skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> but you're ignoring the question of whether they're incremental improvements over existing patents or over the public domain. If the question is whether a patent reduces the incentive for others to make incremental improvements, finding an incremental improvement to something that exists in the public domain provides no such evidence.

Here's how patents are prosecuted: Applicant files a patent with some broad claims. Examiner usually (statistically speaking) rejects it on the basis of non-novelty and/or obviousness and cites some prior art references, which are usually other patents. Applicant then amends their claims with the minimum amount of limitations needed to avoid the prior art references (because they want a patent as broad as possible) and tries again. This cycle typically continues until the examiner can no longer find a concise enough set of prior art references to cover all the limitations of the claim, at which point the patent is allowed.

This process necessarily means that the vast majority of patents technically introduce only incremental improvements (or, more correctly, differences) over the prior art.

Case in point, randomly selected HVEC-related Apple US patent 7,769,084. It was rejected 4 times by the examiner, the last rejection citing patents 5,986,712 (owned by Thomson Electronics) and 6,310,897 (owned by Sony). Apple prevailed by adding a single 20-word clause to a 3-part claim, which the examiner deemed different enough to allow.

If that is not incremental, I don't know what is. Also, note that prior art owned by two different companies did not prevent Apple from making (and then patenting) an incremental improvement to the art.

Here's Microsoft saying MPEG-LA costs it more than it makes:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/05/03/follow-up-on-h...

I feel like I saw similar statements from Apple and Google but I can't find them offhand. The rough math is easy: your share of the licensing pie is proportional to the fraction of your patents in the whole portfolio. The actual calculation is extremely complex, but you can get a good idea by looking at the lists of patents and their owners.

> ... NPEs don't get a vote in the standards body.

Are you sure? I thought I saw a lot of research institutes and universities on standards committees?

> Patent pools have nothing to do with division of labor.

Patent pools are not directly concerned with division of labor, but patents are. Pools are just a emergent licensing convenience when many fragmented rights are involved.
ThoughtWorks Technology Radar Jan 2015
IIRC the analogy is to the positions of a stop/go safety flag (or an actual railway semaphore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_semaphore_signal !) meant to ensure that only one train is in a railway tunnel at a time. A Dutch-speaker with EWD35 http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd00xx/EWD35.PDF should be able to confirm this.
Frankfurt Airport in 200 years time
The portable power pack that charges in just 15 minutes
The beginning of the end of Facebook’s traffic engine
There's been Russian military use of grid fins on supersonic rockets and missiles for many decades. It's my understanding that supersonic flow is not a problem, rather transonic (mercifully a relatively short period on either an accelerating or decelerating rocket) behavior is the problem.
Well, being born here solves the problem from one angle.

The other issue would be a baby brought here illegally, right? Answer me this, how did they get services, like schooling, when they have no legal status to be here? If their parents are not legal residents, how are they getting paid? If they are getting paid under the table then there is no tax money going into the system for the services they and their children receive, right? So, if we rewind back to when the child was first enrolled in school, how did that happen? they should have been identified as a non-legal resident at that point in time. The fact that they made it until high school is tragic but still not legal.

Really, how is it that an illegal resident can do things like enroll in school, register a car, etc. when they have no legal standing to be here? If you are here legally you have a visa, green card, or citizenship, right? Those are all verifiable states.
What is their exit plan? Are they trying to sell the business soon or are they in it for the long haul? Who are the potential buyers and how are they making the company appealing to those buyers.
This is why one writes unit tests, though.

Although, I do occasionally use jQuery, I'm more comfortable and productive when not using it. Also, if I shamelessly take a peek at jQuery's source now-and-then to see how they implement certain features so I can make a helper for it.
> It's one feature I miss since switching back to firefox.

