skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They get the patents in various ways. The common way is to buy it from a bankrupt company, though many companies who aren't bankrupt will sell off patents. A lot of them will buy company X, then create X LLC as a holding company for the patents to sort of trick people into thinking it is a real company.

Some trolls will make their own patents. Sometimes it is engineers who fancy themselves inventors or other times it is a patent attorney looking to make money. Though the latter is fairly rare.

There are several big "patent assertion companies" that do this on a large scale. They are very good at determining value of a patent, figuring out who to sue, etc. They have a team of lawyers on staff. These types of trolls usually go after big companies for big dollars. They'll definitely settle, but they aren't looking for 40k or something small.

Some are small time groups or even single people who just learned the system. A lot are former attorneys. These smaller ones are more likely to just seek a small payout. These ones are the most annoying because they often have zero case but are demanding such a low amount that its better to just pay, which of course incentivizes more patent exortion.

But there are a lot of smaller law firms that specialize in troll law suits who do most of the legal work. I'm not sure what the business model is like, if they work on contingency or not.

If the trolls are making their own patent, one way to "craft" your patents is continued applications. You claim a super broad claim early, and then continue to fight over it for years and years. If you win the broad claim, huge win. But even if you don't, you can sort of craft the claims to cover technology that has since gone mainstream. The continued applications get backdated to the original. This practice has been reigned in a bit by changes to law and regulation.

But I think the best way is to just pick up patents from a legit company that is selling them or is in bankruptcy. These companies will have patents that were cutting edge at the time. I also think it's the more morally defensible way to patent troll. You give R&D extra value and let companies take out loans backed by IP, because you are creating a market for IP. I'm sure more than a couple mature start ups have leveraged patent portfolios to borrow capital.

The trolls and their attorneys are typically more efficient than defense firms. Defense firms typically throw an army of lawyers at the case and it has diminishing returns. Also, the plaintiffs role just seems easier IMO.
So, is the problem encryption or manual encryption ?

I presume you don't care about encryption when you send emails, and yet if you're using a big name your emails will be encrypted without you even knowing it.

That's why I keep wanting to put "automatic" encryption everywhere, and would rather have your browser demote plain HTTP as insecure as a TLS connection with RC4-MD5, and display good security connection with a higher "indicator" than those, even if the certificate is self-signed (yet not as high as a trusted communication)

In practice that would mean "this connection is PROBABLY secure. If you really care about what you're about to do, STOP NOW. If you don't care just go on".

"Automatic" PGP (or really E2E encryption) would be awesome, but there is still far too much manual work for it to happen. Maybe one day we'll be there.
Bitcoins for each one right arrangement
Weren't humans alive back 70,000 years ?

I wonder if one of our ancestor then gazed at the sky and saw something or not. Guess we will never know :(
Yes, but you can use the Disavow tool to try to fix it.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en
Hi Dan,

There are no lock-ins whatsoever. If you like to move over to somewhere else in the later stage. Just send us one email at hoot[at]owlsend.com and we will send you the export of all your contacts.

Thanks
Neeraj
OwlSend Team
I think this is a great tool.

I don't understand what other commenters are complaining about rebase and rewriting history, because this article is not about that, it's about not having to fix conflicts multiple times. This can be handy in a variety of situations. You might not need it, but every person/team has it's own way of working with Git. Rerere is just another tool that might help you in your workflow.

And to the people who are claiming that rebasing is hard, dangerous or a clean history is not necessary: Once you get it's not hard or dangerous, and a clean history really IS useful. Why are we using Git again?

- Being able to work together on a codebase (the history shows the changes)

- Code reviews for new features (the history of the pull request shows the changes the feature introduces)

- Being able to roll back to a previous state in case there is something wrong with the latest version (the history can help you decide where to roll back to)

And a lot of more reasons we use Git that have to do with the history. It is true it takes a little bit more effort to have a clean history, but in big teams/projects it's really worth it.
If more people do this then I'll just stop asking for recommendations on Twitter.

When I do ask, it's because I want responses from the people I follow (and that follow me) - trusted contacts whose opinions I am interested in. I don't want to opt in to a brand new spam feed every time I tweet.
Greece is doomed with pontificating populists like Varoufakis, who are ever eager to take the path of least resistance and pin the blame on an unpopular minority, leading the government.
A close call of 0.8 light years
Which side are you counting St. Louis as an example for? It isn't clear to me from your phrasing, but I think you probably mean that it is split up.

For those that haven't seen it, Saint Louis county has 90 municipalities with 81 court systems:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/09/03/h...
it's a product, not a blog post
Methods of detecting exoplanets
What do you mean exactly by "Medium built inside HN"? Something for long-form writing that's a part of HN? Or a Medium-like service built by people associated with HN?
The Current State of Open Source Hardware
If you can report it as a bug, please do so! Compatibility issues like this are the sort of thing they dive upon to fix.
Yeah, that outcome isn't really surprising at all. I'm sure he'll have no trouble finding work though. Lots of anti-gay (usually thinly veiled with "pro-religion") companies still plague the US.

