Introducing DarkSky.net - <AUTHOR> http://blog.darksky.net/introducing-darksky-net/ <comment><USER2> While forecast.io has been available worldwide and Android apps have been making liberal use of its API, the Dark Sky iOS app isn't available outside select countries:

       Item Not Available

       The item you've requested is not currently available in the French
       Store, but it is available in the U.S. Store. Click Change Store to view
       this item.

<comment><USER3> I believe that's because their original focus, and still the primary focus of the mobile app, is 'hyperlocal', near-term precipitation prediction.

To do this they require access to high-resolution (spatial and temporal) rain radar data, which isn't universally available. (In the USA this is provided by the NOAA, in the UK by the Met Office.)

<comment><USER4> Hyperlocal because it also uses the data from many small private weather stations around the US. So many times the data you're seeing is from a weather station in a neighbors yard around the block.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I prefer forecast.io. First, when I visit darksky.net, I get a location in Kansas. Forecast.io gives me New York, via GeoIP (?), without requiring location services. I'll assume that's just a bug, though.

The main problem is that I really don't care about the maps. It's 78 in Jacksonville, apparently, but I live in New York. I will very, very, very rarely care about the weather in Jacksonville.

Forecast.io quickly tells me, without scrolling, what the weather will be for the next hour, the next day, and the next seven days. That matters. It does it with a quick, easy to parse hierarchy - all in a column, same sizes for elements, left-aligned. It does have the globe map, but I mostly consider that a visual accent. It's a rain map though, which is at least more useful than a temperature map (rain tends to move in a certain direction).

While darksky.net has this information, it's not as easy to follow. It's center-aligned, which is harder to read, and the different fonts don't have a clear role. It goes now -> day -> hour -> (ad for an app I've already downloaded) -> (giant map) -> week, instead of now -> hour -> day -> week, so the scope jumps around instead of increasing with each step.

<comment><USER6> I think it just defaults you to New York on forecast.io because I'm getting that when I load the page and I'm located in San Diego

<comment><USER5> Oh, bleh, dumb luck then. It should really use GeoIP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is great- most weather sites are slow and crappy and covered in ads. The maps especially are gorgeous. And it's getting close to being a good replacement for weatherspark.com, the best weather site ever built IMO (formerly - they built it on flash and couldn't maintain it anymore).

Dark Sky has the historic data too but weatherspark let you pan across the timeline and zoom in and out easily. It made it fun to explore and discover patterns in different areas.

I'd looked into building my own weather site frontend, but finding a good source for radar data was the sticking point, since they were all too expensive or hard to work with. DarkSky.net has radar on the maps, but I don't see it in the API, unless I'm missing something.

</comment><comment><USER8> It is a bit confusing that you have unit selection (for temperature and wind speed) in top-right corner, and then separate for map. I thought it is broken before I noticed the other switch.

<comment><USER9> And its state isn't saved so I have to switch each time I open the page. And it defaults to proprietary units from used in only one country.

<comment><USER10> Last I checked, the US didn't invent Imperial units, there's nothing proprietary about them (they easily and readily inter-convert with metric) and Fahrenheit was Polish/German.

The DarkSky team is based in and focus is also the US and (partially) UK.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice colors and resolution!

I'd love to see one of these weather visualization sites overlay the live lightning strikes from [http://en.blitzortung.org/live_dynamic_maps.php](http://en.blitzortung.org/live_dynamic_maps.php).

</comment><comment><USER12> Thought this was going to be something related to light pollution:

[http://darksky.org/](http://darksky.org/)

<comment><USER13> Same. Poor choice in domain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> One thing I always find missing with forecast.io/DarkSky apis is that you have to supply cordinates to get the weather of a location. What if I want to be able to query by city or postal code? It's the only reason why I stick with weather underground for my weather chat bot where people are trying to get weather info based on a (city, region), (city, region, country), or (postal code).

<comment><USER15> Sure, its another API, but its relatively trivial to get the lat/long from a location using something like the Google Geocoding API.

All things equal, a single API call is nicer, but I wouldn't personally let that be the only reason to not use DarkSky's API.

<comment><USER16> So, instead of depending on one service, you now depend on two.

<comment><USER17> Yes, because I'd rather DarkSky focus on being a great weather API than being a mediocre geocoding API.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I love the forecast.io rainfall animation, seems to have been removed from the DarkSky website. that's such a shame.

</comment><comment><USER19> They seem to be upsetting a lot of Android users by charging £2.99 a year for it as a subscription model.

Personally I don't mind since I've been using forecast.io for years and it's invaluable when planning to walk the dog without getting caught in a downpour.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, this is why I didn't buy the app when it came to Android. I've got friends on iOS who swear by it so I was psyched to see it hit the Play Store. But when I saw it was a recurring bill, I just stuck with 1Weather or Weather Timeline.

I guess there's just a point where I can get weather info (sometimes from the same source, as in Weather Timeline) for a few bucks one time. And if it's a service that requires constant funding, I understand that. But it doesn't make sense that I have to keep paying while many friends just paid their $4 one time.

I think it's that different approach that turned me off to it regardless of how good the product was. Is it enough of an improvement over other apps (even ones that use forecast.io) to be worth a subscription fee instead of a one- time payment of $4 or $5?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Meta: seems like a setting or plugin in their Wordpress instance is stealing the default middle-click functionality (open in new window). I always wonder what the original intent with such things is...

</comment><comment><USER22> I expected a project dedicated to combating light pollution, or possibly saying where the closes dark sky was. Got severely disappointed.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm in Sweden and I can't find the app in Google Play, even if I'm searching for "net.darksky.darksky".

</comment><comment><USER24> Pretty cool!</comment>


Show HN: scorethings - a website for scoring things - <AUTHOR> http://www.scorethings.com/

<comment><USER2> I think we should score pancakes: [http://www.scorethings.com/scores/new?thingId=Q44541](http://www.scorethings.com/scores/new?thingId=Q44541)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's about 6 AM on a Friday. I just spent the week writing boring documentation, and I'm taking the day off to watch some movies.

Yeah, pancakes are pretty valuable right about now: [http://www.scorethings.com/scores/51246719](http://www.scorethings.com/scores/51246719)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You were going to lose me when you scored the Blues Brothers 7. But then I kept watching and you changed it to 9. Good man.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I was tempted to say 10. It's one of the funniest movies ever.

I wanted the potential user to see that 10's should not be given lightly. I was trying, as much as possible, to get all users on the same "scoring" page. answering: "What's the minimum points a thing would need to score to qualify as 'Good'?" That way, the scores mean something. Maybe they can be compared.

Plus, lot of features in scorethings were inspired by this xkcd joke about star ratings: [https://xkcd.com/1098](https://xkcd.com/1098).</comment></comment>


Go's hidden pragmas - <AUTHOR> https://dave.cheney.net/2018/01/08/gos-hidden-pragmas <comment><USER2> For once, I'm gonna be the one sticking up for Go here. :) Pragmas or annotations are kind of unavoidable, and I don't think that it was a mistake to include them. I wouldn't have used comment syntax, but whatever; that's a minor quibble.

Actually, I wish Rust had done one thing that Go did: namespacing the pragmas. That would have been a more future-proof thing to do, because macros effectively give us user-definable pragmas, and once you have user-definable pragmas you have name collision problems. Kudos to the Go team for being forward-thinking there. I suspect we'll have to figure out some kind of solution here, but it won't be as pleasant as if we had just used namespaces in the first place.

<comment><USER3> _> Actually, I wish Rust had done one thing that Go did: namespacing the pragmas._

Yeah, of all the papercuts that the Rust 1.0 macros system had the idiosyncratic modularization/namespacing rules were the most unfortunate. Happily there's already an accepted RFC for the design of macro modularization ([https://github.com/rust- lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/1561-macr...](https://github.com/rust- lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/1561-macro-naming.md)) that simply makes all macros operate under the same namespacing rules as all other items, and it looks to be mostly implemented as well (though it won't hit stable Rust until the larger macros 2.0 initiative is finished). And as for future-proofing, I'm not too concerned: all the "standard" macros can be exported from the stdlib prelude without a problem, and any libs that update to macros 2.0 can easily export the updated macros just like any other public item and consumers can update their code with only a single `use` declaration (it's not like the old macros system doesn't require explicit importing anyway, it's just unique and janky). Very much looking forward to the simplicity and consistency of the new system.

<comment><USER4> cool, I didn't realize this applied to attribute-style macro application too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Poor Rob Pike. He always tries to make things simple, and over they time entropy always does its thing. You can hear his frustration in his cited comment.

<comment><USER6> All languages that tried to fight complexity either grew up to adopt complexity and stay relevant, or faded away.

Programming languages don't get complex just for fun, their designers are tackling actual relevant issues.

Go community doesn't seem to have learned much from the past.

<comment><USER7> >All languages that tried to fight complexity either grew up to adopt complexity and stay relevant, or faded away.

And yet, to this day, C is just as, if not more popular, than C++. Why is that? I can do _so much more_ in C++, but I, and my colleagues, pick plain-old C every time.

<comment><USER6> Thanks Linux.

C was already on the way out when Linus created Linux.

Apple was migrating from Object Pascal to C++.

IBM had CSet++ for OS/2.

Borland, Microsoft, Zortech, Symatec were selling C++ frameworks.

UNIX vendors were playing with Taligent and CORBA.

BeOS and Symbian were developed in C++.

Then came Linus, made Linux with GNU on top.

GNU project for a long time always mentioned that the go to language for GNU projects should be C.

All major C compilers are written in C++ nowadays, there is hardly any reason to stay with C outside UNIX world.

