skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
U.S. Navy Explores Beaming Solar Power From Space
Patent systems are bad because they deal with concepts which are too vague. I don't think we can fix that.

Lets leave aside economic implications for a moment. What is an invention? Is it really different to a discovery. There is no good way to distinguish between invention and discovery because they're not distinct concepts. Distinctions are semantic, even in an archetypical example of patentable invention like Edison's lightbulb. Inventing a lightbulb is discovering that electricity can heat a filament, it emits light when hot and can be prevented from burning by placing it in a vacuum.

These are exactly the types of problems the law chokes on.
Yup, it definitely looks a bit better now. The eyes could also have reflection maps, but they should be properly shadowed or it looks weird. Eyes are hard, I've not seen anyone do them perfectly yet, even in offline renders.
As long as we're talking about professionals, Usain Bolt can sprint at 27 mph, well above 10 mph :).
The cost is definitely a fair point. We could definitely pay for it if it existed. We may not be looking aggressively for mentors' time, but more of a framework.

Or, to put it another way, is there a MOOC "course audit" form of YC?
To be fair, they do conclude the final installment with:

"...we need something better. I hope to share some thoughts soon on what such a solution might look like. However, based on feedback in the comments, we’ll need to discuss JavaScript linters first."
> What was the reason for creating the patent system in the first place? To give people an incentive to invent new things:

No, the point of the patent system is not to incentivise invention. The point of patents is to destroy trade secrets. The word "patent" means "open". The whole point of patents is increase society's knowledge of how to do things.

People invent with or without patents. What they don't always do without patents is to say how those inventions work. The bargain inventors make with patents is, tell us how you did it, and in exchange we promise to not compete with you for a while.

This is an awesome patent:

http://www.google.com/patents/US5255452

This is what patents are supposed to be about: a magician revealing his tricks. Without the patent system, Michael Jackson may have taken his idea to the grave.

The problem is that almost none of the people patenting software are magicians.
Sounds like that's his plan, judging by the end of the coffeescript article (which was published just 2 days ago)

"Realistically, the issues I have raised with CoffeeScript don’t come up every day. Ultimately though, they are enough to say we need something better. I hope to share some thoughts soon on what such a solution might look like. However, based on feedback in the comments, we’ll need to discuss JavaScript linters first."
American cities are the most dangerous in the developed world, by a large margin.
I agree this is a problem. From what I understand SCTP can be TCP and is more reliable but cannot be proxied via a TURN server since it's UDP only. I am experimenting with WebRTC and I built a fallback over websockets but I find myself encrypting the data client side to avoid trust issues because I don't have access to the encryption mechanisms baked into WebRTC. I think there needs to be a pluggable fallback mechanism when all the ICE servers are exhausted.
What Is This Thing Called Generators?
Right. Anybody who's been a first responder will recognize the importance of the request.
I really wish people would stop vomiting out articles about how Javascript, or some other language/framework je dure, is broken, and needs to be replaced, etc. It's just useless noise - a technological tantrum thrown because something they don't like is popular. Plenty of people are using Javascript, Typescript, Dart, etc. to build software, and somehow are doing just fine despite the relentless sniping of people who insist that their language of choice isn't perfect, and is therefore worthless.

Stop wasting yours and others' time writing and reading these kinds of blog posts and concentrate on actually building something worthwhile.
Even then, that still doesn't necessitate violence and solitary confinement.

Stop making excuses for bad behavior!
Cameras seem like a good idea, but training won't change anything.

Good engagement with citizens? The power is the draw to the position, not the responsibility that comes with it. Take away the power from the job, and see how many superheroes exist in the world.
If You’re Wondering What’s Wrong With Men, Here It Is
Use with caution. I was able to print my /etc/passwd file using /log/read.
> attribute the officer's behavior to constantly being surrounded by violence. If everyday, most people around you are violent unreasonable delinquents that want to hurt you, then you start developing personality characteristics to compensate and survive that environment

As I get older I wonder if there are certain jobs that everyone in society should cycle though, because they can be soul-crushing to do them long term.
How Spark does Class Loading
Read the police report (linked in other commments). Author was buzzed and buzzing around, and creatively left a few important details out of his story.

(not saying the police report is 100% of the story either of course)
The reason for creating a patent system is to encourage public disclosure of inventions. Patents came out of the enormous problems that resulted in the widespread use of trade secrets, which actively hindered technological development in the past. This essentially forces everyone to redundantly do a lot of R&D that has already been done under non-disclosure rather than incorporating ideas that have been publicly disclosed and using that as a starting point for further innovation.

