Almost No Patented Discoveries Get Used - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/01/fixing-broken-patent-system/ <comment><USER3> Jay has a huge stake in this, of course.

[http://www.patentproperties.com/](http://www.patentproperties.com/)

He is also the guy who created walker digital.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walker_Digital](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walker_Digital) (look under "patent lawsuits and disputes")

Despite his claims, he is in fact, a troll - he buys broad patents completely unrelated to his company solely for the purpose of suing deep-pocket companies for infringement.

He has 719 patents, and cares heavily about monetizing them, having sued almost everyone under the sun.

He sued Facebook for friending, for example.

He realizes he is finally starting to lose the war, and writes pieces like this because he is afraid trolls like him are starting to finally get what they deserve.

(Jay certainly is a smart guy, and he is certainly an innovative entrepreneur. I take serious issue with his business models around patents, though)

<comment><USER4> Right. He wants to become the Uber of patents. With his plan, patents aren't worth much individually, and they would be sold cheaply, in bulk, with his brokerage getting a cut.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This speaks to the patent system being so far perverted from its original purpose that I feel it's time to seriously begin considering if we want to support it in any form. Are patents in 2015 being used more for "promoting the useful arts"[1] or more as a weapon for large enterprises to use against their large and small competition?

This same broken-ness applies to another system of legal monopolies too: copyrights. Are those used more to "promote the useful arts" in 2015, or are they used more by rightsholders to stamp out that which they don't like?

I wonder what our economic, artistic, and technological landscape would look like if we decided, as a society, that these legal monopolies are causing more harm than good, and that they should be severely curtailed, if not outright abolished? I wonder if it would really be as bad as the people who have a financial interest in these things say it would be?

[1]: [http://memory.loc.gov/cgi- bin/ampage?collId=llsl&fileName=00...](http://memory.loc.gov/cgi- bin/ampage?collId=llsl&fileName=001/llsl001.db&recNum=232)

(interestingly, the copyright laws use the same "useful arts" wording almost verbatim)

<comment><USER6> The thing about patents is that they are public. They encourage sharing inventions in exchange for a period of protection for the inventor. It is generally fair, I think, for an inventor to be able to see a return on his/her investment of R&D effort and expense. Without such a system, inventors would keep their work secret under "Trade Secret" protection or just not bother at all. I think abolishing the patent system would slow technological progress.

The problem with patents is that they seem to be awarded for many "inventions" that do not seem to really be novel. Patent inspectors have not kept up well with the rapid pace of innovation that software allows. Fix that problem, and I think a lot of general unhappiness with the system would go away.

Copyright? I'm not aware of any general problem with that. It's pretty simple, the original author has a period of protection for their work. What's wrong with that?

<comment><USER7> I am from Brazil, here piracy is widespread, also I make games, a industry that loves copyright.

First, it must be understood that the "official" original explanation of copyright was to prevent people not authorized by the author to sell the author stuff, ONLY that, it was NOT intended to prevent the general public from getting free stuff. (the actual explanation was that the first copyright laws were made to allow censorship, but I don't have enough information to explain that now).

Today what I see is lots of people on the "First world" frankly believe they are entitled to earn money from pure intellectual work and that poor people should stay uneducated/ignorant/cultureless if they can't pay.

I personally had lots and lots of pirated games, books, and media in general, because then there was no other choice, I was one of the first "gamers" in Brazil, I was also poor, and stuff was mostly not available here, even to get a pirated copy of Doom (the first one) was hard, very hard (my dad had to make some engineering work for Kia Motors, and asked as part of the payment a copy of Doom, after he learned that the factory manager had a copy).

I am very sure, that if I went with the route of obeying copyright laws, I would be a very, very different person today, probably I would be a cashier, and would contribute to society much less than now, and the same applies to almost all programmers from the third world.

Or you frankly believe a random indian/pakistani/brazillian/peruvian that is a WinAPI programming master had a legal copy of windows and all the tools when he was first learning as a kid?

<comment><USER8> _because then there was no other choice_

I spent a long time pirating games, but seriously, 'no other choice' is nonsense. You could just 'not play the game'. I don't think that software piracy is the great evil that it's made out to be, but neither do I think it's harmless and that there's justice in people just taking entertainment because they don't have enough money at the moment. It's not like video games are a staple required to sustain life.

I guess what I'm saying is that I don't care that you pirated software, but I think it smells bad that you paint it as some sort of social justice issue or class war.

 _frankly believe they are entitled to earn money from pure intellectual work_

Work is work and consumes effort and time, whether it's shifting bricks or squashing bugs.

<comment><USER7> By the way, I was in my post talking about people with your exact argument.

The choices you are giving me are: pirate, or be ignorant and cultureless.

You thinking the second is a good choice, is frankly stupid, games are not just entertainment, they are part of popular culture, they showcase interesting technologies, and may even have actual uses (example: simulators that teach real skills).

And I was not talking only about games, but all sorts of media, or you think all the coding books that curious people (including teenagers) here have are legal?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Considering Walker is described as a heavy patent holder, I'm not sure his enthusiasm for the wonders of patents are entirely objective. Is he concerned here with informing his audience or the value of his holdings?

> it will be aimed at smaller and mid-sized businesses that need a low-cost > way to mitigate their infringement risk. It will also offer universities and > other smaller patent owners a way to finally earn some revenue from their > inventions

Maybe I'm cynical, but "mitigate their infringement risk" sounds like a euphemism for "pay Walker a bunch of money or get taken to court".

<comment><USER10> He says he's the founder of priceline.com and 11th on the list of living patent holders. Good for him. Sure, it's not objective, but there's no such thing as unbiased opinion.

It sounds like he thinks one problem with the current system is that, even if you do use a patent as it's intended (license it properly), you can still get taken to court by someone else for infringing on their similar patent. Using patents is like walking across a minefield. Small businesses just do not (and should not) play in the patent game because of legal risk.

If his company provides insurance that using their patents protect you against liability against violating other patents, it sounds like a great idea. Like the "anti-patent troll".

Like how some app developers are being sued for using some feature of Apple's SDK. [1] Imagine if Apple provided free insurance against all such lawsuits.

[1] [http://www.macstories.net/news/lodsys-starts-filing- lawsuit-...](http://www.macstories.net/news/lodsys-starts-filing-lawsuit- against-app-developers/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here is a true story I have not previously shared on HN...

While in law school, in attempt to defray tuition costs, I would order _Livestrong_ style silicone bracelets and sell them at Daytona Beach bike week. After tinkering I began working with the manufacturer to mold the silicone bracelets with RFID chips and file a patent.

As a law student, I found the patent filing process to bring real world practice to my classroom theory, plus I learned a lot about RFID technology in the process (mostly researching prior art, such as, RFID shopping carts; RFID one time use hospital bands; ect...). However, as a law student I had no practical (financial) way of bringing my idea to market.

Nevertheless, I contacted Disney's director of park operations to discuss the potential of my RFID silicone bands acting as park tickets, monetary accounts and the general efficiency RFID bands could have of park operation efficiency (tracking lines, ride times, open seats, ect...). As one might expect I was blown off, given a nice generic response that there is no interest...but sure enough 7-8 years later the parks have incorporated RFID technology through the use of...silicone bands.

I think such a story highlights the various positions one could take on our patent existing system. Some might say I was a patent troll, filing a patent where I knew I could never financially bring a product to market, others would argue that situation is why patents exist where the inventor needs to protect an idea where often times but for being the inventor/patent filer a giant corporation might come along and simply take an idea without any benefit to the inventor...finally some may say I should not have received a patent in the first place as RFID silicone bands are not _non-obvious_ in the first place.

Though I never sued, my own experience brings a certain bias to the table, and I would simply ask in countries that do not have a similar intellectual system to the US, is there an example of an inventor actually bringing an invention to market where they were not simply beat out by an existing corporation?

<comment><USER12> You invented neither peanut or jelly or bread, should the pbj sandwich be patentable? The chances of you being the only source pitching RFID tech to Disney is zero. Sorry you didn't get their business. Did you pitch to any other companies? Did you expect Disney to license your patent and figure out the technical implementation themselves? Does your patent apply for non- silicone bracelets? Seems like RFID tech is and still is a legitimate business opportunity for many.. sounds like you gave up on it, why?

<comment><USER13> You're thinking about the invention process backwards.

Edison, according to legend, patented the light bulb. (He actually patented an improved filament, and the screw-in base.) Once the thing exists, it is easy to trace the process back to the origin, just as it is easy to trace from the leaf of a tree back to the trunk at ground level.

Edison did not patent the thousands of experimental filament failures that he tested before reaching a viable consumer product. His task was to climb the tree and find one particular leaf.

The PB & J sandwich seems simple. All you had to do was add two ingredients together!

But you also had to not add any of the other possible sandwich ingredients. No lettuce. No tomato. No mayonnaise. No mustard. No ketchup. No roast beef. No jalapeno slices. No pickles. No cole slaw. You also had to pick the right variety of bread. Pumpernickel doesn't work out quite as well. Sliced bagel favors different sorts of sandwiches. Cornbread doesn't work at all.

You can't just permute every possible combination of sandwich-able foods and expect the good combinations to be obvious. But once identified, they are obvious in retrospect, thanks to a quirk of human psychology. It wouldn't have been obvious that phonograph needles could be made from peanuts, or that light bulb filaments could be made from bamboo until after inventors had done it for the first time. So don't confuse simplicity with obviousness.

The problem with patenting a particular sandwich, or any other type of food recipe, is enforceability. Once the recipe is known, you have no way of knowing whether unlicensed cooks are making your dish.