<comment><USER8> _C was already on the way out when Linus created Linux._

That seems a little... fanciful. There was a lot of C++ and it was a great way to show how modern and forward-looking you were (and to sell compilers, tools, frameworks) but standardization hadn't got far, interoperability was poor, problems great and small abounded. A number of the things you mention above were spectacularly unsuccessful.

<comment><USER6> Yes, C++ was a pain to write portability before 2000, but so was C, in spite of having been standardized in 1990, most compilers were a mix of K&R C and ANSI C.

Nevertheless, all major desktop OSes were going C++ for their application frameworks, before the widespread adoption of GNU software.

> A number of the things you mention above were spectacularly unsuccessful.

Mostly due to politics between corporations and very little to do with C++ itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The page is missing the best one of them all //go:linkname, which allows for linking in private functions from other packages. Including the Go runtime. For example: [https://github.com/tidwall/algo/blob/master/algo.go](https://github.com/tidwall/algo/blob/master/algo.go)

<comment><USER10> linkname is brilliant thanks! I've done that sort of thing with an assembler shim in the past.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Pragmas are always a bad idea. The Ada community has learned that the hard way. Whatever the pragma does, it should be part of the language standard and never be implementation-dependent.

It's time that language designers include _language pragmatics_ in the core language. That includes for example big O information about data structures, packing of structures, alignment properties, memory access information, etc. Currently, in most if not all languages this information is spread all over levels, from nonstandardized compiler flags over pragmas up to the core language. It's a huge mess.

<comment><USER12> > Pragmas are always a bad idea. The Ada community has learned that the hard > way. Whatever the pragma does, it should be part of the language standard > and never be implementation-dependent.

> It's time that language designers include language pragmatics in the core > language. That includes for example big O information about data structures, > packing of structures, alignment properties, memory access information, etc.

So pragmas are "always a bad idea" but you should have them "in the core language"… Don't you feel your comment is pretty contradictory?

A pragma is a directive for the system (mostly compiler), that's orthogonal to it being implementation-specific.

<comment><USER11> You misread my comment. The functionality offered by pragmas must be mandatory and in the core language, whether you call them pragmas or not. Everything else leads to problems.

It's true that if pragmas were all fully specified in the core language and not optional, then they wouldn't pose any problems. In reality, however, some pragmas are regulated by the core language and others are implementation specific additions. The result is a huge mess, it's the #1 source of incompatibility of standardized languages like Ada. Even just having optional pragmas in the core language is problematic, because at one point or another developers will start relying on the optional functionality to do something that one implementation does and another doesn't. Optional optimization and packing directives are typical examples. In theory they shouldn't be able to break programs, in reality they do.

<comment><USER12> > You misread my comment. The functionality offered by pragmas must be > mandatory and in the core language, whether you call them pragmas or not. > Everything else leads to problems.

Your previous comment literally states that pragmas are _always bad_ , then goes on to state that they should be included in the core language. This one does not retract the original statement that pragmas are "always a bad idea" but further asserts pragmas "must be mandatory and in the core language".

I don't think I misread your comment, no. You may have miswritten your comment when you meant that, say pragmas should not be optional and/or implementation dependent[0], but that's on you.

[0] I've no idea whether that's you mean given again you state that pragmas should both not exist and be part of the core language.

<comment><USER11> When I said "pragmas are always a bad idea" I was talking about pragmas as they are implemented in current languages like e.g. Ada. In most languages pragmas are added to the language without being integrated into it. For example, in Ada you write "pragma (Something);" next to other statements to influence their interpretation by the compiler. Other languages have similar mechanisms that are somehow outside the core language or added on top of it. These types of pragmas are _always a bad idea_.

I also argued that the functionality of pragmas must be represented as non- optional choices in the core languages. This is one of the lessons that the Ada community has learned over time - but it's too late to change this now in Ada.

So yes, pragmas are always a bad idea if we talk about the way they are implemented in most languages. The functionality of pragmas should be part of the core language, with proper syntax and semantics.

I hope that clarifies what I've stated and which you haven't understood, and that, your nitpicking aside, my position now makes sense to you. If not, there is not much I can do, I just wanted to point out a lesson learned in the Ada community, which is very stringent about language definitions. If you're interested in these kind of topics, I can recommend Michael Scott's _Programming Language Pragmatics_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I hated the idea of using comments as directives when Go 1.4 introduced //go:generate. But, holy, they were there from the beginning?

They bring back my painful memories of the old days when I had to use conditional comments to support IE6...

<comment><USER14> Every higher level language has directives nowadays, and those almost every time encoded in comments.

Honestly, between documentation, compiler pragmas, linter directives, packaging and linking instructions, and etc, we are getting into a point where languages will need to specify something like "comments starting with this string must be ignored".

<comment><USER15> > and those almost every time encoded in comments

which lanugages do that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The pragmas in Go are not intended to be used in general user code. They should be only used in Go runtime implementation and standard packages. The pragmas in Go are just some hints for compilers. Compilers will ignore many of the pragmas used in custom user code.

<comment><USER17> Except for the build conditional flags: [https://golang.org/pkg/go/build/#hdr- Build_Constraints](https://golang.org/pkg/go/build/#hdr-Build_Constraints)

Which are pretty useful when you want to target tests to different versions of Go when std lib exhibits different behaviour (behaviour changed as std lib matured).

<comment><USER18> Also when you want to put package-main files in a library package directory, you need to put

      // +build ignore

near the top of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This seems like one arugment to be made in favor of giving the language first- class access to the compiler, à la Lisp.

<comment><USER20> Not at all! This a common impulse among programmers: upon seeing a specific case, you want to make it as abstract and generic as possible. This maximizes the power and flexibility available to the programmer.

However, the design philosophy of Go pulls in the exact opposite direction! Go emphasizes simplicity and large-scale engineering -- i.e. standardization. (gofmt is the canonical example of this.) Giving programmers the power to manipulate the compiler in arbitrary ways would be a nightmare for Go's designers. It opens the door to "clever" code that you tear your hair out debugging 6 months later. The strength of Go is precisely that it makes it difficult to write "clever" code. Go looks pretty much the same everywhere. Which is a little boring, sure; but for me (and many others), that's an acceptable trade-off.

<comment><USER6> I rather prefer the Ada, Eiffel, Delphi, C++, Java and C# decisions regarding large scale engineering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Given the race detector has no known false positives, there should be very > little reason to exclude a function from its scope.

Performance, maybe?

<comment><USER22> > Performance, maybe?

Performance for running race detector (debug) binaries? Are you worried slower code hides a race?

I can't think of a reason to ship or use race detector compiled binaries in production. Or do you have something in mind?

<comment><USER21> Yeah, that's what I was getting at. Race condition detection would probably slow down your code, so you probably wouldn't use it in production.

<comment><USER23> Race detection is totally disabled for production binaries, because it does slow down the code.

The question is: For debug builds that explicitly have the "-race" flag passed to the compiler, why would you want to disable race detection for a specific function?

<comment><USER20> I actually do have a real example of this.

We use -race during our automated testing. The setup for some of our tests involves CPU mining (rapid blake2b hashing). This code definitely doesn't have any races, and it runs waaaaay slower when race detection is enabled. So we could speed up our tests significantly by disabling race detection just for the setup phase.

<comment><USER24> Have you considered enabling parallel tests for that package? It let's test functions run in parallel with each other. Might address some of the issue with the performance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Go's "pragmas" are already exposed to the developer via go generate [0].

Edit: Granted, this is not a directive for the compiler though.

[0] [https://blog.golang.org/generate](https://blog.golang.org/generate)</comment>


Start building your tech now - <AUTHOR> https://phpocean.com/blog/article/start-building-your-tech-now/108 <comment><USER2> This is the same thing Luke Smith was fleshing out in this video on LBRY. So many of us are net-consumers of the Internet instead of producing more. [https://open.lbry.com/@Luke:7/get-a-website-now-don-t-be- a-w...](https://open.lbry.com/@Luke:7/get-a-website-now-don-t-be-a-web- peasant:e?r=J8SjyojoYzoqYQu2js3Wk7PEERpiQBHn)

That's why I've set out to learn the trio of HTML, CSS, and Javascript to be able to build my own website/virtual apartment from scratch.

Learning C programming language will give me the foundation to get into development.

Learning linux sys admin in Debian and modifying my config files in XMonad window manager allows me to take back control of my computer. Once I master my computer I can help empower others to start doing the same! Great article btw</comment>


Ask HN: How does a product like Snowflake pitch itself to customers - <AUTHOR> Snowflake is, from what I understand, a database engine.
To get value out of it, a developer has to write sql and integrate some other reporting tool to actually view results.
How are they positioning the product to customers? As a tool for developers? For business analysts (will business analysts want to even write sql)?
How are they picking up million dollar contracts when the output of their product is essentially a stream of data that needs another tool to visualize it and the input needs to be written by an engineer? <comment><USER2> Snowflake is solidly a B2B analytics app. It is, and I don't mean this dismissively, nothing new. They do it _very_ well, and their market performance agrees with that notion, and they are innovating within their field, but data warehousing is complicated, especially at scale and they're not breaking new ground by providing a better solution for that. For a small company's analytics, I can download a CSV file and do all my analysis in Excel. But at a bigger company, when that "CSV file" is terabytes, possibly even petabytes of data, it's going to take a bit more of work to deal with it. For companies who's core expertise _isn 't_ shoveling around data like that and loading it into a database, it's reasonable to contract with a vendor to do that. Snowflake is just one among many other vendors who do this.

