skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It easy to see how this patent application can actually come to life:

At the end of every sprint or dev milestone, an email goes out from some PM or dev manager, asking people for "ideas to be patented." Somebody then collects all of these ideas. Because applications cost money and units have budgets, then there is a preliminary amount of "filtering": ideas that are "cool," the latest shiny feature (who cares if it has been developed elsewhere for ages), etc. This goes from things like tiles for UI to really deep advancements in cloud computing. The specs are a source of leads. Obviously in many cases the list includes a bunch of relatively minor advances (since a lot of development at MS is mostly incremental) that may be prior art except to the junior dev and PM who think they just discovered how to square the circle. There may be some preferential treatment here for patents to special people, given that there is a little bit of money that, if approved, goes back to the employees too. There is a column in some spreadsheet that classifies the patent ideas based on their perceived awesomeness.

At some point the list of patents has to be sent to some IP lawyer. The IP lawyer does real work here, but is also looking at thing like competitive aspects the team might have missed: i.e. if it is in an important business area, then it gets an extra boost to become an application. An exec probably approves the list too.

When the list is approved for applications, the job is then to make sure the application is written by the members of the team and the lawyers. This takes a lot of time and a lot of work, but since the specs already exist, people use that as the basis.

When you get a patent application granted, you get a little plaque which you hang on your wall and/or a little cube you stack on your desk. The higher the stack the more your patent prowess. Given how some people have been at the company for long, they can accumulate 20+ of these cubes. You get an aura of inventor.

Obviously, people find that it is beneficial to get a patent (the plaque, the cube, the little cash), and would lobby for these ideas to be in the approved set, or at least to participate in the shiny specs because the rule is that everybody who was even remotely involved in the patent gets to be listed in it (therefore, managers get a lot of patents because they were in meetings where the idea was discussed and maybe contributed to it).
Ask HN: Do I ask for a payment?
I, like most of us here, am a web developer.

Recently, 4 friends of mine started an NGO[a organization that works to improve awareness amongst people and looks upon other social aspects(in, well, India)]. They came to me with the idea, and I straightaway agreed to join. We even have quite a buzz now in the local newspapers and otherwise, and that's when we, around 50 of us now, decided that we need to go online. As you guessed it, it was me who was burdened with the task of making the website, I have nearly completed making it, over the past week, but there's a problem:

DO I ASK/ACCEPT A PAYMENT ?

I know it's not right to do so, as it's an NGO, but the other members of the NGO are arguing that I accept a payment, which I don't personally feel moral. This means not even accepting any money for the hosting and domain registration etc. etc. But this, isn't right, as why should I personally pay for hosting and stuff ??? And after all the cake and watermelon, as Joker would have said it "If you’re good at something, never do it for free."
I do care, it's why I made the comment I did in earnest. The lack of a fully formed argument was simply because of my lack of time and typing on a phone. Point taken: I will try to be more kind even to strangers on the internet. You need to let this go.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair

HN is a sort of social network for coders. Anytime I post something about the evils of advertising, I attract enough downvotes to usually cancel out if not override those who see my points. I can see this as I watch the vote tally constantly go up and down. The sad thing is that the downvotes represent not that my comments are low quality and unworthy of HN, but that they are threatening to a culture that is sadly, for the present at least, beholden to advertising for its very survival.
22 Stunning Examples of CSS3 Animation
Will Backbone stand the test of time as both data binding and DOM eventing continue to evolve? I'm not resolutely convinced of Backbone's staying power, but I'm open to entertaining other thoughts on the matter.
ignoring your frankly unnecessary sarcasm, I'd have to point out that some of us are held to the expectation that websites should look almost the same in older browsers. My previous employer, for example, required full support of all features in IE7, and that the product should even bear some resemblance to a website in IE6. In that situation (combined with AJAXed content making polyfills difficult), flexbox isn't usable. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has been in the situation of having to support non-bleeding-edge browsers.
The Future of Scala
JUnit in a Nutshell: Test Isolation
The Home Data Center: ManCave for the Internet Age
For some locks, that's true. Other lock companies use copyright to do key control. Your not going to find blanks for many of the kinds of keys this promises to print.
Coffee all over my keyboard.

