IPv6 excuse bingo - <AUTHOR> https://ipv6bingo.com/ <comment><USER2> The number one excuse in my opinion is: you can't only support IPv6 if you make a service that can interact with anything IPv4, so the real question is not "should I use IPv6 or IPv4?" but rather "Should I use IPv6 _and_ IPv4 or just IPv4?"

Clearly all other things being equal supporting only one stack is easier than two. It's a shame though, at work I've decided to go full IPv6 for one of our software solutions because I'm only talking "to myself" and it's amazing to have so much flexibility in your addressing. Need a unique IP in a distributed system? Just stick your MAC in there and you're good to go. Need a private network prefix that won't clash with anybody, anywhere? Use RFC 4193 and you're good to go.

<comment><USER3> > and it's amazing to have so much flexibility in your addressing.

More flexibility than having the entire 10.* block to yourself? What are you, Google?

<comment><USER4> Yes, flexibility. You don't need to have 2^24 hosts for a 24-bit address space to start becoming cramped. You have to divide up that space into subnets that roughly match your physical network structure, which depends on accurately anticipating future growth; otherwise you'll have to suffer the pain of renumbering later on.

The real benefit of a /48 or /32 IPv6 subnet isn't that you never run out of individual addresses. It's that you're practically guaranteed never to run out of identifiers _at any level of the hierarchy_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 17) Nobody wants to do work without some actual immediate local reward (in time _and_ space, since IPv6 is surely beneficial from the POV of the world at large), potentially creating N problems.

IPv6 should be studied as an emblematic case of mistake in the approach of the introduction of a new technology.

<comment><USER6> Yeah I did a bunch of AWS stuff for a new project at the startup I'm at. I tried for five minutes to get ipv6 working across all my VPC stuff. Didn't work. Wouldn't provide immediate benefit. Moved on real quickly.

<comment><USER7> If you use terraform, I put together this example project for AWS + IPv6: [https://github.com/aodin/aws-ipv6](https://github.com/aodin/aws-ipv6)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The strongest rejection of these that I've seen so far is that BT in the UK rolled out IPv6 to all of their residential customers over a year ago now, and have had it in some form for several years.

BT are huge, very slow moving, not very efficient, not considered "cool", not considered to be cutting edge in any way, and most of their residential customers have no idea what IPv6 is. Technically inclined customers who care about this sort of stuff, or early adopters are very unlikely to use BT.

If they can do it, anyone can.

<comment><USER5> This is a good case study, however it is worth to note that internet providers are among the ones getting something back from switching to IPv6.

<comment><USER9> What do they get back?

<comment><USER10> Not having to buy IPv4 addresses. CG-NAT infrastructure expenses scale up with customer base. If most of their traffic is end to end IPv6 that's a savings. End point machines like cable modems, TV decoders, VoIP adapters/IP phones, all need their own IP address; service providers with more than 16.7 million managed devices attached need IPv6.

<comment><USER9> But do the ongoing CGNAT expenses outweigh the potential expenses of transitioning?

I'm with one of, if not the, largest UK ISP and am pretty sure they're not IPv6 ready because their routers have no mention of it (Huawei router firmware updates presumably needed). BT have upgraded the physical infrastructure so I'd expect we'd be there already if there were easy savings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Bingo is a 5x5 grid, not 4x4. At best, this is "bino". And you're missing the free space square in the middle.

<comment><USER12> Bingo In Name Only?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> When it comes to tech migrations I see 3 types of stories.

1\. Create "new technology" that is a backward compatible or even drop in replacement for old technologies. Good examples of this is Web technologies, TLS, Linux APIs, bitcoin soft forks etc. This however makes "new technology" vastly more complicated both in concept and in implementation. e.g. writing a conforming web browser from scratch is impossible today.

2\. Create "new technologies" that are parallel redesigns and are made "how they should be". The intent is to simplify the technology and fix problems discovered in previous versions. The plan is to run things parallel until people _voluntarily_ switch to "new tech" because it's better. Examples of this is python 2 vs python 3, IPv6, etc.

3\. A third approach I guess is making backward compatibility a tool, like it's done with all ANYTHING->ES5 compilers.

(Sidenote: python2to3 tool should have been python3to2 instead)

</comment><comment><USER14> Well, these sound like great excuses to not switch to ipv6.

<comment><USER15> LOL, that's actually quite true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Customer sites routinely have IPv6 disabled on all their systems by their cargo cultist sysadmins"

<comment><USER17> Ayy, we're one of those sites. Disabling IPv6, if you don't use it, is basically the second bullet point on any system hardening benchmark.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> My favorite part of this site has got to be the crying double-colon logo!

I do wish IPv6 would come sooner, but it's going to take a real extrinsic reason (e.g. catastrophe) for true mass adoption to happen quickly. Otherwise it's just going to happen slow-as-ever.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm always in for some laughs, don't get me wrong. But if there's something I hate is a list of bad examples (such as "falsehoods programmers think") where there's no reference to an explanation of why each of those is a bad example.

If you can't formulate _why_ it's a bad example then there's no way it will be spreaded knowledge.

<comment><USER20> You didn't follow the hyperlinks, then. (-:

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Nit: the site should be serving all of its assets over https.

<comment><USER22> Otherwise someone could eavesdrop this publicly available material, or MITM the content for the benefit of...why?

This new https craze is like demanding seals of authenticity from posters on lamp posts.

<comment><USER23> > _" MITM the content for the benefit of...why?"_

To insert advertisements or "helpful" messages ([https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6108](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6108))

<comment><USER24> See also RFC 7258, " _Pervasive Monitoring Is an Attack_ "

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7258](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7258)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Ironically, their excuses make sense in context. Not all people will find technical superiority as a good argument(Linux vs Windows), as any doubt or excuse will be judged as another benefit of maintaining the status quo. The cost of switching is a real thing, they don't feel the Ipv4 exhaustion pressure personally and the old thing works. And there are some unfortunate details in IPv6 deployment decisions that make switching harder or costly enough, just enough to use alternatives fixes(like NAT) or maintain some cludge to route IPv6 without actually supporting it(read [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6to4](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6to4) ).

</comment><comment><USER26> Missed one: Waiting for IPv6.1 to revert everything back to like IPv4 but with four extra digits.

</comment><comment><USER27> It's slightly curious to see one of these for a (to my best understanding) not particularly politicised as of yet topic, but maybe it is worth reasserting that "I anticipated your argument and put it on a bingo board!" is not a useful or productive counterargument. (cf. Scott Alexander's old post on this tactic in the culture war context: [https://web.archive.org/web/20180311015052/https://squid314....](https://web.archive.org/web/20180311015052/https://squid314.livejournal.com/329561.html))

<comment><USER20> This discussion has been going around and around for roughly 20 years. _Anticipating_ arguments is almost certainly _not_ involved here. (-:

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> "I can't remember IP addresses that long"

</comment><comment><USER29> So we don't have PI address space, but that'd probably cost some dough.

Anyway, our hosting provider wants money to give us a v6 prefix. And that's probably because the RIRs and LIRs also charge a fee.

And I don't understand why wouldn't they allocate prefixes for free to those who already have v4 leases.

Or maybe someone just wants to fleece us.

</comment><comment><USER30> It's missing a square: "Switching to IPv6 doesn't provide us any material benefit."

<comment><USER31> The tiles change as you reload. It's in there like this:

There's no ROI (return on investment) on deploying IPv6.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> _> There's no ROI on deploying IPv6_

That's Verizon.

</comment><comment><USER33> I had to disable IPv6 on my LAN because many things didn't work or didn't work reliably.

<comment><USER34> Mind sharing an example? Not that I don't believe you, but I'm fully IPV6 on my (admittedly small) home LAN and have IPV6 upstream to my ISP (thank you, Comcast), and everything I need works well. I'd love to know what you had trouble with, simply to verify for myself that I'm not unknowingly broken!

<comment><USER33> I'm sure it's highly dependent on the equipment. My ISP's router allows you to control the DNS settings for IPv4 but not for IPv6. So I could not reliably re-point the DNS servers. The router also gives the ability add local DNS names for lan addresses and that literally just doesn't work when IPv6 is enabled.

Connecting to a Chromecast from iOS devices was also more hit and miss when IPv6 was enabled. Actually iOS devices seem to have a lot of LAN connectivity issues in general even though they had full access to the Internet. Again, this could be a router issue.

<comment><USER35> I also have had no issues with a fully dual stack ipv4 and ipv6 network on Comcast. I however do run my own firewall/router, its just a silly openbsd box with some pf firewall rules.

I wouldn't trust any vendor router anyway. Never had issues with ipv6 internally with ios devices either. They're some of the most active ipv6 devices as well with the happy eyeballs or whatever change they seem to prefer ipv6.

