skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So basically, getting past the people who have no idea what they're talking about, the Australian Government wants some private company to sell them something similar to Gov.UK as a hosted service. Is that about right?
Does anyone know why the defensive patents were eliminated? If Amazon is being honest with the goal of this then that would have been perfect.
It's also available in Hamburg, Leipzig and other German biggish cities.
This looks like it's for product pictures

Products are usually photographed against an "infinite background" (usually white)
Google Maps Has Forsaken Us
I like how all the comments so far are defending the fact that the patent isn't quite as broad as the title suggests. Sure, they are patenting taking a picture against a white background when perpendicular against a... Who gives a fuck. This is a patent to take a picture against a whit background. There is no invention here. The only thing novel or unique is the fact is that some genius realized that with enough legal terms, you could patent a photo shoot. Shit America, get it together.
Instead of spending your time bashing PHP, why not encourage people to write "PHP the right way"?

http://www.phptherightway.com/
When I visited the university of Göttingen, it was everywhere. Students also seem to have it adopted as the drink of choice.
If there only was a sugar free variant. Having quit sugary sodas also meant having to overcome my Club Mate addiction. :(
True, but code is running. If it's not used, then the error won't be relevant anyway. I'm not talking about rocket, aircraft, power plant software. But even there, I never heard that any of those really critical domains use Haskell (or similar) in their control systems.
This stupidity need to be stopped ..
It definitely looks and feels quite a bit different now.
The mnemoneitoR
In the music industry, there are plenty of digital download services that offer convenient and reliable distribution of DRM free audio files. Yet it's commonly accepted that their business is still severely impacted by copyright infringement, ie. competing with free.

Services like Spotify make far smaller revenues than music sales, so can hardly be considered a success for anyone other than Spotify.

I don't disagree that rights holders should make their services as user friendly as possible, but it's disingenuous to infer that will fix the underlying problem.

I'm not sure what you mean by your final paragraph. Why would the public 'force politicians to move decisively against the film and television industry'? The film and television industry are the ones producing the content that the public want.
The Unmothered
I've seen it in almost every shop in Hamburg. In other regions it's more a few group of people that drink it. In my university it's quite popular for instance.
But you'd imagine (or hope?) decisions like this aren't being made by any MPs, who probably know little about IT.
depends on the version of windows you have, it may be built-in..https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-instance_storage
JQuery Practice with the Simpsons
I seriously wish you'd given a useful, content-full and considered response like this in the first instance, rather than just dismissing it. Then there could have been a discussion that dissected the source, rather than ignoring it. We could then have had a resource at which to point people who nod sagely and re-tweet thoughtlessly.

Too late, now.
A brief history of space flight – in numbers
Try living without tap Deuchars IPA https://www.caledonianbeer.com/beers/deuchars-ipa/ . :(
Free, open source alternative: http://octoprint.org/

Has most of the same features, and is working on slicing as well
I used to work for AGIMO, and I personally implemented the first version of australia.gov.au. Funny story: I got caught posting something on Slashdot that they interpreted as critical of their decision making (spoiler: it was, because their decision making was hideous), so they decided not to renew my contract. They still had me doing the australia.gov.au project though. I took what was, basically, a Photoshop document produced by some mob up in Brisbane, and turned it into something usable, accessible and extensible, with a strong focus on accessibility for visually impaired and disabled users and on old or non-desktop browsers. I had to fight every step of the way to fix the original Photoshop design to make it work, but I was vindicated when the site won awards... which were given to the mob in Brisbane.

Meanwhile, they had a grand opening at Parliament House to which all the media were invited -- and I was very pointedly not invited, presumably because they were worried I'd say rude things about them (spoiler: I would have). Then the leader of the National Party chose that morning to resign, and nobody from the media came to the launch party because they were busy over the other side of the House interviewing him. So I felt a certain degree of whatever that German word is for "serves you right, you bastards".

