skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Algorithm patents do not patent math, they patent processes that are describable with math. It is the difference between patenting the concept of "sorting" and patenting a specific sorting algorithm; only the latter is allowed.

The problem with this logic is that algorithms and math are the same thing.

F=ma describes what happens when you hit a golf ball with a club. You can't patent F=ma, you can patent a novel golf club. A golf club is not an equation.

An algorithm is not described by math, it is math.

Thought experiment: Suppose that you were allowed to patent math. Name some product that would infringe the math patent that would not infringe the corresponding algorithm patent.

> The conceptual test for patentability of an algorithm in most countries is that it is directly reducible to practice as a novel electronic circuit design.

That is no test. All novel algorithms (or, equivalently, mathematical formulas) are directly reducible to novel electronic circuit designs. Deterministically by a machine. It's like saying you can't patent math unless you write it down. You're attempting to distinguish two things using a test that identifies them as equivalent.

> All patentable subject matters are directly describable with math in exactly the same way as proper algorithm patents, and chemical process patents have an identical abstract structure (just change "bits" to "atoms"), so any specific argument against algorithm patents would consistently apply to most or all patentable subject matters.

The difference is that with "atoms" the description is distinct from the implementation. A computer simulation of the atoms in Tylenol wouldn't infringe a patent on Tylenol. The simulation is math. The simulation doesn't treat aches and pains.
If you're stressing out about making ends meet on a paltry salary in the mid-five figures

It's all relative. Someone out there (in, say, a developing country or even Mississippi) might be aspiring to that mid-five figures, puzzled that people can't survive on $50,000.
> I doubt they are getting swarmed by emails

HAH!

> and wouldn't mind hearing from you.

Probably not :)
Then you'd have to worry about securities laws (both California and federal). Also, I doubt there's some sort of employee-owner exception to the CPUC rules.
>> "Most of these are district court cases."

3 out of 11 are Federal Circuit cases, and one of the District Court cases was actually decided by Federal Circuit Judge Bryson (Loyalty v. American).

I'd count that as 4 out of 11 being Federal Circuit cases. Its certainly a trend.
If you take this analysis one step further, one could argue that a company which fails to sell profitably before its death is not a company at all; it's a hobby or charity, redirecting invested time and money to its customers.
Yeah, he may well be right and I might be totally barking up the wrong tree. But that just seems so depressing I can't help but tilt at this particular windmill. The hope is that his theory will become obsolete if the activity of programming changes radically enough.

I started out thinking you couldn't solve social problems with technical solutions. Now I think social problems arise in the context of configurations of technical energy barriers. Making something easier can make good behavior more or less likely to arise. So it behooves technologists to think hard about what they make easier. But this is getting abstract, and I need to show examples of what I'm trying, what I'm keeping and what I'm discarding. If you send me an email I'll show you what I have.
Not all capitalists. I'm not sure I can think of any actual ones for whom any democracy is the most horrible thing. Bit of a straw man argument perhaps?
Unless I am missing something, your premise is that Nacchio is a cheat, and therefore we should discount anything he says about the motives behind the government's prosecution of him. Is that correct? Need I remind you that the government are confirmed cheats and liars here, as well? The judge who tried and sentenced him? Resigned in disgrace afterwards from some sort of sex scandal. See how Ad Homs work?

As for peoples' sympathy for Nacchio, I'll tell you that I think that a company executive who cheats on stock options is not a rare thing. It's not my favorite thing, but the degree to which that affects me personally is close to nil; but a telecomm executive who (allegedly) told the NSA to piss off is something that affects me, and worth a second glance. Nacchio has been consistent in his denials and allegations throughout and continues to be to this day.

Here is an interview from March. http://www.foxbusiness.com/business-leaders/2014/03/27/forme...

And one from May http://denver.cbslocal.com/2014/05/28/defiant-joe-nacchio-la...

>But I have an even bigger problem with accepting what seem to be obvious falsehoods in the service of that perspective.

What seem to be? They either are obvious falsehoods or they are not. And, I have to tell you that the things that are obvious to you and the things that are obvious to me are not always of the same set. I can't even begin to imagine what kind of saint a person would have to be to earn standing in your court.
I think it's about time I jump on the js bandwagon then.
Maybe that's what he means, but there are numerous examples of very innovative monopolies that are "illegal bullies" (e.g. Microsoft) or "government favorites" (e.g. AT&T, Xerox). IBM is probably all three.
Not sure, but from the article: "If the companies would like to add a carpool feature, they first have to request an adjustment to their existing permits with the CPUC or petition the state legislature to modify the law."