<comment><USER33> I previously didn't have any choice but to use the ISP's router but I recently got fiber and now I'm no longer limited to the router they provide. I might splurge and buy a good one. I used to run my own PC-based router a long time ago but when it became impossible to use with my ISP I dropped it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I feel the issue is more about benefits than how easy it is to set up. The why matters more.

</comment><comment><USER37> "We are doing just fine with NAT."

<comment><USER38> "NAT gives you privacy!" :D

I mean, I like how sharing my IPv4 address with neighbors under cgNAT makes e.g. torrent monitoring sites (was on HN some time ago?) mix several people's downloads together into one list lol… but with actual data analysis it shouldn't be hard to separate my activity and the neighbors'

<comment><USER39> In the end this indeed doesn't really help you much, because the ISP just ends up maintaining a giant database with records of every single connection that they can use to figure out who did what.

And who pays the bill for that? You do.

<comment><USER38> Well, e.g. a random forum admin from overseas doesn't really have access to my ISP's database.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Seriously speaking... not a single sysadmin is going to spend time deploying IPv6 for future-proofing while IPv4 is fully maintained and supported.

Best push we can make IPv6 happen is to force all Operating Systems to ditch IPv4 support in favor of IPv6 on their next major version and just play the wait game but nobody is going to do that.</comment>


Big Mergers and Investment Banker CEOs - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-10-13/big-mergers-and-investment-banker-ceos <comment><USER2> The big takeaway for me seems to be that you can no longer just be a PC manufacturer. You now need to manufacture PC's as a loss leader to sell your cloud solutions and your server management solutions and your virtualization solution and.....

Oh and the average consumer is about to be able to trade Dell in more ways now that when it was public.

Tracking stock, which is what Dell is proposing to use to partially finance this deal, is usually a bad deal for investors as it usually trades a a discount to regular stock and has inferior voting rights, unless that investor is an HFT who now has one more arbitrage target, the tracking stock vs true VMWare shares, for their algos:)

Since Silver Lake is involved and they know how to acquire public companies, I'm pretty sure they've already secured the votes required from EMC shareholders to force this deal through.

So going through the checklist......

\- Leveraged Private Equity deal, check

\- merging two companies that don't really seems like a reasonable fit, check

\- spinning part of the merged company out immediate to help finance the deal, check

\- deal creates a huge company, check

This has all the hallmarks of the Compaq/HP merger of 14 years ago.

if you work at EMC or Dell, I'd be making sure my LinkedIn contacts are up to date and starting to rebuild my network. It looks like its going to be job hunting time soon.

<comment><USER3> It is not nearly as bad though. Carly is famous for their problems for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reading there headline and the URL, I immediately knew that this would be written by Matt Levine.

Amazed that a writer can have a distinctly recognizable headline style. (Also, he must not be relinquishing headline rights to the editors, which is great).</comment>


Victory Lap for Ask Patents - <AUTHOR> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2013/07/22.html <comment><USER4> Pure Awesome. Shame there's not a way to do the same thing to _existing_ software patents. There are plenty (~40k/year according to the article) of bad, obvious nonsense patents already out there. It'd be nice if there were a simple process to appeal and invalidate them with similar demonstrations of prior art and obviousness.

I'm definitely looking forward to seeing some Wikipedia-level-OCD focused on this site to stop the roughly 100% of bad applications for new software patents dead in their tracks. Imagine a 2014 where zero new software patents were issued.

EDIT: Incidentally, patentlyobvious.com is just a parked domain at the moment. It seems like the obvious choice for a place to host a site like this.

<comment><USER5> One thing missing in the patent system is that the patent seeker should pay a "fee" of $1000 if it is patentlyobvious that prior art exists.

That would enable "Amazon Mechanical Turk"-style killing of most patents with prior art.

<comment><USER6> Would hurt the proverbial small inventor more than it would hurt others. Almost like a regressive tax.

<comment><USER7> I think the problem is that the proverbial small inventor is extremely rare, and if they are indeed small enough for us to take pity on them, then a patent isn't enough to protect them anyway.

<comment><USER8> I don't think the proverbial small inventor is so rare, but that as you say, a patent is practically useless for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There was an extremely depressing AMA on reddit a while ago where a patent examiner explained that what all of us consider "prior art" will be completely ignored by a patent examiner:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/ww982/iama_patent_e...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/ww982/iama_patent_examiner_i_want_to_answer_questions/)

The bar for prior art is very high - it has to be _published_ in a recognized medium. Most specifically, unless it has a date that the patent officer can verify and cite (and a self stated date on a web site is not "verifiable"), it can't be considered because it is not possible say for sure it came earlier than the patent filing. So - some random thing on the internet - <USER3> published. Even an actual real product made and sold by a company - <USER3> published. Even standard industry practise, established for years, if not written up and "published" somewhere, may not qualify as prior art. In one comment he says:

"You may be right, that is how everyone does it. But if there is no documented prior art for us to search, we are out of luck rejecting it."

This explains why so many things that software developers routinely do end up in patents. Some of them are just _so_ obvious that publishing it in a formal way is redundant. Yet that is the same bar that the USPTO is applying for rejecting patents. So the patent system itself is enriching the pool of obvious patents that get through.

Anyone using this Ask Patents site really needs to sit through a mini-tutorial explaining these things before they start, or they will waste more time than they save.

<comment><USER10> Wait.

What about the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine?[0]

And how can making a physical product not count -- surely any physical product sold in the United States has some kind of qualifying documentation associated with it which counts as publishing, even a manual?

[0] [http://archive.org/web/web.php](http://archive.org/web/web.php)

<comment><USER11> The wayback bachine is used routinely, at least in Australia, to show that a web document was publicly available before the priority date of an application. One problem is that if the document happens to be from the domain of the applicant (more common than you'd think, some applicants are dumb like that), they can have it removed by archive.org. This is why examiners will make copies of the page from a date before the priority date when using documents accessed through the wayback machine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > "Sometimes you have a picture that you want to scale to different > resolutions. When this happens, you might want to have multiple versions of > the image available at different resolutions, so you can pick the one that's > closest and scale that."

This is basically mip-mapping, and was described in a 1983 paper: [http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=801126](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=801126).

<comment><USER13> I read that Lance Williams invented this technique in 1983, but I remember seeing a documentary on Tron where they had to come up with a technique during the lightcycle race to reduce the Moire effect on the grid and I could have swore that they invented mipmapping to do that, even though it was a year earlier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Congratulations to the stack exchange team for getting this going. It's an incredibly good idea, maybe you could patent it?

<comment><USER15> The patent trolls are already on it, patenting crowd-sourcing as a method of patent defense. This will inevitably result in the shut down of Ask Patents in a stunning fit of irony.

<comment><USER16> If only some sort of prior art could be found...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Good lord, it's actually working! Full steam ahead, boys!

If only we'd done this a decade or two ago. How about some reevaluation of granted patents?

edit: The original title, _" Joel Spolsky, patent killer"_, was better :/

</comment><comment><USER18> > Since patent examiners rely so much on keyword searches, when you submit > your application, if you can change some of the keywords in your patent to > be different than the words used everywhere else, you might get your patent > through even when there's blatant prior art, because by using weird, made-up > words for things, you've made that prior art harder to find.

Wouldn't it also make sense to build up, maybe at the same time, a sort of "counter-thesaurus"?

As in: If you find prior art where the thesaurus method has been used to obscure terms in the patent, enter those as an example into a database. When another patent is looked up, individual terms that show up in the database have a "there are alternative terms for this" marker applied to them.

This might also make it a lot easier to make automatic search for prior art feasible again.

<comment><USER19> I believe the tool you are looking for is a reverse dictionary. Several good ones already exist, but a tech-specific one would be helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Does anyone know whether participating in a public forum like this could used in future proceedings against the user or their employer as evidence of 'willful infringement'?

I vaguely recall something about large corporations discouraging engineers from reading potentially relevant patents due to the possibility of greater damages if they were later proved infringing, since demonstrating that they _didn 't_ take any inspiration or details from the patent is quite difficult.

Not wanting to spread FUD or anything, but it strikes me as a potential exploit for patent trolls to discourage participation if it's a significant risk.

<comment><USER21> I have been asked by my employer (a large software company) to avoid looking at patents in any form. It is precisely because, as you cite, it exposes the _entire company_ to willful infringement claims around any patents that I were to view.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I had a bad attitude dealing with patents in my last job, refusing to take part on the basis that I hadn't come up with anything novel. I noticed a member of staff with views on patents in line with mine taking a more active role. He took part in the patent meetings, but instead of merely offering nothing up, took active part in finding prior art, thus preventing time wasting patents going to the office. He took special pleasure in finding prior art by current employees at the same company, preferably in the same arm.