We already see this in a number of areas of computer science, where the algorithm state-of-the-art at private companies is a decade ahead of the public academic literature. This basically has the academics in many computer science domains essentially trying to reinvent things that have been known for years as trade secrets at large companies rather than doing genuinely original research.

I do not think there is an obviously good solution, since algorithm patents are difficult to enforce in any case, but one of the trends resulting from a lack of algorithm patent enforceability is that almost all cutting edge computer science R&D is now done and kept as a trade secret by companies because it has a material commercial advantage.
"What was the reason for creating the patent system in the first place? To give people an incentive to invent new things: if someone invests the time in coming up with something novel, the legal system would give a temporary monopoly in return."

If someone invests the time in coming up with something novel, and discloses it publicly. If I remember correctly, public disclosure was the more important part of the original motivation for the patent system.

"patents are intended to facilitate and encourage disclosure of innovations into the public domain for the common good. If inventors did not have the legal protection of patents, in many cases, they might prefer or tend to keep their inventions secret."

That's from Wikipedia, but I'd be interested to see a better reference if anyone has one. So, to play devils advocate, given that motivation you can see an argument for software patents. Potentially a stronger one than for other patents.

It's much easier to obscure algorithms than other inventions. If an algorithm is not patentable, many companies might choose to just obscure the algorithm either by offering it as a service or obscuring the code.

By allowing software patents for a complex algorithm the method is released into the public domain in return for a limited monopoly. After the term of the monopoly, the algorithm will be freely available for use by everyone.
It's not an accelerator but rather a conference: you want Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman's BaconBiz conference in Philadelphia (http://baconbiz.com/), or the Business of Software conference in Boston (http://businessofsoftware.org), or Rob Walling and Mike Taber's MicroConf in Las Vegas (http://www.microconf.com/).

All three are for bootstrapped businesses. All three also have incredibly useful and non-fluffy videos of their past speakers online, well worth watching even if you can't attend the actual events.

And keep the faith -- the VC model has tremendous drawbacks for many people, especially those of us who are not willing to essentially become indentured servants. Bootstrapping is highly underrated.
Well, the guy definitely doesn't deserve all the followup treatment that he's rightly complaining about, but about that particular single episode it is quite clear - if you're given a lawful order to not hang around i.e., cross the street; for whatever technically valid reason (and not disturbing 911 ops == not hanging around == not only a technicaly valid, but a very very valid reason) - then there are two options:

a) you comply voluntarily;

b) you get made to comply;

c) there is no option c. (a) and (b) are both reasonable options, allowing to not comply is not a reasonable option.
OP was in a police van at that time, though.
Agreed, the buzzword 'Big Data' has nothing to do with the actual size of a given dataset except that it is about gathering as much data ( really metadata) as possible and finding novel ways to extract value from that data.
Yes, nothing here that's really exclusive to survival mode projects. I've experienced all of these on projects that were well funded, but poorly run.
I wasn't talking about manually adding in the assertions into the library code. The idea is that you would take the type declarations that people are already writing and have the Typescript runtime add some sanity checks to verify that they are correct. TS doesnt do that because it insist on not including any extra runtime code so if there is a error in a type declaration that problem might go undetected or onyly cause an exception in a different part of the code.

I can see that library versioning would be annoying but I think its more of a ecossystem problem then a technical one.
I was surprised that Porsche makes as much profit on 150k cars as VW on 4.7m cars (2.6-2.9b euros).
Ironically - he doesn't it's kind of the whole flaw in the series.

How is JavaScript a minefield? Well, JavaScript has all sorts of pitfalls lurking for the developer. Each pitfall is like a mine in the minefield, silently waiting for you to accidentally step on it. Just like the minefield, JavaScript’s mines are hidden in plain sight. Entire books have been written about all the mines present in JavaScript. Maybe I’ll get into what some of those are in future blog posts.

So then he goes into why Typescript/Coffeescript/Dart aren't the answer to the "Javascript minefield" though he doesn't actually describe the mine's he's trying to avoid. He's not even bothering to setup a strawman to knock down. Its kind of hard for any tool to solve an undefined problem.
Good comment.

1) You are correct that the system is designed so that users can make payments and conduct transactions even in the absence of an account balance, without incurring debt. Strangecoin allows users to act as if they have effectively unlimited wealth in terms of access to coin. Nevertheless, Strangecoin allows users to judge differences in influence on the network, so they might evaluate who they want to engage in transactions with, regardless of the account balance each has. So X might want to trade with Y instead of Z, even though both are able to pay the same number of coin individually, because Y's network amplifies the transaction more than Z's, and the better overall support for Y makes the transaction more attractive.