To answer your question, what's great is that anybody who can SQL can use this, developers and business analysts alike. Developers who want data to back up product decisions will use this to answer, eg, how many customers use feature A vs feature B, and then use that information to choose to build either feature C or feature D. Business analysts want answers about the business, and if they have to write SQL to do it, then they'll partner with someone who can, or more likely, just learn SQL. (This is why "data scientist" is a hot new career path.)

Corporations that are in a place to be giving Snowflake a million dollar contract most likely already have a similar system already in place, either homegrown or via a competitor. (Eg Amazon Redshift.) Thus, their positioning depends on the customer, but for customers that previously already had a million dollar contract just with a different vendor, their focus is on why their product is super-amazing-awesome compared to their competition. (Which, and the market agrees, it is.)

patio11 has a thread on just how unseen some of the niches of software is - [https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1235919318329643008](https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1235919318329643008)

Software is like an iceberg - there's a wild world of software that none of us have heard of. It seems strange that it's possible for Snowball to succeed given that it's "essentially a stream of data that needs experts in order to use it", but the same thing is true about the Internet in the 1980s.

<comment><USER3> > Corporations that are in a place to be giving Snowflake a million dollar > contract most likely already have a similar system already in place

100% correct. We're in the middle of migrating to SF right now, moving from some very old homegrown systems and a patchwork of systems from the past couple of years of M&A. The real selling point for us was the unified interface, and the ability to plug in systems (new and old) just by creating connectors. There is a view layer that can look across various backends and make it look, to the user, like it's all the same data set.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They found me on LinkedIn last year and scheduled a sales call, which I agreed to. I'm in consulting, so I need to know about their product in case a client asks for it, or in case I need to recommend their product as a solution to a client's case. They specifically marketed to me its database performance and its use in the cloud, which I won't get into here, since I'm not their spokesperson.

To date, I haven't had a specific need for Snowflake, but that's down to my client's situations, not any issue with the company or its product. If that situation changed, it would indeed result in contracts.

</comment><comment><USER5> Pretty much what the other guy said. I'm likely to be working with Snowflake soon hosted on Azure. Existing warehouse is on Oracle and is costing >1 million pounds per year in hosting and licensing. For enterprises with expensive licenses on Oracle or SQLServer and expensive hosting costs Snowflake offers a more attractive package to the business. Technically I'm not sure it will be too different, I'll update in a couple of months!

</comment><comment><USER6> Snowflake advertises itself as a pay as you go complete data warehouse with a simple interface, primarily SQL. It can installed on Azure or AWS etc. It is self-tuning; no database admin required. It has built in COPY commands to ingest parquet files and Tasks and Streams to perform scheduled data transformation. That is it has all the tools needed to perform data warehousing out of the box.

</comment><comment><USER7> That's a good question; I'm curious how the sales process works.

It's not winning on performance or price/performance. I suspect it's other features such as easy onboarding and an ETL (or ELT) toolchain. They claim it's self-managing, as so many products have before.

B2B over the web/cloud circumvents traditional enterprise sales (and billing!) channels, so I guess that's part of it.</comment>


Show HN: StartMode – Build and Upgrade your business model starting at $59 - <AUTHOR> https://www.startmode.co/ <comment><USER2> I love the Launchaco platform for making these pages, but you might want to remove the name 'Launchaco' from the title bar on the plan's and pricing page.

[https://www.startmode.co/Plans%20&%20Pricings](https://www.startmode.co/Plans%20&%20Pricings)

</comment><comment><USER3> I sincerely would like and use and pay for something like this, my problem is that I don't believe you have the right incentives to do your best job if I'm just paying you $59 or whatever.

I'm not saying you should charge more, that wouldn't solve anything.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is an interesting idea but lacks a page that explains why I should use your consulting. What's your experience and expertise? Without that it makes no sense.</comment>


Using Redis as a Frontend Cache for WordPress - <AUTHOR> http://www.jimwestergren.com/wordpress-with-redis-as-a-frontend-cache/

<comment><AUTHOR> I got the execution time down to 0.00256 seconds with Redis + Nginx + PHP-FPM + APC + Cloudflare.</comment>


Cosmology from quantum potential - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0370269314009381 <comment><USER2> For non-physicists trying to understand what this is paper is about, here's a short article that takes a shot at vulgarizing it: [http://phys.org/news/2015-02-big-quantum-equation- universe.h...](http://phys.org/news/2015-02-big-quantum-equation- universe.html)

<comment><USER3> Even as a physicist who studied Bohm's work long ago the paper is very unclear.

It's quite possible they've done something remarkable, but the argument is sketched out in extremely high level terms (which is entirely appropriate for Physics Letters B).

One big question that pops to mind is: since Bohmian trajectories live in R^3N where N is the number of particles, how does one go about "replacing geodesics" with them? They would seem to be animals of a completely different kind, and the transformed theory would therefore involve much more than simple "replacement".</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does your company use Weebly or Squarespace? - <AUTHOR>

I'm interested in Weebly and Squarespace. I'm struggling to find real-world usage of it.<p>Please post a link to your site if you use either service for business! <comment><USER2> Weebly: www.fightingwalrus.com the e-commerce feature is... improving. Shipping and accounting integration still needs work but they have been responsive so far.</comment>


Website Performance Scores Monitoring - <AUTHOR> https://www.pubperf.com/ <comment><USER2> Tried to create an account. Got the confirmation email, clicked on it, and received this response "Your account has not been approved or disabled by the account manager. Please contact us: firstname.lastname@example.com"</comment>


Let's secure security defaults together - <AUTHOR> http://jessepollak.me/2012/11/13/lets-secure-secruity-defaults-together/

<comment><USER2> There's some kind of cognitive dissonance in the crypto community, where on the one hand they hammer into people the concept that they should _always_ use trusted libraries and not screw with any of the settings, but on the other hand- many of those trusted libraries have insecure defaults or non-obvious gotchas that require developers to dive into the documentation and, quite often, understand quite a bit about cryptography.

It looks like this is often the result of legacy code, need to maintain backwards compatibility, etc. etc.; but I think this is one area where those reasons are absolutely NOT justified excuses. When your entire world is based on security - make your product WORK and make it secure BY DEFAULT; nothing else matters.

<comment><USER3> This is one of those things that just shows how immature the software industry still is.

Often times when people talk about software they talk about feature lists. And they talk about things like design, security, performance, robustness as secondary aspects and often times as things that can be bolted on later. But the reality is that this is exactly backwards. Security, elegance, performance, etc. are fundamental to the operation of a tool, including software. The difference between a tool that does those things well and one that doesn't is not some tiny detail, it's the difference between a tool that is so good it takes over a billion dollar market and one that is relegated to failure.

Look at, say, cars for example. Some cars differ on features but the biggest difference is in the overall design, fit-and-finish, and attention to detail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wait a second.

If you use pickle to serialize your cookies, and if your secret key is freely available on the interwebz, yes, you've got a problem.

If you use json, you've still got a problem, namely, that your secret key is still freely available on the interwebz. People might not be able to execute arbitrary code on your server, but they can still easily modify their cookies to log in as a different user, steal their personal info, etc. etc.

If we're going to talk about securing our defaults, I think it's very important that we make the defaults _actually_ secure _all the way_ , rather than just making them slightly less insecure than they currently are.

Keep all session data on the server side. Now you've got secure defaults.

Or make sure that your secret key is actually, you know, secret.</comment>


Blackmail the Government and You Can Pay Less Tax – Twitter Style - <AUTHOR> http://cameronkeng.com/hn-blackmail-the-government-and-you-can-pay-less-tax-twitter-style/

<comment><USER2> Blackmail means threatening to reveal someone's secrets unless they do what you want them to do. I see nothing in anything the article alleges, or in anything I've read elsewhere, that even hints that Twitter has blackmailed any government, or blackmailed any non-goverment for that matter.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, blackmail is the coercion of a benefit derived from the act of a threat. Twitter clearly threatened the city along with a number of other startups in the SF area to move the jobs and tax revenue to another local town or city if SF didn't abate their payroll taxes. Thus, blackmail is a justified and correct term for such an act. But, I will concede that coercion is an equal substitute.

While I don't fault twitter for their business decision. I do find it fair to call the kettle black when it is true. I generally don't have a problem with companies tax planning within the means of the law to achieve their tax goals, but simply flat out threatening the community that created you doesn't seem 100% fair either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you crowd sourced the problem you could probably make it work. Call it MoveOn.com, a group of people thinking about moving to another municipality get together sign some sort of binding contract forcing them to move to another municipality or not, the MoveOn representatives then canvass the two governments for the best incentives to stay / move, the company takes a percentage of the incentives negotiated. It could be instrumental in improving neighborhoods, schools and the general community, not to mention providing a much needed tax base to impoverished neighborhoods that could benefit from a better tax base. I'm sure with the state of legislation post-Kelo you could make it work with some helpful developers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow that's an amazing concept. I never thought of something like that. I think that with the proper idea for the "MoveOn.com" platform to work would be a great way for the average joe to "lobby" like the big guys.

GE worked the hell out of the system when they got congress to pass their "green or re-usable energy credits." The energy credits often had more than 50% of the tax savings going to the company.</comment></comment>


Is Health Care a Right? - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/02/is-health-care-a-right <comment><USER2> Its fascinatingly interesting how it all subjectively ties into the narratives of scarcity and free will or the lack thereof in the background and how those meta topics obscurity actually feed into the endless cycle that is politicised opinions on topics like these.

Its a bit ironic to feel embitterment while not forgetting to work not harder smarter. If you catch what I'm getting at.</comment>


Talloc: The Tutorial - <AUTHOR> https://talloc.samba.org/talloc/doc/html/libtalloc__tutorial.html

<comment><USER2> It's cool, but a seldom recognised downside to custom allocators is having to reinvent heap protection.