I am impressed by Spolsky's positive attitude to do something about the problem, I bid ask patents continued good fortune!

</comment><comment><USER23> So, this _sounds_ great and all, but I don't see any proof that it was ask patents that caused the examiner to find this, rather than the examiner's standard search?

In fact, the search history, on PAIR (look for 4-11-2013 SRFW Search information including classification, databases and other search related notes) does not say ask patents was used, nor does the search strategy (document code SRNT).

It could be the USPTO has not gotten around to noting this yet, but the only entry I see that could be related is the NPL entry, which of course, has no image available (god i love PAIR), and does not say it came from outside the search.

Don't get me wrong, I think askpatents is great, but i'm skeptical considering how examiners actually work.

<comment><AUTHOR> The USPTO explicitly asked us to set up this site to help get the public involved in getting prior art to the examiners. (Press release:[http://www.uspto.gov/news/pr/2012/12-60.jsp.](http://www.uspto.gov/news/pr/2012/12-60.jsp.)) So, while it's entirely possible that the examiner might have eventually found this without us, which is far from certain, it seems reasonable to assume that they saw it on the site. Which means that even if you assume they _would_ have found it without help - again, questionable, given the number of weak patents out there - at a minimum, we probably saved them a lot of time, which frees up more resources to look for prior art on the next crappy patent. And that reduces the odds that the clock runs out without them finding any, which leads to a lousy issuance.

<comment><USER23> I'm aware the USPTO asked you to set up ask patents. The USPTO has a number of pilot programs, and i'm involved in some.

My only question is whether AskPatents was how it got to the USPTO.

I don't see why it's reasonable to assume that they saw it on the site considering most examiners still don't do that sort of thing. Most of them search the USPTO approved databases, internally, and go about their way. This is in fact, what the search strategy/et al says happened. Given that, i think the burden falls on you to show some likelihood here.

For example, do you have anything to say that any significant percentage of examiners (IE > 10%) use askpatents on a regular basis? I would be pleasantly shocked if you did.

The rest is not the argument i am making, the only argument I am making is: "Do you have _any_ evidence that your site is the reason the USPTO found this?"

From what I can tell, your answer is "no".

If you do, great!

No offense meant, of course, my problem is if you declare victory when you were not actually involved, this will actually make things worse - people will think they are helping solve the issue, yet, if the PTO actually _isn 't_ using your data heavily, they aren't.

Again, don't get me wrong, i think askpatents is a great idea, and i'd hope and love to find out it's actually being used heavily by the PTO. I can't find any stats on that, and given the history of prior pilot programs/etc, i'm very skeptical.

<comment><AUTHOR> No offense taken, and thanks for the overall support!

As to:

> "Do you have any evidence that your site is the reason the USPTO found > this?"

Well, the office has told us directly that examiners are reviewing the site. So, when they then reject an application, based primarily on art posted on the site, that was asked for and posted there just prior to the actual review, it makes me highly optimistic that it's not all a coincidence, although I suppose that's theoretically possible.

<comment><USER24> You could have just said, "no" and it would have been okay. We would have understood. We're on the same side after all. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I like the concept of Ask Patents but at the same time I wonder if it is possible that participation on Ask Patents could be leveraged by malicious litigants to seek treble damages.

For example, if the company I work for is being sued by a troll for infringement, could the troll see that employees have been participating on Ask Patents and therefore a reasonable assumption could be made that they're reading/reviewing/participating in discussions on patents, and therefore they knowingly are infringing? Would this something that either I or my employer should be worried about?

<comment><USER26> From my brief experience, you're probably better off assuming that the default price will be triple damages, and any reduction from this is a lucky discount.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is an excellent result. I worried when the idea of helping the PTO uncover prior art would be controlled by the attorneys filing the patent (which is to say they would be a filter between the examiner and the external sources) but if the examiners are going directly to the source then this will really put a crimp in bad patents being issued.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is an awesome project. I've signed up and will see what I can do to help shoot down patents!

There is one true and important point in the article that isn't supported by the example given:

> This patent was, typically, obfuscated, and it used terms like "pixel > density" for something that every other programmer in the world would call > "resolution," either accidentally (because Microsoft's lawyers were not > programmers), or, more likely, because the obfuscation makes it that much > harder to search.

The patent uses "pixel density" to refer to the physical size of the pixels on a display. This is a fairly common term, with over five million results in a Google search. I've used the same phrase myself for over 10 years with the same meaning.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_density](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_density)

"Pixels per centimeter (ppcm), Pixels per inch (PPI) or pixel density is a measurement of the resolution of devices in various contexts: typically computer displays, image scanners, and digital camera image sensors."

Of course here we can see where the terms get a bit confusing: "...pixel density is a measurement of the resolution..."

But display resolution these days usually refers to the _number_ of pixels, not their physical size:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_resolution](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_resolution)

"The display resolution of a digital television, computer monitor or display device is the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be displayed."

Advertisements and spec sheets almost always use "resolution" this way, for example the MacBook Pro specs on Apple's site:

"Supported resolutions: 1440 by 900 (native), 1280 by 800, 1152 by 720, ..."

Forgive me if this seems like nitpicking, and I completely agree with Joel's point here: patents often do use unusual terminology to obfuscate what they're talking about.

This just isn't a case of that. The patent is using the correct term, and it even does a very good job of explaining what it means:

> A particular characteristic of display components that may affect > presentations rendered thereupon is the pixel density of the display > component, such as a pixels-per-centimeter measurement. It may be > appreciated that such characteristics may be independent of the size of the > display component (e.g., two display components of the same size may present > different pixel densities; conversely, two display components of different > sizes may present the same pixel density) and/or the pixel dimensions of the > display component (e.g., two display components displaying a presentation > with a particular pixel dimensions may do so with different physical sizes).

<comment><USER28> Following up on one comment I made:

> There is one true and important point in the article that isn't supported by > the example given

I can't actually vouch for the "true and important" part. I must confess I put that in there to try to be nicer about what I was saying. :-) And it certainly seemed plausible enough that patents would be deliberately written in obfuscated language, I just can't say it's true or untrue from my own knowledge. I know pixels better than patents.

There's a great comment here that sheds some light on this:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6085888](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6085888)

In particular, there are reasons for some of the language that seems obfuscated. Read the comment for details and a lot of insight into patents.

Another interesting comment, with a link to a patent examiner's AMA:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6087057](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6087057)

(Of course there are interesting comments all up and down this thread!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> One thing I don't understand. Suppose a patent examiner does not ask on Ask Patents about a patent application, but I would nevertheless like to submit prior art.

How do I do so?

<comment><USER30> Ask yourself, then answer your own question.

<comment><USER31> I think he means he wants to submit prior art directly to the patent examiner. Is there a way to be sure they'll see it?

<comment><USER30> Oh. Yes. You can always submit it directly to the USPTO. See [http://meta.patents.stackexchange.com/questions/105/i-want-t...](http://meta.patents.stackexchange.com/questions/105/i-want- to-make-a-difference-how-can-i-submit-prior-art-to-the-patent-office) for details

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Trouble is, what killed the patent was prior disclosure from the researchers.

The same thing has happened to friends of mine; an undergraduate's summer research presentation may have betrayed patentable inventions. An effect of the 1-year prior art rule is to force researchers to keep mum about what they're doing and to generate greater numbers of incremental patents.

If you're interested in the free flow of information, using a researcher's own publications to kill patents may not help the cause.

Prior art from other work in the past? Bring it on!

<comment><USER33> I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "prior disclosure" here. They filed a patent application: those are _supposed_ to be public. The prior art Joel used was the documentation of the Win32 API from 5 years previously (and I'm pretty sure we've been using variable-resolution apps since earlier than 2008, and not just in Windows -- this was just an example). Could you clarify what the problem is?

<comment><USER34> App icons in OS X are interpolated between about 4 different sized images. I remember reading about this in the developer docs back in about 2002. I'd be surprised if Apple don't have pretty much the same patent on this already but registered 10 years earlier :-)

<comment><USER35> Mac OS has done this since much earlier. The classic Mac OS needed at least two different representations of the same icon, one for the desktop (32x32) and one for the application switcher (16x16). The application switcher, initially called MultiFinder, was introduced in 1987[1]. If memory serves, the various sizes of an icon were stored together in the ICNS resource of the app binary's resource fork. There was a developer tool provided by Apple called ResEdit which allowed you to view or change the icons of any application, in a nice GUI editor (of course).

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multifinder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multifinder)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> An idea that might help in killing patents: Have one daily sticky post on HN (ala job post) with a short description of a pending patent and a link on where to post prior art. It is very likely some reader will be able to provide this prior art.

