skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Patents today are written in legalese that can only be interpreted by a select tribe of professionals, and Microsoft benefits by keeping lists like this secret.

This is like a blub programmer complaining about lisp being unreadable. I am no attorney or patent agent, let alone part of a "select tribe of professionals", just a typical software geek. Yet I can read patents pretty easily. Took me some practice to get the hang of it, but I needed absolutely no training for it, and neither do you!

Of course, if it's a legal matter (you're being sued), you need a lawyer. But if you just want to evaluate the technical merits of a patent, you can interpret the claims yourselves. All you have to realize is that patentese is just a particular form of English -- English that has to be overly specific (e.g. avoid pronouns) while at the same time trying to be as broad as possible, but English nonetheless. And you usually only need to read the independent claims (those that don't reference other claims) get a sense of the scope, as those are the broadest ones.

For instance, look at the claims conveniently posted at the top of the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7901544

I really cannot see what's so complicated about those. They seem a bit vague (e.g. what's an "entity"?) but applying the common meaning of the terms involved (e.g. maybe "entity" as in "person, place or thing") reveals a pretty straightforward description. It's nowhere near groundbreaking, but popular narrative of lightbulbs and flying machines notwithstanding, patents rarely are.
Why drone valley and not autonomous vehicle valley? Seems more prime for the motor city.

Not to mention, Detroit already has some large neighborhoods that are mostly vacant and the roads could be shifted over to test grounds for the autonomous vehicles. Michigan endures extremes in all four seasons, as compared to Santa Clara County which has pretty moderate weather year round.

But I don't think Marc was specifically saying that Detroit is for drones. I think that was merely an alliteration. I do think Marc is right in that specialization is the key.
I used to do this as a job; it's a form of market research. Usually you focus on a single vertical (mine was pharma) — getting the numbers right is HARD.
It's great that Lattice is coming out with even cheaper FPGA dev board options. The bare-bones student dev kits from Altera and Xilinx are typically around $70, but $25 is a low enough price for hobbyists and beginners to begin experimenting as well.

I'm not too sure about the USB stick form factor, though. I have Texas Instrument's F2013 dev board[0], which is also a USB stick-type device. It's adorable; it's cute; and it has everything you need on-board (both the emulator and target), but you end up not being able to do anything very useful with it (unless you get very creative[1]). Hack-A-Day seems to agree[2].

Part of the reason this eval board is so cheap is that most FPGA evaluation boards have a bunch of peripherals that you can toy around with. My worry is that the lack of peripherals, low number of I/O pins, and the USB form factor might work against the product. That said, it does have an IrDA transceiver, which should enable some cool demos like acting as a TV remote.

If you're looking for a cheap FPGA board to use as part of a greater project, take a look at Lattice's iCE40-HX8K Breakout Board[3]. It's double the price, but it has all the basics and has tons of I/O to use. You can see Mike from mikeselectricstuff use it in his iPod Nano LCD project here: http://youtu.be/IIR1Bw8T_vM .

[0]: http://www.latticesemi.com/en/Products/DevelopmentBoardsAndK...

[1]: http://forum.43oh.com/topic/248-ezprobe-ez430-based-logic-pr...

[2]: http://hackaday.com/2011/01/30/hands-on-with-ez430-f2013/

[3]: http://www.latticesemi.com/en/Products/DevelopmentBoardsAndK...
I will be arriving on Wednesday (commuting from Long Island). We should get a group to meet up before the event!
Ha oops, read your comment after reading his whole comment, so the first line wasn't in my working memory anymore. :)
I don't want to hijack this thread too much from the original post, but we use some of the same software as Airbnb (scikit-learn, randomforest models, etc.) as well as some stuff developed in-house. Credit card fraud has been one of our biggest issues, and we've developed some pretty robust systems to fight it. Contact me privately and I'd be happy to talk about it -- this stuff is what I do for a living.
FWIW, I had never heard of this before today, and I make a point of keeping tabs on these kinds of things.

