skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Personally, I think Jefferson's take on patents illuminates this subject pretty well:

It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body.

http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/presidents/thomas-jefferson/letter...

The thing is, there are good arguments for many aspects of patents, copyright and trademarks, however to try and establish them under the banner of Intellectual Property is both inaccurate and damaging.

In the long run, the pushing of IP is to the level that a Google search for "Mickey Mouse Law" lists the first result as the Copyright Extension Act https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=mickey+mouse+law is the factor that might lead to laws being dialled back so far that patronage will be the only option.

The reformists are the IP industries only real hope at this point, because if they are not paid attention to, then the abolitionists will win the argument.
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Out of curiosity iTerm or iTerm2? If the latter what is crap about it?

I have one huge gripe that I haven't been able to fix but its not that huge a deal. Every so often the terminal will lose its mind and start displaying mouse escape sequences. Nothing resets it out of this state, have to close whatever window I have open and start anew. Not a huge deal due to tmux but annoying enough to frustrate.
YouTube to Acquire Videogame-Streaming Service Twitch for $1 Billion?
The suburbs being affluent does nothing to alleviate the problems that Detroit faces, which are largely having to do with a lack of taxes, because those suburbs don't increase the tax base of Detroit itself.

They're the people fleeing the problems of Detroit and leaving it to burn while they watch from next door.
I lost 20 kilos by working out, but not the way you think. I just felt guilty eating fatty foods afterwards, because "then that whole hour of boring workout would be wasted".
Google's algorithm already analyze if a link is useful or spam. They can simply ignore the links that are spam and count only good links. But, Google decides to punish the websites caught in the fire. If your website has a link Google does not like, Google can penalize your website along with all the websites that link to you or you link to them.
"This is a case where google wants people to mold the internet according to what their current incarnation of their algorithm says the way it should be"

You do realize, of course, that Google is part and parcel of the internet, and that much of the way the internet works "in reality" is in response to external perceptions of how googles algorithms work?

Google's early dominance in search was a result of their algorithm's ability to surface relevance. If they had never staked out that Site A linking to Site B means site B has more relevance, then the internet would be an entirely different beast, and SEO would take entirely other forms that do not amount to linkstuffing.

The internet hasn't existed 'naturally' since search engines first came around.
If you think that's bad, I heard a story about a guy at the local TAFE (Australia's Technical and Further Education) who annoyed all his classmates. This being the 90s, they were still using floppy disks.

Well, one day he annoyed the class a little more than normal. When he went for a bathroom break, they took his floppy disk, removed the magnetic media and replaced it with a circular sander. Sanded the heads right off his FDD when he got home.
Personally, I think there are other ways to fund intellectual creation like this than to return to patronage, but I want to lay out a hypothetical since your comment intrigues me.

In a world where we had a basic income guarantee, you could think of that as basically universal patronage. Sure, artists and other "thought workers" might not make as much money as others, but it would be a viable way to spend your time. And, actually, you could probably even make more money since the stuff you do in your free time would act as effective advertising for hiring you for your services (e.g. a commissioned work, or consultation etc).

Would you have any objection in principle to such an arrangement? I ask because it actually sounds pretty nice to me.
McDonalds sponsors nutritionist convention
Can't disagree, but computer science is in serious need of less but better and well known, highly reliable software development standards.

Something universal that makes us confident enough to say: If you follow this process you'll ALWAYS get the work done in the predicted time frame, and this will not happen: http://ykyuen.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/howprojectreallywo...

One of my software engineering professors used to comment often that if architects and structural engineers didn't had those procedures, 9 out of 10 bridges would collapse and there would be no way to guarantee the remaining 10% would be fit to handle x amount of traffic on any given day.

Software engineering is a new science, not thousands of years old like bridge building, so we are taken our first baby steps towards that kind of efficiency and reliability. TDD is one of them.
No, people should be skeptical of arguments made for things and pursue further scrutiny of them regardless of the author's views and opinions in other non-relevant fields.