<comment><USER37> At 40,000 software patents per year, it would require 110 posted patents per day to actually stop them, or a significant fraction of that to make a serious dent.

One a day would be less than a 1% reduction in software patents. We need to shut them ALL down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Wow - crowdsourcing the removal of ludicrous patents. This could be the killer app of StackExchange. Well done!

</comment><comment><USER39> > _How cool would it be if Apple, Samsung, Oracle and Google got into a > Mexican Standoff on Ask Patents? If each of those companies had three or > four engineers dedicating a few hours every day to picking off their > competitors' applications, the number of granted patents to those companies > would grind to a halt._

I'm kind of surprised this isn't happening already.

</comment><comment><USER40> In another patent thread some time ago I identified what I think is the core problem with software patents, which is abstractability. I used the example of a tractor being generalised into transportation, so I was nodding along with Joel's example.

This is because that's how software development often proceeds. We start with the concrete problem, then notice a pattern that encompasses a class of concrete problems, then a pattern that describes a group of classes of problems and so on. Building abstractions is literally what we do as a profession.

Now, as Joel points out, the rational strategy is to take the highest-level, most abstract version of your invention to the patent office to see what will get passed in. So patent applications are written like matrioshka dolls, with a super general case on the outside, and progressively more concrete descriptions as you go deeper. Somewhere near the bottom is the original thing that started the ball rolling.

</comment><comment><USER41> Idea: Make reading patents a mandatory exercise for students. Assignment: squash a patent application.

</comment><comment><USER42> It would be cool if there was a way to penalize high number _and_ high ratio of rejected patents from a single company. OTOH I don't see a way that allows genuine mistakes from small shops while being immune from big bad corps acting via shell companies.

<comment><USER43> That is an excellent idea. (To clarify, you're saying a company would need to have _both_ a high number and a high ratio rejected to be penalized.)

More generally, it seems logical to have the size of the penalty increase at a quadratic or even exponential rate, based on the number of rejected patents within a certain trailing time period[1], and scaled by the rejected/submissions ratio. So every rejection would carry a penalty, but the more that were rejected (both in total and as a percentage), the larger the penalty would be, at an increasing rate.

It might also be an idea to do this with individual claims as well as, or even instead of, entire patents, to also deal with the overly broad claims problem.

[1] Or even for all time, but with a weighting factor based on recency. Wouldn't want to get overly complex though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> This is great! I don't truly believe that no software patent should ever be granted, but we should definitely weed out the bullshit ones.

I would think mipmapping would be the core prior art, and that's from 1983. But I suppose anything over a year older then the application is good enough.

Also note there is another technique for patent manipulation which is to provide a provisional patent application (to start the clock) which can't be granted, then continually refine and the application as time goes by. In a worse case scenario you could taller a general patent into a specific patent based on someone else work, and have a patent already in place that will predate the new invention.

</comment><comment><USER45> somewhat active on Ask Patents. In fact, I've submitted an answer that is pretty sure to kill at least one Google patent application, and possibly another from Uniloc.

A few comments on this article:

1) This is a very unusual case; most answers (and almost all questions) from "lay engineers" completely misunderstand the scope of the patent, since they don't even know what claims are. And even if they do, they are very lax at interpreting claims. And even then, most posters frequently misunderstand the terms used (case in point, Spolsky's very post! [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6084884](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6084884)). All this leads them to post irrelevant prior art.

That does not mean there are no useful answers at all; there are, but they mostly come from people who are somewhat versed in patent law (such as agents, lawyers and examiners). Some re-wording of claims, such as what Micah Seigel does in his posts, helps, but for the proportion of useful answers to go up, we need more education about how patents work for this to be useful. It's really not that hard; heck I did it!

2) It's wayyy too soon for a victory lap because that was only the first non- final rejection, for which a response has already been filed. Statistically, this application will undergo 2.5 more rejections [1] and (based on my guestimate) at least one Request for Continued Examination (RCE) before being abandoned or (more likely considering the applicant) issued with much narrower claims.

3) Patents are worded so not (primarily) to be obfuscating, but rather because of legal, technical and some silly historical reasons. For instance, pronouns are very rarely used because _any_ indefiniteness can be cause for invalidation. Obfuscation will not help much, because you are not trying to get it past lay engineers, but patent examiners, who have a technical background and are (usually) adept at reading patentese. Complaining about how hard it is to read patents is like a Blub programmer complaining about Lisp. You simply need to learn the language to appreciate what you are reading.

4) Most "software" patents (which can't even be cleanly categorized as such) are not crappy, at least with respect to all other patents. There are studies presenting this view [2, 3], but it's also based on my experience having read hundreds of patents. Almost none are revolutionary, but just as few are really as bad as the media portrays. The PTO has gotten pretty good at finding prior art (interestingly around the same time Google came around), and the really broad patents are dying out.

The "crappy software patents" view is common mostly because tech media routinely publishes uninformed (or disinformed? [4]) rhetoric, mostly because they garner some easy rageviews, and audiences accept it without critical thought. I do think the bar for non-obviousness should be different, but solving that is a difficult, almost-philosophical problem.

5) In response to various comments on this thread regarding pay-for-prior art schemes, initiatives such as Article One Partners already exist.

I am not a patent lawyer or an agent, but I believe in the patent system, as I have actually worked for the mythical small-guy firm that was ripped off by the big guys and almost died, but eventually prevailed with patents. You don't hear these stories much because typically the small guys don't have the PR budget for it [4]. (And also because many of those with patents turn to trolls, who like to keep a low profile.)

I have only recently become personally invested in the patent system, but I want all inventions, including mine, to be truly novel and worthwhile. And I want people to get off their butts and do something rather than complain about patents on HN. This is why I support Ask Patents.

[1] [http://www.uspto.gov/dashboards/patents/main.dashxml](http://www.uspto.gov/dashboards/patents/main.dashxml) [2] [http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=650921](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=650921) [3] [http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=970083](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=970083) [4] [http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

<comment><USER46> Re (2): In 1924, legendary federal judge Learned Hand [0] remarked that "the antlike persistency _[sic]_ of _[patent]_ solicitors has overcome, and I suppose will continue to overcome, the patience of examiners, and there is apparently always but one outcome."

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_Hand](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_Hand)

[1] Lyon v. Boh, 1 F.2d 48, 50 (S.D.N.Y.1924), _copy available at_ [http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=9696597566965196...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=9696597566965196877).

<comment><USER45> Agreed. It is an unfair match. It is, statistically, almost a tautology: The set of examiners is necessarily limited by government funding constraints, but the number of patent attorneys and agents they contend with on a daily basis is only limited by the market, which is _huge_. The examiners will eventually be overwhelmed.

I think this is one reason that most examiners (at least IME) have their default mindset to "Reject! Reject! Reject!" Also, this is why something like Ask Patents is invaluable to even the odds.

I don't agree with the quantitative approach, but I can't help think that technology can help. Google has already (in my opinion) helped the PTO greatly narrow claims the past decade; similar technology can help even more.

I have some background in NLP. And I know it's surprisingly effective when it comes to domains with specific jargon (cf. Watson and medical language). I've lurked long enough to know some here (such as VanL) have already experimented in this area. Personally, I have toyed with the idea of constructing parse trees out of multiple technical texts and claims, "normalizing" them using ontologies, and trying to find matches (i.e. prior art) using various tree- matching algorithms. I have a feeling it would be very effective. (Maybe Google already does this!)

But that does not address the problem of identifying patents that are quantitatively invalid but qualitatively valuable. To me, that is the more important long-term problem.

<comment><USER47> Increase the filing fee, to pay for better examiners directly? Patents that cost a few thousand dollars?

<comment><USER48> This weighs against individuals too heavily. The UK for a time had a zero filing fee but they've gone back to a small fee again (to avoid getting so much chaff).

It's the renewal fees where you should be charging highly IMO; hyperbolic year-on-year increases would be an interesting option to model.

<comment><USER49> I know this sort of thing is unpopular in the United States, but how about a pay-according-to-your-means model? So individual inventors working for themselves could file quite cheaply, but a publicly held corporation with a >$1b market cap pays a much bigger fee for the same thing.

<comment><USER50> Or perhaps even a pay-based-on-number-of-filings model. First application is $500, with a doubling for each filing, up to a max of $10k. (Or whatever multiplier and ceiling you want to have.) For small filers, the legal fees will dwarf the USPTO fees; for large filers with dedicated legal assets, the USPTO fees are still fairly minor but might start to be large enough to deter some of the frivolous filings.

<comment><USER48> How much does it cost to set up a shell corp, $50?