[http://www.void.at/exploits/hoagie_samba_packetchaining.c](http://www.void.at/exploits/hoagie_samba_packetchaining.c)

[https://lists.samba.org/archive/samba- technical/2013-October...](https://lists.samba.org/archive/samba- technical/2013-October/095546.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> So, I've been learning C (through "Learn C The Hard Way") to be able to contribute to various projects (PHP being one), and build my own system tools, as well as learning it so that I can understand Vala and Nimrod's underlying architecture and functionality better (Vala's GObject system seems like a leaky abstraction at times, and I get stuck as I'm no good with C...).

For my projects and the like, the other stuff I want to play with, is it worth using libs like these? They seem to "bring C into 2013", if you will, in terms of the features possible without re-inventing the wheel.

Speaking of re-inventing the wheel, I wish I knew where to look to get specific libraries for C, something like Ruby's Gems, and PHP's Composer. For now, I've just been using Google. Is there a better way? And does anyone have a good resource for explaining how to set-up a project with dependencies that are both binary and need to be compiled? I know a little bit of Makefiles now (I love it, and use it across all my languages now for various automation tooling), but feel like I'm not sure when to "expect a .so in the system" vs, brining the dependency with my archive and compiling locally/statically or dynamically, etc. There's a lot behind it all, and I don't know where to start, so I've been winging it!

<comment><USER4> > where to look to get specific libraries for C

[http://ccodearchive.net/](http://ccodearchive.net/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Talloc borrows the block hierarchy idea from halloc and extends it with destructors and some fluff. So if you need just the hierarchy, take a look at [http://www.swapped.cc/halloc](http://www.swapped.cc/halloc)

EDIT - [https://github.com/apankrat/halloc](https://github.com/apankrat/halloc) too

<comment><AUTHOR> I've used (and like) halloc but I found talloc interesting because it also supports memory pools and is well documented.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Apache has a nice system where all allocations come out of pools. [http://apr.apache.org/docs/apr/2.0/group__apr__pools.html](http://apr.apache.org/docs/apr/2.0/group__apr__pools.html)

You can then create a new pool to handle a single http request, then discard the whole pool with one free when the request has finished.

<comment><USER7> Spot on. This and APR make stuff a lot simpler. Have used pool allocation on a number of projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hierarchical memory allocations are a great concept. But Samba's talloc is kind of bloated, with all the reference counting, destructors and stuff.

Here is a simple, 200-line version of just the hierarchical allocator: [https://github.com/esneider/talloc](https://github.com/esneider/talloc)

<comment><USER9> Too simple ;)

      void * p;

      p = talloc(1, NULL);
      talloc_set_parent(p, p);
      tfree(p);

<comment><USER8> Yep, you can also do

      void *p;
      free(p);
      free(p);

Don't get me wrong, I get where you are going. But C philosophy is that libraries shouldn't do expensive checking to detect programmers' errors.

<comment><USER9> I'm not going anywhere. Double-free is a known pitfall. People watch for it and a lot of standard libraries have safeguards against it.

On the other hand tfree() hangs if a prior call to talloc_set_parent() is passed certain arguments. Just more ammunition to shoot one's own foot. (p, p) might be a degenerate case, but real code _will_ create cyclic references. In such case blaming programmer is the least productive way to handle it.

<comment><USER8> Fair enough... I thought it would be more difficult/inefficient to check for cyclic hierarchies, but it wasn't.

Fixed! Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been looking into things that might help manage memory in some larger applications. I've been working with GObject recently, which has some benefits but using it is a bit of a full on lifestyle choice, and I'm not sure how suitable it is for some of the smaller embedded environments I work in.

This might be quite a good middle ground. Need to go and have a look at the impact on performance and memory usage.

</comment><comment><USER11> This seems to be a very useful concept and implementation. I wonder whether it was possible to make this more transparent for C programmers.

<comment><USER12> I think C programmers would be better of moving to a small subset of C++ with destructors. This library tracks the link between a struct and its child objects for each instance of the struct (both the application and this library know about the link between a user and its username field). In C++, the knowledge 'free the pointer pointed to by field X' is kept only once. If you have lots of objects, that will add up.

Even if you don't want to move to C++, I don't think this is easier than writing separate functions 'allocAnX' and 'freeAnX', and being disciplined to always use them.

The 'reference counting' mentioned in the introduction may be a reason to use this instead, but it could not find it in the documentation elsewhere. Did I overlook that?

<comment><USER13> Reference counting is implemented by [https://talloc.samba.org/talloc/doc/html/group__talloc__ref....](https://talloc.samba.org/talloc/doc/html/group__talloc__ref.html#ga1d70927673b42a6d2e42823307280502) or [https://talloc.samba.org/talloc/doc/html/group__talloc__ref....](https://talloc.samba.org/talloc/doc/html/group__talloc__ref.html#ga573831a64a47a33cce8c80bde085e158) (talloc calls this "adding a parent" \- note it does do quite a bit more than just incrementing an integer.)

You're right that talloc has a memory overhead relative to smart pointers or a free_foo() function; talloc'ing up an int is very inefficient. Note that you can add a talloc-integrated "destructor" at zero marginal cost, so e.g. an array of a million pointers to individually-allocated int's could let talloc manage the vector and free the int's in the destructor. (That is, you can de- talloc part of a talloc'ed memory hierarchy.)

Additionally, malloc also has a runtime and memory cost; like talloc's, this cost is high enough to discourage arrays of pointers to individually allocated int's and low enough that it doesn't matter for arrays of int's. The one time I played around with talloc (for a network daemon), I didn't really run into any allocations where I'd hesitate to use talloc but not to use malloc. (I forgot the numbers; a quick Google suggests that talloc adds 96 bytes to malloc's 16 bytes of overhead.)

That said, just being disciplined about memory usage seems to work decently well, too. (For expert programmers with good tools, usually; it's a hard problem.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It looks like they understand memory as a tree, but in complex structures it's a graph. I couldn't found how they handle ring topologies. I guess, this stealing stuff doesn't help.

<comment><USER13> IIRC, talloc basically doesn't handle rings. Note, however, that it's fairly easy to create a "reference to the entire ring" that cleans up some node/the entire ring when it's deallocated, or to explicitly deallocate some node of the ring.

For what it's worth, non-tree reference graphs are a lot rarer than you'd think. (Note, for instance, that Perl doesn't clean them up automatically except in a few specific cases; this is annoying, but Perl is clearly usable!)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to calculate fair share of this ride? - <AUTHOR> John and Cindy needed to travel from a place A. John had to go to place B; Cindy to C. Both got into a taxi and went together to B first. John dropped off at B. Cindy said to John that she would pay the driver for the whole trip, and John could pay his share of the ride to her later, since the cost for whole trip would be known only after reaching C. Cindy continued the journey and got down at C. She paid $280 to the driver for the whole trip from A to B to C.
Following are the rates for DIRECT trips: A to B - $160; B to C - $170; A to C - $250;<p>How much should John pay Cindy so that both bear their fair share of the ride? <comment><USER2> I suggest that the complete fare (A to C) should be divided by the 2 passengers. BTW John should try to stay in touch with Cindy!</comment>


[startup critique] Randomicity - Random sites from across the web - <AUTHOR> http://randomicity.diffle.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a little side-project that I've been working on for about a week, in between my main startup & taxes & moping around from being rejected by YC. It crawls the web for sites (only frontpages, not the full text like Google), and then displays a random selection of 20 on each refresh. The problem I'm trying to solve is that I'll likely need a new idea for my startup, yet there's a whole World Wide Web out there and I've never explored 99.9999% of it. Most social news sites try very hard to give you sites you'll like, but I don't want sites that I like; I want sites I've never heard of.

I initially had the idea for this about a year ago, but dismissed it as "Something so simple couldn't possibly be useful." But recently, I got to thinking about Paul Buchheit's blog posts on humility, and Linus Torvald's advice on starting from a trivial problem and expanding it, and Evan Williams' success stories with Blogger and Twitter. Maybe humility isn't just acknowledging that the big idea you've pinned your hopes on may fail; maybe it also involves acknowledging that all the little ideas that you've dismissed as being incredibly stupid might also succeed. So here's my incredibly stupid little idea. If it fails, I only invested 3-4 coding days in it, and it'd be worth it just for the Django and BeautifulSoup practice.

Unlike past side projects, I _will_ be maintaining and updating this, as long as it remains fun (i.e. as long as there're cool hacks that'd make it noticeably more useful). I don't have any grand plan for it; my development process is basically "Look at feedback e-mails, implement those, look at the site, add any features that I think would be useful." If you've got ideas, submit it through the feedback form (which I want to replace at some point; I'm using James Bennett's django-contact-form plugin, and it's a bit heavyweight for this purpose) or post here.</comment>


Bitcoin Price Rises While Rival Currencies Fall – Fortune - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2017/12/07/bitcoin-competitors-price/?utm_campaign=fortunemagazine&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&xid=soc_socialflow_twitter_FORTUNE <comment><USER2> They're wrong I bought 1 litecoin and 1 ethereum. I have the ability to crash any market by investing in it.</comment>


95% says TSA is going too far -- US News & World Report survey - <AUTHOR> http://www.adrianscott.org/95-says-tsa-is-going-too-far-us-news-world-re

<comment><USER2> yes they are. I guess I side with the majority. My son recently had a brain aneurysm and was fixed up at the Barrow' s clinic in Phoenix, AZ (he is fine now). During the process they use dye and X-rays to check on the progress of stopping the leak. The doctor's post op instructions to us were for him to specifically avoid any X-rays that we could - his example was dental X-rays. When we asked about the body scanner he was very emphatic that it should be avoided - he regarded it as much more problematic than the dental exam. He stated that he would be going for the grope option, instead of the nude photo. Radiation exposure is cumulative, see more here <http://www.epa.gov/rpdweb00/understand/health_effects.html></comment>


Show HN: Tinder for Ideas - <AUTHOR> https://www.posyt.com/ <comment><USER2> This seems awesome, the video is great.