2) You are right that a fundamental constraint on the system is that TUA has an available balance. As I mention in the document, the most important constraint on all users (including TUA) is that their balance remains stable; users want to engage in transactions that will stabilize their overall impact on the network. TUA can adjust certain parameters to ensure a stable, nonzero balance: the basic income most importantly, but perhaps TUA can also adjust individual account caps and set limits on the allowable parameters of other transactions to ensure it has a constant, nonzero balance.

This is how I was imagining TUA being a universal indicator of economic prosperity of the network. If I see my TUA income go down, for instance, I know that means a drop in the overall available funds in TUA, which means the economy overall is offbalance, with more expenses than income. And I see that global property of the network directly in my account balance, and I can use that to act accordingly. Specifically, I know that if I increase my own income (or even hit the balance cap), I'll be helping the overall economy by contributing to the TUA balance.

3) Inhibition seems to be giving people trouble. Being "too rich" isn't normally a problem for people outside of hiphop, which I think is a source of the confusion. But being too rich in Strangecoin could be a bad thing, so I included the transaction type to provide a mechanism for negative feedback. This would be useful for some situations where users are finding it difficult to maintain an stable account, and where scaling back it's overall influence on the network might help promote stability. If I'm making more Strangecoin than I know what to do with, this could be a bad thing for me financially because of the penalties that might accrue, so I might want to enter into inhibiting relationships to ease the pressure of those penalties.
As I made plain - I couldn't read the original article. But let me see if I understand you correctly.
a) person A has a patent (which incidentally as a matter of law cannot be for just an abstract idea)
b) person B challenges the patent - I am not sure what the grounds for this challenge are because you don't specify them. Is it because B is claiming that the patent was falsely awarded because it was no more than an abstract idea?
c) person A disputes the challenge by pointing out that it isn't abstract.

If this interpretation of your comment is correct then I don't see how it is in conflict with my observation that abstract ideas can't be patented.
Because one of the key challenges of law enforcement is securing community cooperation. Law enforcement cannot be effective when hey are seen by the community as a hostile gang of thugs, and politeness is just a name for adherence to social standards than signal that you are part of the community and not a hostile outsider.
delayed: () ->
-> this.model # isn't the class

Well, that isn't really fair now, is it? You could have used the fat arrow (`=>`) for binding `this` to the class.

With that in mind, I agree with the author in that CoffeeScript isn't the answer, at least not exactly. With syntax this incredibly similar, how far are we from compiling python (with generators, with statements, imports, ...) to JavaScript?
There is definitely value to big data, but isn't it also a form of legitimizing stereotypes, at least in some cases? I mean, the general premise of big data, is to glean conclusions and new knowledge of the world from billions of records. When humans are the source of the data that is being extracted and analyzed, are the conclusions not stereotypes of those individuals, unless the correlation is 100%? This might be ok, and even useful, when trying to optimize clicks on ads, but what about when the government uses it to make policy decisions?
What's wrong with http://pyrasite.com/ ?
Same here, using the official one with Mono. It's a bit buggy, but still works properly most of the time. Do you use keepassx on Linux, and if so, does it work well?

KeePass is the program for linux I've found that fills in your details in the browser for you (short of LastPass, which I don't trust).
So when he says "that doesn't excuse what the officers did" you think he's excusing their behavior?
Thoughts on Berlin, Startups and Founders by Readmill founder
Except when the order is not lawful because the person is not "interfering" in any meaningful way, that is. Police absolutely do not have carte blanche to dictate what someone must or must not do outside of specific, limited circumstances.

Not that it matters, because the behavior demonstrated here and the current climate of the justice system (i.e. he-said-she-said vs a cop, you always lose) means that those limitations are mostly invalid. Police can order you to do whatever and if you decline, knowing that they have no right to say such a thing, you'll just get hassled and imprisoned anyways.
>You can't do that and expect to not get physically removed.

This is an excuse/rationalization.
That's a bit annoying. Hopefully someone will release a patch or something that keeps it from hiding.
There are a few projects, this is one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyjamas_(software)
Sometimes I think that most CoffeeScript, ClojureScript, etc. programmers are people who were advanced in other languages before they learned JavaScript. There are quite a few programmers who have no issues with these "bad parts" or "really bad parts" because they cut their teeth on them, and these numbers are growing: Most people now learn JavaScript as their first language. JavaScript already won, and things like CoffeeScript are the last gasp of the old regime.
Replying to facts with your own opinion isn't real useful.
Seems interesting, but I need to see some charts. I think I will use psdash + loadavg (http://loadavg.com/). Until now I was using New Relic server monitoring.
I think that this is probably good advice, and it's communicated clearly and effectively with a great metaphor.

