skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The only way to fix the situation is to exempt all file formats from patent claims as it is clearly anticompetitive.

This is clearly the correct answer, or at least part of it. Many real world problems in the technology industries would never have existed if intellectual property laws could not be applied to restrict communication and compatibility. Allowing patents to effectively restrict the transfer of data, because the tools available to either or both parties effectively require patented formats or similar, is either a tax on communication or a tool for censorship, depending primarily on the willingness of the patent holder to licence on useful terms.

Ironically, the US actually got this right in the case of fonts and copyrights, in that while a specific program to describe a font might be subject to copyright, the design of the font itself is not. Thus unlike certain other creative industries, no-one can go around claiming royalties on every publication displayed in a sans serif font because it looks a bit similar to something from the early 1900s and (insert dubious legal argument about derivative works restarting the copyright clock here).
you never met a lawyer.

send notice to LP #1. subtract value from sending that note. send new value on a note to lp #2. subtract cost... put a note on all notes that they may be an hour out of date but represent the values as accurately as the law demands for that day.
ya, that explains the issue. GP's gallons are bigger than the ones I am thinking of
The argument that all a kid needs to turn out OK is money is absurd

Yes, that argument nobody is making is indeed absurd.

Perhaps the reason wealthier children are healthier is because their parents have discipline and work hard to provide a safe, healthy, stimulating environment for their children, which includes retaining steady gainful employment and using the proceeds from that employment to provide food, shelter, and education for the children. This will not magically happen among poor children if you give the parents some baseline income.

Did you RTFA? The improvements happened after families started gaining an extra $4k from a new casino that was opened in the area.

So yes, it did magically happened after the parents got a baseline income increase.
What Would Real Brain-To-Brain Communication Look Like?
I am a non-engineer who has used mm/cm/dm/m/km all my life. For me, 1 km is not necessarily 1000 m, and 5 cm is not necessarily 50 mm.

In everyday use using only the smaller unit implies a precision that usually isn't there.

Millimeters certainly has its place, but so do centimetres.
Lessons from Five Years in Mobile News Apps: #1 Don’t Have a News App
Stay in Dubai – The Perfect Holiday Destination
replace drone with radio-transmitters above certain power operating in certain frequencies.

HAM operators are proud of the strict licencing requirements and the test they need.
Memoirs of an introvert: How to network
(Got confused by HN threading, replied to myself by mistake)
> the second someone disagrees a mod gets upset

That's quite the understatement. You posted close to two dozen indignant comments in a single thread, crossing repeatedly into incivility. That's an abuse of HN by any standard, regardless of how flawed the article and the other comments were.
I always include a "plain english" copy of my contracts when I send them to customers. I state that it's there for reference only, not a substitute for a lawyer on their part, but that I've made the best effort to make it representative of the contract. Most of my client love it, some don't care, but I think it's something that has helped a lot of folks. I think most contracts should have one.
> The argument that all a kid needs to turn out OK is money is absurd, and yet, it seems to be a cornerstone in Millennial thinking.

I don't know; your argument seems to be actually the typical response, the kind of thing most people say when they see something that can be pattern-matched to "give money".

There are of course many non-material things that are important to growth of a children, but why dismiss this one so easy? Is it because it "sounds too simple"? Personally, I think we seriously overstate effectiveness of methods appealing to virtues, morality and "if only people would...". A lot of things in life are indirectly related to material wealth, you can improve pretty much anything by throwing more money at it. And we also know that things like "hard work" and "discipline" are overrated; people usually behave the way they do because of the environment they're in, and you can manufacture discipline by a mix of glucose and (in more extreme cases) some anti-ADHD medication.

I think we're as a society ignoring the obvious because it's easier to blame someone's lack of virtue than actually invest resources into solving their problems.
Versus BSD:

Whatever, just remember we wrote it and if it fucks up, don't blame us.
Though it's actually a very bad summary in this particular case. If you've paid real money for a permanent copy of some software then in many jurisdictions you do effectively own that copy of the software. In those places, there may be quite severe restrictions on what the copyright holder can then restrict you from doing with your copy, even though they retain the main rights to the software itself, and in some cases there have been lawsuits which have made it to court and upheld limitations on the rightsholders' powers.