How do you find related ideas/needs? Simple fulltext search?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! It's mostly text search, but proximity and a HN/Reddit style hotness score are also considered. There is a graph of links and skips, but it's not used for recommendations yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> First, Where can I buy a Catocolypse T-Shirt?

This is what we need out of a social network more social connection. This looks like it has a great opportunity to connect a lot of people who could build amazing things.

 _I submitted this on Product Hunt_

</comment><comment><USER2> Why cool things like this have to be always a smartphone app? Couldn't this work on the computer?

<comment><AUTHOR> I just really wanted to make an app and when react-native came out I couldn't help myself. I plan to bring it to the web eventually.

<comment><USER4> Please do. Very good idea.</comment></comment></comment>


Ginzametrics (YC S10) gets Faster Processing, Notifications and Easier Setup - <AUTHOR> http://ginzametrics.com/ginzametrics-gets-faster-processing-notifications-and-easier-setup.html

<comment><USER2> Awesome - these are great improvements.

I also came to post my experience with using Ginzametrics. I really like the product, and Ray has been very responsive and great to work with. The public beta should be very well received.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks very much, Tim. That means a lot.</comment></comment>


Google Goggles for iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://emilychang.com/2010/10/google-goggles-for-iphone/

<comment><USER2> Why not link directly to the Google Mobile blog, eh?

<comment><AUTHOR> no reason, this is what I was reading so I posted it.</comment></comment>


Paul Klee's Personal Notebooks Are Now Online, Presenting His Bauhaus Teachings - <AUTHOR> http://www.openculture.com/2016/03/3900-pages-of-paul-klees-personal-notebooks-are-now-online.html <comment><USER2> "To emphasize only the beautiful seems to me to be like a mathematical system that only concerns itself with positive numbers." -Paul Klee

</comment><comment><USER3> Direct link: [http://www.kleegestaltungslehre.zpk.org/ee/ZPK/BF/2012/01/01...](http://www.kleegestaltungslehre.zpk.org/ee/ZPK/BF/2012/01/01/001/)

Unfortunately, it appears to be down at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER4> Seems down (Error 500). However, the books that were published can be viewed at Monoskop: [http://monoskop.org/log/?p=10127](http://monoskop.org/log/?p=10127)

For those who are interested in Klee's personal notebooks, this collection of Bauhaus eBooks on the same site could also be of interest (iirc, HN brought me to these a couple of months ago): [http://monoskop.org/Bauhaus#Books](http://monoskop.org/Bauhaus#Books)

</comment><comment><USER5> Klee is proof for the 'practice minded' set. Certainly he had natural artistic talent (and was an accomplished chamber musician), but he worked very hard to arrive at a fundamental understanding of color.

</comment><comment><USER6> Only a matter of time before someone translates them into English.

<comment><USER7> There's a translated edition available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> ended up reading this, very cool but I thought a new laptop framework was being released!</comment>


Paul Allen breaks his silence, calls Gates a rip-off artist in new book - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2011/04/paul_allen_destined_for_heated.php <comment><USER3> It amazes me Paul Allen ever managed to become filthy rich in the first place. He just doesn't seem like a savvy person. Why even bother criticizing Gates at this point? True or not it just doesn't make much sense to attack someone who is now primarily recognized as one of the individuals doing the most good in the world right now. Between this and his ridiculous patent lawsuits I think he's just getting old and mad that no one worships him as a legendary figure in technology the same way they do guys like Jobs, Woz, Ellison, Gates, etc. Sad really. He made out like a bandit -- he should be happy with that and stop trying to tear down other people.

<comment><USER4> > one of the individuals doing the most good in the world right now

In what world do you live?

> he should be happy with that and stop trying to tear down other people.

So, the truth deserves to remain hidden and people should continue to worship borderline psychos just because they got rich?

<comment><USER5> What's your opinion of the Gates Foundation's work?

<comment><USER4> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundati...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundation#Criticism)

Lots of PR, money being directed towards maximizing media impact and arguably more bad than good being done.

<comment><USER6> While I agree that there is a lot to criticize about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, it strikes me as fairly silly to claim that because there is a lot to criticize they are not one of the largest / most influential charities in the world or that they are not doing good.

<comment><USER4> Let's imagine it's the Ernst Stavro Blofeld Foundation deviating attention from SPECTRE through a series of arguably good deeds that are coincidentally profitable for its mother organization. Blofeld always dreamed with being remembered as the new Carnegie for all the good his kind heart brought upon mankind. That or world domination, whatever comes first.

It would be awesome if they had a missile base inside Mount Rainier ;-)

On a more serious note, they may well be one of the most influential charities in the world, but, unless the net result of their activities is good, they are not, really, doing good. Most of the criticism is because their activities are worsening the situation where they are trying to help. It also doesn't help when they push Microsoft (or other companies owned partly by Gates and his satellites) stuff along with their fully tax deductible good deeds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It might be harsh, but I think it makes business sense to reduce a co- founder's influence in a startup when it becomes uncertain if that person will be able to continue contributing.

When I read that Bill Gates was called a rip-off artist, I was thinking of a couple of other decisions that made the company what it is now.

<comment><USER8> The best way to do this is to make all founders go through vesting from the beginning. Under that standard, Allen would likely have been fully vested by the time he left and it would have been clear that he earned his stake. According to wikipedia he was the one who found QDOS which has to be one of the most important and valuable acquisitions for early MS.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like how his version of the story makes it sound like he rolled QDOS himself in a few hard evenings. He neglects to mention that they found and bought it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's the full segment from 60 Minutes: <http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7363070n>

<comment><USER10> "He was too angry and proud to tell Bill Gates 'Some days working with you is like being in hell.'"

Wow, the interview was great to watch. I don't know if it was spun like this or not but Paul Allen comes off as someone with almost no social skills - <USER2> rarely looks the interviewer in the eye, shows no sense of humour, his private collections seem to show him being lonely and his words do sound like him being bitter. I think the least he could have done is sent a draft copy to Bill Gates saying this is what I'm planning to publish and wanted to give you a heads up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Go cry in your MiG-29, Paul.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm sort of reminded by this quote by Pablo Picasso Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal . Just because you are making a copy of some one doesn't take away that you are either changing or improving on the design or taking it in a new direction...

<comment><USER7> It is uncertain whether Pablo Picasso ever uttered those words. There's no record of it. However, it is certain that T.S. Elliott wrote [1] something along those lines:

 _One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest._

[1] [http://nancyprager.wordpress.com/2007/05/08/good-poets- borro...](http://nancyprager.wordpress.com/2007/05/08/good-poets-borrow-great- poets-steal/)

<comment><USER4> Comparing Windows with the Lisa, the Macintosh, the Xerox Star or even Smalltalk 80, or MS-DOS with CP/M, you arrive at the inescapable conclusion Microsoft has always been really, really short on good poets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I get so mad when I see multi-billionaires getting pissy at each other over bullshit. What the fuck do they have to complain about?

<comment><USER4> Not much, except that his friends were trying to rip him (along his soon-to-be widow and children) off while he was very busy dying.

That excepted, nothing very serious... Just a lot of drama.

<comment><USER4> A small correction: he has no wife or kids.</comment></comment></comment>


Johns Hopkins study suggests medical errors are 3rd-leading cause of death in US - <AUTHOR> https://hub.jhu.edu/2016/05/03/medical-errors-third-leading-cause-of-death/ <comment><USER2> Any statistic can lie, but this one is even more susceptible considering that vague definition of what constitutes a "medical error". I remember looking at this study when it was first published (there should be a 2016 in the title by the way) and it basically attributed any action by a doctor that resulted in a negative outcome as a medical error. For example, that could include a doctor prescribing a treatment that is successful for 99.9999% of patients, but if it fails for that one patient it would be an error.

<comment><USER3> That seems like a reasonable definition, not a lie.

>could include a doctor prescribing a treatment that is successful for 99.9999% of patients

Sure it could, but that is an edge case that would account for a negligible number of deaths in relation to the sum total.

<comment><USER4> Meds aren't always so black and white. A treatment or drug may be successful in 70% of patients (or even 10%), and still properly prescribed when the potential harms outweigh the benefit.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. However, there are massive monetary incentives and influences to perscribe treatment even though the risk/benefit ratio may not be in the patient's favor.

<comment><USER4> Whoa there. Pretty impressive accusation as you're describing malpractice. Why don't you cite a source or two?

<comment><USER3> Doctor who ordered unnecessary heart surgery and risky tests jailed for 20 years

Dr Harry Persaud of Ohio made more than $7m from health insurance fraud while abusing patients' 'sacred trust', says FBI

[https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/22/doctor- who-o...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/22/doctor-who-ordered- unnecessary-heart-surgery-and-risky-tests-jailed-for-20-years)

Moreland Hills doctors performed unnecessary tests, illegally prescribed drugs, feds say

[http://www.cleveland.com/court- justice/index.ssf/2018/01/mor...](http://www.cleveland.com/court- justice/index.ssf/2018/01/moreland_hills_doctors_perform.html)

The $395 billion US pharmaceutical industry spent $5.2 billion on advertising prescription drugs directly to consumers in 2015

Every $1.00 spent advertising prescription drugs is estimated to increase their retail sales by $4.20

[https://prescriptiondrugs.procon.org](https://prescriptiondrugs.procon.org)

Doctors received more than $46 million from drug companies marketing opioids

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post- nation/wp/2017/08/0...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post- nation/wp/2017/08/09/study-doctors-received-more-than-46-million-from-drug- companies-marketing-opioids/?utm_term=.704b6be50c2e)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Gonna post before reading (mistake alert), but was just reading The Patient's Playbook by Leslie Michelson and it begins by talking about what a clustercuss the US healthcare system is.