Presumably, the airport shuttle vans have a different type of permit than the ones Uber et al have. Seems more like a temporary paperwork issue than a genuine showstopper.
Presumably they are classified as buses, and not taxis.
Flat rate charge.
There was nothing about that movie that was related to "Money" per se. This wasn't the Koch brothers conspiring with George Soros. This was a couple of goofballs editing together some news footage and dubbing over some scary narration. That is, shit that happens on youtube every day. You know, speech. After the FEC has silenced all the little guys who dare criticize a candidate, do you really think the Kochs will be reduced to normal private citizens?
> This is absurd; most failed companies didn't face any competition because they didn't find a market

You are saying the majority of companies that fail produce a product with no market?

I doubt that's the case. There is a market, however small and a product that is similar or can be substituted for your product is still in direct competition.
I can't even think of a language that has first class complex numbers, let alone complex number literals.
Yes, but you will need to add you own authentication in the routes. We are looking at other ways to add auth soon, but for now this was the simplest way to get started.
I don't believe for a second that the claims were portrayed in a sensationalized fashion. Those are serious allegations that were just brushed off by Boeing's PR folks.
Just as the legal, albeit morally questionable, cosy relation between FAA regulators and Boeing lobbing co.

If the aircraft wasn't safe it wouldn't be flying today. But questions regarding QA must be addressed before it's too late (i.e. UA811).
On #2, a colleague of mine has a hypothesis that that's a primary reason a lot of smaller enterprises (on the threshold of enterprisey) buy ERPs: it tells them what they should be keeping track of and how, along with providing the tool to do it. When small companies grow large quickly they often end up being very unsure of how to structure their processes and accounting, and having a built-in solution for "this is how companies in field X do things" is appealing. So it's not only that they worry about the risk of building an in-house solution, but they also worry they wouldn't even know what should go in the solution! Buying SAP not only gives them the software, but a template for how to structure their business's processes.

In a way it's a little like adopting git and a particular git workflow. Adopting the workflow can be the really valuable part, especially if you had no idea how to structure a workflow in the company previously. The tool is secondary, and just helps structure the workflow. Seen that way, implementing SAP is sort of like buying a default-business-process template, along with some enabling software. (On the other hand, it does run the risk of producing some cargo-cult business practices. If businesses structure their processes to fit SAP, rather than vice-versa, it's not necessarily the case that anyone is checking whether these processes still make sense.)
or rent the car, which happens to have its own driver.
It also seems to defy common sense. How many top ACM programming teams randomly pick programmers from the college? How many great bball teams are randomly picked from players? There are few activities, where excellence is easily measured, where randomly picking participants results in superior results.
Apple Intro Video – Perspective
I recently was in a Lyft where the driver was also an Uber driver. I don't know how rapidly he switched contexts (ride to ride, day to day, or something like surges). Does either company do anything to prevent this?
Thanks! That's just the first instance I spotted — there were a few dozen similar things I saw after skimming for 2-3 minutes. I'll post an issue if I find time.
How is it that there's (what appears to be) c source code in there:

https://github.com/dli/flow/blob/master/flow.js
> By submitting data to this demo you are agreeing that we can do anything with the data. We may store it, process it, make it public, anything.

This makes it difficult to do much in the way of assessment.
I desperately need delaunay triangulation
The problem with his statements is you can't sort out when he is using a figure of speech to convey his point or he wants to be 100% understood as literal. Monopoly can be a figure of speech for "first to market". In the literal sense Monopoly cannot exist without government intervention - which is the antithesis of capitalism. Moreover, capitalism equates to freedom, a free market. This does equate to healthy competition. Competition that brings out the best in all men and a monopoly in the literal sense makes sure that never happens by force of government.

By stating "competition doesn't work", "look at restaurants on NYC." Well that doesn't makes sense because if it didn't make sense then business men would not be making restaurants so something actually does make sense < I was shocked that both people agreed so easily to such a odd statement. Why would there be 16,000 restaurants if no one was making money.

Then they go on to say "who would of known we needed some many online pet companies" Again what is the exact argument here, be 1st to market? zappos.com wasn't the 1st ecom shoe company - 1 billion dollars later...
Scheme and Racket use i in complex numbers, for example:

(* 2+3i 4+5i) ;=> -7+22i
Airport shuttle vans typically operate under a passenger stage corporation permit and charge a flat-rate fee per-person for transport. Charter-party carriers (which is what Uber/Lyft/etc currently operate as in CA) charge based on mileage or time and are prohibited from individual charges for multi-person rides (with a bunch of exceptions, like if they're in Lake Tahoe or if they're going to or from a hot air balloon).
The google doodle commemorating Borges' birthday was inspired by this short story. http://www.google.com/doodles/112th-birthday-of-jorge-luis-b...
Hopefully it's not like Ender's Game :-)

Trying it out, though.
>Imagine if Mark Zuckerberg would have heard this advice and been convinced that there was no point in competing with MySpace..