Not that I'm supporting his other radical views but this is an ad-hominem attack by definition and his views on irrelevant subject matter should not affect, in any way, how you interpret his opinion here.
What does that mean? The government pays... itself? How is that different than no insurance?
That won't happen. Comcast + Verizon, perhaps.
System package managers conflate the stuff that is needed to run the system and what the developer builds with. They do badly in handling several different versions of libraries, they add latency of up to two years and only a subset of the packages are available. And when you are done you have to uninstall all the crap you installed instead of just blowing away the virtualenv (or whatever mechanism the language has).
Thanks for putting in the time and effort. It makes we wonder the state of other code we rely on from that era.
Gophercon talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2VaXnRhob0

Gophercon slides: https://github.com/gophercon/2014-talks/blob/master/petar-ma...
If you are criticising CrossFit because it's not tailored, then you should criticise pretty much all the gyms out their that offer classes. Your yoga class, boxing class, P90x, etc ... none of it is tailored.

You need a coach to assess you and write up a program if you want a tailored program. And even then, you need to ask "Why?". Do you need extra rehab work for an injury? Have a specific goal in mind? Do you train for sport?
When people say "free and open", that's context enough to know that they mean free as in freedom, not as in beer. Please stop using this silly red herring.
Doubt there will be any regulatory grumbling since it actually increases competition in the "triple play" space (Internet+Television+Phone). My hunch is that AT&T waited until they thought the Comcast + Time Warner deal was a virtual certainty before pulling the trigger on this. Who this will put more of a squeeze on is content providers (e.g., Disney/ESPN) as they now have to deal with two juggernauts.
Sorry, George H.W. Bush now counts as a "wingnut"? Or were you referring to John Roberts as one?

HN is not /r/politics or the Daily Kos. Try to keep the rhetoric polite.
A friend of mine told me his startup idea once (he wasn't pursueing it then, but he thought about it a long time and had created a small prototype in paper).

I was just honest and came up with arguments why his niche market wouldn't pay for his product (he thought the governement would pay for his product). If he was truelly sure about his startup, i wouldn't be able to convince him. Neither would anyone be able to convince me :-)
Matt ...it is clear Google has no way of dealing with search past the no follow attribute. Is there anything cooking to make search good again without no follow?
Dead on, good job.
I could certainly see this happening... It makes sense given Square's rough time with going public.[1] That being said, I'm surprised Square would jump on this so soon and not wait longer.. (Much like Andreessen suggests).[2] If any of this is actually true.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/report-square-ipo-unlikely-in...

[2] http://nytimes.com/blogs/bits/2014/05/18/marc-andreessen-on-...
Great demonstration of "toy level camera tech" 14 years ago!

The interesting thing about the sensor in these things (Mitsubishi M64282FP) is that it has an analog output, so it's capable of much higher bit depth than in Nintendo's implementation of it. There are various other (mostly robot vision) projects using it that you can find on the Internet, and you'll see that the images are far less pixelated.

I also think it's rather amazing how much the tech has progressed - 15 years ago, the cost of a 128 x 123 (there's 5 black lines probably for BLC) - 16KP - monochrome array fixed-focus sensor module would be around the same as a 5MP AF colour module today, of the type used in smartphones.
or split a cable sub with someone and use it to log into live events. everyone wins!
Can be a big time saver.

For any package manager to work painlessly and to scale, the repository must be able to detect name conflicts on the code level.
Really? It often seems like the original PageRank algorithm was using links as a measure of content quality and relevance, and now everyone claims they are. But thanks to SEO, we saw that was false (homework question: would it still be true in an Internet where all actors are committed to creating "good" content?). I think links are independent of content quality (or rather search result ranking, because quality is subjective), and we need better AI based solely on page content.
> I prefer not to BSD-license my works because then copyright could be used against me to take my rights from me

I agree with you about GPL now vs. ideally no copyright, but one thing that would definitely be lost is the ability to coerce releasing source code. Companies in a hypothetical no-copyright future could still keep source code secret, and still release compiled/obfuscated software. They could still take code others had released, make modifications, and then only release obfuscated binaries. They wouldn't be able to sue if someone leaked the source code, but is that enough of a protection?

Personally, I'm willing to live with it, because I think in the long run people would rather share. But from, say, RMS's point of view, people are losing some measurable level of protection.
I use lazy in the positive sense, I'd actually forgotten that it had negative connotations when I wrote the above.
I honestly didn't perceive it as "free as in freedom" in the above context.