Even where there used to be potential distinctions between physical copies and things you acquired in purely digital form such as on-line downloads, the law is catching up in a lot of places. It's just doing so painfully slowly compared to the pace of development of technology, and sometimes with a few accidental/deliberate (delete as applicable) loopholes written into the newer laws that still seem rather favourable to copyright holders and the like.
That last part about antitrust is weird. European (antitrust) law is biased against large companies? Huh.
Quasicrystals in Medieval Islamic Architecture, Harvard Physics Lecture [video]
Theo mentions anoncvs. Remember, there was no Github in 1996. Not even SourceForge. Source code was passed around via tarballs, and you couldn’t look at individual commits without an account on the development server hosting the repository. OpenBSD developed the first anonymous access repository for CVS—the desire to do this is what the “Open” in “OpenBSD” refers to. http://www.openbsd.org/papers/anoncvs-paper.pdf
Also, people are quick to weasel out by assuming someone's problems are caused by their lack of virtue ("if only they worked harder", "had more discipline", etc.) instead noticing the environmental factors that can actually be improved.
Why is it the queues responsibility to store consumer offsets? Consumer is the only side that knows how far along his processing is. Why is the queue storing this data, when all the consumer has to do is tell it: send me events for topic X from point P forward.
> please <enable me> and I'll quit economic activity to devote myself to life-improving activities

Interestingly, I keep reading HN and sometimes pause to make a new account with 0 karma, in order to contribute (hopefully) compelling comments and conversation when I am so inspired to, despite the karma/profit-motive. I actually think the presence of karma encourages me to be argumentative and act out indulgently, self-destructively, and even anti-socially, in the same way I see people in poverty do.
You forgot the cost of memory access.

The L3 layer checksum is useless because IP packet is small and the kernel has to read/write all the fields anyway.

The L4 checksum covers TCP/UDP packet data, which the kernel can avoid touching if necessary.

When a TCP sender uses sendfile(), the kernel does a DMA read from storage to a page if the data is not already in memory (in the so called page cache), and just ask the network card to send this page, prepended with a ETH/IP/TCP header. That only works if the NIC can checksum the TCP packet content and update the header.

If the network card can do TCP segmentation offload, the kernel does not have to repeat this operation for each 1500 bytes packets, it can fetch a large amount of data from disk, and the NIC will split the data in smaller packets by itself.
It was mainly created for P2P systems that need to sync databases across clients. Being that data is stored in JSON it can be sent and received with relative ease.
> My point here is that cash clearly helps in some - probably most - circumstances. But "just give cash" is insufficient; we still need to work on all the other things as well.

True, but if it indeed helps in most circumstances, then we should just go ahead and do it. Right now people are searching for increasingly obscure cases where cash handouts won't help to block the entire idea. It's an easy excuse to make that enables one to do nothing.
> Or maybe they would have been scared completely senseless seeing tons of steel being piloted by an idiot with no training at speeds they didn't even know were possible for humans to achieve.

In light of the second amendment, that seems unlikely.
Not exactly - after the perfume is sold, the person wearing the perfume gives out the smell for free, and nobody tries to charge people for smelling the worn smell.

Obviously the bottle of concentrated smell costs money, though.
5 big reasons Alibaba is acquiring a video site for $4B
Its weird that we do this dance, no one reads the terms and we if we ever have to choose between the agreement and our immediate need well... If a client needs you to spin up a vm but you're already running two who gives a rat's behind!
There outh to two sets of license agreements with all software, the legalese one and one like this - then I might actually read it.