It's funny because it's true.
Also, the lawyers are expensive and have to be worth their money.
Dropbox Pro – 1 TB for $99/year
Please stop spreading this myth.
Agnosticism is about whether you think it's provable that there is or isn't a god.
Atheism is about whether you as a person believe in a god or not.

You can believe in a god (be a theist) and still think it's not provable that there is one (be an agnostic).
rumor has it it's BGP issues
> It seems to me that if consumer routers are configured to refuse to forward inbound IPv6 packets to machines on the LAN, we would be in almost exactly the same situation vis a vis home service hosting as we are with IPv4 addresses, NATs, and automated port forwarding protocols. Frankly, this would be a giant step backwards from IPv6 as she is envisioned.

I don't think it is such a giant step back. Devices still get to have addresses in a way that makes sense. Routing still gets to make sense. If two people in the same house want to play a peer-to-peer multiplayer game with a third person not in the same house, under IPv6+automated-firewall-exceptioning they can, whereas under IPv4+automated-port-forwarding they can't.

It's kind of dumb that we need automated port forwarding at all - opening a port should already be a deliberate indication from an application that it wants to accept external connections. If you want to listen only for connections from the same machine, bind to 127.0.0.1 - an equivalent for which will still exist under IPv6. If you want to listen only for connections from the same LAN, think again about what you really want - when the user goes to college, do they really want to be accepting connections from 400 students with poor security practices? If you can stand that, you have nothing to fear from the open internet.

But in the meantime we have the software we have rather than the software we want to have; for home routers, blocking traffic and requiring uPnP or the like is a reasonable default. Even if we do that, IPv6 is still worth it.
In my last rental car they skipped the middleman; there was no 12v port, but there was a 120V AC socket, as well as the usb.
Hole punching will be very reliable though - each end picks a port and starts talking to the other end at roughly the same time. Once they both start talking to each other, the flow will be fine.
Hm, what do you mean they aren't positioned to know what they're buying? In general?

If someone is curious about psychedelic drugs, and they visit Amsterdam because they are decriminalized there, they are therefore stupid?

I can't really imagine that's what you mean, though that's what you wrote.
Well, it's most likely that their product development cycle for this phone was just too long - the smartphone market moves really fast. Couple that with not having supply chain heft that comes with time and big orders from your asian suppliers and mfgs, the phone wasn't going to be cheap either.

But I think they knew all this. It starts the water flowing for them to get into the game. they have staying power, and over time, could start gaining market share. It's a long play, like most of Bezo's moves. The phone is really a just going to be part of the AMZN ecosystem too - they'll start lumping services on it for prime members, etc.
Number of tweets seems like it would be a highly inaccurate measure of almost anything.
"The many apps that integrate with Google Play Service for no good reason, like a password manager like 1Password, is pretty depressing though."

AIUI, "Google Play Services" are basically "Android updates for the Android phones that we can't upgrade because carriers won't do it". Everything ends up integrated into it because if you want one up-to-date service Android provides, you'll end up getting it through that. Otherwise the app developer is stuck on just the lowest-common-denominator.

I learned this because I have a phone running 2.2 that if I let it upgrade to Google Play Services, and then upgrade all the other stock apps on the phone that want to use it (YouTube, Gmail), leaves me without about 10MB of space on the device left over. So I shut off the upgrades. I'm not in a hurry to upgrade because it's just not what I want to do with the money.
Hear hear! A true hacker forum should applaud experimentation not nitpick at it. It helps us all to know the limits of client-side drawing by various means no matter if your site needs a Mario mushroom or not.
Is this the thread where everyone is sharing how much they are paying?

All of my companies are bootstrapped (and bandwidth is the largest expense item), so some of the rates quoted got me excited.