You probably confuse a market leader of a nascent market with a monopoly. MySpace was popular, but even at its peak it was 1/10 or less of the size of Facebook.

Say there's a new product category, for example "pet-rock social sites".

The first site PetRockSter on the market gets 1M account. A second site, PetrockSpace arrives, totally obscures the first site, and gets 20M people.

Then a third one cames (PetrockBook), and everybody you know starts getting "pet-rock social sites", to the point that half the population or more is now using that third website.

Technically the first and second time were "monopolies" in their time. But they only had 100% of a very small niche market, before it matured, that is they had like 100% but of a small percentage of the whole population that would eventually get a social pet rock account.

You are only a legit monopoly (with all the power that entails) if a) you have a huge share of a market and b) that market is not blowing up and expanding at a fast rate. E.g the way Microsoft has a near monopoly on desktop OSes.
That seems like it's not compatible with lyft and uberx if a driver wants to not be a full time driver.
It would probably be easier to work with state legislators to change the laws.
"Apple's partners in this, including Visa, Mastercard and Amercian Express, as well as all those prominent banks must have been looking for reassurances that payment and card data was going to be safe.
It must have been an embarassing week."

Considering that Apple/iCloud doesn't store any payment or card data with Apple pay, and that the hack in question wasn't due to any specific weakness in Apple/iCloud infrastructure, I very much doubt there were any reassurances required...
It's been some time since I read Lem, but much of his work seemed to be a sort of reinterpretation of Borges. To be clear, I found that a very good thing!
It's not live streaming, though, is it? These are recordings. You can't stream something faster-than-realtime live.
Atheism describes the belief that [1] all human beings before the Enlightenment were drooling idiots (never mind the many cultural achievement that among other things made possible the Enlightenment itself), [2] many continue to be drooling idiots to this date, and [3] the best way to disabuse people of their own idiocy is to stomp on all their more cherished beliefs and traditions until they accept that the all-so-smart Atheists-with-Capital-A were always right, and more handsome too.

atheists, on the other hand, try to find meaning in a world where there is no Daddy in the sky that will reward your achievements or punish your mischief, and live accordingly in a dignified, sane way.
Reading things like this make me OK with startups bending an even breaking the occasional law if they're truly providing something of value. The legal system is rife with regulations and actors that are often not intended to benefit the public. There is nothing inherently right or efficient about it, and it's the oldest and most inflexible of the man-made institutions, behind Comcast.
That is GLSL, the language pixel, vertex (and other) shaders are written in.
Why the exception for Lake Tahoe?
Do something nobody else can do. Good luck.
Given its recency, is it safe to assume this works for Rails 4.2.0beta? I'm working on a new project for a client and was a little dismayed that both Rails Admin and ActiveAdmin currently have problems with 4.2.0.
This is true of sports as well. True competition in sports is a lose-lose for teams--if teams don't compete, they can coordinate to maximize their gambling winnings, and everyone comes out ahead (except for fans, just as lack of competition in business makes consumers the loser).
Seriously, man! Anybody who would understand your explanation is the kind of person who already knows what monads are, and thus does not need your explanation in the first place.
I think we will see self driving cars in regular use that do not require an attentive driver on the freeway within 6 years. I think self driving cars will put Uber drivers out of business in 10 to 20 years.
My assumption would be local ski bus operation? No idea if that's the actual justification though. Also, looks like I was wrong about the hot air balloons -- it's only back from the balloon landing, not to the balloon: http://leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=puc&group=...
They are not employees of HomeJoy.
Actually Google failed to gain any market share in China, and "filtered" didn't play any role in that. If anything Baidu is equally filtered and monitored.

Google just doesn't appeal much to the Chinese sensibilities, and especially earlier had very bad Chinese search results.
"the availability rate for this technology will get into (hundreds of) millions in a couple of years"

There - fixed that for you... Apple sells "(tens of) millions" of iPhones per quarter - and that tends to grow. A couple of years of sales add up to a lot of phones.
I haven't tested it with 4.2.0 beta yet. I can give it a go this weekend and I will add it as an issue on github as well. If you comment on the issue or email me - jon [at] upmin.com - I can make sure to update you on this.
My second child was born after submitting the application and before being accepted. The fact that I have kids was on my twitter profile and not hidden.

It's tough. But not impossible. My solution was to cut everything else out. But, I love my family, my co-founder is awesome, and building my company is what I want to do. So, "everything else" should probably have been cut out anyway.