> Cap'n Proto's solution to this was just to build unions into the language, something Protobufs should have done a long time ago.

This has been implemented internally; the next open-source release should have it.
I'm not sure how necessary true emulation really is. The fact that you can easily plug a phone in and run there means that the emulator isn't as valuable so would be if it took 20 minutes of hoops to get your code on a device.
What makes me really sad is people who think this is the height of Let's Play video quality. There are quite a few higher-quality channels out there. http://lparchive.org/ is a good place to start. A few recommendations: Frankomatic (adventure games), Bobbin Threadbare (adventures and others), SimplySimon (Mega Man games), Deceased Crab (indie and lesser-known games), retsupurae (specifically their adventure game MST3Kings such as King's Quest 5/6), and Video Games Awesome (miscellaneous games streamed blind but with very high production values and an interactive chat).

I also highly recommend the annual Speed Demos Archive charity marathons, especially the races and challenges. For instance, several top Super Metroid players racing for 45 minutes and finishing within seconds of each other, or players completing Punch-Out and Super Punch-Out blindfolded.
Financially successful doesn't necessarily mean the same thing as being financially "successful relative to the rest of the population", for what it's worth.
I can plan a trip to Italy, complete with finding best flights, hotel, etc with no intention of traveling to Italy. Where's the benefit?

The level of thinking you do should not and does not automatically cause you to have a certain level of intent.

How could "predators" harm anyone if they're talking to a computer model?
I've just built a system very much like this for a large customer. Extremely interesting and I learned a lot while doing it. Funny to see companies operating at a similar scale running into similar problems and solving them in roughly similar ways.
Hmm. The vtable approach used by FlatBuffer seems harmful for streaming. I don't think the SBE people would have used such a design.

> permitting new fields only at the end of a structure

Be careful not to conflate the order of fields as written in the schema with the order of fields on the wire. Cap'n Proto (like SBE) more or less requires new fields to go on the end on the wire, but lets you put them in any order in the schema. FlatBuffer apparently requires them to go on the end in the schema but lets you put them in any order on the wire.

(I say "more or less" because Cap'n Proto can actually stick a new field into what was previously padding space between two existing fields. But usually new fields go on the end.)
I was wondering if their solution is a home grown version of SiftScience?
Awesome node-mongoose dashboard, with love from LastRoom at México to you.
It's ironic how in the failed communist centralized economies, the economic policy was dictated by "elected" nomenklatura and it was BAD

It was bad because the only effective way of determining which goods should be produced and which should not is via the price system. It's a fatal conceit of planners that they can predict and determine what people want - even right down to how many loaves of bread they want.

It's the whole reason why some startups fail and others succeed, but nobody really knows why at the outset. Replace the dynamism of Silicon Valley with a government planning board and the whole thing would be dead in 2 years.

The actual idealogy behind it doesn't matter - if you think you can plan an economy, you're already creating trouble.

Control of the economy is most definitely not in the hands of 'unaccountable private banks'. Banks rarely even feature in most startup stories - the market innovated around them by forming venture funds and employing individuals who were skilled at allocating the capital in them. It's simply not true that banks control the economy, and anyone is free to start their own bank or perform their own lending if they like.
> This has been implemented internally; the next open-source release should have it.

Oh cool! Presumably based on the patch I wrote before I left? :)
If you are banking on your homeowner's policy you should check the small print. Many (most?) have a relatively low cap (say, $1500) with a deductible of $500+ you don't have much coverage. My insurer requires a specific extended policy that at $3 per 100 makes it very expensive for higher-end bikes.
Fun story: I was actually accepted into English grad school, but turned them down when they changed their tune about the cost of tuition. I already own a copy of both books. ;)
Well I'm glad he's getting rewarded for his original content. I no longer have time to play video games anymore, so this guy, along with Robbaz, Day9 and GameGrumps are pretty much the only way I get my gaming fix.