It sounds like there are a lot of knowledgeable folks here (on the buy side), would you mind sharing some info?

I typically buy between 2..5 Gbps per POP in the US and Europe.

What's the best rate I should be able to get, you think? Tend to buy L3 or premium blend (no Cogent or HE). Any insights would be appreciated.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/arts/design/23pain.html?_r...

I think this story is evidence that there are some non arbitrary qualities to artwork that you (and I) are not perceiving.

It would never have occurred to me to pick up this painting in the trash, but the woman did... a woman who was "not a modern-art aficionado" but felt the painting "had a strange power".
Poll: Are you a web developer?
A very recent item started:

I, like most of us here,
am a web developer.

I'm not a web developer. Am I in the majority? Or in the minority?

I know polls are self-delecting and therefore biased on not worth anything, yada yada yada, but I thought I'd ask anyway.

How do you see yourself?
I am a web-developer - front-end
I am a web developer - back end
I am a web developer, working on both front and back ends
I dabble, but I do not consider myself a web developer
Sounds rather "we had to burn the village in order to save it".
A deployment prior to the priority date is beyond any doubt not infringing that granted patent. If you can prove the date somehow then you can take on anyone quite easily in court by simply saying "this technical implementation preceded the priority date of the patent it is alleged to infringe, see".

What's the linked list patent in question (publication number preferably)?
At least with IPv6 we won't have the mess of translation, requiring p2p apps to perform public address determination (and possibly port guessing). But you're right, the central problem remains.
Ha, I can't believe I got down-voted for this. To spend $600 on a phone, there has to be some emotional attachment to it given that you can get a really high quality phone for under $400 now (Nexus 5, OnePlus, Motorola X and G). In the US, the only company that holds that sort of attachment is Apple (and maybe Samsung). But, as T-Mobile and others shift to a more European model for phone pricing, I think we are going to see value phones in the $200 - $300 price point be dominant. That is not to say that there won't be a premium market, but it will be smaller. This is how mature markets work.
I love the meta.

It's pretty obvious as time goes on, unfortunately it's not better. For some who didn't maximise their earlier it looks like they did, but no, they didn't get better.

But it's great art to think it does. So perhaps it's true after all. It's a nice artistic article.
> In principle it seems to be banning fraud, and if that's all it does then I can't really complain. But to say "you can't structure your site in such a way" I think it's rather heavy handed.

What if the only way to ban fraud is to say you can't structure it this way? Pyramid schemes seem like a good example.

>some sort of government agency with an official review process for websites

My understanding of the article was that customers complain to their local council, get their money back, and the company changes after loosing too much money.

>it's the job of a consumer to decide if they've been defrauded

The EU doesn't like doing that, there's too many vulnerable people, too much to do in the day for the less vulnerable.
I hope carriers or sellers don't create unfullfilled expectations.

Here in Uruguay, one of the carriers, Movistar, heavily marketed the Firefox OS phone, and quite a few non-techies bought them (including coworkers), and were VERY dissapointed when they found out it was very limited compared to similarly priced Android phones (one BIG disappointment was the lack of WhatsApp, a deal-breaker in my country).

Edit: it seems that "ConnectA2, a WhatsApp client, comes bundled with the phone". Good point :)

Firefox OS needs to be able to combat the network effect of Android and iOS, or it will fail. Windows Phone already suffers from the same.

http://firefoxosguide.com/firefox-os/firefox-os-accounted-30...
Of course, but the point of the article is that blanks for high security locks used to be much harder to come by. Now, software and 3-D printers make it easier to defeat the feature that makes them "high security". The implication is that pretty much anybody can do it now.