The fact that Disney is using RFID bracelets, on the other hand, is immediately discoverable and verifiable by anyone who visits their parks. Furthermore, they have pockets deep enough to afford even unreasonable license terms. The problem was not even technical. It has always been human acceptance. Stick an RFID on a hospital-style plastic band, and no one wants to wear it. Embed it in an exclusive park souvenir, and people will even pay extra for the privilege of having one.

The bracelet is how you get the guest to carry the same RFID tag for their entire visit without losing it, breaking it, or shorting it out. Previously, Disney has used paper tickets, hand stamps, biometrics readers, and mobile applications to manage guests, and they still had problems with loopholes, fraud, and innocent accidents.

If someone were able to patent a PB&J sandwich, somewhere like a Disney theme park might be one of the few places on the planet where its licensing could be enforced profitably. They cannot hide what they do, as anyone present could read a menu and watch a sampling of trays exiting the serving line, then figure out the numbers on a napkin.

This is exactly what the patent system was made for; so the little guy could have an incentive to invent without being crushed by a copycat with more clout. So he doesn't have to be the only person to pitch it. He only has to be the first to offer patent licensing terms.

<comment><USER14> >This is exactly what the patent system was made for; so the little guy could have an incentive to invent

I think this is completely false despite it being "common wisdom". I've challenged people who say this to provide some sort of evidence that patent systems aid innovation and seen none that was anywhere near convincing so far.

Nobody so far has so much as ventured an answer except one person who pointed to a study that measured innovation solely by the increased use of patent systems in countries where the regime of legal monopolies strengthened over time. I see that as evidence of the insidious nature of patent systems if anything, but to each his own I guess. Got anything?

<comment><USER13> In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.

In practice, there is no legal construct that cannot be employed to the advantage of the party that can hire better lawyers. In the battle of ironclad patent versus fully funded legal war chest, the latter wins.

The implication of my post, in context, was that the patent system _does not accomplish_ that idealistic purpose. And indeed, the article itself says that most actual innovation avoids patents. I interpret this as the network of innovators recognizing the flaws in the system and routing around them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> (Disclosure: IAAPL, but this is my view and isn't reflective of any former clients or my current employer.)

The key problem with the patent system is the problem of _disclosure._ We always say that the patent system is a bargain between the inventor and the public. The public gets new knowledge and the inventor gets a period of exclusivity for the using/making etc that knowledge.

Where the system falls down is in the "disclosure to the public" part of that bargain. Patent language has become so abstracted that most of the time it fails to inform someone of skill in the art how to actually make the promised item. This has some corollary effects:

\- The patent system becomes less useful as a source for knowledge (as argued by the article) \- Novelty and obviousness (and later, infringement) all become less certain. This results in poor quality patents coming out of the patent office and high costs to litigate for infringement.

In the end, though, the result is that the patent system is (for most of the computer arts where I spend my time) not very useful as a store of knowledge. If there is a choice, I will almost always seek out a paper (or source code) rather than an accompanying patent to get an understanding of new technology.

This is due to the incentives associated with each type of publication. The source code is designed to convey certain algorithms to the computer in an unambiguous way. Papers are designed to get read and cited - and they don't do that unless they communicate what is new and meaningful to an audience of peers.

In contrast, patents are designed to cover a range of possible solution spaces, with as much room for reinterpretation later as is possible without being insoluably ambiguous.

This problem is hard to undo because the push to abstract the descriptions in patents was done with the best of intentions. \- Congress wanted to allow new things to be described without constricting the form of the language used. \- Prosecuting lawyers (and their clients) wanted to get the maximum coverage for their new ideas. \- Courts want to reward inventors and disallow trivial workarounds (nail->screw) not addressing the core inventive concept.

All of these points are valid ones - but in combination, the result is that patents have become too vague, particularly in anything computer-related.

As an aside, the mechanical arts (and some others, such as many bio/chem arts) don't suffer from this problem to nearly the same extent, and so you usually don't see the same problems.

<comment><USER16> I can substantiate this. I've done a few patents (all owned by employers) which take years to go through. When finally granted, I go and read them, and even though I am the "inventor" I can't make any sense of what the heck they are about! They are in no way disclosed in a form and language that makes it easy to fundamentally understand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's worth pointing out that the author of this piece is considered by many to be patent troll.

[https://gigaom.com/2011/04/13/419-jay-walker-goes-nuclear- pr...](https://gigaom.com/2011/04/13/419-jay-walker-goes-nuclear-priceline- founder-sues-more-than-100-companies/)

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/04/priceline- founder...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/04/priceline-founder- sues-100-companies-including-google-apple-over-patents/)

<comment><USER18> Oddly enough, I think that gives him more credibility in my book.

Who better to talk about a system being broken than someone who makes a living exploiting it?

<comment><USER17> Another way of looking at this is that his trolling has not been going so well lately [1], so he's trying a change in tactics.

The "brokenness" that he sees in the patent system is not that it's too easy to profit from patenting obvious things, but rather that it's too hard.

[1] [http://www.law360.com/articles/573649/google-wins- invalidati...](http://www.law360.com/articles/573649/google-wins-invalidation- of-walker-digital-patent-claims)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What a mess. Starting at the title, there's no such thing as a patented discovery. ([http://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/what-cant- be-p...](http://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/what-cant-be- patented.html))

Secondly, it really doesn't matter if "almost no" patented innovations get used, just as (to make an analogy) it doesn't matter if "almost no founders get VC funding" (!). There are over twenty million founders in the United States alone who would take $100k into their 'startup business' from a VC tomorrow. So what. "Almost no founders ever get VC funding" is a useless observation (even if it's true), and I make this analogy because here on HN we have a lot of experience with the cases where they do, and could rightfully see the sentence as a useless observation.

There is less experience with using the patent system here, but what matters, of course, is patented innovations that do or did require the patent system. And anyone who has any experience whatsoever with this subject knows about what kinds of cases this applies to.

I am not going to elaborate but I found the article basically totally worthless and clearly written by someone who has no information on the workings of the system. Clearly there is a systemic cost to having a patent system at all. But perhaps the reason the author had to write that no patented discoveries get used (which is a truism, since there is no such things as a patented discovery) is that the same is not true for innovations and inventions.

</comment><comment><USER20> Patents in the US and Europe need serious reform:

1- They should update to the current world. That means using computer files like 3d CAD drawings or STLs. Today most patent's drawing are way worse than drawings 100 years ago(on purpose of course, as they don't want people to really understand the patent).

Patents today try to obfuscate as much as they can so they give the less they can to society, but try to claim everything under the sun, so they receive the most from society.

They should also let other types of documentation be presented, like audio, or video.

Obfuscation should be taken care of, using standard formats for documentation, using standard terms. They try to patent already patented tech just changing the terms, so it looks different for the examiner.

2-Business and software patents should be banned. But this will take a fight, some court has declared business patents void.

The software patent situation is surreal. Someone comes to your house and tells you you have to pay them for patents, but they can't show you!! If you don't pay they will sue you with a football team of layers.

</comment><comment><USER21> I think, due to the high number of patents that simply aren't valuable, this would be true regardless of the case.

In the only possible good case for the system, it prevents two rivals from sueing each other because they very likely infringe on each other already.

The patent troll problem is of course absolutely terrible. Anybody can sue anybody, they don't have to be right - they might not _win_ , but there's costs and time involved. And we also have "practiced" court systems in a certain area that make money basically exclusively off of this.

I think it's safe to say that most software most companies produce violates a large number of existing patents - whether they know it or not - <USER2> dilligence around rejecting incoming patents for novelty or prior art is so bad, and patent language is so terribly obfuscated.

Once, I knew some folks at a three-letter computer company who basically patented a scroll bar. In the late 90s.

It may provide somewhat of a chilling effect to people starting new businesses, but it doesn't seem to be that rampant.

But do patents provide a useful library for sharing technological ideas after X years? Not in most cases.

</comment><comment><USER22> This isn't useful without knowing the same numbers for 100+ years ago. Lincoln filed a patent on a mechanism to lift a boat over shoals and obstacles, which almost certainly wouldn't have worked and was never used.

If almost no patented inventions were used in the 1800s then it's hard to use that as a metric for determining if the patent system has gotten worse.

</comment><comment><USER23> > 95 percent of all patented discoveries from ever being put to use to create > new products

Is this really assuming that every patented idea is a good one? Doesn't everyone assume the opposite, that most patented ideas are crap? I'm not surprised to learn that 95% of crappy ideas never turn into new products.

> More than likely, you won't be able to put it to good use unless you have > the multi-million-dollar resources required to launch a startup

How is this worse than starting a business _without_ a patent? I don't think patent law was also supposed to be a guarantee you'd get a small business loan.

<comment><USER24> > How is this worse than starting a business without a patent?

The argument in the article is that if _you_ don't have the resources to commercially exploit a patent yourself, then _no one else_ will pay you for your invention, because a) the frictional costs in licensing from you are too high, especially when b) they can just steal the idea, since you are too poor to defend yourself in court.

That creates an inefficient market.

Personally, I think the effect of b) is smaller than implied, since an inventor could always sell the patent to a troll who _can_ afford to defend it (though discounted by some large risk premium)... nevertheless I've heard of it happening.

The effect of a) is very real. Just consider any software product given away for free... even a requirement to _count_ how many copies are distributed for the purposes of computing a royalty may be inimical to the business model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> When we talk with investors one of the top questions is "What is your IP?" and that can mean a range of things but typically means "Do you have a patent?"

When we were starting out I did a lot of reading on patents, the system of patents litigation etc...and decided that the best thing for us would be to ignore the whole patent system and just push forward our technology into the marketplace hoping that we would be moving so quickly that trade secrets would keep us covered for the foreseeable future.

