skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Of every $1 spent in the US, $0.06 goes to Wal-Mart.

I do not believe you. How can that possibly be true?
You write about having a rational discussion but all you come up with are some non-representative anecdotes and the "argument" of "you'll understand when you are my age". Does that make sense to you?

> . I'm sure I'll get some 20-year old jump in now and say that smoking hash is fine but it's not - you won't know it until you're that fried person in your 30's and it's too late.

Okay, I'm gonna be that 25-year old: It seems to depend on the dosage, like almost any substance use. It's fine to smoke some hash every two weeks or maybe even a bit every evening, but if your friend is one of those who spend most of their day doing nothing besides smoking pot, then of course that destroys you just like drinking beer for the whole day.
see also parser combinator approach:

reg exp engine in 14 lines of python
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3202313
this article is about patents, and there's a mention of superman in there.
Scala is still a much better java than even Java 9. Even if you don't want to go FP crazy, it still makes sense to at least try scala.
Your E=mc^2 example actually highlights one difference between patentable and non-patentable math. Calculating E does nothing useful by itself. But calculating the DCT of a series of numbers representing an image, arranging it in a matrix, traversing it in a zigzag pattern and applying run-length encoding does do something undeniably useful: it allows compression, which can conserve bandwidth and disk-space.

Yet you seem unwilling to accept the difference between mathematics and applications of mathematics, of which the latter is being patented.

Let me try a different analogy. Mathematics cannot be copyrighted. Yet software can be. If you can resolve this conflict, you may find a hint to explain how software can also be patented.
>seeing a flash of light in the night right before an unexpected sudden loud noise

Does this improve your reaction time to sudden noises? You should totally test it :)
I'm not sure, since this was learned through a series of hard lessons that no one ever taught me or explicitly mentioned. Just keep in mind that many people are not like you, and their value systems can be very different, allowing them to do totally crazy things and backwards rationalize them (see German population during WW2, Steve Jobs, Groupon's Lefkofsky). Eventually you're going to run into low functioning psychopaths. Just try to minimize your losses when it happens.

The other thing to learn with game theory is aligning self interests. When your interests align with other people, your sails are going with the wind, and everything just gets a lot easier. If they aren't, everything is very tough. Try to observe this from an objective viewpoint, if your interactions and results from this person are getting easier or tougher.

I'll need to think on this some more and maybe make a full post about this later.
The key mediating variable here was whether people had a mystical experience, so this doesn't look like it was necessarily related to the introspectiveness of the experience; that would happen at much lower doses, and it would happen to everyone regardless of whether or not they had a mystical experience.
Considering the dearth of retailers that actually support NFC checkout of any flavor, Google is getting a mere thread of the sweater that is anyone's purchase stream.

I get that it would be different if/when we standardize on it across the board. But I don't see that happening soon, either.
Oh, the comment section.
This is a false dichotomy.

If someone makes such an invention, there is no incentive to keep it perfectly secret (i.e. hide it in a filing cabinet and make no use of it that might hint towards its existence) -- other than sheer paranoia or vanity.

Instead they will either sell it like any other trade secret or make use of it. If they make use of it and it gives them a notable advantage over competitors, the competitors will seek to either reverse engineer the invention or invest in finding something that works equally well or even better. If the competitors succeed, the original invention becomes obsolete (rendering knowledge of it less valuable) or common knowledge.

What's more, a competitor or a non-commercial organization might decide to publish their findings for various reasons ranging from harming the original inventor by eliminating their advantage to benevolence / publicity / "fostering innovation".

In the current situation a lot of patents are flat-out useless to anyone but the holder. They either describe something that is blindingly obvious ("X on a computer"), something that is already common knowledge (but nobody bothered patenting before) or that is so vague the description itself is worthless to anyone seeking to copy the idea when the patent has expired.