Meanwhile, australia.gov.au had a bunch of redesigns and is even better now, so the three guys they brought in to replace me obviously did good work...
It's everywhere in Budapest: http://www.clubmate.hu/#map
This is similar to my reaction: A patent for a focal length and ISO setting? How is this innovative?

Particular settings for otherwise standard set ups, do not seem to me to meet the bar. What's next: Patenting key strike patterns on our keyboards?
Groundhog is pretty awesome[1]. Persistent also works, but it does some wonky stuff on SQL databases. Acid-state is really neat! Of course, there's stuff like postgresql-simple, but that's not very type safe.

[1]https://www.fpcomplete.com/school/to-infinity-and-beyond/pic...

Edit: Also, esqueleto has a pretty okay looking hackage page[2], but I've never used esqueleto, so I don't really know.

[2]http://hackage.haskell.org/package/esqueleto
I'm curious what the minimum size of a .NET-native executable is.
Ironic: HN folks quibbling about a bad article title.
Its not about how narrow patent is - its still picture on white background. Such a picture with this specs might be done for art (picture art is huge part of modern culture) and afaik law prohibits patenting art...
I feel sorry if anyone breaks the patent by mistake and will get nice letter from Google that they need to get rid of their picture...
The taste reminds me of fig newtons and Worcestershire sauce.
This might be Nightly only. But in the Inspector pane of the Firefox dev tools you can right-click elements to set their focus/active/hover states. Doing so will also update the pane to the right showing any state specific rules that now applies.
Such a shame...
AGIMO is funny. It used to be part of the Department of Communications, then it got slurped up by Finance. The people in charge were career public servants, totally interchangeable with no real idea of what the org was doing. What they basically did was develop policy according to whatever the Minister said in Question Time, which frequently led to whole new projects being invented in a rush on a Thursday afternoon and made into unassailable policy by Monday. So in a sense, decision were being made by MPs. Though you're right, this doesn't seem to be suffering from the same problem.
Why would they get a letter from Google?
That's not necessarily true - thanks to the doctrine of equivalents, even if what you're doing doesn't fall under the literal scope of the patent claims you could still be infringing on it. (What's more, whether you're potentially infringing also depends on how exactly those limitations came to be in the patent claim.)
Oh those parasites...
I'm sorry, that's incorrect.

"Native apps" are ones that have been compiled down to machine code that's directly executable on whatever CPU or CPUs might be provided by the device in question. Ahead-of-time compilation is thus required.

As such, "native apps" cannot be represented solely in a higher-level code that is interpreted, regardless of how its interpreter may be implemented (this includes direct interpretation, JIT compilation, and so on).

Apps built using interpreted JavaScript clearly are not "native" apps, unless we're dealing with hardware that directly executes JavaScript code. The ARM CPUs typically found in smartphones today don't do that.

What you're describing is independent from the concept of "native apps". It's more about platform restrictions than it is about their capabilities. If an operating system like Firefox OS goes out of its way to not support real native apps, that doesn't mean that what it does support are "native" in any way.

I don't know if there's a good term to use instead, but it surely does not involve the word "native" in any way, given that that term already has very specific and existing meaning.
Let’s play “spot the 7 differences”:

1) Old: “Tabs” on top

2) New: “Search box” on top (the old one has a small search box in the bottom)

3) Old: “Browse bar” on left

4) New: Bigger Images with “<” and “>” arrows to rotate them

5) New: “Try prime” link in logo

6) Old: Shop in Amazon stores (Target / Office Depot)

7) New: Big yellow button to “sign in” on bottom (the old one has a link on bottom “Where's My Stuff?”, and a small link neat the top that is almost invidsible)

Don’t let the white background fool you. Probably each on of these changes was A/B tested and they earned a few million dollars with each one of them.
you're not selling it. ;-)
"image capture device equipped with an eighty-five millimeter lens, the at least one image capture device further configured with an ISO setting of about three hundred twenty and an f-stop value of about 5.6"

crazy. But very specific in some ways. 85mm lens is a great lens for this stuff and portraits. I see sales of the 90mm tilt shit increasing..