That said, roads aren't that, either. Try driving on one without a license, insurance, using them in ways that are disapproved of / disallowed (speeding heavily, drinking and driving, etc) to see. Alternatively, use the road to play a game of football. I don't really think they're "free as in freedom", either.
> law-of-the-jungle amorality

What we want to avoid is actually the much more destructive force of the 'modern civilization' of organized corporations, like the East India Company.
CEO of Cisco needs to write an open letter to the public not Obama. He can start with the importance of the 4th Amendment to America, Americans and Cisco.
That Secret was posted last Sunday, with predictable results.
AT&T and DirecTV Might Further Consolidate the Pay TV Industry
Reading the comments from Matt Cutts here, I see the worst is ahead of us.
Join the FutureAdvisor Team. We're Hiring Engineers.
I think a big attraction of cross fit is it's group fitness training that you don't have to think about, you just have to show up. You can switch crossfit philosophy with traditional weightlifting philosophy and I bet it would become fairly popular.
It seems many people have a habit of using Comic Sans for formal/semi-formal stuff, even though it was inspired by comic books and designed to be used in Microsoft Bob. Lately, it's become yet another way for typography hipsters to put people down and feel smug about themselves. Scoffing at typography hipsters scoffing at bad typography is just the latest plot twist.
things are definitely changing. downtown + midtown are nothing like they were just a few years ago. the neighbourhoods are another story; i'd go as far as saying they haven't been worse...
Mac user (or at least Airport Express)? NAT-PMP is a competitor to uPNP which is more likely to be implemented on a consumer grade router.

http://v2.nat32.com/upnpc.htm

It looks like the upnpc and natpmpc apps are in the same package though.
This is interesting. My building has tv/phone/internet via DirecPath, a fiber based isp now owned by DirecTV. The only alternative is via the local telco, AT&T. Will be interesting to see how this plays out.
there seems to be an attitude that what happened to detroit was not related to policies and politics. i respectfully submit that significant lasting change in any system requires change in the environment.
Does anyone have any other confirmation of this? Seems like a crazy rumor, but... maybe?
"we are getting a google-shaped web rather than a web-shaped google"

Very well put.
Most sports? Hardly. Sure you can, in theory, watch American Football, Rest of the World Football, basketball, and baseball on ESPN3, but if you want to see these sports played by teams that matter then you need regular ESPN or a cable subscription to view them. All the games that matter were removed from the ESPN3 lineup at least a couple of years ago.
What we will tell our grandchildren, or what they will tell theirs. The titles.
> Because I'll switch to Comcast or Verizon if I'm an ATT customer and their internet service is bad?

Because Comcast is known for the high quality of their internet service? They all have the same incentive to degrade streaming services that compete with their TV packages. You're assuming that they won't each behave the same way even though doing so is to their collective benefit.
If confirmed, this would definitely be a smart decision. Twitch will be extremely important in ecosystem development as e-sports break in the mainstream worldwide. Lots of engaged eyeballs.

Google near monopoly on online video market bugs me though, community at large would benefit from multiple players and more competition.
This is true of all fields where social skills are critical for the acquisition of the position. The problem is that people with good social skills are also really skilled at avoiding being removed from a position that they can't do - often the only way to get them out is to promote them and hope they don't cause more damage.
> Reps for YouTube and Twitch declined to comment.

Yeah. I call this just a rumor.
> I'm not sure what the "non-prime order" objection you're describing is.

Curve25519 has a cofactor of 8— its order is prime*8. This directly reduces rho security by about 1.5 bits, and since many discrete log attacks exploit a composite order for further speed up almost all other requirement sets for curve selection (including NIST and Brainpool) have required curves to have a cofactor of 1 in an abundance of caution (a small cofactor isn't know to create weakness right now, except via the direct reduction against rho attacks, but its obviously prudent to ask the cofactor be 1 out of the same kind of caution that suggests building systems which are twist secure or not using fields of small characteristic).

> The leading 1-bit on the key prevents a potential timing attack.

Yes, it does. But the timing attack can be prevented another way (e.g. always doing that outer loop and throwing away the result is one example— using a bit interleaved precomputed table is another) but that is slower. The consequence here is that existing curve25519 implementations are incompatible with some very useful forms of key generation. The effect is that implementations must sacrifice either security (by not being able to use public key derivation techniques that improve security) or compatibility (by ending up with private keys that don't have the high bit set and being unable to use the widely distributed fast curve25519 code).