The thinking was: A patent only gives us the ability to argue our case for infringement in court. As a startup there is no possible way that we would be able to afford a lengthy IP court battle without serious VC money or revenue, at which point we should have been able to get the patent stuff figured out easily. Besides, a patent just tells the world how to do what you are doing which makes it easy to rip-off or change slightly as the ability to cover every single use case/implementation in a patent is basically impossible.

I still believe this, but we had so much pressure from investors (that usually didn't invest) that I spent a good 80+ hours writing/drawing our patent and getting the provisional done. Seemed like a good compromise.

<comment><USER26> _> As a startup there is no possible way that we would be able to afford a lengthy IP court battle without serious VC money or revenue..._

This is essentially why many NPEs exist. You can approach them, and if they think your IP is being infringed by somebody worth suing, they will litigate it on "contingency". That is, they will charge you almost nothing but will keep the lion's share of any settlement or damages.

As bad as NPEs are when they target startups, they are often the only recourse when faced with a big, well-funded infringer. The current widespread negative rhetoric against "patent trolls" does well in distracting startups from this fact.

<comment><USER25> This is a good point and was actually the argument that pushed me over the edge to actually doing it. The issue remains however that, even if our legal fees are paid for, the time and effort that goes into the defense is a HUGE distraction for an early stage company and enough to give the big company time to grab market share.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Un-litigated or un-licensed patents still have value, even to smaller companies.

One huge use for patents is a like a nuclear arsenal between competitors. Competitor A has 500 patents, competitor B has 500 patent, both covering the product range they both make. Neither is going to sue based on it because it would be a huge mess. The Smartphone wars is something of a rarity. Usually industry leaders don't go at each other.

Google found this out because of their late development of patents related to Android. Not having the arsenal made Google weak. It's why Google acquired Motorola. Google paid billions for patents that never got used.

IP portfolios also are an asset you can borrow against.

Commercial litigation is always expensive. Doesn't matter if it is breach of contract or patent infringement. The little guy is at a disadvantage.

<comment><USER21> True -- unfortunately this doesn't work against a patent holding company with no actual assets.

It's likely they hold thousands of patents but have nothing to return fire against.

Thus, a very GOOD public company can be attacked by someone who has simply bought IP, and does not have recourse against them.

<comment><USER27> In my mind, the issue isn't the ability to buy IP and sue, but the fact that there is shitty IP out there that can be bought and misused.

The best IP a non-practicing entity gets is from legit companies who sold off their IP or lost it in bankruptcy. When that happens, it's just monetizing the R&D the company invested in.

The big issue is dogcrap patents that granted to garage inventors with way too big a scope or after there was already a ton of prior art. The trolls take those patents and then extort the shit out of everyone they can.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think article completely skips over important point when quoting the statistics - majority of patents are virtually useless. If you account for that fact, 95% of patents never seeing use suddenly does not seem as bad.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'll preface this by saying that IANAL, but I've been tangentially involved in the licensing and sale of patent portfolios and have read hundreds of patents. I'm also an inventor on many.

Most patents (including mine!) don't get used simply because there's no one practically using those inventions. The comment at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8838681](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8838681) hits the nail on the head. It's not usually because they are too expensive or risky to license or that the inventions themselves are not technically interesting. It's just that the market or industry ends up using technology (which itself is often patented) that does not infringe the vast majority of patents.

As an example, I once saw a patent on sale that was a precursor to DHTs and could potentially read on systems like Amazon Dynamo. But the way they did DHTs was completely different from Dynamo, and in fact, different from Chord, CAN, Pastry, Kademlia or any of the other DHTs in academia and practice (all of which the patent pre-dated). Hence, as interesting as it was, it had no commercial value.

I've seen this pattern repeat in many other fields of technology. The fact that only < 1% of patents are ever asserted simply reinforces this notion. This is not surprising, since in most engineering there are many ways to implement the same idea, and each of these ways can be patented. But typically an industry converges on a few ways of doing things and the other approaches lay unused.

Does this mean the system is broken? Consider academia. Think of all the hundreds of papers that get published in computer-related fields alone. Then think of how many of those actually make it into production. Does that mean academia is broken?

The patent system may be flawed, but this is not why. This article essentially is an ad for the author's new venture, simply using the "broken patent system" meme to get some free publicity.

As an aside, the "create efficient market for patents" language TFA uses at the end is oddly similar to the rhetoric Intellectual Ventures started off with. Initially IV was adamant that they would only license and not litigate, but more experienced people in the licensing business knew that was laughable. After all, a patent is nothing but a right to sue.

</comment><comment><USER29> For a detailed analysis of this, look:

[http://www.iam- magazine.com/blog/detail.aspx?g=af22f2c6-e794...](http://www.iam- magazine.com/blog/detail.aspx?g=af22f2c6-e794-4e5b-9599-33a8055eebae)

</comment><comment><USER30> In rare instances patents allow keen individuals to cash in with their skill and grit. Most of the time this does not happen.

With companies, they are generally happy selling the old stuff with lipstick since it's easier, rather than innovate.

I would claim that for businesses with less than astronomical R&D budgets trademarks and brands are far more valuable than patents, while patents act mostly as an outside markets legal leverage (i.e they provide a big stick against competitors but the only effect it has on customers is a slightly higher price).

</comment><comment><USER31> I don't know. It seems easy to find counterexamples where the expiration of core patents was the catalyst for a boom of new low-end competitors, for example in 3D printers a couple of years ago.

Isn't that how the patent system is supposed to work?

<comment><USER32> That's a pro-example rather than a counterexample, surely? Nobody _licenses_ the patents, usually because they're not available on FRAND terms, instead the field is held up for 20+ years waiting for them to expire.

(Is a patent that has expired still counted as a "patented discovery"? This changes the meaning quite a bit)

<comment><USER33> People and companies always want a competitive advantage, often at the expense of the industry as a whole.

Why is it "bad" if patents are the reason things are held up, but "not bad" if it's a common trade secret or proprietary application? Didn't Google hold back the entire industry by not making their secret sauce for large scale management of IT infrastructure broadly available?

IMO, the patent problem is a scoping problem -- we allow patents that aren't appropriate. The concept of patents makes it possible to make large capital investments to actually invent things. We need that imo.

<comment><USER32> Trade secrets and proprietary applications can be independently re-invented.

<comment><USER33> That's exactly the issue that the previous poster brought up -- with a patent, the "secret sauce" is public. The lessons learned by Google all need to be re- learned again and again, which slows progress for industry as a whole.

In the pharmaceutical case, generic manufacturers are often able to start producing a medicine on the day the patent expires. In the Google/trade secret case, the world may forever lose valuable tools and techniques that are kept proprietary once, but cease being useful to Google.

<comment><USER32> It seems the usefulness of this varies from field to field. It's generally easier to reverse engineer software from binaries or even rewrite it from a plain English description than it is to reverse engineer the patents.

Whether it "slows progress" has got to be an empirical question with results that vary from field to field. The "with patents" case in software forces not only rediscovery but reinvention and engineering _around_ patents (which exists in the pharma case as well).

Now, a software patent system that involved filing a copy of the source code with the patent? _That_ would be a great way of preserving tools in the public record. But that's not how it works at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> At this point do any of you really feel you can talk about patents in an unbiased manner?

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm so put off by the title I can't even read the article.

 _Discoveries_ aren't patented - inventions are.</comment>


Internet of Boats; bootstrapping an Arduino-based marine data system - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@floathub/from-itch-to-launch-3a8cfa7a241e <comment><USER2> Kind of long, but it is an interesting read. One forgets how possible it is to bootstrap so far, even hardware.

<comment><USER3> This seem pretty hackable, anyone have one yet? I'd love to have something run on a battery at the cottage and let me know when the temperature gets close to freezing.</comment></comment>


Escape Competition by Being Yourself - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-escape-competition-and-build-a-business-on-your-own-terms-466a305939ab <comment><USER2> cool article. thanks for sharing</comment>


Ushahidi Accused of Covering Up Sexual Harassment Case "to Protect Ecosystem" - <AUTHOR> http://www.techweez.com/2017/07/10/ushahidi-coverup/ <comment><USER2> This thread was flooded with comments by new accounts (and some not-so-new accounts) in ways that show patterns of abuse, so we've banned the accounts. The comments are visible if you have 'showdead' set to 'yes' in your profile, but not otherwise.

If you're one of those users and want to be unbanned, you're welcome to email email@example.com. We're happy to unban users who give us reason to believe they want to use the site as intended.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why am I not surprised. I hate to generalise but the conglomerate that is iHub, BRCK, and Ushahidi has previously handled issues in a very disingenuous way:

\- They denied that BRCK violated the GPL for the longest time, until someone had to go out of their way to break it down for them, and the community [1].

\- How some of their board members handled the Angani saga [2].

1\. [https://nairobilug.or.ke/2015/05/brck-violating- gpl.html](https://nairobilug.or.ke/2015/05/brck-violating-gpl.html)

2\. [https://www.iafrikan.com/2015/11/23/angani- saga-2015/](https://www.iafrikan.com/2015/11/23/angani-saga-2015/)</comment>


DRACOs May Be Effective Against All Viruses - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/dracos-may-be-effective-against-all-viruses <comment><USER2> The topic of funding DRACO research has come up several times before. The thread from 1055 days ago (26 Jan 2013), at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5118344](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5118344) with 28 comments, refers already to older threads.

I did not find any more recent published experimental research which cites the original 2011 paper; [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3144912/citedby/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3144912/citedby/) .</comment>


PDF Is the World's Most Important File Format - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pam43n/why-the-pdf-is-secretly-the-worlds-most-important-file-format <comment><USER2> I didn't "get" PDF's until I started doing academic research.