But... I think it fails because it's ineffective. You have to talk about the problem, not the solution (http://katgleason.tumblr.com/post/47257463324/talk-about-the...). People don't trust a solution. They have to understand the problem itself, the alternatives, and finally, why the solution is the best amongst the alternatives.
^ This is a model HN post. Instead of contradicting and insulting the parent poster, it acknowledges the value in the contribution, and adds further clarifying information to correct minor errors.

Thank you!
I disagree. Why does that deserve a patent?

If a particular invention is created that realizes the idea, I agree that the invention should be patentable, but it sounds like your post advocates patents on scientific research.
What makes you think that the police didn't creatively add a few details to the story?
It's certainly something we could figure out. Work out the rough gross margins required to operate on that low volume, given their opex.
I'm certainly all for choice in development tools and I understand that there are people who like each of these languages. I think it is great that people are experimenting with all these extensions to JavaScript, both because they can inform the future of JavaScript or its successor and because eventually someone will come up with the right mix of features/changes to really supplant JavaScript.

That being said, for the reasons I spelled out I think the current crop of options are really lacking. I get that developers are going to use whatever tool they have to get what they need done, but I don't see why we shouldn't provide them great tools to do their work in.

I'm interested in a source for your statement that "Crockford loves Coffeescript". What I found was http://zhan.renren.com/h5/entry/3602888497994246013 which while very favorable sounds more like my statement that it is good things like this are happening. He concludes "I'm not sure there's enough of a payoff there. But just as an experiment, as a design exercise, I think it's a brilliant piece of work."
Copyrights and patents solve problems that look similar on the surface, but underneath are completely different. Copyright fixes the ease of theft of creative works, patents fix ease of theft of innovation.

What constitutes theft of creativity? Stealing Mickey Mouse is an extremely concerted act, you have to present a character that is intended to fool people into thinking it's Mickey.

But stealing innovation is much broader. Accompanying a software patent application with illustrative source code will not limit the scope of the patent to copying the code. It covers use of the method, not just the code.

If someone, for instance, applied for a patent by describing an electronic game in which a player controlled character collects tokens inside a maze while computer-controlled characters tried to capture him, and accompanied his application with a full working copy of Pac-Man, then the patent would protect him against clones as well as direct copies. The point is not protecting against copies, that's the job of copyright. The point is the clones.

Patent law is intended to safeguard innovation that one could say would not have happened otherwise.

As to why we need software patents, recent articles have described the legal situation better than I can in a HN comment. Basically there's no legal distinction that has been drawn yet between software patents and other types of patents, one needs to be properly described and that's the job of the Supreme Court. At one point they were banned because they were insufficiently distinguishable from mathematical formulas, which definitely are unpatentable.

Over the years, Congress decided that patents were getting too complex for the court system to properly adjudicate, so they created a separate court to hear patent cases. This court turned out to be friendly to big business and gradually opened the doors to software patents while the Supreme Court chose not to get involved.
> Your body and tissues are made to happily work with surges of insulin and there is absolutely nothing problematic about that.

then what is diabetes about?
Lol, I can't address every single one https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-lang...
As someone from the old regime (cut my teeth on spectrum basic in the 80's, get of my lawn etc etc) I sorta agree.

For years I avoided using javascript beyond wiring little bits of jQuery together because I hated the language but eventually I ran into a project where I could no longer do that and resolved to learn javascript properly.

Many wtf's where had but now looking back I realise that Javascript is a warty language (but then show me a widely used (top 10) language that isn't).

I still don't like it but I don't hate it and I just accept it for what it is.
This article proves not that CoffeeScript is flawed but that Jeff Walker doesn't understand how to use it. For instance, his first example is:

# BROKEN
func 5, {
event: (e) ->
if e.something
36
else
45,
val: 10}

Anyone with more than a day's experience with CoffeeScript knows that it's much better to express this with the simpler:

# far better
func 5,
event: (e) ->
if e.something
36
else
45
val: 10

Note how just dropping the excessive notation makes the intention clearer while also making the code cleaner.

His example on variable capture neatly illustrates a few of the opinions of CoffeeScript that actually make it far easier to reason about code: don't use global variables, and if a variable has the same name, it should refer to the same thing. It's far more confusing to allow rampant variable shadowing. Code that relies on variable shadowing is simply broken.

His last example shows a fundamental misunderstanding of not just CoffeeScript, but JavaScript generally. Granted `this` binding can be sometimes confusing, which is why CoffeeScript has a fat arrow (`=>`) to automatically capture `this`.
What is SSL and how does it protect you online?
Except for the patents that huge organizations already own, right? So they can go on using those to beat the crap out of each other and crush threatening offerings from smaller firms. Pick up the ladder after you climb it. Sweet.