The diagram shows a person as a product. There is a lot of prior art out there for a lot of lighting setups, often diagrammed.

If you want to take better flash pictures may I humbly suggest
http://www.strobist.blogspot.com/
Wonder how this handles dynamic code generation (System.Reflection.Emit and the rest).
Show HN: Creating your own blogging site
My degree is in Digital Imaging Technology, I worked out of college for many years as the CEO of a film startup (stillmotion) that did quite well (way before I joined DigitalOcean).

This disgusts me.
Here are the idiots behind it(*potentially, as I've not talked to them, I can't confirm 100%):

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jeremy-sawatzky/6/8a/461

Gross gross gross gross.
There are tons of prior art out there to invalidate this stupid patent. Wondering what lawyers at Amazon where thinking when they filed for this patent.
A Few Bad Hair Days Can Change Your Life
It's not hard you click the address or press ^L and it exposes the entire URL the only time it introduces more work is clicking in the start or middle of the URL instead of the end
I have the same problem. I loved club mate but now on lowcarb I really can't drink it anymore :(
Category theory is pretty popular IME, I've seen lots of mathematician talk about it. It seems fairly popular especially with algebraic geometrists and algebraic topologists.

OTOH I've never seen any mathematician use (perhaps with the exception of myself, depending on at what point you start counting a person as "mathematician" and at what point you consider someone to be "using haskell") haskell. I doubt the haskell community actually has any mathematicians, it's mostly just people who'd like to be mathematicians but are too lazy to get a degree.

The overlap of mathematicians who care about category theory (some logicians, algebraic geometrists, algebraic topologists, ...) and mathematicians who program (mostly mathematicians from applied disciplines, numerical methods, computational physics, ...) is pretty much zero.

You probably won't find your algebraic topology professor programming in any language anytimes soon, except LaTeX.
It's probably written by Club Mate copywriters.
Well, about half of the people I introduced to Club Mate said the exact same thing - that it tastes like water from cigarette butts.

Haters gonna hate. I still love it. ;).
I reaslly wish they had gone with C#. That whould have been amazing. I wonder if MS would have even tried to start their own mobile platform if Android was already running .Net?
It's not always true in practice. See for instance:
http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?t...

Common List on SBCL is often faster than F# on Mono, eve though Mono is statically typed, as the former runtime has had a lot more work put into optimising it.

Or, compare F# on Mono with Clojure on the OpenJDK: http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?t...

Clojure again is faster, due to a more optimised runtime.
I have to say that I've had completely the opposite experience from the author. GMaps almost always find what I'm looking for in a timely fashion, I find the offline maps useful when I'm traveling to a different city, and so on.

One of my favorite use cases is having GMaps give me directions by public transit, especially if there's a metro, which is nice if you're in a new city and want to save a few bucks on taxis or Uber.

That said, they've definitely made a few changes I haven't been a fan of. For example, offline maps must now be refreshed once every 30 days, and if you're offline when the timer runs out you won't be able to see the map. (Previously there was no time limit.)
Stack Overflow was created in response to a site that was doing something similar to what Quora is doing with search engines, except that site required a paid membership to see the answers. I recall one trick that people used before SO was around, which was to spoof the User-Agent to be GoogleBot. Doing so would show you the answer(s) to the question. :)
AFAIK dynamic languages have gone away from compiling to native code because there is almost no benefit to it, if all you're doing is basically unrolling your interpreter into a unnecessarily huge binary. Methods like tracing JITs are much more effective at delivering good performance in the hotspots of your program.

The exception is when you allow yourself to annotate your code with type information, which allows you to eliminate a lot of the code you'd otherwise emit. Python for instance allows you to do this with Cython/snakeskin/etc., so the technique (that I think) you're talking about is applied there, because it is effective.
Hmm, I don't know. The small brewery that's making Club Mate here in Germany doesn't do any PR/advertisement.

