skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In short, we are getting more or less a coin toss
> when it comes to patents being granted. And then the
> cost shifts to legal proceedings, and sadly the threat
> of these proceedings causes many innovative startups to
> settle BEFORE any trial. The trolls then cite their
> success in obtaining licensees as they go and
> intimidate more small victims in a legal racket.

I think we need a bit more evidence before we can make (or accept) the claim that granting a patent is a 'coin toss' (which for me implies that all patents are equally likely to be granted regardless of merit). My experience is that the number of "stupid" patents being issued, especially software patents, has consistently been reducing. Further the scrutiny that later software patents of which I'm familiar (two at Google, one at Blekko) were given a much more thorough going over than earlier patents I've been a part of. I attribute that to three things, one the number of examiners who are aware of modern technology is rising, two the image of the 'non practicing entity' as a leech is becoming accepted, and three politicians who supported a dysfunctional system have been made to look silly. All of those put pressure on the system to be better, as not to make people look silly or facilitate legal predation on small business.

Part of the reason this is coming to a head now is because we're at the opening of the great unravelling. The dot com boom, and the software patent equivalent of the Cambrian explosion occurred starting in 1995. The 20 year anniversary of which, and the maximum lifetime of any post GATT patent[1], is 2015. We will be seeing upwards of 10,000 patents a month expiring and that is only going to get faster. This leads to desperation on the part of NPEs to get some value out of their patent portfolio before it goes poof. Unlike copyright there will be lots and lots and lots of things that not only can you use them for 'free' but they won't be biting you in the behind later.

[1] http://patentlyo.com/patent/2012/05/how-many-us-patents-are-...

[2] http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/us_stat.htm
Thanks for sharing that link. This paragraph in particular jumped out at me in regards to all the efforts that have been made to rubber surface everything:

We might accept a few more phobias in our children in exchange for fewer injuries. But the final irony is that our close attention to safety has not in fact made a tremendous difference in the number of accidents children have. According to the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, which monitors hospital visits, the frequency of emergency-room visits related to playground equipment, including home equipment, in 1980 was 156,000, or one visit per 1,452 Americans. In 2012, it was 271,475, or one per 1,156 Americans.
> Unfortunately, Bitcoin does not solve a problem for consumers.

That's not true. It took a while to convince my friends, but now we normally use bitcoin to settle restaurant bills and other debts that used to be difficult to keep track of and error-prone. It's not a godsend from heaven, but it works and is much better than what we used to do.
Google Glass getting a stylish makeover
HealthCare.gov for Developers
Michael Lewis: Markets are 'rigged'
Mt. Gox clients are hopeless about their Bitcoins
Could you clarify your logic?
I think we'll be able to have great solutions to supplying our eyes and ears with believable virtual realities. But I'm not sure what we're going to do about our arms, hands and legs. I'm really interested to see how the experience on a VR treadmill is, I have a feeling it will leave a lot to be desired.
I was thinking more of the academic paper, actually. It's extremely cite-able.
Could be huge - given that China had it's biggest year ever in box office last year ($3.6 billion)
Or add a few hundred milliseconds of random jitter to the transaction time. This would remove any advantage to low-latency traders.
Because it wouldn't reward insiders.
1, 1, 1, 1, 1... Can you verify if this sequence is random or not?
You still lose. In your scenario, you are blocked out of buying the stock. And without a limit order, you get the stock but pay more.

Imagine this happened when ordering food. Sure, you could put in a limit (no more than x french fries and y per fry) but your price would either be run up or you'd go hungry.
The request can be signed and then checked for authentication on the back end. Using public key encryption it would be sent safely to the server and checked for authenticity.
I'm surprised they wouldn't have started with something smaller. Apparently this is one of the largest animals to have ever existed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apatosaurus
It took me many years to find an idea that worked.

I took jobs that didn't require many more hours beyond 9-5 (IE: boring programming jobs) and used my free time to work on business ideas.