I'm also really interested in apps/games (ex. strawpoll.me) that let viewers participate in their stream. Seems like a good use case for meteor.
display animation at 60fps and react to a hardware input through layers and layers of software abstraction are two different things.

Run of the mill 3M controller has 5ms latency

http://datasheet.octopart.com/87-5961-211-3M-datasheet-21189...

5 year old Fujitsu FMA1127 had 10ms.

http://www.fujitsu.com/downloads/MICRO/fme/tsc/FMA1127_Data_...

Interrupt latency is measured in nano seconds.
The Cambridge License Commission vs. The People of Cambridge
As original service, I wish you all the best. You deserve it.
Love the idea, the example e-mail has offers looking for local developers, and only from inside the US. I wonder if that is a common requirement.
Original author here. Exactly, thank you! I thought everybody knew 'C' and C++ both, and specifically that:

1) 'C' is the most basic, it only has functions. A function call looks like "bzuiutil_pause_backup();"

2) 'C++' is a super set of 'C' and if you want to group several static functions together, you can put several static functions in one class. This defines scope, and also allows programmers to find where the function is written, in this case "BzUiUtil::PauseBackup()" means that there is a 'C++' class called BzUiUtil and it has a static function with EXACTLY the same contents as the 'C' version has inside "bzuiutil_pause_backup();"

At Backblaze, we tend to void writing 'C' code in favor of 'C' code in static C++ wrappers as described in point "2" above. There isn't any downside as long as all of your compilers on all platforms are C++ compilers anyway. I honestly didn't know a pure 'C' compiler still exists. Specifically, Microsoft Visual Studio does both seamlessly. On the Macintosh Xcode does both seamlessly. On Debian Linux (the flavor we use most and is also the slowest to adopt anything) the g++ compiler ships for free on every linux box that does both seamlessly.
Aren't most of these things something that a hotel could charge customers? You want to check in at 1 PM instead of the standard 3 PM, OK, that is more money? You want to be able to cancel up to 12 hours before check in, OK, that is more money? We can't guarantee you can't get bumped out of your room just like airlines can't guarantee that you won't get bumped off your flight. It seems like almost all of the same issues with airlines apply to hotels and yet airlines, as bad as they seem to be at customer service, are actually ahead of hotels in this regard and I assume they did it because they could make more money by constantly attempting to up sell customers and it seems hotels could do this as well.
Download link that skips the moronic Java "download manager" requirement: http://dlm.cypress.com.edgesuite.net/akdlm/downloadmanager/s...
No company will license patents they don't know about. If they do, well, I have a bridge to sell them. That WebM page is probably for PR purposes. If you really want to know exactly which patents that covers, you can send Google's legal department an email and they should be glad to tell you.
Maybe because it's resized down. In contrast to what others have replied, I personally find PNG file sizes to be horrible for thumbnails - even after running through optipng.
Oh just put it back in the deck.

The relevancy is that the knock-offs aren't bad, considering the patent situation, and [geographic region] knock-off doesn't make sense to specify when the original is from that region and the competing products are largely not made by companies based in Asia (Nokia, Logitech, Livescribe, etc). Incidentally, the competing digitizers are quite the value if you can get over the extra battery weight in the pen. Which, again is a result of abiding by wacom's patent. In this case "Asian knockoff" is shorthand for you having no idea what you're talking about.

I have used wacom products for over 10 years, my first being a graphire2 and my most recent is the surface pro 2. The Microsoft default calibration is better than the halfassed 4 point calibration offered with the wacom feel drivers. The 273 point calibration to address the significant corner distortion requires dropping to command line and 15 minutes of tapping in hopes to get at all the tiny UI elements on the high res screen. Wacom is imperfect and competent competitors benefit us all. And they are competent.

You probably hear this frequently, but your ethnicity has nothing to do with this. If you actively declare your ethnicity while throwing around accusations of race-baiting whenever someone highlights your baseless brand affinity, I'd wager that you go through agonizing retail experiences.
Catapult: Moving Beyond CPUs in the Cloud
Well, that is just not true. Technological innovation has been automating jobs since, well, the Romans built aqueducts and hydro-power and stopped people having to haul water in buckets up hills and bashing grain with a rock.