You'd think your primary care physician would know what medications you are on, and what specialists you'd seen, but they don't work like that unless you laboriously tell them everything you received when they weren't staring at you. It's inefficient to say the least. And it's borderline negligent too.

</comment><comment><USER6> IIRC this is only looking at hospitals, and it's likely the second if you include outpatient clinics, nursing homes, etc.

Excessive medical care is why the upper middle class have longer life expectancies than the super wealthy.

</comment><comment><USER7> Ive heard this statistic before and it's not all that surprising. One of my "mental models" is that humans tend to be pretty bad at things.

</comment><comment><USER8> Its not mentioned in the article but almost all the doctors I have spoken to seem to have needed to do ridiculous shifts as junior doctors straight out of university. You are doing a highly skilled job under extreme conditions. Most say they get used to it, but still, it doesn't sound like the best idea.</comment>


How To Build A Community (Why Lyft Rocks) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.startupthreadsmonthly.com/post/31526628102/how-to-build-a-community-why-lyft-rocks <comment><USER2> Lyft's marketing has been pretty impressive to watch. Just this morning on my MUNI train I overheard a conversation where a guy was excitedly describing the service to another passenger, describing it as "way cheaper than uber". And the mustache branding is brilliant. Once I found out what it meant, I started seeing them everywhere. All around, a brilliant launch.

</comment><comment><USER3> I love Lyft. Sidecar feels sketchy every time I use it and Uber just seems ridiculously expensive in comparison. John, Logan and the guys have done a great job to make it feel like a friend is picking you up rather than some guy with a car to drive you from point A to point B.

Lyft has a very bright future.

<comment><USER4> There is a very real difference between Über and the other two, but why does Sidecar feel any sketchier than Lyft?

The fact that you know both founders by first name makes me suspect. Someone without a conflict of interest would likely have said "Lyft has done a great job to make it feel like a friend is picking you up rather than some guy with a car to drive you from point A to point B."

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Love it.. nothing replaces or beats amazing personality that resonates with fans and leaves an impression. Kudos to Lyft for putting themselves out there. You might put off one or two people, but you'll gain many more raving fans that will spread your message and tell your story.

</comment><comment><USER6> Great post, always love to hear about the little cool things startups do to differentiate their product/service and help people love them.

Fist pumps, t-shirts are wicked... I guess the moustache works :)

</comment><comment><USER7> It's really neat seeing examples of how companies get word of mouth and marketing in novel ways. You don't need huge marketing budgets to raise awareness - just need to leave people with a smile.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm curious to know how Lyft handles insurance/liabilities with their drivers and passengers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like they just added 1M in liability insurance for drivers <http://blog.lyft.me/post/30998195495/1m-lyft-protection>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> God dammit. Yet another cool service that uses Facebook logins. As someone who has quit the Facebook crack addiction a year ago, I'm deeply disappointed.</comment>


Ballmer Says 'People Don't Want to Work' at Amazon - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-23/ballmer-says-microsoft-has-advantage-over-amazon-in-hiring <comment><USER2> Every programmer in Seattle knows that Amazon is a really unpleasant place to work. I'm a programmer in Seattle and I personally know at least a dozen people who worked there. Several of my friends worked over the magic 2 year limit, & one person is there right now, about on year 4. People almost always quit around year 2 because they just can't take it anymore.

When they offer you a job, it almost always comes with a bonus package payable each quarter over 2 years. I even interviewed there a few years ago and received that kind of package (which always comes with below market pay, plus a stock package which is often worth more than salary).

It's terrible because they way overwork people, and it is a super cutthroat environment. At the same time, they have very good people there, and accomplish a lot. It's amazing how they move their infrastructure along faster than microsoft, and are more nimble than google.

They also import thousands of young programmers, many of whom who are naive, from all over the us and the world. One friend who worked there for about 6 years said the core of good experienced people made it work, shepherding a large army of new people always coming and going.

<comment><USER3> It's true. As an engineer working for a large company in Seattle, there's almost a disdain for the employees, which I admit is unfair.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Clickbait headline to mask an advertisement for Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER5> >Microsoft Corp. has the upper hand in its "intense competition" with Amazon.com Inc. for talent and is the only company that can compete with Apple Inc. over hardware, said former Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer.

I can see he's still batshit crazy. No wonder he was exiled.

<comment><USER4> I'm not so sure that's true. Nadella is still executing Ballmer's playbook, with a kinder, gentler face.</comment></comment>


A patent lawsuit against GNOME - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/Articles/800516/ <comment><USER2> Rothschild Patent Imaging appears to be the company holding the rights to a number of dubious patents filed by Leigh M. Rothschild, who appears to have a well-deserved reputation as a patent troll [1][2].

I hope Gnome is able to take a Newegg approach here and kill the patent.

[1]: [http://www.unhappyfranchisee.com/qr-code-patent-troll- sues-d...](http://www.unhappyfranchisee.com/qr-code-patent-troll-sues-dickeys- barbecue/)

[2]: "A Florida inventor named Leigh M. Rothschild is the largest single NPE based on the number of defendants who have been added to patent lawsuits he filed, according to the the report." [https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2016/0106/Despite- crack...](https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2016/0106/Despite-crackdown- from-courts-patent-suits-still-battered-tech-companies-in-2015)

<comment><USER3> > I hope Gnome is able to take a Newegg approach here and kill the patent.

How do you propose paying for that? It is fantastically expensive.

<comment><USER4> If anyone from the Gnome team is listening, if you guys started a GoFundMe or something to help with legal fees to challenge this, I would throw twenty bucks your way.

I'd be happy if someone held me to that.

<comment><USER5> It cost Newegg $60,000 to fight their patent troll. Gnome team is going to need a lot more then $20.

<comment><USER6> > _It cost Newegg $60,000 to fight their patent troll. Gnome team is going to > need a lot more then $20._

Wow, that's all? That's actually really encouraging, if true. I would have assumed it was millions.

<comment><USER7> Even if that is correct, you still need to have a couple hundred grand in reserve in case the judge is a dumbass and you lose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't understand why software patents are allowed to exist. There's _nothing_ novel about software. Every software patent I've ever read is "a system for X" where X is something generic like "taking photos with multiple cameras and sharing them over the internet." You haven't made anything novel there, you've taken a logical product of interoperable building blocks and put an artificial legal barricade around it.

It would be like Target patenting "a system for selling goods to consumers" and suing any other retailer with a checkout.

<comment><USER9> My (layman) impression is that the "non-obviousness" requirement is supposed to deal with this problem. But it seems like the patent office is (was?) poorly calibrated for obviousness. I'm sure the lawyers writing patents intentionally make it hard on the PTO, but that must be true in every other field too, and I assume the PTO can solve that problem.

<comment><USER10> The problem is that so many brilliant inventions are obvious once they've been explained. Because of this, it's very hard to describe what is and isn't obvious.

The closest analogue I could imagine would be a test in which your patent includes a problem statement and a solution which solves that problem, and the test for obviousness is to present the problem statement to a group of skilled professionals and see if the solution they craft for that problem statement matches the patent, and strike any claims they propose.

This is a very unreliable test and a lousy and expensive standard, but it's the best I've got.

<comment><USER11> Can't work if the patented solution has become common knowledge within the profession

<comment><USER10> Drat, that's a good point. The patent office could use the test as part of the review, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> That complaint ([https://insight.rpxcorp.com/litigation_documents/13472237](https://insight.rpxcorp.com/litigation_documents/13472237)) is wild. Paragraph 19 states:

> _The Product practices transmitting, via a wireless transmitter and to a > second image capturing device, the filtered plurality of photographic > images. For example, the Product offers a number of ways to wirelessly share > photos online such as through social media._

It then specifically calls out a screenshot of [http://yorba.org/shotwell/help/](http://yorba.org/shotwell/help/) with scary red lines highlighting how you can "export photos" and "publish to the Web" and "send photos via email, instant messaging, or in other ways."

...which just use whatever network interface the system has. And sure, that could be wireless... but it's not like Shotwell has any say (or necessarily any knowledge) of that, right?

How does patent law deal with that, where the wholly circumstantial and independent properties of a product's operating environment could result in a system with emergent properties that violate the patent, and which are wholly outside of the control of the original software?

E.g., if I'm using Shotwell on a home computer plugged into an Ethernet cable, but there's a radio link somewhere on the route between me and Facebook... would that instance of Shotwell suddenly be in violation of the patent?

<comment><USER13> It doesn't. Software patents are an absurdity that people have fought for ages. They are basically invalid in most of EU.

<comment><USER14> You can't patent math, as per patent law. Software is just abstracted math. Therefore, software should not be patentable.

<comment><USER13> But somehow, you can copyright it...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Reading patents is hard, but the patent in question is easy because it's so short, and the lawsuit is explicitly saying which claim they believe is in violation. Here is the claim in full:

> A method performed by an image-capturing mobile device, comprising:

> receiving a plurality of photographic images;

> filtering the plurality of photographic images using a transfer criteria > wherein the transfer criteria is a subject identification of a respective > photographic image within the plurality of photographic images, wherein the > subject identification is based on a topic, theme or individual shown in the > respective photographic image;

> and transmitting, via a wireless transmitter and to a second image capturing > device, the filtered plurality of photographic images.