Weekends were for friends and family. You need to learn how to balance your life, or it will be very difficult to succeed.
I am an Australian parent, and whilst I agree there's some liability-averse nonsense[1], the parks we go to do still have swing and see-saws. Maybe a different state or council?

[1] E.g. a local spot where kids would jump from a rock ledge into water. Council concerned about liability put up a 6' fence. So now kids jump from an unstable footing at a greater height - but hey, the council can avoid liability.
In many systems you can predict larger scale events (when the pot of water will boil) despite being unable to predict smaller scale ones (turbulent flow inside the pot).
"especially considering that owning a smartphone or other mobile device, with its monthly fees of network access, data plan, insurance, and app services, is almost comparable to the monthly payments required when leasing a Honda Civic"

It's not almost comparable. The author supported the position that money wasn't the driving factor (despite the substantial increase in youth unemployment among other obvious money-related data points), by proclaiming that $2,000 down and $300 per month to lease a Honda Civic is comparable to a $200 down + $75 / month smart phone cost.

On what planet are they comparable costs? Gasoline alone per month is more than the cost of a smart phone.

http://automobiles.honda.com/tools/finance-calculator.aspx
Cool thanks for the info. I don't actually use Dropbox's service but its awesome to see a solution that cares about the security of its users data.
Wtf is their a linked item on HN to a payed news site?
Exactly this. If you do not have a problem or product you are passionate about, then just work for someone else who is able to generate much better value out of your time.

Read earlyretirementextreme or mrmoneymustache to see how you can get out of the rat race as fast as possible, and get back into doing startups (if that's what is exciting to you)
please don't use HN exclusively for advertising =[
They should be, but that assumes docs about what PDF format is survive, and they'd know how to read media on which PDF is stored (which is much more scarcely documented - do you know how your HD encodes data on physical level?) and have compatible hardware or know how to build one. That's a lot of hops and failure on any of them may render the whole chain unworkable.

And, of course, magnetic media can degrade and be physically destroyed as well as dead tree media. There are standards for long-term storage, but most of the info is not stored that way. We find most routine documents from thousand years ago written on paper, cloth, leather, bark, papyrus, etc. but today's routine information would never survive even a century, only specially preserved data - a tiny minority of it - would.
Get friends who know how to do math, go to less expensive restaurants or learn how to divide.
Is there any reason in particular you're not using existing solutions, like Venmo or Splitwise?
HFT pushes incremental buy orders, which your sell order accepts (price discovery) but are canceled before they are filled. Knowing your limit, they then fill your order at your limit.

It's illegal for anyone to issue an order they don't intend to complete, but the HFTs get a pass for some reason or other that must end with quite a few zeros.
You're comparing apples to oranges here.

Predicting the exact type of precipitation in a specific locale is one thing. Extrapolating a global trend based on past data is another.

They don't need to know whether it will be raining next month in Istanbul to tell you that the world is warming at a specific rate and what are the likely culprits.
The sources that page cites do not agree with what that page says: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-i...
>They're getting their monopoly, what did we get? Zilch.

We get to buy a product that we otherwise may not have been able to. The original purpose of patents is debatable (just read this thread), but one cannot reasonably argue against the current understanding of their purpose, which is to encourage invention. Patents on (some) "obvious-after-the-fact" things encourage invention. Why bother to put in time and effort to invent something when BigCo. will simply roll out their own before you can even bring it to market?

Now I'm not saying all obvious-after-the-fact inventions should be patented, my original argument was against using obvious-after-the-fact as an exclusionary test. One should attempt to judge obviousness before it was proven to be viable using the given method, as an after-the-fact judgement is inherently biased.
In the simplest of cases, let's say a stock you are following is at 50.50. You want to buy it at anything under $50. It drops to $49.99, and someone cuts in front of you in line, and buys it. You miss the purchase, and the stock goes back up.