Patents are supposed to be a fair deal between the public and the applicant: the applicant is offered legal protection to maintain a monopoly in a technology they created for a limited amount of time but in return they have to disclose their technology so anyone can copy it once the protection expires.

If you take away that benefit to the public, it's just a blessed monopoly that can be used to extort anyone who independently comes up with the same idea (or shares the same common knowledge on which it is based). Even with that benefit to the public most software patents would still be harmful because of their insane longevity -- the software industry is disrupted on a monthly, weekly or even daily basis, but patents can be maintained for more than a decade.

What's so bad if software patents were abolished? Copyright would still exist. Trade secrets would still exist. Trademarks and trade dress would still exist. NDAs and other legally binding agreements would still exist. At this point the benefits of software patents are theoretical at best -- every single tech company out there could potentially be sued into oblivion if they were to pop up on the radar of a patent troll. Patent infringement has become SOP for software companies -- not because they don't care about other people's IP but because it's simply impossible to license every single "invention" your company uses (and let's not get started on what the situation looks like for contractors).
Lazy Eight is taking nominations for NGOs/Non/For-Profits doing good work
DanBC just gave one example, but independent invention tend to be the norm. Strike out patents, and inventions will likely flow anyway —if one keeps it secret, others will publish it. It doesn't really matter that inventors "deserve" a reward: the cost monopoly is just too high for society at large.

Besides, you forgot a third option: "first to market".
Odyssey.js: Open Source tool to combine maps, narratives, and other multimedia
Ultimately, it is rule of man, since man can change the law.

However you call it, it is ultimately power (of man) that rules other men. Having to push it through the frictional and slow law process merely makes powerful men less powerful by the amount of the systemic friction. But the power gradients still exist and lead to the same consequences.

It merely prolongs a "i dont like him, behead him on the spot" into "i dont like him, make the state attorney accuse him of rape and murder, drag him through courts for 20 years and execute him". But the intimidating effect of power differences is the same. Rule of law is just the same ol rule of man cloaked into law.
I have watched many chapters of the Gingery lathe casting series, because I have always loved process and tooling and youtube is now FULL of amazing documentary footage. I found it strangely enjoyable to watch.
Ask HN: Managing flight itineraries for conferences?
We're booking 30+ flights for special guests this week, anyone know of a solution to monitor flight status updates and send itineraries to guests?
#ifdef alone

#ifdef HW_REVISION_1

#ifdef HW_REVISION_2

etc
Ah, I was unaware, thanks.
I don't know that it is -- I just pulled it from the cited link. The source cites it's own sources, and at a first glance, it seems reasonably well done, but there you go.

Oh, and on second thought, maybe it would have been better to say "through" Wal-Mart. They're not making 6% of the all the profit obviously.
I'm not convinced these encodings couldn't be protected sufficiently with copyright, trademarks, licensing and the DMCA alone.
The Story of Pixel Density and Touch Interface
Rot.js 0.5 released (JS toolkit for Roguelike development)
It's only a few milliseconds before the noise, I would have to develop Bruce Lee-grade reflexes to do anything about it ;-)
Source code: https://github.com/quasado/gravit
Psilocybin is not addictive. Therefore, your argument bears no meaning in this discussion.
A test like this needs to isolate the subject to only one spectrum at a time. I gave up after the first two because of too much noise.
Ask HN: What tech stack do YC startups use?
What tech stack do the YC software startups tend to use these days?