IANAL, and I am not sufficiently well-versed in patent law to know precisely how the terminology is to be interpreted in court, but that last element of the claim is really hard to substantiate. First, there's no evidence that it's transmitting via a wireless transmitter (if it doesn't, it can't violate the claim by definition!). Second, there is strong evidence that the destination is not a "second image capturing device." If that last clause is not violated, then the claim is not violated, and the patent is not violated.

From the way the patent claims are constructed, it feels like the patent examiner narrowed the patent to cover specifically wireless point-to-point transmission of images. I don't think the court will look kindly on the broad interpretation being used here.

<comment><USER16> > Reading patents is hard

You'd think that would keep all the brilliant legal minds on HN from commenting on it!

I appreciate your analysis of it. You're one of the few here who did read it.

<comment><USER17> Patents are written in an intentionally obtuse and difficult to parse way. They're pretty much written in the style of an 11th grader who is overdoing the thesaurus to try and sound smart while conveying as little actual meaning as possible. It's not like you actually want your competitors to be able to reproduce your idea -- you just want the protections.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Abstract of the patent in question:

"A system and method for distributing at least one digital photographic image is presented, the system and method comprising at least one capturing device and at least one receiving device disposed in a communicative relation with one another via at least one wireless network. In particular, the capturing device is structured to capture the at least one digital photographic image via, for example, a capture assembly, whereas the receiving device is cooperatively structured to receive the digital photographic image via, for example, the at least one wireless network. In addition, the capturing device(s) and receiving device(s) may be disposed in a selectively paired relationship via one or more common pre-defined pairing criteria. Further, the at least one digital photographic image may be filtered via at least one pre- defined transfer criteria disposed on the capturing device and/or receiving device."

<comment><USER19> What a bunch of assholes. Federal government really needs to stop enabling these people.

<comment><USER20> These kind of claims should yield further investigations into the rest of the patents of the companies that have too many patents. Especially if their only source of income is patents. If found that they hold invalid patents to things that have prior "art" or implementations, those specific patents should be revoked.

<comment><USER19> At the very least the company must show damages to sales or something like that.

The whole patent system in general is a massive drag on innovation and the economy. Sure it's supposed to do the opposite, but that the difference between theory and practice.

The way it is now it's harms technological progress with this sort of nonsense.

<comment><USER20> Whats worse yet is does GNOME even generate any revenue from Shotwell? If not... this is such a low blow.

<comment><USER21> From what I remember, they only picked it up once the Yorba Foundation folded.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Wow, going after GNOME is such an incredibly stupid thing for a patent troll to do. Once EFF get involved they can kiss their patent good-bye.

<comment><USER23> Part of the stupidity of filing a lawsuit against GNOME is that the awards are either statutory damages (pay what you should have paid before) or punitive damages (pay a higher price because you are willfully violating the patent).

If the court invalidates the patent, which is likely, GNOME and other free software projects can use that as a precedent in the future, which makes it harder for trolls to operate. The smart troll picks "soft targets" who will just roll over and pay.

If the court awards statutory damages, GNOME made no money because they sold no software, so it's possible the statutory damages ends up being less than the cost to litigate. The smart troll does _not_ pick "zero-value targets" like GNOME.

If the court awards punitive damages, GNOME has very little revenue and may not be able to pay all the damages. The smart troll does _not_ pick "poor targets" like GNOME.

This feels like a poorly-paid paralegal just shotgunned a bunch of suits and really, really screwed up.

<comment><USER24> Statutory damages are not related to how much money you made out of the violation.

<comment><USER25> But if GNOME has no tangible assets to go after, the patent troll won't actually get any reward for this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Serial patent troll: [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/04/garmin-sued- in-e...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/04/garmin-sued-in-east- texas-over-patents-on-an-internet-drink-mixer-seeks-legal-fees/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Registering a patent for things that plainly pre existing isn't merely improper it isn't much different than taking a crowbar to your door while you are away to steal away with your valuables.

If you should happen to chase the thief away this time it isn't much of a victory if the thief and his compatriots faces little to no consequences.

Firstly software patents are a net negative and shouldn't be a thing. Next plainly frivolous patents should subject the owner to a fine at time of application. Make the seeker pay an additional bond forfeit for frivolous patents.

Next make granting bad patents expensive for the government. Let anyone read patents in process and by proving them void claim the aforementioned bond.

<comment><USER28> These sound like really good ideas. It sets up the incentives in the right way to facilitate innovation.

Have you studied these propositions in the past, or are these ideas you came up with after researching?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> [https://www.gnome.org/support-gnome/donate/](https://www.gnome.org/support- gnome/donate/)

Let's use up the news momentum to give GNOME (more) resources to bury these fuckers.

<comment><USER30> I always thought of Gnome as a Redhat product.

<comment><USER31> Isn't KDE maintained by RedHat? There was news a while back about them killing off KDE in the near future

<comment><USER32> You are confusing KDE with X11, which is maintained by Red Hat and was announced as going into maintenance mode in favor of Wayland.

<comment><USER33> They weren't confusing it with X, though they were misremembering RH's role - [https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en- us/red_hat_enterp...](https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en- us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html- single/7.6_release_notes/index#idm139718396587376)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is the results of software patents, do not entertain software and algorithm patents and this will not happen. Hopefully USA can reform to follow Europe and rest of the work in this.

Even if the patent is invalidated, it has already created a lot of unnecessary work and no innovation.

I am just thinking Gnome foundation can fight, think of a small firm who doesn't have money to fight and represent in court.

This seems to be right opposite of patents to protect innovation. It looks like patents to litigate and make money and hamper any innovation.

After so many frivolous patents like amazon single click, oracle java and many more I don't see any innovation but attack on innovation and waste of time and money on not required debate in court.

I believe this system is in place to generate jobs for lawyers who will not be able to earn otherwise. Lawyers promote strict patent laws and many non sensible, as many politicians are lawyers not innovators.

</comment><comment><USER35> Would it be feasible for someone to form a non-profit organization who's only goal is to find prior art for patent applications and kill them before they become one? Maybe as a branch of the EFF or something? Would the patent system allow for such thing to exist with the current rules or do the rules need to be changed in the first place?

<comment><USER36> USPTO is now first to file, not first to invent. Prior art becomes less and less useful over time.

<comment><USER37> According to my understanding, the current US patent system is often summarized as "first inventor to file" meaning the named inventor must believe herself to be the original inventor.

Prior art is still relevant WRT patent prosecution. The AIA made several changes to patent law, perhaps most notably making the effective filing date the determining factor for purposes of applying prior art, instead of the invention date. This means interferences no longer occur. There are also now different post-grant procedures for challenging patent validity.

Source: am a patent agent Disclaimer: this is not legal advice

<comment><USER36> Thanks, I definitely misunderstood the change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> GNOME should consider a call for prior art, similar to Cloudflare's Project Jengo. It would be a concrete way to crowdsource help to fight back against what looks like a patent troll.

</comment><comment><USER39> This patent went active today. The patent seems very basic. This looks like a patent troll, doesn't it? The described idea wasn't really novel when they applied for the patent

<comment><USER40> The patent didn't go active today (Google Patents just shows it is currently active today) and has already been used in other lawsuits that were dismissed by a court [https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/Texas%20Eastern...](https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/Texas%20Eastern%20District%20Court/case/2%3A16-cv-01382)

<comment><USER41> For clarity, though, this case was dismissed without prejudice on the basis of an improper venue.

The patent still looks bogus, but don't draw any premature conclusions from the above-cited case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> They are patent-trolling a non-profit. _facepalm_

<comment><USER43> The fact that they're a nonprofit makes them a great target.

<comment><USER44> Why? There isn't much for a troll to plunder

<comment><USER43> The business of patent trolls is to find targets too small to have counsel on staff. The cost of sending a letter is negligible so even very "small" amounts (a few thousand USD) is a huge win.

Non-profits can easily make their benefit calculation to send off a few thousand and/or hire counsel just to cover a cheap settlement. Much less expensive than the cost of litigation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Even more incredible, this guy has a patent on recharging mobile devices? Filed in 2012?! Does the US patent office even read submissions before approving them? Or are they just dinosaurs who have never even used a mobile phone up to 2012?

[https://patents.google.com/patent/US9448603B2/en?inventor=Le...](https://patents.google.com/patent/US9448603B2/en?inventor=Leigh+M.+Rothschild)

</comment><comment><USER46> Now, of course, IANAL. But in these discussions, I always hear 'ignore the abstract, look at the claims'.

The claims describe "An image-capturing mobile device".

GNOME makes software that could be used on such a device, but surely no-one can claim that software _is_ a mobile device?

Claim 4 _could_ apply to the software, except it still says "mobile device" in that claim as well.

This is all without even considering how ludicrous the "invention" being claimed is. I'm pretty sure I could choose to transmit only some photos, based on date, from my phone way before 2008.

</comment><comment><USER47> > Patent was filed in 2008 and is about wirelessly (wifi/bluetooth/etc) > connecting an "image capturing device" (webcam/phone) with a "receiving > device" (computer) and selectively (date, location, image recognition...) > transmitting them.

Funny. Can I patent whatever I can imagine (without actually building a working prototype) and sue everybody once the technology emerges making this possible and practical? Can science fiction writings be used as "prior art" to disqualify patents?

<comment><USER48> You have to explain how to build it in "sufficient detail", but you don't actually have to provide a working prototype.

<comment><USER49> Not required, but you need to be able to provide one if patent office requests.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> An interesting thing about patents in the US is that this company could also sue any organization using the infringing software (eg, a Linux distro that uses GNOME, and it's customers).