WRT the compatibility— it's not just about "only use the NIST curves", many things already have fast, well tested and reviewed constant time code for doing operations over the fields used by the NIST curves. The BADA55 curves curves instead would just be constant changes. It's a much smaller change than changing to something that uses a totally different field. This may be a consideration for some.

In the same way that VPR managed to find a very simple sounding transcendental constant that achieved the BADASS property the same sort of attack could potentially be employed against DJB's design criteria (though, admittedly, not a one in a million one). Not that I'm suggesting those curves are rigged, but several of his mandated criteria are very different than ones commonly used for purely performance reasons. At the same time DJB doesn't like SECP256k1 which has an almost identical design strategy because it achieved performance in a different way (though also a way that gives up about 1.5 bits of rho security).
high speed maglev will be quite noisy too.

At <100mph, the TR08 is fairly quiet [0]. When I was en Elmsland for the noise testing, it was common for the vehicle to sneak up on us when it was running at lower speeds. At higher speeds, especially over 150 mph when aerodynamic noise kicks in, it is very loud.

[0] http://ntl.bts.gov/lib/22000/22500/22570/fra0213.pdf
This was the case for me historically as well, but I recently got an HD antenna to avoid paying the fee for digital and told them I didn't want the box. They somehow unbundled them and now I have a more expensive data plan for the same overall cost, and no TV listed anywhere on my bill. I have no idea if I'm practically any better off, but it's nice not feeling like I'm paying for something I'm not using.
OF course they are not really 'free', but does Amazon pay toll to get things delivered to you? Do government bodies who maintain the roads, tax large suppliers to make use of them?
Real buzzer site found – UVB-76
It's worth noting that Twitch partially became popular because it wasn't YouTube, and gamers could stream without content restrictions (e.g. copyright and region)

Miraculously, this could end up making YouTube comments even worse.
Dogecoin is mainstream now?
To follow-up IvyMike's earlier comment [1]:

It was indeed very true then, and it is even worse today.

In 1999, there were around 400,000 STEM PhDs in the US, but only 70,000 STEM academic faculty positions available. Today, there are over 800,000 STEM PhDs, but only around 100,000 STEM faculty positions [2].

And the gap will get even worse: in 2013, over 35,000 new STEM PhDs were awarded, but only about 3,000 new STEM faculty positions were open [ibid]. It's just unsustainable.

So, anecdotes aside, this is a very real and very serious structural problem. No matter how 'passionate' or how resourceful they are, with current trends, at least 9 out of 10 current first-year PhD students will invariably not get an academic faculty position when they enter the market. The longer this elephant in the room is ignored, the worse it will be [3].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7763857

[2] http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v31/n10/fig_tab/nbt.2706_F...

[3] See also related discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7764289 (where I initially saw the chart from).
It sounds like intermittent fasting would be the thing for you. When you only eat one meal a day, that meal can be reasonably large. Many people do find it easier to get used to skipping meals than to eating tiny ones.
If they can compete against the devil--Comcast; I'm all for this merger.
> Many of the suburbs are very affluent.

This has been true for a while, but somehow didn't prevent the city from hitting rock-bottom. How is this relevant now?
OP here. I'd like to say that I did not know about the author's other controversial articles and many of which I find disturbing. I was on a journey to figure out whether PhD (esp. in other fields than your prior ones) makes sense, for myself and while doing so came across this article and HN seemed like a nice place to have a discussion.

My apologies to not have searched HN prior to submitting this, to see if it will be a re-post. However, even if comments were anecdotal, it still helped me understand the gravity of the situation.
So, this is just like a bazillion jpegs of a powerpoint presentation?

Why not send it to a PDF printer and cutdown that filesize (and not make it take an age to open in a browser)?
While I do see this being an excellent acquisition for YouTube if true, I do agree. I don't see how YouTube could reconcile it's copyright stance with how Twitch fundamentally works.
I think its not complicated enough.

If your not going to include information on state trial courts, why include the federal trial courts? Most people will step foot in a courtroom, yet most people will not step foot in a courtroom of any court listed in this graph.
I think Feynman was just jealous :) When you consider that von Neumann was at IAS and he managed a huge amount of collaboration of vast importance I think it had more to do with the individual than the environment.
This is now probably Y Combinator's largest acquisition!