I'm going to guess Ruby on Rails, AWS, Angular.
A valid Flowdock competitor
I'm a huge fan of Keith Fenner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kANvdzoVUfw . He takes you all the way through a project.
I do both on my blog ( http://upgadgets.com ), write my own and outsource some. The issue here, is just continuity and keep doing it. Make sure if you are outsourcing your articles to do the following:

1- Posts should have relevant pictures/video attached (Go to google > images > usage rights > and choose rights accordingly)

2- Make sure you read the articles afterwards to check any errors

3- Have a list of articles you want to write about each week and send them to your freelancer

4- Even better, if your freelancer can come up with ideas
for your Blog posts

5- Compensate your freelancer accordingly (ie bonus if articles are really good)

6- Hire more than one freelancer if you want continuity. If one of your freelancer goes on holidays or is not interested anymore, you should have a backup ready.
The Dark Side of Early Retirement
Just read the entire series (seems he was inspired in the summer of 2012, and recently returned to this backyard project). I found it really engrossing, and as he wrote in his first post, the spirit of hacking with tools outside the metaphorical software application.
He could paint it with night vision paint that then could look like pitch black or have some other unintended side effect for a normal viewer.
1. Independent invention may be common, but simultaneous independent invention is very rare. Look at the few dozen examples on wikipedia and compare that to the millions of inventions throughout history. In fact the USPTO moved to a first-to-file regime precisely for that reason -- less than a fraction of a percent of patents were involved in interferences. (An interference is a case of simultaneous independent invention at the PTO.) Reinventing something years after somebody already has is no great feat.

2. There is no empirical evidence that the "cost of monopoly to society is too large". In fact there are tons of economic and historical studies that clearly show the benefits of patents by comparing metrics before and after patent systems were introduced. There are also studies that show the costs these systems impose. It is, however, impossible to say if the costs outweigh the benefits because the metrics used are largely orthogonal.
Apple Pay will have slow adoption simply due to it being tied to new phones and/or the US. That's tiny in global payments. Then I think its early traction comes via in app mobile payments. Things like Lyft and Uber. From there it'll branch out into physical retail. Short answer is the battle at retail is still 2-3 years away at least and that's OK
The site doesn't seem to list which languages are supported.
The question is not whether they are non trivial, and useful. The question is whether they (or something like they), would have existed at all.

Once granted, a patent give a benefit to the inventor, as well as a cost to society at large: monopoly. I think it is fair to say that the costs of monopoly always exceeds the benefits: you can't justify having the society as a whole pay such a cost for the benefit of a lone entity.

The only way to justify such a cost to society, is an equivalent benefit to society. If it turns out an invention would not have existed without the patent then the patent may not be that bad. But if would have existed anyway, then the patent is a net cost —bad.

Reading my sibling comments, it seems H.264 and MP3 patents were not instrumental in the coming of those technologies (efficient audio and video compression). Those technologies would have been invented anyway. Which means these patents didn't serve any real purpose, and their costs (monopolies) are therefore unjustified.

In a word, Bad.
I would gladly forfeit my right to free healthcare as long as all the smokers, drinkers, and caffeine addicts do so. It'd be simple discrimination otherwise, especially considering the health costs of, especially, nicotine and alcohol. Come to think of it, this would pretty much solve all healthcare problems as it would eliminate most spending.
I wonder what it's Weissman score is :)
All the states that allow fracking should make the gas/oil companies fund these for everyone since fracking is proven to cause damaging earthquakes.

Of course that will never happen because it would be the worst constant reminder about what you've allowed your politicians to do to where you live.
Invisible colors? Boring. How about imaginary colors?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_color
Can drone practice take place on poachers?
Do you think all drugs are the same?
تقرير: ديربي السوبر .. لمن يبتسم ؟
The Future According to Stanisław Lem
Libraries may digitize books without permission, EU top court rules
I'd like a rover sent to snap Olympus Mons.
Looks very similar to https://slack.com/
Has there been any attempt at quantifying the "wishful thinking bias" in social science?
Ragel? http://www.complang.org/ragel/
I hope you're right but the very uneven progress of AI generally--especially when it involves real world interfaces--makes me skeptical. As I wrote elsewhere, even voice recognition is very much still a mixed bag.
Our team has been using Slack and we love it.