Maybe Hobby Lobby needs a lobbyist? :)
“You Might Also Like:” Privacy Risks of Collaborative Filtering
Why don't you just try both?
GoAccess – Terminal-Based Visual Web Log Analyzer
Misogyny seems to be big in Reddit comments.
Canvas doesn't work that way. It's immediate mode, so unless you are doing something purely additive, you reissue all draw calls on every frame. Compare to SVG, which is retained mode.
This doesn't match my personal experience. I learned music at five and have been an active musician all my life, but languages have always bee hard for me.

I believe that music is much more related to computer languages - just instructional notations as opposed to natural languages.
You have to be specific here.

1) How many apps will flat out refuse to run if Google Services are not present, as opposed to have reduced functionality? Having a dependency on Google's Services library only means that the app will use it if it is available, not that the app will fail if it's not.

2) How many apps use more than the Location / Maps / In-app Purchases API, which are implemented in a compatible way by all of the other parties I mentioned?
The Nature of Information Could Resolve One of the Great Paradoxes of Cosmology
Two points:

1) It's true that there were uniquely powerful and dominant figures during both the Red Terror and the Collectivization. But those were people who genuinely had the support of the rest of the Party. Many of the other Bolshevik leaders were just as bad. In fact, Trotsky (the alternative on hand who usually plays the "if only the czar knew!" role to wishful leftists) was if anything worse, pushing for an immediate campaign of massive warfare and terrorism to be extended to other countries and being particularly brutal in putting down rebellions.

2) Thinkers trade in abstractions--thought is really just the application and generation of new abstractions. It's not clear to me that you can hold those thinkers responsible, though, when people proclaiming their ideology use their abstractions to ride roughshod over human rights (itself an abstraction...)

Take Adam Smith, who's a secular saint in the Anglosphere. The liberal version of British imperialism embraced him and laissez-faire capitalism to justify actions that cost tens of millions of lives. E.g. the Irish famine, the Indian famines, arguably even the Opium Wars/Taiping Rebellion. A typical argument for not providing famine relief by the Indian Famine Commission:

The doctrine that in time of famine the poor are entitled to demand relief [...] would probably lead to the doctrine that they are entitled to such relief at all times, and thus the foundation would be laid of a system of general poor relief, which we cannot contemplate without serious apprehension.

This variant of capitalist ideology was the deadliest in the world during its time, until variants of Marxism managed to blow that record away. I think you can just as easily say, "A philosophy that reifies an amorphous abstract idea like property rights to the extent that people's lives don't matter if they lack property is extremely disturbing."

It seems to me that the only ideologies out there with clean hands are the ones that only exist in people's heads.

FTR, I think the healthiest approach is to reject all ideologies that pretend to be all-encompassing and use the analytical tools provided by them as needed. Epistemological, if not political, anarchism.
Probably not, most, if not all, non-compliant XML/XHTML is either written by hand or by very bad generation tools. In the case of HTML/2 it's a protocol that needs to be implemented by browsers and web servers and there are only so many of those. In the case of XML/XHTML any person throwing up a website or sending a document does the generation with a different set of tools(or by hand)
Oh, yeah, those were just examples. No way I'd move a four-person family to SV, or anywhere near :-)

Portland, Seattle, VA/NC? Maybe. Or remote work.

Nice to know that the SV "Ivy, MIT, or GTFO" standards don't necessarily apply in other tech hubs.
Another Apple Rejection Story – GIF Finder
I guess it depends on whether you're Deleuzian or not.
Well, Microsoft has a huge responsability when it comes to the failure of ES4. No matter what you say. Especially since now everybody is talking about adding type declaration to javascript. We add these in ES4, MS clearly didn't want it because it would have made JS too powerful and threaten MS business.
BTW, in some jurisdictions, a lot of clauses commonly found in contracts are invalid. Most EULAs don't hold any water in the EU, for example, especially when they contain "surprising" clauses (i.e. something a consumer would not reasonably expect to find in an EULA).
Does anyone else find it odd that the major releases are listed in descending order and then minor revisions are listed in ascending order?
I use a few of these hacks. But I wanted to be 100% sure the user could not open certain builtin apps, like the phone app. So my kiosk device is locked and my app runs on top of the lock screen.

My target device is Android 2.3. Does anyone need to see some code?
Secret, All Expenses Paid, Hackathon
Yes, I love how unbalanced Baldur's Gate 2 sometimes is. I think this makes it actually a great game.
But not this year.
Here's what Google says about the location API:

> This API is not the recommended method for accessing Android location.

> The Google Location Services API [...] is the preferred way to add location-awareness to your app.