You can use multiple profiles in Firefox. There is even an addon to make the switch easy: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/profileswitch....
Is the Year 2038 problem the new Y2K bug?
Obviously I trust $BIGPLAYER’s setup. To name a few reasons: 1) their large user base makes it simply more probable that a given bug will be discovered by someone else than me; 2) they have a dedicated team with more experience and resources to spend on testing and fixing bugs; 3) their setup has been working for me for many years now.
Hatred game back on Steam Greenlight
52wins: A personal productivity app *only* for 10,000 humans
I worry that you are right. This is my fifth job in 34 years and the best place I have ever worked. So I was hoping to make an improvement from where I sit instead of looking for a better environment.
The term 'organic chemistry' confuses people. We commonly use 'organic' to mean 'living', which is correct in the field of biology, but quite different in chemistry (where it essentially means 'includes the element carbon'). Science journalists usually know the difference, but when stories get in to the mainstream media you often see writers get it wrong.
Notes on HTML, XML, TeX, and Unicode
Indications of life on Mars have been found nearly as many times as Voyager has left the solar system.
Thanks, everyone for the help. I'll be talking to Dave and working on some of the other suggestions, too.
There are more meanings for semaphore:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_semaphore_signal

Edit: Ok, actually that could be within your first meaning. But the practical result for railway semaphores is that one of their uses is to stop trains from entering a blocked segment.
Couldn't the fraudster stimulate human browsing behavior as well, at least to some degree?
Depends on the keyboard?

Screen-input devices like phones and tablets really are lousy keyboards. I get unbelievably better work done with my Note 3 and Shield Tablet then by poking away at a fussy keyboard.

But for sitting at my desk or on my laptop, the keyboard is far superior for most things. So it depends.
Not saying they shouldn't do that, but virtual prepaid CCs are available in many countries, including in the Netherlands, from what I can gather, like https://www.3vcard.nl/
Using chmod command
I will certainly watch those - but for the moment, I see no obvious way to immediately see that a proof is proving what you intended it to prove, whereas `assert (append "foo" "bar") == "foobar"` immediately shows what you expect and can be read and checked by somebody with the slightest programming knowledge.

The point of tests is that they're supposed to be simple enough that it should be near-impossible for them to contain bugs - they're incomplete, sure, but what they're testing should always be correct - whereas it seems that it would be easy for a proof to prove something subtly different from the spec without anybody being able to tell. If we could write complex programs to spec without error, we wouldn't have tests in the first place.
Electronic defense against drones
The shuttle's promise (inexpensive frequent launches) never materialized. Instead it was an incredibly complicated and expensive system to operate, launch, service, and recover. SpaceX's approach is to take the approach that's cost-effective and simple (but no more simple than necessary) and then to try to iteratively improve it to achieve reusable spaceflight. The "works like an airplane" thing is a great strategy if the thing can take off and get to orbit like an airplane, but to this point we (humanity) have not had the technology to produce a single-stage-to-orbit reusable spaceplane. Once we have to stage it and add boosters of various sorts, it quickly has all the same problems as a "traditional" rocket, but with all of the added complexity of a space plane. The Skylon approach purports to tackle this, but at this stage is more fiction than science (funding aside, there's a long way to go).

The Energia (Russian shuttle) program originally planned to have a system like the Shuttle with even more of the rocket returnable to launch site (boosters/core stage (Energia had the "main engines" on the tank rather than the orbiter)) but also abandoned that plan (and indeed the entire program, shortly thereafter).
Gain only “relevant and real” Twitter followers with Tweet Rocket
For and against languages
Yeah, want weDr.Dobbs needs is more flashiness and less quality content! Hell, it works for everyone else.
A common abuse of this is dry cleaners who advertise that they use all Organic cleaning methods, usually meaning compounds like tetrachloroethylene, an organic that is far from organic.
Yes, you are missing something. Air resistance.

At the velocities rockets go, air resistance is terrible, as it grows with the square of velocity and air density.