Red Hat offers to fight and protect end-users of their software that might get caught up in a patent fight like this one: [https://www.redhat.com/en/about/open-source-assurance- faq](https://www.redhat.com/en/about/open-source-assurance-faq)

</comment><comment><USER51> A group of companies that has form as well...

A previous recipient of the FSF 'Stupid Patent of the Month' award...

[https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/09/stupid-patent- of...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/09/stupid-patent-of-the-month- internet-drink-mixer-vs-everyone/)

</comment><comment><USER52> He started BarPoint.com which at one point lost $3.53 mil on $23,185 revenue [1]. What a joke. [1] [https://www.bizjournals.com/southflorida/stories/2002/08/12/...](https://www.bizjournals.com/southflorida/stories/2002/08/12/daily90.html)

</comment><comment><USER53> IANAL but the claims appear to be about one device filtering which photos it sends to other devices based on identifying the photographic subjects (people, buildings, or animals) and forwarding photographs that contain certain subjects to particular other devices wirelessly. Shotwell is just an application which supports filtering based on manually applied labels, not an image-classifying AI with a wireless network stack.

Setting aside prior art for a moment, it seems like a pretty far stretch to say that classifying files according to metadata and uploading them to Flickr or Pinterest is equivalent to identifying the subject of a photograph and making it wirelessly accessible to another local device.

Is anyone, I mean anyone, here unaware of software prior to 1998 that would filter files into different folders based on, say, ID3 tags, EXIF data, or file timestamps?

</comment><comment><USER54> This looks like a patent troll. The functionality they have patented is quite basic for a modern photo program.

<comment><USER55> The inventor has about 134 patents [1] and many of which seem (to me) very generic. I am not very familiar with patent jargon so I can't definitively say if those patents have enough substance to them. Maybe someone with experience could expand on this?

[1] [https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Leigh+M.+Rothschild&sor...](https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Leigh+M.+Rothschild&sort=new)

<comment><USER49> Patent applications are usually not written by inventors themselves. Hence, they have vague and/or prolonged language to cover the invention more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> After reading through the patent and the suit, their comparison to Shotwell is ridiculous. In the patent, they even describe how Shotwell and other similar photo gallery programs that can share to social medial work and further go on to explain how their patent is different from these. The patent essentially is for a group of wireless devices to be linked together at say a wedding, when one person takes a picture, the picture is transmitted wirelessly and automatically to the paired devices, digital cameras, smartphones, computers, etc.

So, everyone's smartphones or digital cameras pair together and anyone that takes a photo has that photo distributed to the other devices. How is that anything like Shotwell?

<comment> dylan-m Someone pointed out that the patent became active _today_. I wonder if they filed other lawsuits based on this patent as well? Would make sense that they target a bunch of small software developers who can't defend themselves in hopes of some easy settlements, but they rather miscalculated on GNOME.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> > Patent was filed in 2008 and is about wirelessly (wifi/bluetooth/etc) > connecting an "image capturing device" (webcam/phone) with a "receiving > device" (computer) and selectively (date, location, image recognition...) > transmitting them.

Pfffft. Primitive animals destroying civilization at this Rothschild troll plantation.

We need patent reform that involves criminal felony penalties for trolls on the basis that their actions greviously harm civilization. Get these parasites off the street and away from harming the people doing actual useful work.

</comment><comment><USER58> Here are the specific independent claims of the patent 9,936,086 by Leigh M. Rothschild of Rothschild Patent Imaging LLC. Obviously, Shotwell does not violate this patent. Can you think of any prior art that might invalidate the patent? All elements must be present prior to 2008.

1\. An image-capturing mobile device, comprising

a wireless receiver;

a wireless transmitter;

and a processor operably connected to the wireless receiver and the wireless transmitter, wherein the processor is configured to:

receive a plurality of photographic images;

filter the plurality of photographic images using a transfer criteria wherein the transfer criteria is a subject identification of a respective photographic image within the plurality of photographic images,

wherein the subject identification is based on a topic, theme or individual shown in the respective photographic image;

and transmit, via the wireless transmitter and to a second mobile device, the filtered plurality of photographic images.

4\. A method performed by an image-capturing mobile device, comprising:

receiving a plurality of photographic images;

filtering the plurality of photographic images using a transfer criteria wherein the transfer criteria is a subject identification of a respective photographic image within the plurality of photographic images,

wherein the subject identification is based on a topic, theme or individual shown in the respective photographic image;

and transmitting, via a wireless transmitter and to a second image capturing device, the filtered plurality of photographic images.

Imglorp posted elsewhere in this thread suggesting perhaps the Mars Viking spacecraft would serve as prior art which I thought was clever. The only challenge might be whether any spacecraft prior to 2008 had a "filter" function that had a "transfer criteria" of "subject identification" that was "based on a topic, theme or individual shown".

I think the final element of transmitting to a "second mobile device" or a "second image capturing device" would be met by any lander that relayed through an orbiter that also had a camera.

<comment><USER59> They only claim #4 in the filing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> If only GNOME was part of a foundation which worked to advance software freedom... Oh well, I hope the #cancelstallman team will be of more help than the FSF.

</comment><comment><USER61> Here's an interesting sentence from the complaint filed by Rothschild:

>On information and belief, Defendant sells, offers to sell, and/or uses network storage systems and methods including, without limitation, the Gnome Shotwell platform, and any similar products ("Product"), which infringe at least Claim 4 of the '086 Patent.

Does Gnome Foundation sell Shotwell?

</comment><comment><USER62> What if they just ignored it? Isn't Gnome foundation Europe based? Software patents are void here in most cases.

</comment><comment><USER63> Could we update our open source licenses to have a clause that the software can not be licensed to (or used by employees of a company) on a patent troll register. (With a clear definitions of what gets a company on a patent troll register)

This type of company would soon not even be able to keep a website online.

<comment><USER64> Then it wouldn't be free software ([https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free- sw.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html)). Freedom 0 is the most critical item:

> The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Note the Leigh M. Rotschild Intellectual Ventures link:

[https://www.intellectualventures.com/buzz/insights/inventor-...](https://www.intellectualventures.com/buzz/insights/inventor- spotlight-leigh-rothschild)

Birds of a feather.

</comment><comment><USER66> Shotwell doesn't support the wireless transmission of images, the supporting WiFi/LTE/etc firmware stack (if applicable) does.

I'm not sure how it could be argued that the Shotwell codebase contains anything specifically related to supporting wireless data transfer.

</comment><comment><USER67> How about nipping this nonsense at the source, and crowdsourcing patent applications processing? With the backlog there is in the US, it's not so surprising that ridiculously generic patents were granted (and probably being granted).

</comment><comment><USER68> Looks like the patent assignee([https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Leigh+M.+Rothschild](https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Leigh+M.+Rothschild)) has filed a lot of similarly vague patents.

</comment><comment><USER69> I think we need a better "obviousness" hurdle for patents.

And we need to get rid of "do something we already do, but wirelessly!" patents and "do something we already do, but using a computer or network!" patents.

</comment><comment><USER70> Patents that are too broad are routinely invalidated in courts. It's just going to trial is expensive so the patent trolls are hoping people would settle long before it goes to trial.

</comment><comment><USER71> The lawsuit is laughable for 2019, especially section with importing photos.

I'll donate for easy, but hope IBM can defend their investments.

</comment><comment><USER72> Muhahahaha, best joke this week. GNOME gonna trample all over them in court and not only.

</comment><comment><USER73> What's in it for a patent troll to sue GNOME?!

</comment><comment><USER74> Suing anything GNU or Linux related is pretty low.

</comment><comment><USER75> SNR is quite low...

</comment><comment><USER76> Parent sounds trivial and should be busted as having prior art.

</comment><comment><USER77> tldr: patent on wireless transfer of photos. Earliest filing appears to be 2008.

Prior art abounds, perhaps most notably the EyeFi product line that came to market around 2006[0]

[0] [https://web.archive.org/web/20060805175034/http://www.eye.fi...](https://web.archive.org/web/20060805175034/http://www.eye.fi/)

</comment><comment><USER78> "Rothschild Patent Imaging LLC"

Best company name.

<comment><USER79> At least there's self-awareness here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> Software patents ensure that every major software supplier in the world is an American controlled company. Not awarding the patent claim would be a threat against American national security.

</comment><comment><USER81> Patents are supposedly designed to protect inventors with limited resources. Dont rail against patents rather than the abusers

<comment><USER82> Has there ever been an instance where an inventor with limited resources used a software patent to protect significant innovation?

Has anyone, anywhere, ever once faced a coding challenge, searched through software patents, and found a useful solution?

I'm laughing as I try to imagine either of these things happening.

A friend of mine recently earned good money serving as an expert witness against a patent claiming to cover the concept of transmitting a zero over a carrier wave. You see, the patent holder never actually produced a device taking advantage of this great idea, and then he "hurt his back and couldn't work anymore", so he sued his insurance company for the billions of potential dollars he could have earned if he ever did get around to transmitting a zero...

<comment><USER81> Quite a bizarre story, what on earth is "transmitting a zero"?</comment></comment></comment>


Is a Master's Degree Worth It? - <AUTHOR> https://shecancode.io/blog/8q9btj9oere11lmqp0byqi7n0509nq <comment><USER2> It depends where it is from and what did you learn during getting it. I visited two faculties and one was totally worth the time and effort I spent, and the other was just enough to put the foot in the door of a programmer's profession -- nice to go through if one didn't have any experience in programming whatsoever, but otherwise next to useless.

</comment><comment><USER3> My experience says...depends. It did not make a difference in the current job, but it did on the next (a 5% bump to be exact.) As I've heard from others too, you'll likely need to change positions to recognize the value.</comment>