What is difference here? Why would we switch?
Looks like blood in a vein on the default xD
An Astrobiologist Asks a Sci-fi Novelist How to Survive the Anthropocene
Show HN: I wanted a fat-free, bare-bones wget for Windows so I made Nugget
1. Okay, then, let's do a study about how much time does independent invention need. Then patent durations must be tuned to that. For instance, if most independent re-inventions takes 2 years, then we shouldn't grant patents for more than 3 of 4 years. I suspect that according to this criterion, current durations are much, much too high.

2. I just take for granted that all other things being equal, having a monopoly is much worse than not having it: the (diffuse) cost to society at large is much higher than the (concentrated, visible) benefit to the monopolist.

I take it for granted that it is not defensible to have the society pay a significant cost just to reward a lone entity, no matter how much he "deserves a reward". Global costs must be balanced by global benefits. The very existence of an invention is such a global benefit. But unless the patent helped get the invention out sooner, that benefit is void, and the patent, unjustified.

Also, apparently, we haven't read the same "tons of studies". The arguments againts patents I have read so far (Against Intellectual Monopoly was a good read), sounded very compelling —not to mention grounded in evidence. Could you give me some pointers to the studies you speak of?
All customers are more likely to use Android vs iOS, even in the US as its marketshare is much greater. Unless you just mean to imply that people that shop at Walmart are poor, which whether true or not, is irrelevant.
Why is it "another" debate? Alcohol and nicotine (assuming that by "smoking" you meant tobacco consumption) are both drugs. It's the same discussion.
Here's something you might find interesting: http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/698.htm...

There have are also loads of replication projects, some currently ongoing, of both experimental and statistical papers, with generally dismal results.
Lionel Oliver has put together a great resource for this kind of thing for others who are interested [1]. When I was in high school I built a foundry (basically a stack of bricks with a draft hole and a place to put a small cast iron pot). I used it to melt aluminum and make castings in sand, and it was tons of fun. Looking back, I had no concept of safety at all but amazingly I didn't burn down our chicken coop, which is where it was built. The fuel I used to melt the aluminum was leftover lumber from our house remodel that I cut into cubes, and I had an old double squirrel cage blower set up to provide the draft.

1. backyardmetalcasting.com
Strip VirusTotal out of it, or make it an option, not a default.
> Considering the dearth of retailers that actually support NFC checkout of any flavor

Google's "solution" to this is Google Wallet Card, which is a physical MasterCard Debit Card. How popular this is I have no idea, but I wouldn't be surprised if people who willingly hand over their transaction history to Google would also think its rational to use a google supplied card instead of their own card sitting right next to it in their wallet.

However, it's also not quite the wild-west of implementations that you imagine.

All the major credit card systems for contactless payments, are an implementation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_14443 - of which NFC is also a compatible implementation.

Australia (and I suspect Europe) has had Visa PayWave/MC PayPass for a number of years - PayWave/PayPass POS terminals are very common in shops.

That the POS systems are not common in the US right now is no different to GSM not being common in the US when the iPhone was launched. America just seems to be particularly bad at implementing broad community affecting changes - and extremely bad at anything to do with banks it seems - like this, until they're dragged kicking and screaming into it.

I suspect that once Apple starts organising the B2B arrangements (i.e. dealing with banks) the rollout of ApplePay in the rest of the world - particularly "1st world" countries - will be phenomenally quick compared to in the US.
It did sound low so I went to the link and it says 8 cents there.
How to provide better customer service through visual communication
The Revenge Porn Fixers
Video is not working.
"-50% for a half-year commitment - only if you sign up before the 1st of September!" Is no longer valid yet it's on the pricing page
I know it's easier to say "it's obviously bad, so we must ban it"... but I wanted to share some thoughts too.
(I don't use drugs, I stopped smoking, I still drink alcohol)

Cantaloupe can kill me (allergy), so I choose not to eat it. Darwin at work... For similar reasons, I'm not pro-drugs.

But I don't think a ban on cantaloupe is needed, the same way I think drug prohibition is not an appropriate response to drug abuse. I know it seems far stretched, but please read on.