Rockets minimize area and drag by huge amounts. This means they could carry more payload per power unit.
Maybe they should do a crowd funding campaign, if anything those requests seem to get more media attention and hence momentum. Lots of people use Gnupg indirectly ("infrastructurally" if that's a word...) and might simply not think of donating because of the project's low visibility as a tool in or component of a larger system.
No doubt. But I'd posit that it's probably no more prevalent among those in tech compared to the general population.
Practical Advice from Leonardo Da Vinci on Learning and Honing Your Craft
Good point - though it also applies to non-open-source systems, where we don't necessarily even get to keep the pieces if the maintainers disappear.
A list of words or themes that will get you thrown off a plane
It could also be a matter of "expected" vs "actual."
If I had bitcoin, I would donate it to GnuPG devs.
RE/MAX Holdings Announces CEO Transition
Not return-ing but just falling through to the closing } is perfectly fine and defined as returning 0.
Sony concept eyewear tech turns your existing specs into smartglasses
Please edit the title to start with "Show HN:" if you're looking for feedback from HN users, otherwise, this will probably get flagkilled (since it looks too much like an advertisement / spam).

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
What will I do without my YouTube comments?? /s

In all seriousness I blocked Third Party Cookies in Chrome and never looked back. Nothing of value was lost.
To clarify: this is only for main(), in C++: (see c3.6.1p5 of the standard)

"A return statement in main has the effect of leaving the main function (destroying any objects with auto- matic storage duration) and calling exit with the return value as the argument. If control reaches the end of main without encountering a return statement, the effect is that of executing return 0"

It's really best not to get in the habit of not returning from a function though, as in the vast majority of cases, you'll get a random value (well, whatever's in the appropriate register) as the return result, and unless you specifically configure it, most compilers won't even warn you!
I am going to semi-quote Rich Hickey (the creator of Clojure): You can do everything in any language, it's about what the language makes idiomatic.

So from a very utilitarian perspective, language doesn't matter. However, that's like saying "I can use a square peg for a round hole, just give me a sledge hammer".

Clojure, for example, makes concurrency an idiomatic part of the language. In Java, C# or most other mutable OOP languages, that's very much not the case. However, if you seek the utmost concurrency performance on the JVM (and you know how to do it correctly), Java might be a good option for you.

So it really depends on what your problem domain is. From my experience, application backend web dev is a perfect fit for Clojure with current hardware since you're most likely utilizing multiple threads in one process. Erlang is also a good language to explore, especially OTP and the way it handles distributed concurrency (the "let it fail" model).
So what, we give up entirely?

Most times I'm aware of a site being hacked it's been through a hole in their application code, not the stack they're running on top of.
Is this actually new information? I remember hearing at least a year ago that a large portion of weight loss was due to CO2 being exhaled, in terms of the mechanism by which it actually happens.
THE WAYS TO DOUBLE Your PRODUCTIVITY
For anyone who used: how/where it is better/worse comparing to other "new" JVM languages (Scala, Clojure, Groovy)?
Your incantation of the logical fallacy is how it often appears in what could best be described as ignorant conversations.

The appeal to authority fallacy is if I measured the acidity in a lake over a long term period, and then presented my findings and someone declares that such can't be the case because the Environment Agency says it's fine. They're undermining my objective, demonstrated efforts with a hand waving appeal to someone else. If, on the other hand, I casually and lazily said "I think that there lake is acidic, no matter what anyone tells me", it isn't an appeal to authority to point out what someone who is undoubtedly in a better position thinks and actually knows.

In this case someone offhandedly, based upon nothing but the fact that they seem to want it to be true, declared the ease with which the Go team -- you know, the actual people working on it -- could add generics. No fuss, no muss. It isn't an appeal to authority to point out that they are in absolutely no position to make such a claim.
> This suggestion eliminates bugs that are introduced by unsafe typing, sure. But race conditions, logic flaws, misconfigured tools and almost every class of web vulnerability wouldn't be eliminated just by implementing this.

