was Sick Of Expensive Rent And High Costs. What He Did Took Guts…
I've been building a game engine in JavaScript as an exercise for the past few weeks. Using IS-A for my base classes and HASA composition for various needed and shareable behaviours works wonderfully, is super testable, and makes sense. Seems like the answer in this case does indeed lie somewhere in the middle of two extremes.
Y'know, a lot of Windows games work well under Wine, basically 'cos the Codeweavers devs are also gamers ... I'm a little surprised Valve isn't adding to Wine, given that's the really quick way to get Windows games onto the Steambox.
Take a look at John Cleese's talk about creativity[0]. I personally buy into the whole concept of there being an open mode and a closed mode and you can't be in both at the same time. My coding tends to run in cycles. When I'm trying to figure out a problem or structure an area of code, I'm in the open mode and I experiment a lot. What I don't do is commit a lot of code during that period. After everything is nailed down and I have a game plan, I switch to the closed mode. That's when I code around the clock and bust my ass. But that lasts a day or two, max.

Maybe it should be work smarter, then harder, then repeat?

[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AU5x1Ea7NjQ
Google says government requests 'up 120%' in four years
Only self recursion, which is a special but common case.
I haven't directly cofounded a company remotely, but I've contracted at early stage startups (<5 members) multiple times from afar. They were always in DC or SF, I'm in NY. I'll no longer agree to do so, however. In fact, I no long freelance offsite at all, because I don't believe it's possible to get results of the same caliber.

The best ideas are born of spontaneity, and the hardest work of camaraderie. Despite the best intentions on all sides, remote hires don't feel either.

I remember staying up all night drinking and eating pizza hunched over a conference table, or slouching back after a brainstorming session that literally covered 3 walls of a room in marker, basking in an afterglow that can only be described as "post coital".

Remote hires don't feel that. I've felt it - I know what it's like, I know why it's good, and I know what it takes to cultivate it - but try as I might, it can't be replicated over a google hangout.

There's no agility. You can't see the light in the other guy's eyes, where you both pause for a moment and let the breakthrough sink in before passionately attacking it.

Startups are able to pull such great work from so few people because they're intense. They're hugely intimate. It can't be faked online.

I know there are ample exceptions to this. Whatsapp comes to mind. But, in the same way, there were those couples in high school who managed to make it work despite 4 years of distance, to the surprise of everyone around them. It's anomalous to the same degree. A lucky few pull it off, but most fail and slink away to try again.

If given the choice between a 9/10 employee across the country, or a 6/10 employee that's in the same suite with me, I'll take the 6 every time. Proximity matters.
"Big data can tell us what’s wrong, not what’s right."

from: http://www.wired.com/2013/02/big-data-means-big-errors-peopl...
Are Oakland's problems mostly caused by low per-capita tax revenues or by inefficient city government? If it's just a matter of cash, that will change quickly. If the government culture is broken, that can take much longer to fix.
I thought Actors does that, but not Scala in general.(?)
I want to clarify, the crime thing isn't the main thrust of my argument. Its an issue but not the one I'm addressing. My point is that a lot of the actual physical spaces I saw were outdated offices or Office Space style cube farms.
Clojure is really hard for me to use, coming from a lisp background. The various special forms seem to sometimes want a list and sometimes want a vector and sometimes don't care. I've yet to find a way to keep track of that.

Anyone have a link to something from Rich mentioning why vectors are used in basic syntactic constructs? It's the one departure from its lisp roots that I couldn't figure out any motivation for.
This article is about Uric acid + Chlorine producing Cyanogen chloride (NCCl), but a bigger concern in practice is Urea + Chlorine producing Trichloramine (NCl3). It has been suggested[1] that this reaction is responsible for the rise in asthma cases.

Also, it is responsible for some ignoble controversy around the new public bathhouse in my old home town. Apparently there was a perfect storm, in that the building both has a poorly designed ventilation system, _and_ inconveniently located restrooms which tempt people to...

No deaths so far, but several people complained about the bathhouse air making their asthma flare up, and when measured the concentration was above the health and safety limits [2].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pool_chlorine_hypothesis
[2]http://www.sydsvenskan.se/lund/kansliga-personer-varnas-for-...
Phew. I was beginning to worry that a whole month would go by without a blog post about CoffeeScript's deficiencies. I hate it when I write unidiomatic code in a language and then get punished by said language.

Now that I got my sarcasm out of the way, whenever somebody bashes CoffeeScripts variable shadowing they openly show the world that they don't understand how variable scoping should work. CoffeeScript covers up JavaScript's warts. One of those warts is JavaScript's broken implementation of closures. CoffeeScript is trying to help you, don't let your lack of understanding of lexical scope get in its way.
for computer storage bandwidth, the unit is bytes. for transmission bandwidth, the unit is bits.

i think this is mostly because on the network, transmission actually happens a bit at a time. whereas in a computer system, data is addressed at a byte level (wikipedia says it has evolved due to the fact that in the early days, a byte was used to store every character of text).

hence files have sizes in MBs etc, while ISPs have speeds in Mbps
I don't think it's fair to lump the biotech firms in with the tech stocks.

Biotech firms are different for a few reasons. Biotech firms have a very long lead time before getting FDA approval and can start making money. Therefore, it shouldn't be unusual that they are showing a loss each year. You can't create a MVP for a drug and starting selling it.

Second, the value of biotechs is firmly linked with IP. If the drug works, no one else can sell it until the patent runs out (usually 8-10 years after FDA approval). The valuations you see are not based on current revenue/profit, but rather potential revenue/profit once approval happens. Tech companies don't really have the benefit of IP that biotech companies have (someone can make an AirBnB knock-off and there is nothing AirBnB can do about it).

That said, I think the biotech stocks are getting really high valuations lately. There is a TON of risk in biotech stocks. If you're drug has bad side effects, you might not get approval and future revenue = $0. Not quite the same as tech stocks where you can still enter the market, you might not do as well as you thought, but you still get some revenue.
To be honest I'm not advocating anything. I'd like very much to live in a more enlightened age than this, but it's a good idea to understand how things work.

If you need money to do something you will get it from someone who wants to get back something (modulo risk), and the patent system is one way to transform ideas in value that can be traded. It's not the only way, and not all the alternatives are better.

My point was that as long as there is a real work behind a patent, people tend to show more understanding of the need of a patenting system, while being rightfully outraged in cases of patent trolls and/or plain bullshit.
It's still a work in progress. Right now if you trust the service to connect you to the right person, everything works out. However, they aim to make things work even if you don't, and the jury is still out about whether or not they can make a UI that reflects this safely. Furthermore, there are some anonymity issues related to the use of RSA to secure the SRTP connections.

The identity provider portion involves trying to sandbox javascript in new and interesting ways. However, most of the pieces are fairly well understood, and the breaks will happen because identity providers mess up.
It's really not a bug in Haskell that you ran out of time to learn what you needed before an arbitrary unrelated deadline. I hope you didn't let a silly grade stop you from continuing to learn.
Don't most users of the internet not have IPv6 addresses. I know my FIOS and business Comcast lack IPv6 support... I can only imagine that means everyone in a very large radius around my hometown are in the same boat of zero IPv6... That said, I agree it would be nice if the browser vendors handled networks that block all traffic that is not over TCP port 80 and TCP port 443, but I'm certain that it's because WebRTC is non-trivial and we have it's usefulness goes beyond peer to peer...
That's not very good. On all pages or just the process-list page?

I could add an option that disables the auto-updating. The only thing that's currently polled by a background thread is some network information from /proc/net/dev.