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/location/pack...

It seems like Google is intentionally encouraging developers to switch to their closed APIs. Most developers will probably follow what the red warning message says instead of spending more time building another solution.

Google wants to keep control of all Android clone OSs, so they add convenience features to their closed-source libraries, encourage developers to use them, and force phone manufacturers to bundle them with their OS.

Bundling an alternative implementation of the API is probably a bad idea because of copyright.
SMB as well as boutique design shops. Occasionally well-funded startups if they can afford me.
I wrote a mini platformer in Elm and it was great fun to make, but suffered the same problem as this demo: quite janky (seemed to suffer a lot GC hicups, especially in Firefox), and that's just at 30fps. At the time I thought it was because it was doing a lot of unnecessary canvas operations under the hood - which you just can't afford to do if you want buttery-smooth games, but figured I'd revisit Elm when it's sorted out ;)
After VVORK: How (and why) we archived a contemporary art blog
I'm curious when "photographs" (which, as described, were part of this dude's job) became "recording a private meeting" in the sense that any actual human being would mean it. Or when a meeting with a thousand people was somehow "private".

So I won't go on about how it doesn't change anything--though it doesn't--but I will inquire as to why you'd cape for one of the most universally acknowledged jerks in the industry.
The authors actually discuss this possibility in their paper. (Section 4 of [1].) The star is very faint (an M dwarf), so even at its nearest approach it would have been far too faint to be seen with the naked eye. However, M dwarfs do show occasional flares, so it is possible that it would have brightened to be visible to the naked eye for a few minutes to hours during a flare event.

[1]: http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.04655
long ago, when I had just a tiny company and we were essentially a friendly lot, we'd do skits once a month, competing to come up with the best reasons to fire each other, for prizes and forfeits. It was a game, but it helped among other things to relieve a lot of internal tension that might otherwise have politicized us.

About that time, or rather a few years later, reflecting on those skits, I told my cofounder, "Dude, I have come to the conclusion that lately if I worked for myself i'd have quit, and if I hired myself i'd have fired myself. What went wrong?" as a result I stepped out of management for a while, and hit the proverbial drawing board.

I can imagine now that someone would sue for this sort of thing being bullying at work, or some such rot, but the skits gave us often too much insight into the real effective personalities at our work, often in the "too much information" category, but almost invariably in good humor.

Just thought the exercise might yet benefit somebody else, still, for the mention.
Possibly a fairly dim point of light, moving slowly like a planet? It was a red dwarf star (with a brown dwarf companion) so not that bright in the first place, and very, very, very far away - that perspective diagram has a log scale. The sun seen from the outer planets isn't much more than a particularly bright star, and it's much bigger and hotter than Scholz's star.
As someone that was born in an ex-communist/socialist/whatever "no true marxist" state that had a system in which workers' assemblies owned and managed (large) state companies, but who (luckily) never had to read Marx, i might just ask this:

Set aside the rosy situations where the workers share the surplus, what happens when workers collectively squander and fk up the means of production? Because, in reality, that is exactly what happened.
I think you misinterpreted some of Google's documentation here, or are deliberately FUD'ing. You made me look around in Android's documentation and the web and I did not find anything about this. Care to share a link?
I think the seemingly arbitrary behaviour of things like `[] + []` vs. `[] + {}` doesn't really affect you, as someone writing real JavaScript in the wild, very often (but perhaps they still might do occasionally, depending on what you're doing).

On the other hand, errors in logic because of truthiness/falsiness do occur pretty regularly in real code (I'm sure every JavaScript developer has at least once forgotten to check whether an argument is really undefined and then not very gracefully handled `0` being passed to that function)... and these problems do all have the same root cause: JavaScript's type system.
A player shouldn't have to play your game just to learn in the end game that their fighter isnt going to cut it and they'll have to reroll as a wizard. That sucks (and is bad game design). Things shouldn't be perfectly balanced, but all play styles should be equally viable.
The article doesn't appear to mention it, but in the past I had a need for this type of information when interfacing C data structures from other programming languages.

If the structure you are connecting with is packed you have to be aware of that or else you'll end up with data soup :)
Finally, an article that explains it comprehensively. My prior knowledge of it was hazy at best, and it seems like I did not take full advantage of this.
Looks at big stack of C64 hardware in the corner and shifts uncomfortably

I'm reading Kondo's book right now, and at first I thought it was going to be a wash for me, but her criterion for keeping or discarding things is actually more subtle than "have you used it in the last year?" In her words, you should ask yourself "does this bring me joy?" This may sound like a cop-out, but for people like myself - people who have a lot of hobbies, projects and interests...it makes the problem more approachable.