How often are security flaws a subtle, complex thing that couldn't have been caught by a sensible type system? Almost all of the flaws we hear about, at least here, are the really simple dumb mistakes that a better language absolutely would have caught.
Also, since you're not allowed to talk about it, if you work out you have blue eyes you could just keep your mouth shut.

They do seem to be going to an awful lot of effort to top themselves.
Mark Stratmann
I was being flippant in my answer, but there's a nugget of truth to it -- growing up, my school district had maybe 50-60 administrators to run about 25 elementary schools, 12 middle schools, and 8 or so high schools. Each of which had a principal, assistant principal, librarian, etc.

But today, that number is much higher. Mainly because of increased reporting requirements (No Child Left Behind, etc). But also to do things like write grant proposals (the federal Department of Education hadn't been created in my time, and wasn't handing out money)
I wonder at what price gas needs to be for this to be profitable?
6 Ways That Lack of Focus Can Kill Your Business
Tech hiring will explode in 2015, according to recruiter survey
How to Impress with Charts
Lemon Law in Different States
Lemon Law varies from state to state, however, a “lemon” is deemed a car, truck, or motorcycle suffering from a “non-conformity.” This means that the vehicle has a problem — be it a defect or condition — that impairs its use, value, and safety. Usually, the problems experienced with a lemon cannot be repaired, even after a number of attempts by a manufacturer-authorized dealership.
SEE calemonlawinfo.com
Taming a Wild, Testless Code Beast
life on earth isn't sustainable anyway. how can you not be aware of that?

the sun is dying. if humans don't 'develop' enough before then, it is unlikely that any of earth's legacy will be preserved.
Yes, it's minor compared to the currency I used to have. The number of MXN could have gotten you 1470 USD in 1994 would have only bought you 338 USD by the middle of 1995:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_peso_crisis
ICANN Targeted in Spear Phishing Attack
Vex – modern dialog library
They aren't making more fossil fuels. Wait long enough, just about anything to extract them efficiently becomes profitable.
I mean how people see their Windows desktop experience and how they look for alternatives not associated with the Windows name.
Animate Text with SVG Paths
Travel Startup Busbud Partners with Greyhound, 1M Departures Worldwide
As a user, I don't care if your app will self-destruct if you don't get access to permissions like "read and send SMSs". I simply don't want a free to play game to scan my SMSs for advertisement purposes.
Yup, I made a browser that did that and used it for a while, did even one better. Rather than per tab it was flexible and by default it was locked to the domain you were on. I created an experimental browser with as much new stuff as I could, but sadly users don't care that much. I mean just look at Chrome and how horrible the history control for users is. Even really basic stuff like delete every history entry from site X or for the last N minutes is missing. Where is the outrage?

If anyone is interested, here is a much more fleshed out description of what a next generation browser could have:
http://benjamin-meyer.blogspot.com/2009/08/next-generation-d... If a company out there is looking to see some browser R&D work done send me an email.
I was not suggesting we give up entirely. I'm just pointing out that it isn't a complete solution of the problem. But I agree that application code is probably the bigger problem to solve.
In chrome none of the labels have any text so when scrolling after the push (*Available for free only for
10,000 people who are
serious about productivity), there are just empty text boxes, buttons, and a few HRs.
Tilted on its side exoplanet could still be habitable
Nice stuff..
As long as we keep treating security as a purely technical problem the state of software isn't going to improve significantly. Responsibility tends to catch up with things. It's mostly a question if it's going to benefit software or not.
Ionic has made some giant strides with Beta 14
Sorry, I don't get it. Could you please explain it?
Historically, those in creative professions will be asked to do things for free for exposure - graphic designers still see this quite a bit today, and it is quite common amongst musicians. When they are paid, it usually isn't at a level that properly values their time and service either.