SimpleLegal
YC S2013
The irony of your statement is that Rockstar Games almost certainly has a ton more money than Citizens United, and is a for-profit corporation on top of all that. Citizens United is just an advocacy organization, no different than Sierra Club, etc. Who exactly is the "moneyed interest" here?
Thats the exact point. There has never once, in human history, been a monopoly in a free market. They only exist via government controls. Just study American history between 1900-2000
wide market appeal? multifunctionalism? profit margins? market captivity?
PennApps Hackathon Live Stream
Pretty cool - this is coming at a perfect time for me.
Transistors and semiconductor advances were far more important than UNIX or C. You can't have modern computing without the underlying hardware, but it's not hard to envisage an alternate reality where UNIX or its descendents never became popular.
> So, we're talking about Haskell passing around void pointers and later doing cross-your-fingers typecasts on them?

Following on this thought: Every compiler is essentially an assembler programmer! And we all know how error prone it is to code in assembler. So how can the compiler ever produce error-free binaries?
Very cool! Smooth as silk at 524K on my GeForce GTX 650 Ti and Chrome 37. 1M makes it a bit choppy, but still pleasant.
Free Giveaway at Cornershop Jesta
> people and corporations both must be able to speak to their representatives

A lack of lobbying wouldn't prevent anyone from speaking to their representatives. The negative connotations around lobbying come from things like:

- Large campaign contributors getting more attention than constituents (even if their industry isn't in the state; See Orrin Hatch and Hollywood for an example).

- Lobbyists being people that know the politicians, and therefore are being paid to use that trust.

... etc
It can't, but it doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing thing. A system that is less corrupt functions more smoothly than one that is more corrupt, even if there is still corruption.

In the U.S, corruption takes the form of old-boy networks for financial access, exclusive business relationships, under-the-table deals that you'd rather not be made public, close relationships between business and politicians, alumni networks, etc. In many other countries, corruption takes the form of bribes needed to even start a business, hired goons that you have to pay off for protection, unreserved Party loyalty, and midnight executions of people who are deemed a threat. As a startup founder, I get annoyed at all the hoops I have to jump through that have little to do with building a good product, but realistically, I am risking comparatively little and there are ways to convince people that don't involve obsequiousness. Doing something disruptive in, say, sub-Saharan Africa or China or the Philippines often involves much more significant risks to life or property.
Great idea.
Could be a little more intuitive. I admit I struggled at times to figure what to do next. Really liked everything else. Parabens!
Yes times 1,000!

This is what we're trying to address at Sourcegraph (https://sourcegraph.com/). 80% of programming is about reading and understanding code, not writing code.

Why don't existing tools focus more on helping people read and understand code--and, more broadly, collaborate on a development team? Things like:

* seeing everywhere a function or class is used, in context (like https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/joyent/node/.CommonJSPack... on the right side)

* seeing who at your company knows the most about an area of your codebase

* seeing the history of changes, in terms of functions/modules added, not just lines (like https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/fsouza/go-dockerclient/.c...)

* having a long-lived discussion about a module/class/function that doesn't vanish after a commit is merged or the file's lines shift around

So far, most of the innovation in programming tools has been in editors or frameworks, not in collaboration and search tools for programmers.

While there are great editors and frameworks, the lopsidedness is unfortunate because making it easier for programmers to learn and reuse existing code and techniques, and to collaborate on projects, can have a much bigger impact than those other kinds of tools. That's because, in my experience, the limiting factors on a solo developer's productivity are the editors and frameworks she uses, but the limiting factor on a development team's productivity is communication (misunderstanding how to use things, reinventing the wheel, creating conflicting systems, not syncing release timelines, etc.).
Presumably, the shuttle services have different permits,
the statement
"If the companies would like to add a carpool feature, they first have to request an adjustment to their existing permits with the CPUC"
would seem to hint that its possible to have that permit, uber and lyft just haven't successfully applied for one yet.
Swiping into a building is the electronic equivalent of signing in on a clipboard held by a security guard. That is hardly spying, and it's definitely not "your data."

If a municipality were to do this with all the private residences under their jurisdiction, sure, that'd be Orwellian, because then it really is your data. In this case it's MIT's data about MIT's facility that happens to have been triggered by you.
If anyone is interested in better research on diversity and team outcomes, I recommend looking into research on "faultlines" in teams. It is an interesting way of operationalizing diversity and predicting its effects.

Link to abstract: http://amr.aom.org/content/23/2/325.short

I can't find a direct link to the PDF at the moment. That's the original article. There's been a lot of research since testing the theory, typically supporting it (though I'm not 100% up to date on this topic).
I'd guess the 3rd edition of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial would be an excellent place to start for learning the basics of testing.
Agreed, but I also hope that the regulators catch up and make sane decisions to correct the current environment. For example, at the forefront of my mind is the need for consumers and the state to have assurances that the drivers of these services have commercial insurance. Or that it truly is a ride-sharing lookup, not a taxi service.

I'm sure there are other issues that need sorting, but as an outsider much of the taxi industry's regulations seem like they can be modernized for a post uber/lyft world.