We base our choice on perceived risk vs benefits.
People who decide to use drugs that could kill them probably don't care about the law. If you accept a high risk of death, jail shouldn't look like a major risk for you.

The fact that a majority of people have tried drugs prove that prohibition only allows punishment, but it doesn't prevent drug abuse.

Reconsidering prohibition doesn't equal being lawless: if a drug addict kills/hurts/steals from you, he risks jail anyway for that (not so much for using drugs!). Prohibition doesn't protect us.

Reconsidering prohibition might open the society for more evolution. Research could lead to real health benefits under medical supervision. Maybe a startup could find ways to explore the effects of some drug safely. Maybe the society would start teaching people about psychology and altered states of mind... Maybe drug traffics would plummet, leading to less violence. Maybe we could then treat all addictions, without a legal vs illegal barrier which is probably barring some from seeking help. And I believe I'm not creative/clever enough to imagine all those changes that would occur.

Lastly, it's widely accepted on HN that we must measure the effects of the actions we take. Reconsidering prohibition will allow such measurement and we'll build our future more wisely.

There will still be casualties, but think again about that cantaloupe... You can't ban cantaloupe to save me from myself.
In the UK it's often stated that £1 in every £7 spent in the UK is spent in Tesco - a large supermarket chain. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/8471807/Its-time-Te.... This similarly sounds impossible. Maybe there's some extra constraints they don't mention - just supermarkets, or just consumer spending. I know I certainly don't spend anything like £1 out of every £7 in Tesco, or any other supermarket. For example I'm sure I've spent many times more on buying my house than I will in Tesco in my entire life.

This is the sort of thing that More or Less should look at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qshd.
Slack and Flowdock have been around for a while and I don't see anything novel here. Also, "high-level security"? Security could be a novel selling point but your copy around it feels dubious.

Maybe "Slack" for enterprise? For Law Firms? Where security is extremely important and they are willing to pay? Not just OTR and encrypted chat but stuff not even YOU can read, maybe self-hosted licensing or in-browser locked keys for encryption? /me is not an expert here but those seem like valuable features that I don't see in Slack or Flowdock.

[EDIT] When you have pre-existing competitors in a space, particularly a space focusing on developers, if you can't provide a feature that would compel (me) to switch (which I won't, I love Slack, unless you've got something amazing Slack doesn't) then you need to focus on a different target.

I've seen a lot of powerful tools for developers and software teams pop up but I almost NEVER see those similar tools being pushed hard for other types of teams. Like Law Firms. Or politics. Or R&D labs. Scientists. So many out there!!!!
This particular law is consumer protection. Taxis are required to charge per trip, not per passenger. If you are standing on a street corner, hail a cab and say 'anyone else going uptown?', that is purely between you and the other passengers, and not between you and the driver.

I suspect that if Uber had a second app, or maybe a second marketplace within the same app, which matched Uber passengers with each other -- instead of multiple passengers with a single driver -- it probably would have been legal.
Injury, no. But gross violations of people's privacy, yes.
From what I remember, they need absolutely crazy tight tolerances in every single join and gap. Something like <0.1mm for every component involved in the reaction chamber. And it's huge too. Otherwise the whole thing will start falling apart as soon as they turn it on. I imagine that's what's requiring the unusual build mechanisms.
I think he means free software as defined by the FSF, which has different definitions for free-of-cost, open source and free/libre software.
You had me at "tacocopter".
> No one patented modular exponentiation, they patented an encryption algorithm that employs modular exponentiation.

Then I must ask: What invention is needed to invent the algorithm, once you know the math?

Is this a novel invention (no prior art about the same algorithmic idea being applied elsewhere)?

Is it non-obvious (a professional computer programmer couldn't be expected to come up with the algorithm, when presented with the math)?

I'm no expert, but I suspect that if you teach me the math behind a particular encryption scheme, then I could program the algorithm without too much difficulty.