I do some UI/UX work for free, but only for a hobbyist community of musicians I am a part of since it is a community centered around a love of particular content. I also offer some help for free on IRC on solving simple problems. Otherwise, I charge for my services since my time is valuable.
Playing Chicken
It seems like this project is basically just fake-factory applied to a few different databases. It doesn't look that useful on its own, but it's a nice demo of those packages.
Perhaps not write-only memory per se, but write-only registers are a pretty common thing if you do any hardware-level programming.

Though admittedly this isn't something I've done for a number of years, IIRC both the VGA and the original Sound Blaster had write-only registers which you would use to request some change in state, and some other registers that would reflect the actual current state of the device if/when the request was honoured.

Of course these are not write-only in the sense that nothing can read their contents, since they are provided as an interface to some coprocessor like a GPU or a sound chip. That coprocessor can of course read the incoming data. They are more like the hardware equivalent of mutator methods on top of private properties.
The Ageing Gamer
They also apply different methodologies from case to case. Some publishers include Comscore's tracking beacon, so their data will be based on a mix of panel and "real" tracking data whereas other data will only rely on the panel.
Entrepreneur Changes Life in Uganda by Turning Waste into Fuel
Window to the Law: Rules for Proper Use of NAR’s REALTOR
I have a CS degree and interned at IBM, and it's a novel idea for me as well. I'll have to give it a try.
I'm using MultiFox now and it works, but it's not nearly as seamless. I'll give the addon a try.
WTactualF?

Does Disney work for the NSA now? Are they trying to indoctrinate the children?
No, cannon. Like, really solid and made out of explosion-resistant iron.
It's actually quite reasonable to complain about the use of the term semaphore here. As you recognize, stopping the train is only one of their uses. Railway signals can convey many different types of information about the state of the track, not just free/blocked.

And moreover, a semaphore is just a specific type of railway signal, one with a pivoting arm. It's very hard to see how a pivoting arm is at all related to the CS concept.
Milder conditions relative to our environment? this is subjective, where do you see complex life and how do you know that complex life requires "milder" conditions or that is rare if we only have ourselves as an example that happen to live in such an environment?

What stops bacteria that live in harsh environments to evolve even if probably slower? harsh meaning hard/impossible for ourselves or for life as we know on earth.
It's "root" when you use the first letter of the first name + last name.
No-Nonsense Guide to Web Components
I think it's very handy, saves me from writing seeders for my projects
Rather, the hands-off “play” demanded by the elf is limited to finding (but not touching!) The Elf on the Shelf

I see a parallel with this and the concept of "black-box abstraction": If this Elf is an abstraction of surveillance, it's basically saying to the child that they should unquestioningly accept however it works, and not attempt to discover what it really is. That's what I think is the really disturbing part - children are being taught to not think deeply about and "dig into" how the world around them works, but to internalise the belief that everything "just works" like magic. I say this as someone who was known for (sometimes aggressively) disassembling all my toys when I was young. I'd probably give the Elf the same treatment if it existed back then. :-)
I disagree. Preventing vulnerabilities is not primarily an "attitude problem." Writing code is hard enough as it is, and writing flawless code that can withstand hostile attacks is really hard. Odds favor vulnerability existence, and when bad ones are inevitably discovered in production systems people always claim the whole process is broken.

That being said, this one is pretty bad.
Why not link to less catchy, but more accurate report?

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26709-curiosity-rover-...
Can someone provide a better "forwardable" explanation of CSRF than the wikipedia version of "let me f-ing google that for you"?

I already unsuccessfully searched for a XKCD treatment.

Something I can forward to non-devs not written at dev level. Also no videos (who has time for that?). It sounds like a graphics arts type project, like a xkcd topic, so I guess something like that is what I'm looking for.

The wiki explanation is pretty good, just curious if anyone has anything better for non-technical-ish people.
Kotlin doc has short feature comparison with scala: http://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/comparison-to-scala.htm...

In general, "If you are happy with Scala, you probably don't need Kotlin."