I remember reading several years ago about how one can take a picture of a key from far away and use that image to replicate the key. Back then, replicating keys from a picture was not something just anybody could do, so it wasn't a threat worth fretting about. Presumably 3-D printing will make that easier too. One can even imagine an app: point your phone, press a button, and get a key in the mail a few days later. I expect we'll see that article soon.
Mozilla isn't operating far outside the ecosystem though. By releasing an Android-based OS with programs that run on web standards, it's pretty easy to add compatibility for most popular things that people do on their phones.
Pseudo-inverse (and other direct methods) do have a lot going against them, especially as problems scale. In practice, iterative methods introduce their own challenges as well though. Optimal algorithm selection is highly problem dependant, and often hinges on knowing how to generate an appropriate preconditioner.

GMRES is still pretty much my favorite general method for inverse problems, but it comes with plenty of nuances that you really don't see when using a direct method on a tiny problem that you can bank on being well-conditioned. It's hard to say how often those kinds of problems exist in the real world (in my case: exceedingly rare), but they are still out there.
Plays Well with Others – Lessons in Reusable Tooling
Dropbox for Business now starts at 1 TB per user
And most importantly, sleep helps clean "brain junk" (layman terms intended)

See http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6156/373
Ukraine Crisis Украина ~ Independence Day in Nezalezhnosti – COMBAT FOOTAGE
Dropbox is adding more space for the same old price. They are removing the various pricing tiers on Pro and give you 1TB for the 9.99/month or 99/year. My pricing is in euros, but I assume it is the same numbers for dollar prices.

Also looks like the old Packrat offering is going away and being replaced with "Extended Version History". I have a notification on my account saying if I want to continue having the Packrat with the old price I need take action before November 1st, 2014.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake
The infamous "linked list" patent didn't cover any version of linked lists we are familiar with. It covered a linked list where each node had multiple "next" pointers that allowed different traversal orders, beyond just back-and-forth like doubly-linked lists. I'm not even sure why anybody would use a single data structure to hold what should really be different lists, so I highly doubt you or anybody else is infringing that one.
It says I have 200GB for $199.99 per year. Is this just for new users?

Edit:

More info here https://blog.dropbox.com/2014/08/introducing-more-powerful-d...

Seems likely they'll upgrade existing plans.

I don't have a 1TB drive on my laptop so I'm not even sure how I can make use of all that space. I don't know how to sync things with Dropbox without actually putting that space it uses on my laptop.
Some people are actually proud of their patents, even in CS area. I was pretty surprised about it, but someone I know was really happy that they got their 13th patent granted.
TrendJam Needs Beta Testers (EFFORTLESSLY CROWD SOURCE, VISUALISE AND SHARE)
We just started today with an open call to beta testers....it's MVP only....be gentle, but honest. Use the feedback button to send in results. Most of all have fun. trendjam.com
TACK is a TLS extension. It must be added to TLS 1.3 RFC.
I'm not afraid of the internet bullies. I'm already out there so doxxing doesn't scare me.

If you want to make a moral case why I should change the title, do it. If you are persuasive I'll change it. Appeals to inconclusive but "socially accepted" evidence are, however, ridiculous.
Jos Weyers has repeatedly brought plain sense to hyperbolic reporting. His statement at the end is bang on:

“The sky isn’t falling, but the world changes and now people can make stuff,” says Weyers. “Lock manufacturers know how to make a lock bump-resistant. And they had better.”

Always very pleased to see his name pop up when this sort of thing makes news, as he never seems to offer a quote that can be used to stoke unreasonable fear.
The Lumia 920 (unlocked) sells for $267 incl shipping at Amazon.

(To be precise, it is available for a little less when it is not fulfilled by Amazon.)
this sounds identical to google CRLSet. Basically a list of pinned certs inside source code.

> In the future, we would like to support dynamic pinsets rather than relying on built-in ones. HTTP Public Key Pinning (HPKP) [1] is an HTTP header that allows sites to announce their pinset.

ok cool. Requires initial safe connection once. Like HSTS.
"Use composition over inheritance" doesn't make a strong case. Can someone explain this more in depth?
I don't mind creating an account, but I'd let users try the product without one. I don't want to go through signing up – no matter if via OAuth or creating a dedicated account – just to find out the product doesn't suit me due to some details I could not find out by the page or video. Unless absolutely unreasonable, I think you should always allow users to test your product anonymously.
Java.com and TMZ served malware due Java, Flash and Silverlight exploits
How to Find and Solve Your Application Bottlenecks
Yes! This is what I've been waiting for! Dropbox is still my favorite; it just works so well.
I am a Web Developer working on the Java/J2EE platform. I use Spring MVC as the Controller framework and jQuery as the client side framework. We don't use any MVC framework on the client side. There is a heavy use of Ajax in the application.