> _For small filers, the legal fees will dwarf the USPTO fees_ //

You _can_ self file; though it's not generally advisable. $10k isn't even a blip for someone like HP who (at least in the past) markets themselves on the number of patents they have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Be aware that there is a backlog of "secret" patent applications in the US, where the patent application can be kept secret until such time as it is granted, at which point the easy invalidation described by Joel is not allowed.

For example the Twitter patent was granted, even though there is prior art (mine), and even though I submitted my prior art as soon as I found out about the patent. But I got a reply along the lines of "too late, the patent has been granted". It turned out that the application was kept secret until it was granted, thus guaranteeing protection from any prior art not already known to the patent office employee assigned to that patent.

The "new" US patent laws require an application to be made public after 18 months, but there could be thousands upon thousands of older patent applications benefiting from the secret option.

</comment><comment><USER52> Brilliant! Too bad however that so much energy needs to be wasted on SHIT like patents.

<comment><USER53> Absolutely. We should not have to waste time proving a patent is bad.

The root of the problem, the patent system itself need to be abolished.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> It would be great if others could attach bounties to certain patents. Of course then the patent examiner would have to pick "winners", answers that helped the most.

Also, like Quora, does the StackExchange system allow one to register one's fields of expertise, to have questions suggested to you? (I'm not a big participant on SE but I know it may be hiding that feature from me, because it slowly reveals features based on karma).

Anyway I'm sure this has been thought of before, just curious if it's on the todo list.

<comment><USER31> You can post bounties on Stack Exchange if you have enough reputation to cover it. Whoever posts the bounty (not necessarily the patent examiner) gets to pick who wins the bounty. If they don't, it can be automatically awarded to the highest-scoring answer during the bounty period (one week). More details: [http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/16065/how-does- the-b...](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/16065/how-does-the-bounty- system-work)

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> > How cool would it be if Apple, Samsung, Oracle and Google got into a Mexican > Standoff on Ask Patents? If each of those companies had three or four > engineers dedicating a few hours every day to picking off their competitors' > applications, the number of granted patents to those companies would grind > to a halt.

Wouldn't the result of this be that the company who finds out that they have the earliest implementation of the code in question be able to get the patent for it?

<comment><USER56> The first publisher of an invention has a year to file a patent on it. Because of the length of time taken to get to a filing, by the time this prior-art shootout takes place more than a year will have gone by and the prior art will actually disallow anyone from patenting the invention, including the original inventor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> The "How to Read a Patent in 60 Seconds" article mentioned seems to be down (danshapiro.com). Does anybody have a copy or a alternative link for it?

</comment><comment><USER58> Why is this acceptable? Would we allow police detectives to out source solving a crime or garbage men to outsource picking up the trash? Why can't the patent office just hire good people like this guy who can figure this stuff out in 10 minutes? Perhaps the cost of filing a patent should increase each time you do it so the same people don't just keep flooding the patent office with this junk.

</comment><comment><USER47> If the patent office cannot do this work themselves, they should offload to the private sector: small bounties for prior work, paid out of a fraction of the filing fee. It costs a few hundred dollars to submit a patent... thus, they could easily afford to give out a hundred or so for each comprehensive dismantling.

TLDR: Give people financial incentive to destroy patents, and they will be ALL over it.

</comment><comment><USER59> This is really, really cool.

Its actually some part of governing delegated to the public. A part they can be good at. I wonder if the crowd can be authoritative, rather than just helpful. That would let them tackle obviousness, not just prior art I could see a stackexchange-like. It might be that they can tackle it now, if good methods/guidelines exist for objectively determining obviousness.

</comment><comment><USER60> Two quick thoughts:

1\. Swap the burden of proof: couldn't much of these issues with software(!) patents be avoided just by forcing the "inventors" to check for prior arts themselves and prove (somehow) that they actually did do that?

2\. Make them pay: What about a (huge) fine when the patent does not get approved eventually or when prior art was found during the approval process?

</comment><comment><USER61> From my friend who is a patent examiner:

"The Mexican standoff bit would be neat. The AIA allows for third-party submissions directly into the patent application file. I am not sure that any of the larger companies would do this, but I think a devoted engineer in some of the smaller companies could use askpatents to stave off predatory patents."

</comment><comment><USER62> Nice win but I have to say the bit that really got me excited was this

"My dream is that when big companies hear about how friggin' easy it is to block a patent application, they'll use Ask Patents to start messing with their competitors. How cool would it be if Apple, Samsung, Oracle and Google got into a Mexican Standoff on Ask Patents?"

How great would that be?

</comment><comment><USER63> > An example might help. Imagine a simple application with these three claims:

> 1\. A method of transportation

> 2\. The method of transportation in claim 1, wherein there is an engine > connected to wheels

> 3\. The method of transportation in claim 2, wherein the engine runs on > water

> Notice that claim 2 mentions claim 1, and narrows it... in other words, it > claims a strict subset of things from claim 1.

> Now, suppose you invented the water-powered car. When you submit your > patent, you might submit it this way even knowing that there's prior art for > "methods of transportation" and you can't really claim all of them as your > invention. The theory is that (a) hey, you might get lucky! and (b) even if > you don't get lucky and the first claim is rejected, the narrower claims > will still stand.

I'm pretty sure this is not accurate. To my knowledge, the claims of a patent are considered only as a whole, not individually, so there should be no fear that this is somehow trying to patent "methods of transportation" broadly.

To make a broad patent claim, you can't have any narrowing claims on the same patent. Put another way, the maximum scope of claim by a particular patent is defined by the narrowest claim in the list.

Lawyers--correct me if I'm wrong.

<comment><USER64> Not a lawyer, but I'm pretty certain that you're wrong. There are 2 types of claims, dependent and independent. dependent are those that refer to a previous claim and expand on it, (2 and 3 above). Claim 1 above is independent. The dependent claims are taken together with those they reference, but the independent claims if accepted are taken independently.

Here: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claim_(patent)#Basic_types_and_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claim_\(patent\)#Basic_types_and_categories)

<comment><USER63> Thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> This! What the author describes is exactly what happens.

Our lawyers even admit that. The company I work for gets sued for a bogus patent every week(!), so we were all ask to file patent applications. I didn't, but I got involved in some applications as co-inventor anyway.

This isn't - and not been for a long time - about inventions.

</comment><comment><USER66> If you want to get an insight into that world I can really recommend when Patents attack Part Two.

[http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/496/w...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/496/when-patents-attack-part-two)

</comment><comment><USER67> This is a great first step, but can we sustain this and keep more patents from being granted. Everything hinges on community involvement, so hopefully we can build and sustain a community that does this every day.

</comment><comment><USER68> Would a reward system make sense? Money to the one who gets a patent rejected?

</comment><comment><USER69> > The number of actually novel, non-obvious inventions in the software > industry that maybe, in some universe, deserve a government-granted monopoly > is, perhaps, two.

Any idea to which two he might be referring?

<comment><USER30> I sort of like [http://www.google.com/patents/US4464650](http://www.google.com/patents/US4464650) (Ziv/Lempel compression), which doesn't seem obvious to me

<comment><USER70> Can't patent algorithms though, so, can't be that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> How about just increasing the costs for filing and maintaining a patent as a quick way of getting rid of some of the really weak ones? Say double the fees and see what happens.

<comment><USER72> Any flat increase would just make it less likely that the big guys will have competition in their "most patents filed" competition.

Also, given we just switch from first-invented to first-filed, it is particularly onerous for those garage-based small inventors as a big corp can easily justify the cost.

What might make more sense is to _tax_ intellectual property. We tax physical property with much less value than a "successful" software patent (ahem, Eolas?), why not tax the non-physical property as well? If you make it progressive based on the number of patents owned/controlled, it will also limit the usability of maintaining warchests of patents for controlling markets.

<comment><USER73> Perfect. Tax them heavier as they age. That way the people trying to create usable products are barely hurt, but by the last few years it costs a lot to hold on to. And you can release your patent to the public domain to release it. That's more likely to hit trolls than innovators.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Like [http://www.peertopatent.org/](http://www.peertopatent.org/) but with the momentum of the SE platform/network. Good stuff.

</comment><comment><USER75> Check out the caption I got for this article from USPTO ;) [http://prntscr.com/1h0c3u](http://prntscr.com/1h0c3u)

It says "Resolution"

</comment><comment><USER76> Isn't this the job of the patent examiner?

<comment><USER77> Yes. And how does that seem to be working out?

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> The original title on this was:

Spolsky, Patent Killer</comment>


Ask HN: Which Universities Have Free Engineering Master Programme in English? - <AUTHOR> Hello, Which universities have free English Master Programme in Engineering?
I want to start study Electronics Engineering Master programme in 2016-2017 education year.
Thank you <comment><USER2> You could take a look at Coursera [https://www.coursera.org/courses/?query=electrical%20enginee...](https://www.coursera.org/courses/?query=electrical%20engineering)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you but I am not looking for MOOC lessons. I want to study a regular master programme and write a master thesis.