I'll add one like this to my software now!
Reminds me of these Japanese stair-climbing hand-trucks that you see delivery people using to get supplies into the shops in the subway stations:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCEglW9e5EQ
Very cool and informative at the same time. Well done!
I would say because ultimately it is just a shorthand/buzzword/brand. The theorom itself is kind of tautological, but it provides a simple starting point for talking about trade-offs.

Unfortunately and inevitably things are a bit more complicated than a model simplified to 3 words so it has also generated its fair share of confusion.
Should there be an intermediary the client needs to sign that the summary isn't a perfect representation of the contract? Kidding, of course. Mostly.
SMTP Mail is broken. The best justification is that error messages can't even be sent back to avoid abuse by spammers.
People are constrained to use services like gmail to avoid troubles. This is a serious privacy threat.
How does it work when an open source project is acquired? What's the benefit for RH compared to just forking the project?

I guess the choice of license can get really important in this situation? Are there any old decisions by the founder that now turn out to be especially important?
Repeated actual peer reviews studies are showing the same thing namely that poor people are poor not because of their moral failing but because they don't have any money.

So you argue that instead of actually using the results of research we should focus our welfare using understanding based upon 19th century moralizations.
> The only function for which this is true is identity

If you want to clamp a value to some arbitrary range (a hint to the name), then any function that does so has this property.

unsigned char f(unsigned long x) { return x & 255; }
long f(long x) { return x < 0 ? x : -x; }
Thanks for the input. I agree the readme should be rewritten to offer more descriptive information, and give people real life examples and use cases that they couldn't figure out it could do for them...
Real life points to the contrary. It's conditional welfare that strips people of their dignity, to the point of many eligible not seeking it out of shame. I know some examples of that first-hand.

"Just getting cash" strips one of dignity no more than "just getting water from the river" or "fruits from a tree" stripped humans of their dignity in the past. Nature provides for us unconditionally. No one is truly independent from the systems they're embedded in, and the assumption that a baseline amount of resources that can form a stable foundation will make one forgoe "improving their situation" is, frankly, offensive to me as a human being.
So we're at the point now that legal documents need comments to be human readable. I wonder how long it will be until they look like perl.
IIRC, #7 about the voice synthesizers appeared with 10.6. Prior to that, there was no mention of the voices in the license and commercial use of narrations produced with the system's voice synthesizer might have been legal.
> Parents stimulating their children does probably more to the brain structure than a check in the mail.

Yes; a check in the mail does not raise a kid, parents do. But what a check in the mail can do is enable one of the parents to stay home and do the kidraising instead of having to seek another job so that the family can have heat in the winter. That's why it is useful.
Canon is known to do this alot. I think the magic lantern software illustrated this quite well when they started unlocking raw capabilities in cameras as old as the 50d, a ten yr old body.

Upgrading your camera becomes a frustrating ordeal. Never knowing if you're getting a good deal or you're getting conned.
Really interesting, and probably applicable to other categories of app as well. For small companies the cost of apps on several platforms can be prohibitive, and the benefits questionable if your content is already free.
Well, maybe we could at least stop high-energy sonar testing.
Retro diner in Detroit neighborhood wards off crime
from the article:

> Each core needs to generate a few thousand data packets per second, because Ethernet packets typically contain up to 1500 bytes. This gives the CPU around 100 microseconds to process each packet.

No it doesn't, not when using TCP Segmentation Offload (TSO)

This only works for a particular use-case: sending static data using TCP, but this is the most common use-case since a typical "video streaming server" is actually a simple HTTP server that serves static MP4/MPEG-TS data.

for each connected client this is what happens
- nginx/apache does sendfile(file, sock, off, <large_number>)
- kernel issue large (> 10kB) DMA read to the file storage backend into a set of memory pages and wait for completion
- kernel allocates/clone a small IP/TCP header (40 bytes)
- kernel gives that small header + set of memory pages to network card, which will segment and create those 1500 bytes packets and send them on wire

if you have a lot of RAM, the read from storage could even be skipped because the previously read data pages are kept in the page-cache with a LRU approach. (help if clients are requesting the same file).

you can easily saturate a 10G link with spare CPU cycles on cheap hardware with that approach, no need to bypass anything.
Would very much like to read your blog post. It's a rare thing to hear from someone that has been on both-sides of the system and can reason about it in an organic way.
> Parents stimulating their children does probably more to the brain structure than a check in the mail.