There are more people employed now than at any time in history. That's only possible with automation. Even since the time of the Luddites, people have been freed from drudgery and poor jobs and have higher quality of life, despite industry after industry being dissolved.

For each product that is produced at lower cost and higher quality through automation, extra spending is released by the consumers who get to purchase those products at lower cost relative to their income. The extra spending either goes into savings (good) or spending (still good) which in turn creates new industries which create new jobs.

Essentially, you can't have a gaming and micro-brewing industry without the more menial tasks being replaced by automation. I want no part of a future where new innovations can't happen because we insist on slowing technical progress to keep people in menial jobs.

The process has been repeating for a millenia - you have to have a very compelling reason to suggest that it will somehow stop because of more technology.
You do realize that you can play hundreds of poker hands in a night. For your analogy to hold, you'd need to be able to start companies for a million years.
You're probably right, but Windows-only stopped me in my tracks too. I won't bother trying this, because the advantages over an Arduino mini pro (more memory, a snappy USB interface) don't seem to justify the pain of struggling with serial interfaces in WINE.

And although the vast majority of these devices will be going to big industrial users, if I was Cypress I'd consider the cost of developing Linux/Mac versions against the prospect of losing a generation of tinkerers to Atmel.
I'm not necessarily conflating them, though. That is, can you, through interaction with the original app, show that the code is of "low quality"? Even relaxing it, can you show it is of "lower quality" than the Haskel solution?

Because, just using the app, I'd say the original app is much higher quality than this derivative. One I would consider playing for a bit, the other is just kind of neat.

If we are just going off how nicely the logic can be expressed, with no regard to the dirtiness of implementation, free text wins. A simple paragraph describing the game is much more understandable than even the haskel. Especially if you allow examples.

Edit: Also, I'm curious if you could reproduce the UI of the original with just a library in Haskel. That is, sure, most of the code is done though a library. Does that really change much? If so, you should be able to achieve the same fluid and pleasant UI with "just a library" in Haskel, right? (Genuine question.)
A meta suggestion: please make the article's date easy to see. (The timestamp is hidden until you mouse over the title: Jun 16, 2014.)
I think innovation and the disruption it brings is real - but I think this article does a good job of arguing that the inability of incumbents to respond is overstated by the theory and its proponents.

Intel hasn't closed down and given a few years may be stronger than ever.
More like SiftScience is a weaponized version of something a lot of companies develop in-house, I would say.
Nintendo And The Future Of Kids' Games: E3 From A Father's Perspective
Does anyone have any experience with this tool chain? Would this be a good way to - from a hobbiest standpoint- get started with fpga and logic synthesis?
The dog was fine. If anything I suspect it enjoyed the extra play time.
I meant you might get bumped out of your room and even the hotel if you decide to stay another day for which you don't already have a reservation. If you have a prior reservation you can't get bumped. Well, maybe you can. I've never heard of that happening with a hotel but I assume they do overbook and somehow they deal with it.
Actually SiftScience lists AirBnb as one of their customers on their site, so I'd say it is very likely built on top of SiftScience.
As a Blackhawks fan I was really hoping the name was a reference to our beloved goalie Murray[1], but it seems it's also a Game of Thrones reference. Oh well...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Bannerman
This is barely readable. Wow FBI(even if it's for OCR reasons)
Girl's Frantic Facebook Post Saves Father's Life
Seems likely, though I couldn't say for sure. I am sure you will recognize a lot of the design. :)
It's a process called "Freedom-to-operate", and it's somewhat common in some industries. I'd guess it's non-existent in software, though, probably because it's unfeasible.
I've tried searching reddit and google for this question on reddit but I can't find it. Do you have a link to that question on reddit?
> The vtable approach used by FlatBuffer seems harmful for
> streaming. I don't think the SBE people would have used
> such a design.