We mostly render the views on server side using JSTL (Jsp Standard Tag Library).
Talking About Language
I'm currently on a 100GB for $9.99/mo plan. The UI won't let me upgrade to the 1TB for the same price.

Am I ineligible for the new pricing or is this a UX issue?
>there was always pressure from management to file patents //

IBM's past technical disclosure bulletins (TDB) [I think they stopped them a while back] suggest that there wasn't "always" pressure just that they realise[d] that their patent portfolio is one of their greatest assets - strongly encouraging employees to flag apparent innovations (and getting upstream oversight of those innovations) means that IBM can make the most of the inventiveness of their employees though.

The public benefit is early disclosure of every possible innovation and the TDB helped to disseminate details of tech that may not have been well known.
That was my bad. I've fixed them and the article should look all ok now.
For me and my needs, dropbox still has the best experience for cloud storage, but I don't see the downward pricing trend for cloud anything abating any time soon. What will they do to innovate, I wonder?
Earthquake Warning Systems Exist. But California Won't Pay for One
I'd really like a 100gb for $40/year instead. I'd be happy to upgrade but can't justify paying $100/year. I know there are logical arguments that it's just $60 more per year etc. But this is how I feel and I'm sure I'm not alone in this kind of thinking.
While it must be a factor, I don't think weariness from teaching intro courses is the main reason we don't see better math books.

I think it is genuinely difficult to write engaging texts that are sufficiently rigorous and retrain teachers in the methods that go along with them and drum up support among administrative types.

Not that it's impossible, but it is very challenging.
That is the goal, however, deep learning models still have a long way until feature engineering goes away im afraid.

Once we get to that point, the "black box machine learning as a service" that many startups seem to be selling nowadays will be replacing data scientists.
That app/service has existed for years, first Shloosl (now keysduplicated), then KeyMe and I believe the proprietors frequent HN, so I expect you may see them pop up to offer an informed opinion on this article.

https://keysduplicated.com/
https://www.key.me/
Author of the story here. Like I wrote, 3D printed bump keys make locks that weren't easily bumpable in the past more easily bumpable. That's not a 50 year-old idea. Likewise, if your 3D-printed lock picking tools were more effective than the traditional kind, than yes, I might write about them, too.
It looks like you will be auto upgraded according to the site.
Dropbox has 'selective sync' in preferences on your computer. You can select what to sync and what not to sync. Comes in handy with only 128gb SSD in my Air.
Robotic Brain 'Learns' Skills from the Internet
Getting Started in *Lisp (1991) [pdf]
Yeah they are infamous. Budapest isn't any better.

Funny story involving Prague mayor...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4175143.stm
Stanford bioengineers close to brewing opioid painkillers
Postgres multicolumn indexes to save the day
This is pretty cool. One minor complaint: when I vote, the animation of my dot moving seems painfully slow.
I know this is just demonstrating an example, but the example includes a dangerous XSS vulnerability:

for(var i=0; i<products.length; i++) {
content += products[i].name + '<br />';
}
$('.content').html(content);

Use a template library, do not concatenate strings and then just set HTML. Most template libraries will have safeguards in place to prevent XSS vulnerabilities. Even if the product name is always trusted to be non-malicious, it's still a dangerous anti-pattern.

XSS will eat your lunch. It breaks every safeguard there is, it even defeats 2 factor auth and lets the attacker adopt the identity and privileges of whoever has been exposed to the attack. It's prudent to be extra careful and never have code that looks like this.