<comment><USER3> I think that's the part that you need to pay for (via merit-based scholarships or otherwise).

<comment><AUTHOR> There are a lot of universities which do not require payment. I have found some of them but I want to hear other universities from you ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Any ideas?</comment>


If I can do Excel, can I program? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/fde17f82f65a

<comment><USER2> Excel: bringing programming to the masses.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good guy Excel... doing functional programming before it was cool. SUM(A1:A10)

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly! Didn't want to go into how Excel is actually really strict FP in the post, but that's totally true.

<comment><USER3> Oh my, I just thought of an idea. Since Excel is composed of grids, and a web page underneath is also composed of grids. What if someone made an Excel for web pages? That would be cool!

<comment><USER4> Dan Bricklin, inventor of VisiCalc (and therefore of spreadsheets), suggested using spreadsheets for web content. Looks like WikiCalc came out of this:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiCalc](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiCalc)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


TellHN: Want More Women in Tech? - <AUTHOR> http://www.gofundme.com/4k386c

<comment><USER2> Sorry, there is something about this that rubs me the wrong way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why?</comment></comment>


Dozens of Googlers reportedly retaliated against for reporting harassment - <AUTHOR> https://www.foxnews.com/tech/google-employees-retaliated-against-reporting-harassment <comment><USER2> Fox news should not be allowed as an information source on HN. I read FN each day along with a number of other major publications and FN is bottom of the barrel for honesty or trustworthy reporting.</comment>


Migrating to CouchDB - <AUTHOR> http://www.couch.io/migrating-to-couchdb

<comment><USER2> It's great to see folks providing commercial consulting/hosting/support for CouchDB in the same vein as Cloudera (Hadoop/HBase), MongoHQ (MongoDB), etc!

CouchDB is great but don't get me wrong ORMs like ActiveRecord and DataMapper have done a lot to to ease the pain and abstract away the nastiness of SQL. It's not enough though. It's like treating the symptoms and not the underlying condition. You still have to worry about joins, normalization, and other artifacts from relational databases. These issues leak their way up into your models where they don't belong, and obscure more important logic. All of this isn't an issue with CouchDB, and that's the biggest selling point for me.

<comment><USER3> My favourite lame comparison to counter the ActiveRecord argument is that at some point AR in Rails was about 25k LoC while CouchDB was about 15kLoc. It's comparing apples to bike sheds, so it doesn't say much, but it's fun to look at the complexity of things that way :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The problem is that most applications have instances where using a relation database is more natural and some where using a document store is more natural. Supporting two database products adds overhead. Postgres, DB2, and Oracle have (or will have) XML or JSON datatypes, allowing both methodologies to be combined in one database product.

For the author's specific problem, why not use triggers to populate a table with all of the calculations calculated out? Our in other databases like Oracle or DB2 you could use materialized views.

<comment><USER5> I haven't had much experience with database triggers, so it's hard for me to compare the pros/cons of using triggers vs using CouchDB.

Thinking about it, as far as the stats stuff goes, I don't think there is anything we did that can't be done via your suggested approach (triggers, materialized views, archive tables, etc). However, we're just a few developers here. We don't have a DBA. We're much more at home with Javascript than with the MySQL trigger syntax. So, CouchDB was a much more natural fit.

We're also making heavy use of the fact that CouchDB is schema-less. I'm not too familiar with the XML and/or JSON datatypes supported by the different relational databases, but some quick googling seems to indicate that querying the database for the contents of this data can be difficult. In other words, storing and retrieving XML appears to work OK, but (looking at Postgres) I can't seem to find a way to, for example, find all rows where the xml document in the 'xml' column has a <city> tag that is equal to 'Chicago'. Again, I could be very wrong here, I just don't see it after about 10 minutes of looking.

Working with documents is very natural in CouchDB, as that is what is was designed for. Not only can you easily find all documents with a city property equal to 'Chicago', but you can also programatically interact with that data in the map and reduce functions, using Javascript.</comment></comment>


A Google Maps on Steroids - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/01/urthecast-live-space-camera/

<comment><USER2> The platform will be taken to the ISS later this year and will provide (via the web) both still imagery and (nearly) live HD video with 1 meter resolution.</comment>


My giant JavaScript Basics course is now live on YouTube. And it's 100% free - <AUTHOR> https://medium.freecodecamp.com/my-giant-javascript-basics-course-is-now-live-on-youtube-and-its-100-free-9020a21bbc27 <comment><USER2> I've already learnt some things from these.</comment>


Senator Leahy tries to make Talking about Computer Hacking a Serious Crime - <AUTHOR> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140109/11152925821/senator-leahy-tries-to-sneak-through-plans-to-make-merely-talking-about-computer-hacking-serious-crime.shtml?

<comment><USER2> This is absolutely stupid. If I can't discuss the scope of potential breaches with executives, contractors, legal, or the local authority (with a lawyer of course), how can I prevent them?</comment>


Researchers improve white paints that keep buildings cool - <AUTHOR> https://nuadox.com/post/623297059267706880/improved-white-paints-cooling-wall <comment><USER2> Is it safe for other drivers to use this kind of paint on your car?

</comment><comment><USER3> barium and teflon additives. suuure, that's TOTALLY what we want to do. It's almost like bad science!</comment>


How MySpace test with 1 Million concurrent users - <AUTHOR> http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/3/4/how-myspace-tested-their-live-site-with-1-million-concurrent.html

<comment><USER2> Isn't 1300 users per box extremely low for a load test?</comment>


Ask HN: If I go to Old Pro and buy a few pitchers, how many HNers will show up? - <AUTHOR>

10pm. We'll be in the back by the pool table. <comment><USER2> Certainly not on this short of notice, but perhaps with more.</comment>


'Worst' File-Sharing Pirates Spend 300% More on Content Than 'Honest' Consumers - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/0-more-on-content-than-honest-consumers-130510/ <comment><USER2> Interesting article. I'm assuming this increased spending is simply because they're also the people who enjoy this kind of media the most. If they pirate films, for example, it's because they love watching tons of films, so they also pay for more than the average joe.

I wonder, though, if this stat is misleading. If they were paying for content, would they be spending 1000% more or 2000% more than 'honest' consumers?

<comment><USER3> > if this stat is misleading. If they were paying for content, would they be > spending 1000% more or 2000% more than 'honest' consumers?

I wouldn't say so, the stat is what they are _actually_ spending.

<comment><USER4> I think he meant, if they couldn't pirate, would they buy _even more_ content than they do now.

<comment><USER3> Thing is that's a projection and a massively wrong one at that - the sort of thing that motivates ridiculous anti-piracy laws too. "Hey we have this demographic that spends lots and pirates - if we can stop them pirating they'd spend EVEN MORE!!! DRM FOR EVERYONE!!!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd like to see the relationship of income to infringement.

It's hard to hoard digital downloads when your primary access to the Internet comes via a feature phone on a metered plan and you pay $5 each for bootleg DVDs sold at the barber shop.

It's a bit easier when you have a high-speed Internet connection and a few TB of storage.

If the 'worst', who make up 3.2% of the respondents, are also part of a top income segment it would change the perspective quite a bit.

Also, I wonder how honest the 'worst' and 'honest' are actually being.

 _"However, the relationship between infringement and spend is complex and the claims people make when asked questions about their likely future behaviour given changes to their options do not always closely reflect their real-life behaviour."_ [0] Pg. 5

0: [http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/telecoms-...](http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/telecoms- research/online-copyright/deep-dive.pdf)</comment>


Apple Bricked My Gen 1 Apple TV - <AUTHOR> I've got a lot of Apple products, including three Apple TV boxes.  The oldest one (Gen 1) had been sitting on a shelf for a few months since I moved a TV.  Yesterday I re-connected it and it came up just fine.  It showed that I was logged in, but some of my purchased content was not showing.  I decided to try logging out, and then back in again.  Unfortunately, Apple has now mandated 2FA and the Gen1 Apple TV does not support it.  I phoned Apple Support and they informed me that 2FA cannot be removed from an account.  This is a change they made a few months ago. The upshot is this:  If you have any older (non-supported) Apple products that use your Apple ID, they may get bricked in the same manner. <comment><USER2> This is a great reason to avoid closed ecosystems. A raspi box, or just connecting your laptop over HDMI or Wifi will avoid this issue and you will always have your content available.

Over time, the internet is filling up with horror stories about Google, Apple, [INSERT TECH COMPANY] systems locking people out while a Linux laptop with HDMI can keep working for years without a problem.