We'll see where I'm at in six months, though.
Django and Rails, to name just two open source projects, and I've seen proprietary Python apps with hundreds of thousands of lines of code. You still haven't said how PHP allows you to write bigger codebases than Python or Ruby, and what that has to do with looking like Java.
I remember in junior high our physics teacher made a huge deal about this when they launched it in 1990. He quizzed us on the article he handed out at the beginning of class, just to make sure we didn't forget how important this was.

Beyond the early failures, it has indeed achieved well beyond what I think most people imagined, bringing us closer to a world we know so little about.
Show HN: Qapital
I am very happy that this myth is being perpetuated. The following is a stereotypical view, but there is some truth to it over all. Minnesotans tend to be very soft spoken. They also are very practical. They don't want to spend all their money. They want either a high paying consultancy or a stable job at a big place. So they are out there but you would not know unless you knew their close friends or family and got them to talk over a hot dish or something.

I have friends from MN. I went to school with people from MN. I work about an hour outside of Chicago. I have coworkers that are from MN. I'll give one case. There was a fellow that left and I had to talk about his accomplishments at a lunch. I was floored. I had worked with him for ten years and yes I knew he was sharp and did great work, but I had no idea about everything that he had accomplished in his academic, professional, political, and personal life. I went around asked long timers and got a little clue here and there. Then I would go and ask him and his wife about the things I heard, and he was always like that was no big deal. It was funny to witness how his wife had to push him to open-up.

So you are sort of in a rough spot. The sorts of people that you would want for a start-up largely see almost the same rewards in the endless consultant opportunities with a lot less risk. They figure they can afford a great life with that anyway, so there' just no real upside. They also really don't want to work around the people that they stereotypically expect at a start-up. Then it's also hard for you to know how good they are, cause they talk about the weather or their interests instead of bragging about themselves. It's really hard to get them to open-up. The other side of the coin is that it's almost impossible to get them to criticize anyone else. If they ever do, it's very subtle and non-specific. So you really have nothing to go on unless you have personally worked with them before. I think basically that personality would not mesh well in most cases with you if you formed a start-up there.
Over 60% of Dating Apps Expose Smartphones to Hackers
I find these network visualizations nice to look at, but not all that insightful. They're generally hard to read and track relations outside of the main clusters. Am I missing something?
If the 50 most active only constituted 10% of all reddit activity, though, they wouldn't necessarily paint an accurate picture of all of reddit.

Maybe nothing could paint that picture, but if there are themes prevalent independent of the subreddit topics themselves, this kind of analysis could shed light on them.
It is a superficially appealing point, but I think the analogy falls apart on closer inspection.

Unlike the "right to be forgotten", a lot of effort has been put into harmonizing copyright law worldwide. While the mechanics of the takedown process may vary from country to country, if the content at the end of a link is infringing in country A, it is probably infringing in country B (with some limited exceptions like historical differences in went into the public domain). Given that, there's a serious rationale for applying copyright takedowns worldwide that isn't Google uncritically applying US law worldwide.
Is this just the HN effect where it seems like everyone's really amazing all the time except me, or will the rest of the stack truly be full of MIT and Harvard grads with three years at Google and numerous international awards for building cancer-curing, firefighting, baby-kissing drones that also make a mean cup of coffee?

In my experience, this is just perception. When people discuss their work, here or elsewhere, they generally don't talk about the mundane minutiae and un-glamorous failures that went nowhere. It makes people sometimes look superhuman, which is a false perception.

I'm in a similar situation (live in MPLS, want to move to a coast), but I don't think it is quite as bad as you think. Most decent employers shouldn't give a shit about where your degree came from, or if you even have a degree, so long as you can do the work.
> Why is it that there is not - nor never was - a single prosperous country build on Marxist principles?

Other than the mixed economies of the modern West, whose changes from the 19th Century capitalism Marx critiqued are almost all in the direction Marx advocated, for pretty much the reasons Marx advocated, and often directly as a result of actions by Marxists and other socialists?

> Is it possible that Marx's theory is nonsense and all the rich mixed-capitalism economies are right?

Its possible, but the rich mixed economies of the modern West are the closest thing (to be sure, they have important differences) to an implementation of Marx's theories that has occurred, so their relative success isn't really an indication of Marx being wrong.
I use Windows x64 and for the past one and a half year have kept it MS-Office clean. However my colleagues usually argue with me about this. Even If I try to explain them the advantages, they keep insist on using MS-Office even for scientific papers where I find Lyx superior. At work I installed it since I do not pay for it. At home, never even If I am on windows.

My only complaint is the lack of recent builds of Abiword/Gnumeric.

Abiword is on 3.0.0. in mingw64 in OBS.
Gnumeric is even older.

These problems have to be fixed.
Does anyone know where I can find recent builds for windows 7? x86/x64 makes no difference to me.
What does the speed setting do? Over what time frame is this showing?
Yes, I believe modern humans came about around 200 000 years ago, and around 70 000 years ago were heading out of Africa.