Multiple this millions of times.

This isn't to say they are all completely evil. They do provide liquidity as banks have walked away from equity. But there needs to be more transparency on what is going on. (For example - should it be legal to send false buy or sell signals which will be intentionally cancelled?)
I agree, but it just adds friction. Already, consumers are very comfortable using their credit cards. If you add the mental cost of thinking about taxes, especially when you have to pay capital gains when you pay for something (!!), that's a deterrent for most regular consumers.
Actually, I'd say that HN has too much politics. Almost every week or every other week someone brings up Basic Income (for the 500th time) and that spawns a 500-comment thread. Personally, I'd prefer it if Hacker News stayed purely technical (there are other forums where people can bash each other over politics all they want).
They are making mounds of cash, but their shareholders haven't been rewarded for the past 10+ years of it.
Yes, price variability (measured against USD) would deter consumers.
That's the relevance problem the author is talking about...
It sounds like that's exactly what the market needs though. That there is a "serious bias" against it, that exchanges don't want to have to explain the math to traders --surely the traders would get it?-- is at once understandable and irrelevant.
the wisdom is strong in this post
Not Belgravia, by any chance? We had the same thing at my elementary school in Edmonton!
Question for kasey_junk, seeing as s/he is taking questions :D

Lewis: "This form of front running is legal. It's legalized front running. It is crazy that it's legal for some people to get advance news on prices and other --[information on] what other investors are doing. It's just nuts. It shouldn't happen."

Do you agree or disagree with Lewis' assessment of the state of HFT?
What language do you write your trading platform in? What FIX engine, if any do you use?

Do you colo with a broker or go directly to the exchanges?

Do you arbitrage the roll of ETFs that track commodity futures (e.g., VXX, USO)?

Do you roll your own backtester or use an open-source or off the shelf one?

In general, what is the win/loss and Kelly's expected payoff of your various strategies? Do you aim for out-of-the-ball-park home run's or consistent singles? Thanks.
You don't have to have this random stuff. You can just do pro rata as they do in certain certain contracts on the CME. Though maybe it turns out that market participants actually prefer price-time priority. There's a shocking thought.
I find your point (2) very weird.

Child porn is strict liability (meaning, there's no requirement to show you did anything on purpose). The law generally doesn't require that you be aware of the legality of what you're doing ("ignorance of the law is no excuse").

Now, it's easy for me to believe that if you can show affirmatively that you received child porn by accident, for example through the unknown-to-you malicious actions of others, the judge might let you off, but that's not actually encoded in the law; the federal agents you mention have an accurate view of things.

Can you point out a case where someone knew they were in possession of or receiving child porn, but got off because they were under the impression it was legal?
Won't take off in the marketplace? Seems plausible. Doesn't produce novel experiences? Already false but maybe this can be spun convincingly. But the technology can't possibly work? That just seems silly.
Alas, and contrary to what others are saying, being from a working class background is an obstacle. If you would have had a legacy admission to Harvard (which you could have then most hip-ly dropped out of) and had a bunch of frat brothers with VC dads, it would have been a different story and everybody here knows it.

Escaping from the working class is a matter of luck, not hard work, and that's a brute fact of reality. So don't beat yourself up about it, its not your fault.

Whether you want to keep rolling the dice is up to you. Eventually, you would figure it out if you keep trying. And eventually you would flip 4 heads in a row if you keep trying. But it might take decades, literally decades.
So, A) you are making assumptions about fairness that no trader would ever make. There is literally no argument, mathematical or otherwise that you can create that would explain to them why the idiot in the desk next to them gets a bigger bonus than they do based on trade execution.

B) You are making assumptions about market information "fairness" that no trader would ever make. The exchanges have no problem explaining why some folks have faster information than others because they always have.

Pit traders had an advantage over phone brokers. Phone brokers had an advantage over which ever poor slobs they could get on the hook. No one on the exchange side of things thinks people all have the same information at the same time, if that was a requirement how would you time coffee breaks?
It doesn't.

