dsrguru

I don't think it's possible to have a retroactive tax on instances of patent trolling, as opposed to patents in general. In order for this to be a tax and not a fine, it seems like it would need to be a tax on the patent application, not on bringing and losing a patent lawsuit. And in order to determine at the point of application whether or not a patent will be used for trolling (which we might define as whether the patent will be used in a lawsuit by an entity that holds the patent but does not itself employ the patent's "invention"), the USPTO would need to be able to read the future.

A senior VP of a prominent credit card processing company in the US told me that he fields an average of 200,000 attacks originating from Chinese and Iranian IP addresses every day. Governments having backdoors everywhere would be terrifying.

Having a "flag this title" feature is the best suggestion I've seen so far. If there aren't enough moderators to read articles before reverting titles, then having the community do it makes so much more sense than doing it blindly.

This approach gives intelligent first posters the necessary flexibility to change the title for any of many valid reasons (I still can't believe your comment that they changed the title of that serial killer article, killing one of the most chillingly powerful articles of the last month), yet it prevents first posters from abusing their priority even more effectively than the current approach.

It's not that I know of the specific seller. I have never consumed LSD. I have never been on the SR and now obviously never will. However, you included so many details to demonstrate the rigor of your process, yet you didn't explain how you knew you were even using LSD, which seems to be far and away the single most important detail of the experiment. Now you have!

Thanks for responding. I'm no longer skeptical!

> "The brain ... must choose between two different functional states - awake and aware or asleep and cleaning up"

As any lucid dreamer can tell you, there's also a third option--asleep and aware.

Given the recent tendency for similarly potent drugs like the DOx class of psychedelic amphetamines to be falsely sold as LSD, I'm highly skeptical of an experiment whose supply comes from a random dealer online and doesn't seem to have been tested for identity or purity.

Corrective upvote for your previous post since I agree that the level of interest to most HNers is roughly the same as if the leak had occurred via a different medium (calls to mind the Chicago Tribune's famous gaff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Defeats_Truman), but I strongly disagree with the second part of your post. This is an extremely rare occurrence--where a faux democratic regime that everyone knows to be authoritarian but which makes the effort to pretend to have elections (unlike, say, China's government which directly states that they don't like the idea of elections where the populace votes) accidentally reveals that its elections are indeed rigged. Many of us find it fascinating, and that's why it's at the top of HN. If you don't find an article interesting, I don't get the point of sarcastically criticizing other users for upvoting. There are plenty of articles on derivative startups that hit the front page of HN every day, but I don't think you typically ask on those threads, "How is that in any way novel or intellectually gratifying?" Just accept that each of us finds some highly voted articles interesting and some not.

And that's precisely why they should have picked that excuse--a plausible one!

Why isn't this the main election story (or even on the first page) when you search Google News for Azerbaijan?

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." -- http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This isn't about politics in the sense of it being a debate about policy. This is a funny example of technological misuse exposing a government for rigging an election. Technology and freedom tend to be two of HNers biggest interests, and being interesting to a lot of HNers is the criterion for what's on topic here. If you personally aren't interested in current events, as with any other topics technical or not, you don't have to read those articles.

> Why not freeze the assets of everybody charged with a felony and appoint public defenders?

Agreed, but that would either bankrupt the government or make defense attorney a much less lucrative career and, therefore, greatly decrease the number of available defense attorneys.

> It's almost as though you're saying we don't even need a trial here because the facts are so obviously established. I don't believe it's yet been established in a court of law that any crime was committed, much less that this person committed it.

Not at all what I meant. On the contrary, I meant that cases when we the outside viewers realistically know that the defendant isn't clean are probably not the best cases for highlighting the need for a competent defense.

Ooooh, I missed that part. Wikipedia (at time of writing) speaks of his identity as certain: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_William_Ulbricht#Seizure_a...

Edit: updated the article to reflect that Ulbricht is only allegedly DPR

I agree with the general sense of your post, and its implications about current drug policy, but I think tptacek is right about what our focus should be in this specific trial.

To be intellectually honest about this specific case we're discussing, DPR did by definition commit most of the drug charges. Even if you believe the only morally problematic charge is 5.b of count 1 (that the defendant hired a hitman to murder a troublesome user--I do hope you find that charge problematic!), which is certainly only alleged at this point, it is fact that the Silk Road aided and abetted drug trafficking, which is criminal in the U.S.