It's also a hassle to get it here in Germany outside of Berlin. I'm living in a 300k pop city and there's only one store that sells Club Mate.

So I wouldn't really believe it to be some marketing tactics.
I also find the "taller is better" a bit unscientific. So, 10, 20 ft tall is better?
Actually, the biggest item is changing availability. It is a book that is likely print on demand. Availability should always be 1-2 days tops. By moving the availability out weeks Amazon kills any purchase but the most determined buyer.

EDIT
Also, if you read "The Everything Store", tactics like the above are common knowledge.
GIF Weekly – A free once-weekly email for gifs
From the detailed description, this is the problem they say they are solving:

> Prior art solutions for achieving such a result for capturing images and/or video of objects set against a true white background include solutions that often involve some type of image retouching, post processing, "green screen" techniques, or other special effects and image and video manipulation to achieve the result of an object set against a true white background. Accordingly, as will be described herein, embodiments of the present disclosure provide a studio arrangement in which an object can be photographed and/or filmed, and the images and/or video captured by the camera achieve the effect noted above without any image manipulation due to the particular arrangements of the subject, camera, lighting and background.

First of all, that's not true. You can buy various products on Amazon that do the thing they think they are solving.

Secondly, while other people have noted that to fit the coverage of their claim #1, you would have to be using a particular length lens, etc. They are just describing a typical portrait studio configuration. There is nothing novel about the configuration they are describing. Not the focal length, not the aperture, not backlighting to prevent objects throwing shadows, etc. Not one novel problem or solution.

The patent they refer to, 20030206735, is a patent for one such device, a lighting box. This patent refers to a previous Amazon patents for photographing against a white background. This previous patent appears even less novel and appears to be patenting lighting a backdrop to eliminate shadows. The other patents referred to seem to be irrelevant.

While I doubt the lighting box patent is really novel, at least there is a thing they are patenting. Both Amazon patents are patenting an arrangement of bog standard lights, backdrops, and cameras, arranged in obvious ways. There is no invention, no thing in these patents. If you still had to make patent models, the model would be... nothing!
I stopped reading when the screenshot showed AR (Arkansas) and he said it was Arizona (AZ). If you are that geographically challenged, even Google Maps can't save you.

EDIT: I forgot that a sense of humor is not an option here. Geez.
I am grateful that we are able to revert back to the old Google Maps for now. I hope that they keep this regression available to their users for a while.
" CyanogenMod is not perfect. It contains scripts that extract proprietary code necessary for some phone components (eg. camera) to work. The good thing is that these parts are firmware, thus non-executable code."

I'm either misunderstanding what is being said, or the author has no idea what they are talking about if they think firmware does not execute...
Shebang-line plugin for Emacs
An extension to insert shebang line for GNU Emacs
Upvoted for being cuttingly accurate and making me laugh out loud.

>> Sure, they are patenting taking a picture against a white background when perpendicular against a... Who gives a fuck.

PMSL. Come work for me.
No random limits: cdb can handle any database up to 4 gigabytes.

Am I the only one who finds it hilarious that the first thing after the "no random limits" heading is a random limitation?
The Australian Government CTO's blog post (on finance.gov.au - where else?): http://www.finance.gov.au/blog/2014/05/07/seeking-industry-c...

The draft Statement of Requirements for GovCMS: http://www.finance.gov.au/sites/default/files/GovCMS%20State...

Some notable tidbits:

- No analysis seems to have been done on the approach of hiring their own developers to develop a custom-yet-cohesive solution, a la Gov.uk.

- The CTO says "Drupal appears to offer the best enterprise-level as shown by our previous extensive analysis". Can someone refer me to this extensive analysis? Have they considered the security risks of standardizing on a single platform? http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list.php?vendor_id=1...

- "A solution hosted offshore would not be excluded from consideration" So, putting Australian Government infrastructure in the US is OK. Subject to US laws. Fantastic.