But the ability to collect papers, books, documents, etc. all in a single format that I can read on any device, _and_ mark up with highlights and notes, has been a game-changer.

Yes it's a lowest-common-denominator format. And it's designed for human reading and manual office tasks, not computer processing of data. But it _works_. And it's supported everywhere.

Doesn't matter if I'm on the Apple or Google or Microsoft or Adobe stack. Doesn't matter if the PDF is 20 years old. It just works.

<comment><USER3> Some features, not all of them. Forms in particular are poorly supported in the Apple stack, and specifically, it can't generate QR codes from form fields in documents like Reader can. Fonts are usually inconsistent and wrong in forms. Letter spacing is all wrong. I'm sure there's tons of other things missing, the spec is ginormous and includes it's own version of JavaScript that's similar to -- but not quite -- ECMA which is a huge attack vector [0].

For instance, check out the Canadian passport simplified renewal form [1]. The upper-right corner on the first page is "$FORM$054(06-2018)$V$1.4$CS$0$C$0" on the Apple stack and a proper QR code which changes as you fill in the application in Reader. The big blue "Read Instructions" buttons don't work on the Apple stack either.

It may be important, but it's a waking nightmare of a spec.

[0] [http://mariomalwareanalysis.blogspot.com/2012/02/how-to- embe...](http://mariomalwareanalysis.blogspot.com/2012/02/how-to-embed- javascript-into-pdf.html)

[1] [https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/ircc/migration/ircc/englis...](https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/ircc/migration/ircc/english/passport/forms/pdf/pptc054.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Not that you're wrong about the PDF spec being monstrously complex and not universally supported, but why would someone want to generate a QR code from form fields? Who actually _wants_ to use QR codes?

<comment><USER5> Anyone in Asia, they are hugely popular and super useful.

Adding friends on WeChat, making payments to vendors, getting discounts, installing an app, etc

<comment><USER6> Yep. In my case add friends on Line, buy subway tix, pay at 7-11 and many other places. You can also receive payments to your own QR code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> PDFs for reading is one thing. Fillable PDFs are evil incarnate. Apparently there are multiple ways to do it, and only Acrobat Reader is capable of making them all work.

Then you have abominations like embedded flash...

As a standalone file representing the format of a book, PDFs are a good format. But then PDFs can unfortunately (sometimes) store much more, and then can be a security minefield.

<comment><USER8> PDFs can even contain JavaScript...

<comment><USER9> Indeed they can: [https://github.com/osnr/horrifying-pdf- experiments](https://github.com/osnr/horrifying-pdf-experiments)

(Note, breakout game only works in Chrome's PDF reader)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> After spending time extracting data and text from PDF I would also say it's the worst file format. We have perfectly fine structured documents, convert them to PDF to lose half of the information and then we spend insane effort to get the data back somehow.

It also doesn't render well on different resolutions.

PDF is a perfect case study how inferior solutions can become standards.

<comment><USER11> PDF isn't and was never meant as a data storage format. It is meant as a presentation format. You write a file in latex or docx then convert to PDF for sharing. This means the recipient only needs a PDF reader, not whatever tools you used to create the file. This is similar to writing a file in C and compiling to an executable. You _can_ distribute the source, but most (outside of programmers) just want the executable so they don't have a to worry about the tooling.

<comment><USER10> That's the problem. It was never meant as what it's used for now. It's bad for manuals, it's bad for data, it's bad for mobile devices, it's bad for versioning. It's only good for printing. But somehow it's used for all of these.

<comment><USER12> Formatting matters in many cases, and PDF respects that better than any other common format.

I have policy and legal documents from 2005 in PDF/A that can be rendered identically in 2019, and likely in 2105. That isn't the case for HTML, Word or almost any non-plaintext format. If for no other reason than the US Federal Courts require use of PDF, the format will exist and be somewhat vibrant for many decades to come.

I can wholeheartedly will agree that Adobe Reader sucks, but the format solves lots of problems that are difficult to solve otherwise.

<comment><USER13> How exactly do you think your HTML files from 2005 would render differently today? Sure, your modern browser engine would probably make slightly different decisions with fonts and margins, but would that negatively impact the usability of a legal document, research paper, etc.? Meanwhile, you would have gotten things like robust search and real compatibility with mobile phones and e-readers _for free_.

A heavily restricted subset of HTML to replace PDF as the 'archival' format would make the world so much better of a place.

<comment><USER12> Formatting is important — all of the arguments made in favor of HTML can be made for plaintext. If you don't care about format and want to read the document 30, 50, 100 or more years ago, you should use text.

Will HTML formatting on a 4K display will look the same as an 800x600 monitor?

Will all of the ancient display elements display the same? Will IE4 specific artifacts display?

Search works fine in PDF. Mobile is not optimal, but platforms optimized for mobile require different design considerations. Few webpages look or function identically on mobile.

<comment><USER13> _How_ is formatting important though? Semantic formatting, sure, but again, a 20-year-old HTML file still has that preserved. The em-perfect formatting inherent in PDF seems entirely purposeless unless you for some reason need to be able to reproduce a printed copy of the document exactly. Formulas are a special case, but the great majority of documents I see distributed in PDF would be _more useful_ as HTML, and I don't buy the argument that it would risk archivability. At the end of the day, HTML is a plain-text format which is quite human-readable even if all the world's HTML renderers were somehow lost to the ages.

The only use-case I can conceive for perfectly-reproducable layout if you are not a print publisher is in fields where it is convention to reference text by page+paragraph number; in those cases, the page number is actually semantic information so could quite trivially be encoded in the content of the document to maintain that referent.

> Search works fine in PDF.

 __Search works fine in PDFs that don 't use hyphenation or which properly implement it, and when they don't it breaks silently in ways that are potentially disastrous.

> Mobile is not optimal, but platforms optimized for mobile require different > design considerations.

And my point about mobile was _you don 't need to optimize for it_.

>Few webpages look or function identically on mobile.

Again, it _doesn 't need to look identical_. That is a falce requirement. There is no value in that. The only web pages that don't function on mobile are ones which have been optimized for desktop. We're not talking about general-purpose web pages here, we're talking about textual documents.

This is not some hypothetical scenario, BTW. The UK has been using HTML over PDF for public-facing documents for a couple years now, it seems to be working out for them[1].

1\. [https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2018/07/16/why-gov-uk-content- should...](https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2018/07/16/why-gov-uk-content-should-be- published-in-html-and-not-pdf/)

<comment> ezequiel-garzon _The only web pages that don 't function on mobile are ones which have been optimized for desktop._

Although it's rare to find them nowadays, this is false for pages with no CSS at all. By no CSS I mean not even the infamous proprietary viewport meta tag... which is a posteriori being made CSS. Access for instance the basically unstyled page [1] with a $1000+ smartphone of our day... and you're likely to find unreadably small font.

Now, you could argue [1] _functions_ on mobile, but let's agree it's stretching the meaning of that term. But that's not the main point: HTML elements come and go (for instance MENU; find others in [2]), so it's clear that archival reliability is not a big priority.

We all agree that ideally the source should always be made available (mandated if tax payers' money is involved if you ask me), but that doesn't invalidate the value of a universal presentational format.

[1] [http://www.qrg.northwestern.edu/papers/files/simhobby- local....](http://www.qrg.northwestern.edu/papers/files/simhobby-local.htm)

[2] [https://meiert.com/en/indices/html- elements/](https://meiert.com/en/indices/html-elements/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> PDF is based on PostScript, which is a Page Description Language (PDL) also from Adobe. The first PostScript printer, the Apple LaserWriter, launched the desktop publishing revolution. The interesting thing about PostScript is that it is a full programming language, with loops and conditionals and so on. When Adobe designed PDF, they kept the same imaging model as PostScript, but stripped out the programming language. Thus they ended up with a dynamic page description language (PostScript) for media (printers) that cannot fully take advantage of a dynamic PDL, and a static PDL (PDF) for media (i.e., computer screens) that could have benefited from a full programming language!

<comment><USER15> Postscript is a pretty interesting stack based language on its own. Its size is intimidating though. If I remember correctly there was a toy web-server written in postscript just to show that it is possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't know. I personally think plain text is a more important file format. It's read and writeable by a million programs. Any first year programming student can easily build their own program to read and write plain text. It is fairly easily parseable. Etc.

I just opened a random PDF on my computer in a text editor and it starts off with "xÕ\ko‹∆˝Œ_1@ÉbD 9|ÌËáƒZçÌDJÇ¢)UZ[nıÚÆσA˛Pˇeœπ"

<comment><USER17> Plain text can be a really problematic format for data preservation.

\- While it's fairly easy to read and write plain text, it's also fairly easy to inadvertently introduce unintended artifacts in the process.

\- The more frequently a file gets passed around and read and written to, the more likely mojibake[1] will get introduced. This concern rises exponentially when you move to non-US audiences and introduce local-specific encodings. File storage settings, client operating system settings, server configuration settings, database settings, programming languages that touch it along the way. All of them introduce assumptions along the way of a file's encoding, and many failure cases can be subtle and easily go unnoticed at a glance while causing some irreversible damage to downstream recipients.

\- Even if you solve for the encoding, you still have structural issues with tabular data. Different parsers treat escaping and quoting policies differently. This can result in data shifts as things get mis-parsed, data corruptions if literal values get interpreted as escape characters or vis versa, etc.

For preserving data, generic plain text tends to get worse and worse over time because it's such a non-opinionated format and even if you document the specifics on econdings and parsing details it's easy for those to get lost over time as things exchange hands or for intermediaries to corrupt the plaintext because they relied on defaults instead of the documented parsing details.