<comment><USER3> Recently I was given a 4th generation iPad (released in 2012). It is shocking how useless it is today. Most apps I have tried to install are not compatible with the highest-available OS version. There is no way to install the older versions of the apps that would be compatible. The browser works fine for most sites, but not sites that depend on more recent web features.

<comment><USER4> You may be able to use this trick to download older versions of apps for older versions of iOS:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kqva2OGi18E](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kqva2OGi18E)

"Installing apps on older iOS devices using older versions of apps

Older devices running iOS 8, 9, 10 may not have any compatible apps available, but there are old versions that you can still download and use..."

<comment><USER3> I appreciate the tip, but it does not work in my situation. I am using a completely new Apple ID, so I do not have any previous app downloads or purchased apps.

Ideally, Apple would permit anyone to download any old version of an app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Have you tried to authenticate using another Apple device that's already logged in using the same account? Cause I can enter my ID password using my iPhone on my Gen1 Apple TV.

</comment><comment><USER6> Can you do this? [https://osxdaily.com/2016/08/23/login-apple-id-two-factor- au...](https://osxdaily.com/2016/08/23/login-apple-id-two-factor-auth-old- ios/)</comment>


Freicoin: bitcoin-like currency from the Occupy movement - <AUTHOR> http://www.indiegogo.com/freicoin <comment><USER2> Economically, this is utterly backwards. To those without access to the cheat- code of newly created money, USD basically _is_ a demurrage currency through inflation. In any environment where currency loses value, those with the most assets (your "1%") can best manage their investing to avoid losing value, while the people with modest amounts of savings get screwed either directly by inflation or through encouraged patronizing of the fraudulent consumer- financial industry. "Hoarding" assets by the middle class is what gives people the freedom to _turn down_ specific jobs and hence puts them in a much better bargaining position for favorable working terms. If you want to even the wealth distribution, you have to empower the middle and lower classes to become financially self-sufficient, not simply try to attack the upper class.

<comment><USER3> _those with the most assets (your "1%") can best manage their investing to avoid losing value, while the people with modest amounts of savings get screwed either directly by inflation or through encouraged patronizing of the fraudulent consumer-financial industry_

Is there some reason why those with modest savings can't buy treasury bills? TIPS will match inflation and other treasury notes will often perform better. And you can buy them directly from the US government bypassing the "fraudulent consumer-financial industry" altogether.

<comment><USER4> Treasuries are not liquid assets for the average consumer -- they are held to maturity. This means that those with "modest" savings can't afford to own them, because of the liquidity risk.

edit: s/TIPS/Treasuries

<comment><USER5> Are you sure about that? There is no market in these Treasuries where they can be sold before the date of maturity?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Demurrage is a solution in search of a problem.

Where is all this alleged currency hoarding? Who's sitting on piles of cash? The rich certainly aren't. Does anybody really think that rich people keep vaults full of cash? They keep their money in stocks, bonds, and real estate.

The only people who _do_ hoard actual cash are the poor and unsophisticated, who are often unable to take advantage of banking services.

The only other significant chunk of hoarding going on right now is actually being perpetrated by The Fed itself. They created vast quantities of new money in 2008 and gave it to the banks to patch up their balance sheets. The Fed is paying good interest on that money so the banks will keep it on deposit with The Fed instead of loaning it into the economy -- because that would obviously spark a firestorm of inflation.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Banks Promise Loans But Hoard Cash"

[http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/03/banking-federal-reserve- bus...](http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/03/banking-federal-reserve-business- wall-street-0203_loans.html)

"Firms' Cash Hoarding Stunts Europe"

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230472440457729...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304724404577297610717362138.html)

<comment><USER7> I think you are missing the positive sides of money-hoarding. Whenever someone doesn't spend the money that person has earned, she saves resources for someone else to use (because _she_ doesn't consume them). This increases the availability of resources in an economy, arguably a good thing, right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How is demurrage different from inflation? Isn't the financial system already set up to encourage savers to invest their assets rather than storing value as bills under mattresses?

<comment><AUTHOR> Demurrage drives the velocity of money up, and the interest rates down. These have other beneficial effects, such as easy access to credit (as long as you're creditworthy).

More noteworthy, demurrage is assessed immediately whereas inflation is delayed. Under a demurrage system, this places an incentive to invest in assets which lead to longer-term sustainable growth. Inflation can instead incentise nearsighted short-term growth (and all the ramifications that has).

<comment><USER9> This is irrelevant if people don't want to use your currency. When you invent a currency, you can't just think about monetary policies but also incentives for using it.

<comment><AUTHOR> One step at a time ;)

Some groups have had success in introducing local currencies with similar features. One path we've looked at is getting communities of people (perhaps starting with some #occupy groups and their supporters) to use it and convince local businesses to accept it, hence the subtitle of being the worlds first "global-community currency".

We're open to other ideas as well.

<comment><USER10> Is the local pizza shop going to be able to purchase sauce, cheese, flour, and pepperoni with it?

Unlikely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> You need to ask yourselves why anyone would choose to use this currency. Why would I request payment in Freicoin instead of USD or Bitcoin? Why would I choose to be paid in a currency that is specifically designed to not "store value"?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm the primary person behind this, and will answer questions here.

Since it's a donation campaign I wasn't sure if it was kosher to self-post it to HN, but raising funds isn't why I did it. I know there are a lot of people here with finance experience, and I'd be interested in engaging with you if you have something to say.

<comment><USER12> The first question that comes to mind: why not just use bitcoin? Have you explored adding the features you want to see to the (open-source) bitcoin project?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's exactly what I have done (for the prototype) and will do (for the actual client). However adding demurrage is a protocol-level change and would represent a hard-fork.

It's better for everyone involved to simply start a fresh block chain.

EDIT: But yes, the client would be an open source fork of bitcoin.

<comment><USER12> Interesting. I guess I was mostly just focused on the bittorrent integration and block-chain pruning elements, both of which sound great for bitcoin.

Just did a very quick skimming trying to understand demurrage currency. Sounds very, very different from normal currency.

From a practical standpoint, would a two-step process make more sense: 1) Widespread adoption of peer-to-peer commodity currency (bitcoin). 2) The implementation of a second peer-to-peer currency on a different basis (demurrage).

Both of these seem like very difficult undertakings. And doing both at the same time seems like it would compound the difficulty.

Apart from Woergi, has there ever been a real-life implementation of a demurrage currency?

Excepting of course the natural cost of storing gold (vaults, guards, etc.). Which is easy for people to accept on a wide scale because its necessity is self-evident.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This doesn't make any sense, many members of the #occupy movement already use Bitcoin because the cops often try to hold the money for "evidence in an investigation".

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure how that's relevant--the situation would be the same with Freicoin, which would run over the same bitcoin network and protocol.

<comment><USER13> But it doesn't run over the Bitcoin network or use the same protocol. Its not an implementation of Bitcoin.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it does and it is (I wrote it, I should know).

<comment><USER13> Then you're just admitting you're bloating the Bitcoin chain with useless non- Bitcoin information. Please stop that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting, but I am still waiting for something that would be positioned between Bitcoin and Freicoin with inflation controlled democratically, not set by an authority (developers behind respective currencies). Every user would choose how fast coin mining should be, making the inflation/deflation react to the people using the system.

<comment><AUTHOR> There were people on the Bitcoin forums that proposed such schemes, but not one has been found to be free of exploitable attacks.

In the end, I decided the security of a fixed rate was better than the uncertainty that someone might come along and figure out how to game the system.

<comment><USER14> Sorry to hear that it is so hard to come with a balanced reliable solution in this area. But it is a good thing that you are trying to address the bitcoin's problems.

If there were such solution, it would attract different kind of sellers and buyers than bitcoin attracts now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If real money becomes a "hot potato" how does that encourage long-term investment? And if the wealthy transfer their stagnant wealth to something other than currency, like gold or real estate, their dollar value will skyrocket over time as the value of the dollar plummets.

<comment><AUTHOR> > If real money becomes a "hot potato" how does that encourage long-term > investment?

Because, for example, building a business that achieves steady positive cash flow would be better than a short-term one-off opportunity, since that one-off would only delay the issue of demurrage.

> And if the wealthy transfer their stagnant wealth to something other than > currency, like gold or real estate, their dollar value will skyrocket over > time as the value of the dollar plummets.

There's nothing in that argument unique to a demurrage currency. That same is true for inflationary currencies like the dollar. You've taken a rather extreme case of a bank-run, which is disastrous no matter the circumstances, but doesn't prove anything.

<comment><USER16> 1\. A short term one-off opportunity is as important as a long term one. Want to take your truck and go sale a hundred generators? Could work, but it would work way better after a hurricane.