- Does anyone know if the government intends to contribute to Drupal development? They say that they expect some "feature rich" sites to require custom modules, but what about Drupal itself?
"Native" is not a marketing term, and we shouldn't pretend that it is.

It has a very specific definition in this context, and this definition requires that the application be represented in a form that's directly executable on whatever CPU is being used by the computer executing the application.

Anything that doesn't match that very simple criteria is obviously not a "native" app.

Maybe a new term is needed for describing this type of situation involving Firefox OS. I don't know what that would be, but I do know that we shouldn't go ruining an existing technical term.
May be a better way to read HN
Demystifying event driven architecture
I don't know if the U.S. federal gov can be said to have "standardized" on Drupal, but parts of it are still run on Drupal, including Whitehouse.gov.

However, there used to be more U.S. Drupal sites, including Data.gov...there was even some hubabaloo about them releasing the source code:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/12/05/datagov-goes-globa...

https://groups.drupal.org/node/194808

Viewing the source code of the current data.gov (view-source:http://www.data.gov/), it looks like the moved it to WordPress. That's a pretty damning migration.

Edit:

The current repo for Data.gov can be found on Github - https://github.com/GSA/data.gov/

Here's the shit-show that was apparently Data.gov's Drupal installation: https://github.com/opengovplatform/ogpl-d7

And quite humorously, it seems to be something that we're exporting to other governments, such as India https://github.com/opengovplatform/opengovplatform-beta
You know the best eggs in the world? Seagull Eggs.
The harvesting of them from the wild is highly protected and I've only ever met a few old boys who used to poach them but I've read a few places (wild cookery and survival books) that the finest omelette you can make is one made from shite-hawk eggs. Guess that's an easier taboo to explain, though. I've had swan and goose and find them both perfectly acceptable meat. The best way I've found so far is to salt cure the breast like pastrami - as the meat is so dark it's very much like a salt cured beef. Very tasty.
Wow - cornflakes! (can we patent that?)
Sorry, stupidiy stoppers ARE patented!
It has been my experience that nobody takes AGIMO seriously.

They do a lot of research, produce a lot of reports, publish a lot of "standards", and then everyone else just ignores them and stumbles on with whatever they were doing before.

The people who are already married to some solution will remain married to their solution; they will successfully argue for exemptions.

Those who are determined to use something else will use political capital to get another exemption.

Those who are forced to make the switch will make the switch, but the old system will probably hang around for a long time, more than doubling the overall cost due to double-entry and errors.

Some will make the transition, it will fail, then transition back.

In the end the government standard will be taken up by a handful of sites, AGIMO or its heirs and successors will declare total success, the Minister will have been rotated to something else or kicked out at an election and nobody will give two hoots.

Welcome to public sector computing! It's like enterprise, except even crazier.
Admittedly I only did a couple of years of law school before switching but...

...surely any evidence of prior use of the patent arrangement to the patent is a get-out clause for anyone being charged with infringement.

I can claim originality of a printing press all I want right up until someone can prove a printing press as I designed it existed prior to my design.

90% of patent investigation is finding anything even remotely close to what you are being taken to court for infringing.

I am certain a whole repository of photographs exist that used this setup prior to the patent filing.
New Tab Experiments
Australian governments exhibit a constant level of stupidity; it's just that the focus on stupidity is shifted around depending on who is in power.
...or how easy it is to break by doing a lot of reflection.
OP says that CC didn't reply. At all.

If true, I think it's totally reasonable to complain about that.

You donate to an organization because you want to support them. You responsibly report a data breach because you want to support them. And in response? They can't be bothered to take 10 seconds to type "Thank you! We'll fix this ASAP." Really?

My advice to OP: Next time you're fortunate enough to be able to donate to an organization, pick another one. It's not just about supporting good causes, it's about supporting effective organizations.
Twitter CoFounder Biz Stone Tweets Crazy Nike/3D Printing Prediction