If the vtable and fixed-size fields are placed together with variable-length fields (e.g. byte blobs) at the end, then decoding can make better use of the processor cache than if the fields are all mixed together.
Everything You’ve Read About Hachette vs. Amazon Is Wrong
Seriously, Apple PR via third-party technique?

This is just a derivative of the previous NYT fluff piece which might as well be written by Apple.
Dude, when a country attacks your country, you defend. That is not called 'fighting evil'. That is called survival. Fighting evil means attacking Germany because you got to know how evil Hitler is.
New headline is much less descriptive than the old one...
Wow, guy. Lots of really negative assumptions there.

As I posted elsewhere on this thread, there is no substitute for genuinely caring for others.

Personally, I'm known for being quite outgoing and friendly. Probably because I genuinely care about people. I don't need these kinds of guides or an "easy way out."

But clearly, there are many people in the world who need help in this area.

And for them, I wish there was something more positive than the PUA thing.
Original author here. Yeah, my goal was cross platform APPLICATIONS where the first step is choosing your tools. I suppose if you are writing a library like OpenSSL that you want to compile with every last flavor of every last compiler the problem gets worse.

I stand by my guideline for applications.

Another way to think about it is if you want, use all your own custom compiler flags, then if you can manage to get your compiler flags set by a creative combination of BUILT IN compiler flags, that way your code will compile right out of the box correctly on all platforms. What I dislike is that out of the box the code compiles on zero platforms. Instead, you run a "configurator" program that sets all the cross platform flags correctly. If at all possible, write your code so that it self configures correctly with zero changes on all compilers and all platforms. Please notice the "if at all possible". I think if you are relatively careful and just use basic types this can be done easily. Is it really that amazingly hard to find a native "int32" and "int64" type using ifdefs on every platform/compiler?
>Provide incentives to attract scientists, firms and users;

> Establish a favorable business environment and regulations.

> Except … this approach to innovation clusters hasn’t really worked. Some have even dismissed these government-driven efforts as “modern-day snake oil.”

I would argue that such an approach has never actually been attempted only lip service has been paid. The types of solutions you describe above are politically untenable because they involve significantly lowering taxes.

I would say that Nevada is an example of a place where this kind of approach has worked. Look at Las Vegas it's a metropolis that sprung up out of nowhere in the middle of a vast desert wasteland. Maybe Michigan could learn a thing or two from Nevada and begin by lowering it's state income tax to 0%.
I was about to post the same but nwenzel beat me to it. Contact us. It's in our profile.
AT&T makes the same promises every time it buys a new company
Mentor's Thoughts Week 54: Your Biggest Asset
These are the patents that Microsoft is using to extract licenses from Android manufacturers, so the utility of the list is not zero. 1. It allows well funded competitors to know which patents to attack at the patent office, and 2. It allows poorly funded competitors to avoid those specific patents, and the fact that Microsoft is satisfied by licensing those specific patents to other competitors should provide some small consolation if Microsoft decides to bring out another patent.
Try this link: http://beta.tveeder.com/785/byrange?&from=1402972200&to=1402...
My first FPGA was a cheap Lattice kit and I never fully wrapped my head around their toolchain (Diamond). It has everything you need but the workflow and UI made it hard for me as a beginner. I also found the documentation and tutorials to be lacking.

Later, I started using an Altera FPGA for my hobby projects and I'm much happier with their software. I am beginning a research project using Xilinx (ISE) now. I'm not sure if its better than Quartus, but its better than Diamond.
Ehh, I like the grumps better. I feel like there is more effort put into the comedy.
Specs:

• 1280 Four input LUT logic cells
• 64Kbit of RAM
• 32Mbit flash
• a PLL
• Two sets of 8 digital I/O pins
• One Pmod connector (2x6 0.10" socket, some sort of digital interface)
• 5 LEDs
• An IrDA transceiver
• USB dongle form factor, programmed from USB, can look like a UART from FPGA to PC

The design software appears to only function on the Windows operating system.