2\. A bank-run is a good thing. It permits to see which banks have overextended themselves and, ultimately, punishes them (unless you have a government giving them cash through the backdoor...). It's like going to the dentist. Not necessary pleasant on the spot, but it can save you a lot of pain later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting experiment. I do think that people are not interested in money that does not work as a store of value (to the best of its abilities at least). But in the end the market will decide, and maybe my expectations will be proven wrong.

<comment><AUTHOR> It has been an uphill battle for me in trying to explain this that there really are two uses for money: store-of-value and medium-of-exchange, and that it is possible to cleanly separate the two. It's even been done successfully before, most famously in the town of Wörgl between 1932 and 1934.

Keynes centered his attention on the macroeconomy and used inflation to grease its wheels. Hayek focused on the individual and the value of a deflationary currency at that scale. Gesell showed that these are not, in fact, competing visions and by separating store-of-value from medium-of-exchange you could have your cake and eat it too.

<comment><USER17> I agree there are two uses for money. If I have a choice between being paid in a form of currency that can do both, why would I voluntarily accept a form of currency that can only do one?

That is why would anyone voluntarily accept Freicoin over any other currency?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In 2009, N. Gregory Mankiw (Harvard economist, advisor in the GWBush administration) passed along for consideration an demurrage-like stimulus idea from one of his students. Namely, that the Fed could declare that one year forward, some percentage of existing currency, randomly chosen by serial number, would expire worthless:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/business/economy/19view.ht...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/business/economy/19view.html)

I've also seen the idea that a stimulus tax rebate could be offered in the form of expiring debit cards to have a similar macroeconomic effect.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think the first step to a new currency is to create the groundwork to experiment with a new currency. In other words, if you can create a network of independent people and organizations who are willing to do some of their not- so-important transactions with currency X, then you stand a much better chance of discovering and vetting the best currency X.

Find individuals, artists, independent businesses, etc, etc and get them registered into a database so that this network can internally experiment with currencies.

</comment><comment><USER20> Besides the somewhat strange economics, the greatest problem of any scheme like Bitcoin is that it is a gigantic waste of resources. Mining, which is needed to operate the system, basically amounts to an arms race between miners. If Bitcoin were actually used as a global currency, it seems realistic to suspect that a significant fraction of _all_ global computing power would be used just for mining.

Does that seem right to you?

</comment><comment><USER10> On paper, it sounds like a great idea, but the issues of adoption (why would anyone use this?) and liquidity (why would you keep a balance of freicoins any larger than you had to?) really defeat it before it even gets out the door.

This is something that needs to come from the top - governments need to stop taxing liquidity (sales and income taxes) and start taxing net worth.

</comment><comment><USER21> how does one prevent someone from trading in their demurrage currency for something that holds its value when they do want to store value?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nothing, in fact that is encouraged. I could imagine having a "checking account" in demurrage currency that my paycheck is deposited into, but at the end of the week or month I sweep excess funds (my savings) into a "savings account" backed by treasury bonds, gold, bitcoin, or similar.

The point is to keep cash itself in circulation, regardless of economic circumstances. Had we a demurrage currency in 2008, we might not have had as severe a "credit crunch" as we did--people would still want to loan or invest even in bad times. Demurrage removes, through negative incentive, the "sinks" where money can end up in unproductive storage on the ledger of some company or individual somewhere, and instead keeps it flowing through the economy.

<comment><USER10> That's not how economics works. We had a 'credit crunch' because billions of dollars in market value was disappearing, sometimes overnight, devaluing securities. A new currency that no one wants to hold for longer than they have to isn't going to change that.</comment></comment></comment>


What is a plugin for websites, that shows buttons intelligently? - <AUTHOR> Like, it shows like a horizontal array of buttons (4 or so) and it switches what buttons to show intelligently <comment><USER2> You can change the style of buttons using CSS. You can control which style is used on a particular button with a program that you must write, perhaps using JavaScript.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can't change your username anymore, but this is not hell, brother. I also won't be able to delete this message anymore, even if it's stupid.

But I know that and you could know that I know that. This is HN, not Quora.

<comment><USER3> You OK?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Best would be, if it's a plugin tailed for programming or making changes to code.

I want to integrate it here as the next step:

[http://ezii-os.herokuapp.com/](http://ezii-os.herokuapp.com/)</comment>


HoudahSpot – Advanced File Search Tool for Mac OS X - <AUTHOR> http://www.houdah.com/houdahSpot/ <comment><AUTHOR> HoudahSpot extends Spotlight. It helps build queries using the many search attributes available. Customizable result display make it easy to browse and pick files. The search text is passed on to the next application where finding content is a matter of pressing command-G.</comment>


General AI Won't Want You to Fix Its Code – Computerphile - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l7Is6vOAOA <comment><AUTHOR> It seems to me that utility functions that have very specific goals are the issue. If the utility function were something like "do anything I ask you to do without making me unhappy and without altering my brain" wouldn't everything else we want fall into place?

<comment><USER2> With a few minutes consideration:

There's one glaring loophole, one simple workaround for not making you unhappy while doing things that would make you unhappy, and one potential bug based on how it interprets the word "and".

I won't spoil it in case someone else wants to find them.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Part 2: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TYT1QfdfsM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TYT1QfdfsM)</comment>


Running WordStar under Windows - <AUTHOR> http://sfwriter.com/blog/?p=4109

<comment><USER2> As I was reading this I wondered if the author had ever used emacs. I discovered emacs has WordStar key bindings - [https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Em...](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Emulation.html)

<comment><USER3> WordStar is a lot more than just some keybindings. For a detailed description, read Sawyer's essay "A Writer's Word Processor" ([http://sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm](http://sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm)). The article even has a link to it...</comment></comment>


Adventures with an Extreme Polyglot - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/01/10/adventures-with-an-extreme-polyglot-excerpt-from-babel-no-more.html

<comment><USER2> This guy sounds very eccentric, and clearly has a love for documenting his study of languages, but I'm not convinced he's a polyglot, at least by my definition of the word. Picking up bits and pieces of dozens of obscure languages is an interesting hobby, but as a translator and multilingual myself, I find someone who speaks, reads, writes, and understands 3 languages with native-level fluency much more interesting. However, the book in question bears investigation.</comment>


On Design Thinking - <AUTHOR> http://www.aquinox.net/blog/2007/08/strategy_in_design.html <comment><AUTHOR> _"... Prototyping is simultaneously an evaluative process -- it generates feedback and enables you to make midflight corrections -- and a storytelling process. It's a way of visually and viscerally describing your strategy ..."_

Heard this message before. Prototypes allow a "premortem" of a future product.</comment>


Announcing Darch: A tool for booting stateless operating systems, bare-metal - <AUTHOR> https://godarch.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm here if you guys have any questions.

</comment><comment><USER2> Interesting idea, can you tell how it works from performance side (RAM/CPU/SSD usage)?

<comment><AUTHOR> There is no performance cost. It boots your rootfs/kernerl/initramfs natively.

As for SSD usage, your rootfs will never be written to (read only with tmpfs overlay), only reads. You can mount partitions normally with fstab, which can be on SSD, or w/e drive you'd like.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the answer.</comment></comment></comment>


The struggle of teaching yourself - <AUTHOR> What is your experience learning on your own?
I've found these are the biggest pain points when it comes to teaching myself different things (music, coding, drawing, language, etc.)
* Having a broad or vague goal instead of broken down milestones (i.e. "learn how to make music" vs. "learn how dominant chords are used in this one song")
* For the bigger goals, a sense of overwhelming by all the different topics and available materials (for music, some of the things I've come across and interested in - jazz piano, pop piano, improvising, accompaniment, composing...)
* Questioning whether the tutorial/book/resource I'm using is worth it or a waste of time. I think this is in large part due to the fact that most resources you find are not specifically tailored to what you're trying to accomplish.
* The psychological stuff - self doubt, procrastination, etc.
* Not dedicating time each day to making progress (possibly because of some of the above)
What have you found that works for you when you're trying to teaching yourself something?
What do you struggle with the most?
Why did you decide to teach yourself vs. other options that may have been available?
What is your best/worst learning experience?
How do you define your goals? (success metrics)
What are some of the other things you think about? For example:
* budget
* time
* discipline/commitment (hobby vs. something you really want in your life)
* considering a more traditional learning environment (classes, college, lessons)
* online learning sites (MOOCs, Youtube, etc.) <comment><USER2> After getting a PhD I don't have patience to take classes!

Definitely I see many people on Hacker News who are looking for solutions to the problem you are talking about.

I don't think there is one single solution for everyone and every subject, but I think everybody needs some package of resources.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeah, Same here. Recoomend a book : Principles.</comment>