If you watched 60 minutes tonight, or read the book, the problem was that a large trader (the guy they profiled ran the trading desk for RBC) would make an order for a large block of stock, say 400 shares of X, and then send that out to all of the exchanges.

What would happen is it would get to the first exchange and be partly filled and when it was the HFT guys would send trades on ahead to the other exchanges faster than RBC could and buy out the stock before the RBC order got there, leaving the order only partially filled. (or filled part at one price and filled the rest at a higher price).

In the story they mention that by restructuring how they sent their trades out so that they arrived at every exchange simultaneously eliminated the possibility of the HFT guys front running them.

In order to make it possible for everyone to do that they have created their own exchange (iEX) which locks out the HFT folks (well it has them going through an extra 60km of fiber to slow down their access).
Yeah, I remember that now. This is something deep inside him. I suspect it's inside lots of people of this age, growing up in the vapors of the end of the space age. He may feel a deep responsibility for making this happen now that he had the chance.
It would help to know why you're failing.

- Do your project ideas never get finished?

- If not, is it because of technical issues that make it difficult to get your product working?

- If not, is it because you lose interest or the people you work with lose interest?

- If not, is it because there are non-technical factors outside your control that you cannot successfully deal with (e.g. licensing agreements)?

- Do your startups not get traction in the marketplace?

- If so, is it because you're trying to unsuccessfully compete with a larger player in the field?

- If so, is it because you're not waiting long enough, or your expectations are too high?

- If so, is it because you've tried the standard promotional channels and nobody is paying attention?

- If so, is it because the market has shifted in the period between inception and release in such a way your product is now redundant or obsolete?

- Are your projects torpedoed by issues related to the people you are working with, if any?

- Are your projects torpedoed by the fact that you run out of living expense money before they have a chance to catch on?

Although all startups face some similar base set of failure modes, the challenges facing (e.g.) a robotics startup can be very different from those facing a consumer web-services startup trying to build the next Instagram.
First, make a calendar invite for yourself and your girlfriend. Call it "kriptonic career and family budget meeting." Make the event for an hour, next weekend. Send her an invite too.

Then go to bed and cuddle. Immediately.

In the morning, on the way to work, start to think about how you could reframe your plans on a twenty year scale, optimizing for happiness at home.
Yes, I'd rather stare at a pretty marvel façade than put my kids through college, too.

I'm all about sweat equity, but that payoff better be substantial.
I agree. But it's very difficult to find a system that is so appealing to consumers that they'll make the switch, simply because consumers don't have a payments problem. Incremental reductions in friction (e.g. the consumer won't have to enter their credit card details, or, the consumer will save a percent on their purchase) are certainly not compelling enough to justify changing a deep and old habit.

And a new system would have to figure out a way to mitigate the regulatory risk.
I recall climbing up our 2 story middle school's roof to look for tennis balls that we accidentally hit up there. I can't imagine that happening today. Same with climbing up our house's drain pipe to let ourselves in the 2nd floor window. And the list keeps growing.
Could some of the multiple people who down voted battani's comment please explain why?

For the application in question (settling restaurant bills among a group of friends), Venmo looks ideal. No transaction fees, easy to use and flexible, no exchange rate issues, it's operated by a company that is actually licensed as a money transmitter in every state of the US, and no tax collection or reporting issues.
Kudos to raiyu and nixgeek for one of the most civilized discussions among disagreeing hackers I've seen in quite some time! :)
Actually limit orders are a perfect way for HF Traders to fleece regular investors...for instance if you set a stop loss at a certain level and a HFT causes the price of a stock to drop precipitously, you'll end up selling likely at a loss for an artificial reason.

This scenario used to play out a lot during the 2008 financial crisis. I remember loosing money because of such tricks.
But I'm not buying food, I'm buying a stock--which, unlike food is a totally optional purchase.