So while I certainly agree that people need to be entitled to a competent defense (and I am glad DPR will have competent attorneys to dispute the murder charge), emphasizing the alleged nature of a criminal conspiracy that we realistically know to be largely true doesn't seem to be the best place to focus on rights of the accused. In reality, the vast majority of people wrongfully convicted are going to be the ones who can't afford competent defense. So to me this case almost raises the opposite question from yours: if the prosecution of guilty defendants is undermined by their being able to afford better attorneys than the government, and if the defense of wrongfully accused defendants is undermined by their inability to afford competent defense, then we've got bigger problems with the nature of criminal trials!

You're right. It's working in Firefox now for me as well.

Only works for me in Chromium. Firefox is displaying "box.name" and "box.description" instead of their values.

Interestingly enough, it comes from the Chinese word 洗脑 (xǐnǎo), literally meaning to "wash brains", which was used to describe the 1984-like attempts Mao used to re-educate dissident intellectuals.

If you simplify an explanation, it still needs to do the explaining, even if it's in the form of a high-level overview. I don't even see mention of the dialect you're teaching. Especially since you're targeting people in the STEM industry (people who tend to value knowledge and precision), I'd recommend having a more specific description available for those who want, even if it's not the first message that greets the viewer.

Since we're on the subject of what your software does, and since as a native English speaker, I don't want to [ab]use your free trial just to study its workings, could you please provide that explanation here? :) Do you teach the basics of English phonology or do you just provide [auto-generated] text for users to mimic. Do you provide Rosetta Stone-like pronunciation feedback? If you don't provide basic instruction in English phonology, I highly recommend you consider adding it. Being well versed in articulatory phonetics, I taught myself Chinese phonology (Standard Mandarin) from Wikipedia. Despite not having very good Chinese, I've passed for a native speaker in short telephone conversations on multiple occasions. Even if it takes weeks to give the student the phonetic background that I had (I don't know if it would), you'll then be able to give them near-native pronunciation almost instantly, and then they'll only need to iron out the kinks with your mimic drills before sounding like a native. I don't know if this is the approach used by most accent coaches, but it's highly effective.

Except escolar is a lot more toxic than tuna.

I'm not treating the bugged part as fact. I do believe that there's at least a 99% chance that there was a break-in and that it was related to his interrogation.

> And if I ever set off the explosive detector, my first reaction wouldn't be how unfair it was that "harried" employees were "rudely" explaining that my options were leaving or a private pat down. That would seem utterly reasonable to me.

He was told that leaving was not one of his choices. Even after pointing out the illegality of that to the security official, he was told that if he left, he would forfeit his luggage, including any electronics. So essentially, leaving was not one of his choices. Also, having his house broken into and possibly bugged does not seem utterly reasonable to me.

> I think the correct answer to any question is, "my lawyer will answer that. get me my lawyer."

Hopefully. But their answer to that might contain the word "Guantanamo" and there's a chance, given that you're now an uncooperative brown person, that they're not bluffing.

I'm normally not one to buy arguments that the US is truly on a slippery slope to becoming a police state, but this year has made me seriously rethink that.

> I'm going to ask them to explain how a closure works. How they deal with AJAX. What they think about "!important". Things to be careful about with floats. How CSS precedence/specificity works. Give them an example webapp idea, and ask how they might architect it. ... None of these are gotchas.

You can do those in a half hour initial phone screen. Getting an idea of the applicant's general and/or domain-specific technical competence before you fly them out absolutely makes sense. I think what the author is criticizing, or at least the part of the author's criticism that I agree with, is the typical on-site interview that spends 3+ hours testing one's algorithmic knowledge and whiteboard coding skills. I do think that approach is vastly superior to doing nothing at all, but my personal experience suggests that testing the applicant's skills in a real life situation, after having vetted their technical knowledge/competence over the phone, seems more likely to identify strong engineers.

Yup, see my reply to venus's more lengthy set of concerns. Oh well, I hope venus learns the Truth some day. ;)

So provided Wikipedia's description is correct, the name Hacker Scouts is indisputably a trademark violation. The question is solely whether or not the BSA charter is constitutional.

> Selecting code and copy and pasting it into a chat client for discussion.

Note, due to HN's treatment of asterisks as formatting characters, I'm going to represent a literal asterisk as [asterisk].

In gvim, selecting code to copy into the system clipboard is as easy as "[asterisk]y plus the motion or text object (e.g. `"[asterisk]y3}' for the next three paragraphs or `"[asterisk]yat' for the current HTML/XML tag). You can even configure console vim to copy into the X clipboard: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Accessing_the_system_clipboard

> Grabbing someone else's code from a chat client and editing it, then copy and pasting it back to show them my interpretation.