For better or worse, PDF tends to solve the preservation issue while introducing potential barriers on the parsing/processing side.

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

<comment><USER18> >mojibake

These days, those that are promoting the idea of plain text as a long term archive format are assuming UTF-8 by default.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> My gripe with PDF is that I don't understand why a standard format which is almost 30 years old, requires seemingly weekly updates of the Acrobat Reader, which in turn requires reboot of my work laptop. I upgrade the reader far more often than I actually use it.

<comment><USER20> Now days you don't need acrobat reader typically, Chrome, Edge and Firefox can all view/print PDF's. If your on a Mac/iOS the viewers are built as the OS uses display postscript internally (quartz) which matches up pretty closely with PDF.

<comment><USER21> Chrome/Firefox don't handle complex PDF's well. They render slowly and sometimes inaccurately

It's not uncommon to print things from Chrome/Firefox and have the margins/cropping be wrong. Then again you're using a web browser to print a pdf file, you get what you deserve

<comment><USER20> I very rarely run into this in Chrome, they licensed Foxit and made it open source [https://opensource.google.com/projects/pdfium](https://opensource.google.com/projects/pdfium) its native and fast.

Firefox I think still uses [https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js](https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js) which was not bad last time I used it, but it all javascript so performance isn't up to par with native. Also printing is not great and I don't think they have implemented a SVG backend yet for better printing. On the plus side you can embed it in your web app if you want and have more control over the viewer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I run a PDF generation service [1], so this is nice to read. When I first launched the service, I was worried that PDFs and paper forms might become obsolete in the near future, when everyone starts to go paperless and digital. Now that I'm more familiar with the market, this is no longer a concern. (I have banks who are using the software to modernize their operations.)

I also realized that there might be some pressure to turn into the next TurboTax, where the company eventually lobbies against improvements just so we can stay in business. I made a resolution that I'll never do anything like that. But I guess the founders of TurboTax never intended to do that either.

[1] [https://formapi.io](https://formapi.io)

<comment><USER23> I love little profitable businesses like this. Seems like you're living the dream

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I love PDFs. The first time I used one was Acrobat 2.0. I bought a shitty SAMS computer book that came with a bonus shitty SAMS computer book on the CD. As a PDF of course.

It was cumbersome on a Pentium 75MHz with 640x480x8 graphics. I'd be blown away 20 years later viewing those same files on a Macbook Pro with Retina display.

However, it was easily the best way to distribute printed documents EXACTLY the way they were meant to be seen.

They weren't meant to be edited, modified, data extracted from...And adobe went from a quick, minimal viwer to a bloated security nightmare by adding 'features.

Luckily, 3rd party and open-source projects came to the rescue.

</comment><comment><USER24> PDF is the perfect tool for maintaining document formatting but the worst tool for maintaining document data. The format is not concerned the the actual data of document. Programatically extracting data from the simplest PDF is an exercise in patience. I find it kind of odd that this was chosen as the standard all things considered

</comment><comment><USER25> I sometimes read papers but I find them an absolute pain to read them on my phone because the two aren't really designed for each other. So I end up with this frustrating experience of zooming in/out to read this bits I'm interested in - which is impossible to do one handed!

I know there's that arxiv vanity thing, which is cool, but most of the time I get the "sorry we can't render this" error message.

</comment><comment><USER26> PDF is fine if you are using a laptop/desktop/tablet. But it doesn't fit well into phone screens. Usually I have to turn my phone horizontally and then zoom in little bit. And when I reach the end of the page I have trobles turning it. And sometimes page turning messes up my perfect zoom fit etc. Responsive PDF is what I need...

<comment><USER27> That's not a PDF issue though: it's just an issue of most content being the same dimensions as real world paper sizes. No idea how responsive PDF would work but I agree that would be cool.

<comment><USER28> People in these comments keep mentioning a responsive PDF, but PDF is supposed to be a presentation format. Wouldn't HTML and CSS serve the purpose fine?

<comment><USER29> You can't represent vector graphics, complex math, or anything non-standard in HTML+CSS. Even if you could, you couldn't rely on the user seeing it correctly.

<comment><USER28> Aren't SVG and MathML standard in HTML5?

<comment><USER29> Interesting; I'm not sure if it counts as "in HTML5" but I see they are referenced in the spec.

It's still not something you can rely upon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's also actively harming medical and scientific progress as I allude to here in this talk [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EM61rn9Gxl4&list=PLjzcwcP9P2...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EM61rn9Gxl4&list=PLjzcwcP9P2Lfcz38lDtMF_XupRnecKokz&index=12)

<comment><USER31> Can you summarise your point about that here?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This would've been a lot more convincing before mobile happened a decade ago. Reading PDFs on my phone is a pain, and it hasn't improved at all in the last ten years. Looking at the web on mobile used to be painful too, but it's ok now.

<comment><USER33> What phone? I'm still using an iPhone 6S and they are seemless. Some textbooks that are like 300+ mb start having hiccups though. Probably due to my oldish phone.

<comment><USER32> They're fast, but I have to scroll and zoom around a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It is not open data.

You still can have proprietary blocks of info inside the file.

The lack of open source tools to manipulate the format is a major hindrance IMHO.

It is also a very space wasting as well when people only do a bitmap dump into the file for scans. Forms are also an area that is not open source either.

It has so many hacks and kludges, it would be better if it was trashed and we start with postscript again.

</comment><comment><USER35> What happened to HTML? Nobody could read nor discuss about PDF here without it.

<comment><USER20> Let me know when browser support the full CSS print spec...no Prince doesn't count.

<comment><USER35> Tell me when PDF can reasonably reflow in all environments/devices.

<comment><USER36> The whole point of a pdf is to display _exactly_ the same across all devices. For something like a scientific research paper, you want all figures, etc., to remain in the same place to avoid formatting oddities.

<comment><USER35> That's an important feature, just like reflow. But does the former make PDF _World's most important file format_?

<comment><USER37> >> The whole point of a pdf is to display _exactly_ the same across all devices.

> That's an important feature, just like reflow. But does the former make PDF > World's most important file format?

It's not just that PDFs are displayed the same across devices, it's that it's displayed the same over time. I can open a PDF generated in 1995 and it will look identical today as it did then. The same can't be said about HTML or Word documents generated in 1995.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> The thing I find craziest about PDF/A is it isn't really a format in itself, just a vague promise not to use certain features in the ensuing file. Whether any reader holds the file to that promise is something I'm quite doubtful of. Instead I suspect most readers will do their best to display anything they're handed, happily passing it through any of the hundred-or-so, possibly legacy- code-powered sub-format decoders the file author wishes - leading to a massive attack surface.

From a developer's point of view, when trying to _enforce_ that submitted files are strictly in PDF/A format, from what I can tell there isn't much more you can do than dissect the file looking for umpteen disallowed features.

 _Is there_ an ISO-compliance validator to anyone's knowledge?

<comment><USER31> Yes! [https://verapdf.org/](https://verapdf.org/)

<comment><USER38> Thankyou!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I remember when PDF came out, I didn't get it. I thought the problem was already solved by compressed postscript files! I was already used to downloading and sometimes printing paper documentation in this format.

It was natural to view Postscript files on NeXT and UNIX machines, and Ghostscript was already thing. What could be better than just using the "native" language of the printer? I didn't realize that this was not a common view, or even possible for most personal computers at the time.

I was also misinformed for quite some time about the internal format of PDF, assuming it was just PS wrapped up in a container. In a sense, this is true, but there's a lot more (embedded fonts, transparency, forms are just a few that come to mind).

<comment><USER31> > I was also misinformed for quite some time about the internal format of PDF, > assuming it was just PS wrapped up in a container. In a sense, this is true, > but there's a lot more (embedded fonts, transparency, forms are just a few > that come to mind).

There's also a lot less, as PDF is not a full programming language like PS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Possibly also the most hated file format. Just the fact that no two PDF editors behave the same way goes to show how bad of a format it is.

</comment><comment><USER41> PDFs are an accessibility nightmare and most production pipelines are terrible at preserving the semantic structure of the document or, in many cases, even preserving the text. A PDF is in many cases as series of page images which aren't usable for anything other than human viewing or printing. "Export as PDF" generally produces much better results than print to PDF though not from every application. Many days I wish there was an alternative solution based on SVG. While not perfect it certainly would avoid many of the problems of PDF while having all of the important capabilities.

</comment><comment><USER42> I really hate PDF for many reasons. It seems it's only a partially open format, a lot of features are implementation dependent (how can a file be 'locked' to prevent printing or editing?). There are very few free and FOSS clients that handle forms, highlighting, etc. Some clients do highlighting and annotations but don't save it to the PDF itself.

The failure of epub and other HTLM based formats in this use case, IMO, is that their focus on reflowing to support any display and device makes them inconsistent and therefore impractical for replacing PDF based content.

</comment><comment><USER43> I've been working on an open source PDF library for C# [1] and its given me an immense appreciation for the PDF format.

Sure it's horribly long, complex, comes with vulnerabilities and different consumers have different behaviour. But given the constraints of machines at the time it was created and the wide range of requirements and usages it's pretty damn good and has stood the test of time.

[1]: [https://github.com/UglyToad/PdfPig](https://github.com/UglyToad/PdfPig)

<comment><USER44> Could this be used to remove potentially-malicious content from a PDF, e.g. anything executable?

<comment><USER45> It's a different software entirely, but QubesOS has an interesting way of removing malicious content from a pdf. It basically opens the document in a throwaway VM, then the host takes a high resolution screenshot and makes a new pdf from scratch.