My limit is the price at which I thought that stock was worth buying. If the price never falls that far, then I wouldn't want to buy it anyway.
Would anyone be interested in more ML stuff coming out of #SFHN? We have a new speaker in the pipeline wanting to speak to Simulated Annealing.
The false buy/sell signsls are a legitimate issue. Given that you can't easily make it illegal to cancel a limit order (after all people give up after a while) you could require that the order has to be valid for 60 seconds before it can be cancelled and that would put a huge crimp in the 'faking it' market.
If I knew in advance that they were friends, I would go to my current boss first. The future boss should suggest the same.
Unless they had an enormous amount of personal information, Bitcoin wallets couldn't possibly calculate your taxes for you automatically. At best, they might be able to calculate the potential trading gains and/or losses of your Bitcoin transactions (and even then there would be issues about how you divided your Bitcoin purchases and sales into lots and ...).
Consider using Flashblock. It's heavenly.
The basis for patents in US law is the only thing relevant to this conversation.
My experiences have been in C++, JVM languages and FPGA. I've used proprietary FIX solutions, Onixs, and QuickFIX.

I've always colo'd with the exchanges I've traded on.

I've never traded a US equity.

I've used both off the shelf analytics solutions and built my own. (I don't design trades typically, rather I write systems for folks that do).

I don't usually go in for deals that involve expected payouts of PnL. I build technical solutions for a fixed price for people that have a particular technical requirements set. I'm not sure I even know what a Kelly's expected payoff is.
Alibaba Will Pay $692M For 35% Stake In Retail Operator Intime
Then the cable company improves their service and everybody wins.

Wait sorry, I meant they toss a bunch of money to the politicians and they make those crowd funded ISPs illegal.
let's say that i purchase a bitcoin for $150. this is my cost basis. the next day, the bitcoin appreciates in value to $200. i use this single bitcoin to purchase a $200 camera. in this transaction, i have spent $200, but i only paid $150 for it. this means that i have essentially received $50 for free. the IRS wants to tax this "free" income. under IRS guidance, this additional $50 that you got "for free" is taxed at a capital gains rate (which is up to 20%). if the IRS had declared bitcoin a currency, this $50 in gain would be taxed at ordinary income rates (which is up to 39.6%). since we'd ideally like to be taxed at a lower tax rate, we wouldn't want it to be considered a currency for tax purposes because currency is taxed at the 39.6% rate.

it's also REALLY important to note that the way currency is defined in the tax code is different than how currency is defined for other parts of government, be it another arm for the treasury department (fincen for instance) or even the SEC. so even though bitcoin is not considered a currency in the tax code specifically, doesn't mean that it should be considered less of a currency. am i just talking in circles now?

i hope this answers your question.
you shouldn't rely on your hosting provider to secure/shred your data, do it yourself.

encfs is really easy to setup and use, everybody should be using it, especially on VPS's:

$ sudo apt-get install encfs

or:

$ sudo yum -y install fuse-encfs

then:

$ sudo encfs ~/.encrypted /home/private

the /home/private folder is where you place your files (web sites, etc.). ~/.encrypted is where the encrypted version is stored. when prompted hit 'p' for the default paranoid mode, enter a password and you're done. read more about it on the homepage[0]

When you are done with a server and need to secure delete, use shred -- which is installed on both RHEL and Debian based distributions:

$ sudo shred -fz ~/.encrypted
$ sudo shred -fz /home/private

[0] http://www.arg0.net/encfs
From what I've read, the problem of motion sickness present in the earlier Rifts (including Dev Kit 1) is mostly fixed in recent versions that incorporate positional tracking, because it reduces the disconnect between your head movement and what you see.
That's not the problem, it's more about remembering debts later, or needing to split the bills (wasting extra time) and/or not having the right cash denominations.

And there are plenty of other situations where you might owe each other money.