I run vim and irssi from inside GNU screen, so it's as simple as `C-o [' (my screen prefix is `C-o') to access the scrollback buffer, spacebar to start selection, use screen's vim-like selection commands, spacebar again to yank the selection, switch screens, and then `C-o ]' to paste. The whole process is instinctive and takes no more than five seconds.

> Copying an error message and pasting it into a web browser.

See the above two answers.

> Installing or updating any kind of plugin or package.

The vundle package manager takes care of that.

> Doing anything out of the ordinary (vim users will be googling for the arcane sequence of commands and don't try the "no true scotsman" defence for that - they all do)

No, they'd most likely use some combination of the brilliantly orthogonal editing language that is Vim and the brilliantly orthogonal computing environment that is UNIX to reach a solution in time that would amaze a Windows user. In fairness, most Sublime users I know would do the same.

> Scrolling smoothly through a large file looking for a certain method you will know by shape.

How would Vim and Sublime differ on this one?

> Quickly navigating a tree of files at the side of the window.

Vim users do the same. It's called the NERD tree plugin. I personally find it faster to navigate with autojump from the command-line and then open files in vim from the command-line, but many Vim users like the tree approach.

> Changing the font to something post-1980.

You add a line to your ~/.Xdefaults or ~/.Xresources for console vim or to ~/.gvimrc for gvim. It's no harder than changing fonts in Sublime. I personally like 14-pt Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. It looks similar to Sublime's default iirc.

> Make it look good (this willl take infinite time)

I don't know if by "it" you mean the font or the colorscheme, but as with Sublime, some fonts and colorschemes are really nice and some aren't. It sounds like your criticism here, as with virtually all of your points, is that vim's default settings, unlike Sublime's, are not optimized for use as an IDE. That is correct. However, instead of bashing vim for this use case with uninformed, antagonistic statements like making it look good will take infinite time, all you have to do is ask or google how to configure vim for such a use case. A lot of vim plugin writers are ex-Sublime users, so it should be pretty easy to make vim simulate the default Sublime feature set, if you really wanted to. If you're more comfortable with Sublime, it makes total sense to stick with it. Perhaps Sublime Text's greatest strength is that its default configuration is excellent for software development. As you pointed out, typing isn't normally the bulk of development time, so if you're already happy with an editor, you really don't need to switch to a faster one. Just don't tell others who do use one that's said to be faster that you, someone who has only used their editor in a console/ssh capacity (and from the sound of it, a casual capacity at that), knows their editor's shortcomings for development better than they do.

> It's sort of like Linux vs MacOSX on the desktop. Linux people can and do customise their machines to an amazing extent, all sorts of crazy window managers and weird shell extensions, all promising great improvements in window management and shell completion, etc. But at the end of the day, I don't notice linux-using programmers as being any more productive, as a rule, than mac users, who tend to not fetishize the tool so much and just want to get on with the job.

I know quite a few Mac OS X users who care very much about their programming environment/toolset, and I do think they're more productive than those who don't.

> I admit I'm biased against vim because of how ugly it is

But it's not! If you're running it on ssh and if your console font is ugly, then yes, it will be ugly. But that's like saying that ST is ugly if you set it to use whatever ugly font your shell is set to. Vim is configurable, and a sane vim/gvim set-up looks clean and beautiful. Since you're a Linux server user, you should know the power of configuration!

It takes several days, not 5 years, to train your muscle memory to the point where the vim editing model is much faster for raw edits than the default editor in Sublime [1].

> typing speed is rarely the bottleneck in programming

You're right, especially if you're using a language that doesn't require a lot of boilerplate. But between the UNIX shell and the normal vim add-ons, even higher-level editing tasks, i.e. those that aren't strictly about raw editing, shouldn't give vim users trouble.

As with negatmx, I'm convinced you haven't met people who use vim properly. Name a task on which you've either seen or you'd imagine a ST user to outperform a vim "power user". I'll let you know the logical way to do it in vim.

[1] To obtain solid proficiency with the vim editing model, just work through the interactive vimtutor, read up on text objects, and spend a couple hours acclimating yourself to using the following motions and commands in place of hjkl (sort of but not necessarily in order of usefullness):

/ ? n N f F t T # *

gg G <n>G (e.g. 42G)

H M L

^ 0 $ { } ( ) w W b B e E

C-f C-b C-d C-u

zt zz zb

Without a question, the one with text objects. Productivity is far greater with vim. Actually to be fair, Sublime's vim emulation mode implements a few text objects, but the proprietary source means no adding our own.

What are those legal steps?