The digital equivalent of physically printing and re-scanning the document.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Even among non-technical people this isn't true. Those people use excel and word far more than pdf. For devs, we're all about various text formats.

</comment><comment><USER47> PDF is great! For human reading. But it's garbage for everything else, and, as I found out from a a bunch of frustrating job application efforts, absolute shit for resumés. Literally not parseable, even with OCR apparently. I don't even know WHY any job application even accepts a PDF for a resumé. It shouldn't be allowed to if there's any sort of post-processing done to it to extract information. A bunch of applications didn't even let me see what it extracted, which, depending on the PDF to text application they're using, may spit out absolutely nothing from an entire page of text. That's right, a whole page converted to a single empty line. Marvelous. Truly a technological marvel that's helping the "it's hard to get a job" feeling go away.

<comment><USER48> PDF is the one and only format any resume should ever be submitted in.

It's the only way to reasonably guarantee someone will be able to open and read a resume in its intended form.

<comment><USER47> Only from my view, once it's automatically parsed, nobody is going to look at it, because either it'll automatically throw it out from the parsed data (in which case a blank resume is an obvious throw away), or it'll do some keyword parsing and determine you haven't copy/pasted enough. The second one is a problem with all of those systems though. After that point it'll pass it on to the hiring manager, at which point they'll look at it regardless of format. PDF then is simply not the best choice if it gives the highest chance of failure at the first step. A Word document is a much better choice.

<comment><USER48> > A Word document is a much better choice.

It really truly isn't. Anyone on any device can reliably open a PDF. That is not true for Word files.

Funny enough, this thread made me want to look at my old resumes. I have a .doc resume from 2009. You know what happens when I double-click it? Nothing. I don't have anything that can view it! Windows 10 doesn't come with a preview tool for doc files. Chrome/Firefox can't preview it either.

<comment><USER47> I feel you're missing my point here. A PDF is bad for the specific case of inputting a resumé into an applicant tracking system, due to the myriad of things that could go wrong without notifying the applicant of any error, discarding their application without a second glance by a human. A Word document makes the likelihood of system discard due to error much smaller. A docx file is just a zipped file, which contains a document.xml that can be easily read by any regular text editor. It's got all the style information in it, but it's at least more easily computer parseable than a PDF. A doc file is also just a zipped file, with a WordDocument file inside. It can also be read by any regular text editor, but it's got some binary garbage around it. Still more easily parseable than a PDF.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> To me, a pdf is only a digital version of a paper version. Just to look at, present... nothing more. Data duplication, extraction always had to be done manually. I could never extract text correctly. So I don't anymore. I just accepted it. As I did with a lot of other things.

</comment><comment><USER50> .xls runs half of the world economy.

</comment><comment><USER51> Not moreso than .txt

</comment><comment><USER52> And at the same time PDF Forms[1], animation[2] and 3D extensions are poorly supported in FOSS implementations - poppler, mupdf, etc.

[1] [https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/issues/463](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/issues/463)

[2] [https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/issues/683](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/issues/683)

</comment><comment><USER53> Author must not realize how many businesses, government organizations, etc. have operations that are completely dependent on .xls files that someone first created in the late 90s.

</comment><comment><USER54> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cFOsAzigyQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cFOsAzigyQ)

</comment><comment><USER55> For more info on the PDF format: [VIDEO] Programming data for display, the PDF Story by Chas Emerick - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAki8C6qFHY&list=PLGRqfvsPiR...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAki8C6qFHY&list=PLGRqfvsPiRShRY94F1p_3TT1HMoipcc3c&index=6&t=0s)

</comment><comment><USER56> Are there any people going around and harvesting data of all the PDFs in the world, using Machine Learning to clean collate, and localize the data?

</comment><comment><USER57> Surely database file formats are at least as important to hold whatever data the World needs to go round.

</comment><comment><USER58> Microsoft tried to compete with XPS, xml paper specification around mid 2000's but did not succeed.

</comment><comment><USER59> Adobe acrobat reader has been atrocious. I'm so glad I switched to sumatra this year.

</comment><comment><USER60> I couldn't disagree more. I almost never use PDFs. I read a lot of books on my mobile phone and PDFs are basically unusable there due to their fixed layout.

To say in 2019 that a file format without mobile support is the most important is moronic.

</comment><comment><USER61> Worse is better strikes again? I'm not talking about SGML

</comment><comment><USER62> If they said "Most Important DOCUMENT File Format", maybe, through even then you have stuff like JPEG.

But arguably executable file formats (.exe, .so, ...) are more important overall.

<comment><USER63> Having some executable file is a prerequisite for opening any other!

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> I guess if you wanna claim that, but it's a shit format that causes way more pain than convenience for most people. Just today I had to upload sensitive docs to a server to edit it because I can't locally and refuse to pay to do so. Fuck pdf.

<comment><USER65> It's not designed to be edited.

<comment><USER64> Oh so all those fillable pdfs are just hacks then right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Archiving without extracting is kind of one-way to me.

I prefer a long JSON file, which i can read from, or write down it to file format i want, to a hard-to-extract format such as PDF.

<comment><USER67> > a hard-to-extract format such as PDF

What's hard about it? It's an open standard with libraries in every language known to man.

If you use it as a dumb wrapper for scanned images, that's going to suck. But as a way to store and faithfully reproduce nicely typeset documents with images - ie, to make an archival copy - I don't think it can possibly be beat.

<comment><USER68> I think the comment was about bulk extraction of data. For instance, it is pretty difficult to do bibliographic studies if all the articles you have are provided only as PDFs (even if it is text pdf). For starters, I do not think PDFs have a notion resembling a "paragraph of text", because every symbol is placed separately with its own unique coordinates.

Extracting tables of numbers from PDFs is also a pain.

<comment><USER10> Exactly. I have written software for legal document search. Most of what they get is in PDF and it's a major PITA to get data out of them. Forget about tables. Just try to extract text without some garbled characters and you will lose your mind.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The therapeutic effects of psychedelic drugs - <AUTHOR> http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.amp/articleNo/50209/title/Decoding-the-Tripping-Brain/ <comment><AUTHOR> The table at the bottom is neat, and the article is well written.

<comment><USER2> It also covers things not usually in this genre of articles. For example, the section on DOI/LSD and inflammation is new to me.</comment></comment>


Why Quora uses MySQL rather than No-SQL - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Why-does-Quora-use-MySQL-as-the-data-store-rather-than-NoSQLs-such-as-Cassandra-MongoDB-CouchDB-etc. <comment><USER2> I find this answer incredibly excellent.

particularly:

 _You can actually get pretty far on a single MySQL database and not even have to worry about partitioning at the application level. You can "scale up" to a machine with lots of cores and tons of ram, plus a replica. If you have a layer of memcached servers in front of the databases (which are easy to scale out) then the database basically only has to worry about writes. You can also use S3 or some other distributed hash table to take the largest objects out of rows in the database. There's no need to burden yourself with making a system scale more than 10x further than it needs to, as long as you're confident that you'll be able to scale it as you grow._

I've dealt with some insanely convoluted legacy systems that were made up of a fragile bunch of badly configured clusters ("for scalability!") that I improved the speed and load beariness by 100000x simply by putting it on a single server, tons of ram, and combing through the slow query log.

<comment><USER3> Sounds like pre-mature optimization, a bad idea which hackers need to be constantly reminded of.

<comment><USER2> yes that's exactly what it was.

it was outsourced to a vendor that pretty much took advantage of the contracting startup's lack of DB knowledge. so they got the kitchen sink and a fat invoice.

of course it's easy for the vendor to defend this - "what, we want you to be scalable!".

<comment><USER4> Flip side: How many startups ask for a solution that will scale to millions of users per day once their app goes live?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a site with in the ballpark of 60k uniques per month. What they use is pretty irrelevant. Really all this reduces to is, "it's dumb to optimize for problems you don't have."

Assuming 100 requests per user per month, 60k uniques is 2 requests per second. They could run the whole site on one Linode unless they've got a particularly bad architecture.

<comment><USER6> > 2 requests per second

Your point is valid, but it doesn't work like that.

<comment><USER7> Do you care to elaborate?

<comment><USER6> Taking daily pageviews and dividing it by 24 * 60 * 60 assumes your traffic curve isn't a curve at all - it's flat. For your average US-based consumer web app it's highly unlikely to have just as many people using your app at 3am as you do 3pm.

When scaling a web app, you need to prepare for peak usage, not average usage.

Here are a few first-hand examples. Friends for Sale, a social game, had ~10M daily pageviews (100 req/sec avg) but had peak load of > 200 req/sec. Ideeli, a "flash sale" designer shopping site, typically had peak load 5x-20x higher than median load.

Regardless of what Quora's traffic curve looks like, wheels' point still stand - it doesn't matter what backend you're using for 60k users on a web app.

\</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

[http://highscalability.com/friends-sale- architecture-300-mil...](http://highscalability.com/friends-sale- architecture-300-million-page-view-month-facebook-ror-app)

<comment><USER8> So worst case they will be doing 4 req/s instead of 2.

I know what you're trying to say, but at Quora's numbers, as OP said, it truly is irrelevant.

<comment><USER9> No, 5-20x * 2req/s av = 10 to 40 req/s.

<comment><USER8> Peak on a decent traffic site will be roughly 2x-3x the average. 5x-20x would be a blog that gets 10 visitors a day and after being posted on news.yc gets 100 visitors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't understand all these "why we're not using NoSQL" posts. Why is it interesting that someone choose the default choice? Why would they use a NoSQL database of some sort for a major project unless they actually had a need for it? I'm half expecting a "why we don't use Brainfuck"* post one of these days...

*Not that I'm comparing any NoSQL database or NoSQL databases in general to Brainfuck, it's just that I don't see the point of "why we don't use X" posts when there was no particular reason to suppose that they might use X in the first place.

<comment> brown9-2 I'm not 100% sure how Quora works but is this a post or an answer to a question that another person posted?

<comment><USER11> It's an answer to a question that someone else posted. I wouldn't have written it otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > 2\. These distributed databases like Cassandra, MongoDB, and CouchDB[3] > aren't actually very scalable or stable. Twitter apparently has been trying > to move from MySQL to Cassandra for over a year. When someone reports using > one of these systems as their primary data store for over 1000 machines for > over a year, I'll reconsider my opinion on this.

Are there facts to back up what he says about MongoDB for example or is this just FUD.

<comment><USER13> His assertion is actually backed up by MongoDB docs: "Sharding will be production-ready in MongoDB v1.6, estimated to be released in July 2010." Their current sharding alpha is only tested/supported for small clusters (up to 20 nodes). In addition, looking at their sharding mode of operations, only a very limited set of actions are properly sharded; the rest require touching all the shards.

Disclaimer: this was the first look I've had at MongoDB. However, based on this alone, it would be prudent to wait several years before considering using this technology in serious production. It is somewhat reckless to consider a DBMS feature that wasn't locked for awhile "production-ready".

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> better yet, why isn't Quora using PostgreSQL? :)

<comment><USER14> Can't answer for Quora, but I know why I'm not: activation energy. My team and I know MySQL pretty well, and we can stand by our decision to use it. PostgreSQL we can't.

It's not the most sound technical reasoning.

<comment><USER15> Postgres is easy to convert to from MySQL, if you keep that conversion cheatsheet handy. However, mastery of its performance quirks (all servers have quirks) can take years.

It took me 48 hours to convert to it, 10 months later and I don't feel like I know much about it.

<comment><USER16> Isn't running a system for over 10 months without being forced to learn all the innate details a plus? Gives you nice 'look at the uptime of this baby' bragging rights without too much effort ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> _There's no need to burden yourself with making a system scale more than 10x further than it needs to, as long as you're confident that you'll be able to scale it as you grow._

It should be noted that the 10x quote comes from Jeff Dean. Not only does it make sense from the business point of view, it's also nearly impossible to scale a system 100x: you simply have no idea what the traffic patterns and bottlenecks will be at 100x the volume.

In other words, going from 60k uniques to 600k uniques can be possible with the same architecture. Thinking you can go 60k to 6,000,000 on the same architecture is hubris (as is planning for the 6,000,000 mark while you're at 60k).

It's also extremely annoying to see the what started as people looking into right tools to do their jobs dissolve into a hype bandwagon (but I guess it happens to any technology and I'll be a happier person if I ignore this :-)). First the hammer for all persistence was MySQL + an ORM (ignoring both other RDBMS e.g., Postgres, approaches such as BerkeleyDB), then it was CouchDB now it seems to be Mongo or Cassandra. These are entirely different systems, each has a use case where it shines. Why are people all the sudden demanding that others use a "NoSQL solution"?

That being said, MySQL isn't that hot in terms of reliability (of course starting off with Oracle is recipe for some technical debt and vendor lock- in). There's no substitute for proper backups and administration. This is more of an argument for MySQL (or my personal favourite, Postgres) than against it: with MySQL the backup and administration solutions are very well known.

Some of the points mentioned in the article in regards to distributed systems are also fairly confusing and incorrect. CouchDB and Mongo are (scalability- wise) essentially the same as MySQL: "potentially consistent" replication (no ability to perform quorum reads, no guarantee of eventual consistency, no version vectors) and not truly distributed (a 1000 cluster of consisting of 500 "shards" two replicas each is really 500 separate clusters). MySQL already has very relaxed semantics (a master-slave replication system makes absolutely _no_ guarantees about commits made to master being consistently read from the slaves or even being persisted on the slave if the master crashes).

Dynamo and BigTable inspired systems are radically different. However, as with any other system under active development (which also includes RDBMS such as VoltDB), unless you're ready to ask a committer on one of these systems to institute a special QA cycle and support for your use case (or you _are_ a committer on one of the systems, in which case you know what you're doing) when using one of these systems as a primary datastore, you're taking on a technical risk. A technical risk that's _not_ needed when you need to persist data for 60k monthly uniques: I can do that just fine with any system. Depending on the use patterns of the application, you can also do for 60,000,000 monthly uniques while sticking with MySQL (while most _other_ parts of the applications, including the data access layer to MySQL, would have to be re-written many times over).

In the end Adam's decision is probably the correct decision (I don't work for Quora, so I can't tell), but the technical reasons sound slightly ignorant. It's perfectly fine to be ignorant of these topics, it's not, however, okay to speak authoritatively on a topic you're ignorant of (e.g., I know nothing of machine learning, so I am not going to speculate on how Quora should be using machine learning to make their homepage more relevant -- which they probably are -- I'd add nothing to the conversation).

<comment><USER18> Jeff Dean (for those wondering): <http://research.google.com/people/jeff/index.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Schemas allow the data to persist in a typed manner across lots of new > versions of the application as it's developed, they serve as documentation, > and prevent a lot of bugs.

So, schemaless vs. schemaful is similar to static typed vs. dynamic typed? (or is it more like typed vs. untyped?)

> I think the "NoSQL" fad will end when someone finally implements a > distributed relational database with relaxed semantics.

What does he mean by "relaxed semantics"?

<comment> brown9-2 Also interesting is citing Facebooks giant usage of MySQL (1800 servers, 2 DBAs) but ignoring that they advocate pretty strongly for schemaless structures.

<comment><USER11> The built-in MySQL schemas have problems - mostly that schema changes can take hours or days on large tables. As a result of this you need to build a system that doesn't require schema changes at the MySQL level. This doesn't mean you can't use schemas at a higher level though.

There are two ways to build on top of MySQL - you can either make a flexible schemaless structure with objects and properties and associations between them, which is what Facebook advocates for, or you can make a flexible virtual schema that has column names, types, and arbitrary indexes. I'm in favor of the latter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Isn't it possible to configure MySQL server and data to run in memory if we've enough RAM?

<comment><USER21> Yep, but I believe you have to handle persisting to disk yourself (there might be a Redis-like solution to this that I'm not aware of, though).

<comment><USER22> What does Redis do?

<comment><USER21> It's an in-memory hash store that is persisted to the disk when possible. Sort of like memcached that can survive restarts and is suitable for long-term storage.

<comment><USER22> Well, I know that much. Did you mean that Redis just persists when you ask it to?

(I was counting that under "you have to do it yourself" and thought it might do something more automatic but still infrequent.)

<comment><USER21> Ah OK. I believe redis persists automatically when it can, from the memory, though I haven't actually used it. With a MySQL memory table, if you want to write to the memory table AND have it persist, you have to keep track of what has changed yourself, and handle writing those things to disk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> it's amusing that the article now errors out...</comment>


In Russia, iTunes Store Is Now (Accidentally) Serving Up Porn - <AUTHOR> http://www.cultofmac.com/204494/in-russia-itunes-store-is-now-accidentally-serving-up-porn/ <comment><USER2> So iOS is for porn?</comment>


What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/ <comment><USER2> The irony!!

From the the heading: "The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values equality more than excellence."</comment>


Show HN: Extract Text from Webpage - <AUTHOR> https://documentcyborg.com/ <comment><USER2> I like the Tweet/FB/Insta post to image app more than the text extractor itself.

All you have to do is print to PDF to convert any webpage to PDF

<comment><AUTHOR> That's ok but this tool does way more. It extract only the content of the page (remove ad, remove nagigation and so on), and export it to different format. You can export a webpage to word for example.

<comment><USER2> I agree with capabilities; though might not need it most of the time. I appreciate the creation of these tools.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your kind word, very much appreciated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I tried it out but it just copied the first H1.

I love the idea tho !</comment>


Tesla's layoffs: Bad blood, a bloodbath, or business as usual? - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2008/01/11/teslas-layoffs-bad-blood-a-bloodbath-or-business-as-usual/ <comment><USER2> Not that it's really an option, but after reading various profiles of Elon Musk, I'd be really hesitant to take funding from him. This seems like it's pretty much his M.O.

<comment> daniel-cussen Yeah, on that note, it'd be nice to make a database of VCs and make profiles based on how they treat founders based on publicly available information. Just look at their track records and that will help you decide whether or not to take funding.

<comment><USER2> thefunded.com is sort of that.

<comment> daniel-cussen Awesome. Thanks for the tip.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> daniel-cussen "...but a company spokesperson, Darryl Siry, told us there's no reason to worry."

Whenever something has to be said by a company spokesman, you know something's up.</comment>


Linux: Inclusive Terminology - <AUTHOR> https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/7/4/229 <comment><USER2> Why is everyone on this site ignoring the this?</comment>


How did you meet your cofounder(s)? - <AUTHOR>

a) How/where did you meet your cofounder(s)? b) Has your product/service found success? <comment><USER2> I met my co-founder at the very first Ruby on Rails user group meeting I attended. His previous partner had left him high and dry with a customer and no product, so he was at the meeting looking for a technical co-founder. I didn't know RoR then, but I figured it would be a perfect chance to learn.

We were both wary enough not to agree to anything long term up front. It started with a simple quid pro quo 2 week contract after which we decided to test the waters further by continuing to work together unofficially. After about a month we negotiated a reverse vested stock agreement with a short cliff (already passed) that satisfied us both.

Version one of our product (voltagecrm.com) is nearing the end of the beta cycle and will soon be available for purchase. In the meantime we've been bootstrapping the product using a custom theme on top of an open source CRM to start building a customer base and stay profitable.

I think the partner I found by complete luck was better than I would have found if I'd gone searching. His skills complement mine in every way. He is a salesman, a people-person, who is willing to talk to clients, lawyers, mentors, etc. He has the proper "better to spend $10 than waste 3 hours of your time" attitude that I can't seem to manage. He goes out to ask current and potential customers what features they need and what problems they have with our current system. In short, he makes sure that all I have to do is write software.

Perhaps most importantly of all, I actually like my partner. We can sit and have lunch and talk about things besides the company without feeling uncomfortable.

From reading about the experiences of others, I'd say I got very lucky indeed.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have to say, I envy you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I met one of my co-founders at an Apple store many years back.

I worked at one for about 2 years and he came in looking to purchase a laptop for college. We started talking about business, design, and many of the things we felt Apple was doing right. I'm not sure how long we spoke, but it was definitely a good hour. After speaking for such a long time, we ended up exchanging emails.

Every once in a while (few months or so) we'd touch base with each other just to see how things were going. I had been working on my own business, while he was working for some bigger corporations like Reuters. Months and months would go bye between conversations, but there was always this feeling that we had about working with each other. He, being a developer, and me being an entrepreneur, we kept talking about the idea of working together, but nothing really came of it. We did do a little podcast that a lot of people listened to ([https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/business-and- motivation/...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/business-and- motivation/id477246407)).

Anyways, our personal conversations went back and forth for years – almost 5 to be exact. And then one day I approach him with this idea that I already started. He had become a much better developer and quite frankly, through our conversations he came off as a real hard worker. Someone who wants to make it. He even helped me with some things for free which was really nice. That combination of hard work and him being a developer was almost too good to be true. We chatted on the phone a bit, and then I flew out to NYC (where he lives) to meet up for the second time in 5 years. Things went well. We talked a lot and he introduced me to an amazing designer who has also ended up being the 3rd co-founder of our company.

Now here we are about 6 months later and we've been working really hard on rebuilding an idea that we think is going to be really great. It's not out yet, but I'll keep you guys updated when it is (within the next 6-8 weeks).

</comment><comment><USER4> I've had two cofounders. The first I met at Waterloo, but never worked on anything with him. Shut that startup down within a year, even though we had funding options on the table. Personalities didn't match, and this includes my own failings too.

Second cofounder I met at a Toronto Hacker News Night that I put together every year and a half or so. He emailed me after my previous startup shut down and was heartfelt about how much he knew it sucked. We ended up working together and did a small (low 7 digits) exit in under 8 months, four of which were just negotiating the sale.

Skill is important, but kindness is much better.

<comment><USER5> $1MM+ for 4 months of work? That's amazing. May I know what sort of business was that?

<comment><USER4> Machine Learning :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Mailing list.

Back in 2001 someone on a mailing list I was on was looking for a userland ESP (IPsec) implementation to do some fuzzing or something... And I just happened to have one that was 95% complete. Seeing demand for it, I wrapped it up and had a user of it.

Fast forward a few months later, I lost my job in the common downsizing in 2001, he shot me an idea and then we were co-founders before ever meeting in person.

</comment><comment><USER5> a) Previous coworker. Big mistake. Not everyone is discipline enough to be a cofounder. b) No, it would likely fail if it continues down this road.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm curious to hear what people have to say here as well.

</comment><comment><USER8> College</comment>


Show HN: Pixel Art Editor built with ClojureScript/Om - <AUTHOR> http://jackschaedler.github.io/goya/

<comment><AUTHOR> Source is here: [https://github.com/jackschaedler/goya](https://github.com/jackschaedler/goya)

Caveat: I'm in the process of learning Clojure and Om. There is some really nasty code in there

</comment><comment><USER2> Here's my minimalist Om icon editor using triangular pixels. (Used early version of Om)

Demo: [http://drcode.github.io/tricon/index.html](http://drcode.github.io/tricon/index.html) Source code: [https://github.com/drcode/tricon/blob/gh- pages/src/client/co...](https://github.com/drcode/tricon/blob/gh- pages/src/client/core.cljs)

</comment><comment><USER3> Chrome only so can't see the site but curious what feature of Chrome you're using that isn't available in Firefox? Is it NaCl?

<comment><AUTHOR> <input type="color"> This is just a little weekend project, and I wanted to use as much standard stuff as possible. I believe the color input type is coming to firefox soon though.

<comment><USER4> Weekend project? That's amazing! Is the source available? I would love to read it.

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://github.com/jackschaedler/goya](https://github.com/jackschaedler/goya)

I'm just learning Clojure and Om, so the code is probably very nasty.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


You won't need a driver's license by 2040 - <AUTHOR> http://edition.cnn.com/2012/09/18/tech/innovation/ieee-2040-cars/index.html?npt=NP1 <comment><USER2> I get the statistics, but I think CNN is drawing the wrong conclusion. Even if all cars are automated by 2040, they will almost certainly be required to have a manual override option, which will almost certainly require a driver's license to operate.</comment>


Facebook Photos Slip Through Great Firewall, Arrive in China - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2012/03/29/china-firewall-family-leaf/

<comment><USER2> Last time I looked, Facebook photos are not protected by any security other than the fact that their .jpg link is difficult to guess. (I.e. anybody can view them who has the link.) I was very surprised when I noticed that. Makes sense, cost-wise, I guess; it would be very expensive to integrate their CDN with their security model somehow.

I'm not familiar with FamilyLeaf, but I do wonder what will happen if more people/apps start exploiting that fact and start sharing photo links outside the facebook framework. If a page featuring the photo gets crawled, the "private" photos will be out on the web for all to find and see.

<RANT>I wish more people were selective about what photos they post to facebook, given that the privacy of one's content is not "all that". An acquaintance of mine just posted hundreds of pictures of young girls that she coaches in their leotards, some of them really embarrassing. Argh...</RANT></comment>


Ski Resorts Exaggeration of Snowfall Reduced Sharply Because of iPhone App - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122084539&ps=cprs

<comment><USER2> My Dad used to work for IDRC (www.idrc.ca) and he told me a story about one of his earliest (and happiest) development projects. It's very simple: broadcast actual market price information over radio to farmers in remote rural African areas. In this way, the farmers had enough information to tell the middle man to stuff it when they were offered extremely low (< 1%) of market value for their food. Their wages increased ~10x over the next season.

tl;dr: information symmetry is good for the end of the chains (initial producers, end consumers)

<comment><USER3> That's a pretty cool program that's evolved with other NGO's using SMS messages to cell phones. The proliferation of mobiles and utility of cheap cell phones has been a massive boost to productivity in rural areas. One of the key market barriers continues to be consistent logistics given the shelf life of agricultural products which means some of these middlemen still have a significant upper hand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Gentlemen,

Let me introduce you to the power of online snowfall telemetry stations. They usually report air temperature, wind speed & direction, precipitation, snow depth and water content in real time on an hour-by-hour basis. Find one or two nearby your local ski hill and study them for a season, comparing them to your in-the-field perceptions of ski conditions.

You'll soon be telling your friends about the "8 inches of cold dry powder that's just fallen on soft layer that was laid down last week" and distinguishing that from the "8 inches of heavy wet snow that just fell and then refroze onto the ice layer from last week".

For bonus points, take an avalanche safety course in your area. They will introduce you to a wealth of unbiased data sources. Mountain guides use these sources to maintain a deep understanding of the snow pack as it evolves throughout the winter season.

In the Seattle area, see <http://www.nwac.us/weatherdata/map/>

In the Bay Area, see: [http://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/snotel/California/california.ht...](http://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/snotel/California/california.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> while the measurement may read "inches" it's actually on an arbitrary scale. in other words, to a skier, "14 inches" means _compare-the-conditions-to-the- last-time-you-went-and-we-said-14-inches_.

not to mention the obvious fact that measurements done in different places with different methods will differ.

</comment><comment><USER6> I can't decide if I like it or not, but one commenter really takes the opportunity to promote his website:

> I believe "crowdsourcing" is the future of how we'll tap into and retrieve > much of the information we desire, in real-time. We designed our entire web > site/application (liveskiconditions.com) around the fact that people want to > know the current snow conditions [...].

Spam or not?

<comment><USER7> Not spam.

His comment and website appear very relevant to the radio program, which talks about real-time information from iPhone users suppressing the ski resorts' false reports (say that five times fast).

I would consider it spam if he copied his comment text and pasted it in every NPR summary page that mentioned skiing or snowboarding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What do people consider a fair ski conditions report site?

<comment><USER9> twitter seems like it could be useful for this:

"At purgatory, snow is AWESOME!"

"park city snow is SHIT today!"

"ahhh #snowbowl, when are you going to get freaking snow machines already!"

etc. etc.</comment></comment>


Galaxy S8 Leak Details 15 New Features - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2017/03/12/samsung-galaxy-s8-galaxy-s8-plus-specifications-features-changes/ <comment><USER2> Shame it's a Forbes link. Guess I'll have to search elsewhere.</comment>


Bletchley codebreakers used to dry their damp bras and pants on Enigma machine - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2831806/Wartime-codebreaker-tells-workers-Bletchley-Park-used-dry-damp-bras-pants-Enigma-machine.html <comment><USER2> Thanks to the Turing Completeness, I was able to dry my pants with a VAX 11/780.

</comment><comment><USER3> I used to dry my socks on top of my SparcStation RGB monitor when it rained on my way in to work.

Times changed, though. Now there's no place to put them on my LCD display, so I have to use the RAID under my desk.

<comment><USER2> Now I dry my clothes in "The Cloud". It takes a lot longer, and the NSA knows all my dirty laundry.</comment></comment>