When you give someone cash you give them the ability to buy books, or go to places, or buy lego, that stimulate a child.
Leaked Continuum Video Shows Microsoft Has Found Its Mojo Again
"I can't use El Captain with illegal copies of anyone's stuff" or break any local law. In which case I must delete everything.

Do you think Apple is required to write this? or is it just lawyers maxing out on the possibilities of licensing?
Fair points, you're thinking on a different scale for me. The agencies I'm thinking of were little more than chop shops who hire and then resell. The only positive they could give you is if someone is sick they can back fill; but having seen it in action that's really just someone unfamiliar with the processes warming a seat for a few days and not doing much.

MSDN $2kpa. Liability $1kpa. I guess it's not "a lot" but if you're only doing a little work (as I was) it was a substantial portion of the profit gone; I spent more on hardware though.
> Purely anecdotal but please <enable me> and I'll quit economic activity to devote myself to life-improving activities (and a big thank you to whoever is continuing them for my sake). Fortunately I'm an odd-ball and no one else anywhere would even think to behave as I would. So, my story is not only anecdotal but completely irrelevant.

You'll get bored shitless after a week of doing nothing with your life improvements to make a point, and suddenly you'll be back here having a productive input in the society, be it arts or engineering, services or thinking. But maybe you do really want to make a point and decide to just drink and be merry. That would still be a significant improvement for the society over having you perform "economic activity" in advertising or other bullshit industry we keep because we're too big on puritan values to even consider that slaving away your life for food and shelter isn't the optimal way of living.
This summary is precisely for El Capitan, so no, it has not changed.
There are actually a few restaurants like this in the poorer sections of Detroit. My family has frequented Scottie Simpsons in the Brightmoor section for over fifty years and it's got the best fish and chips I've had this side of London. Its never been robbed or tagged with graffiti.
I remember when I was at school the first day of woodwork class (age around 10) we were told that all measurements were in millimetres.

I don't think anybody had problems adjusting. It was just another thing to remember in class.

Outside the class everybody used mm/cm/m/km as needed (nobody used dm where I lived).
> The software is provided ‘as is’ and the author disclaims all warranties with regard to this software including all implied warranties of merchantability and fitness. In no event shall the author be liable for any special, direct, indirect, or consequential damages or any damages whatsoever resulting from loss of use, data or profits, whether in an action of contract, negligence or other tortious action, arising out of or in connection with the use or performance of this software.”

Not compatible with law in some jurisdictions. Which is one of the problems with complex licences - the more stuff there is in them the more chance they have of not being compatible with local law.
Did you read the article? Your point seems to be in direct contradiction to it. And it seems to be based entirely upon your own ideas with no supporting evidence.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9520984
> The hard truth of First-Past-The-Post systems is that purism doesn't pay. A slightly-shaky alliance taking you to 40% trumps a purist core of 10% every day.

Disagree. What matters in the end are the policies, not the person. In Lessig's case, he wants campaign finance reform. If whoever gets elected takes that up as part of their platform, and does their best to implement it as president, then he's won. If he gets them to take up a diluted version of it, he's still partially won.

Sending the message that you'll only support candidates if they align with your biggest policy issues is effective. Electing candidates who don't support your big policy issues is not.

(Edit: The part about voters not caring about his issues may be valid. From TFA he seems to think otherwise, but I wouldn't be surprised if in fact mainstream voters are completely apathetic towards campaign finance reform.)
Google also adheres to the robots.txt standard. Most of the scrapers I block don't.
Why?

My site, my robots.txt - if the scrapers do not obey, then I'll block them.
If I'm just 'borrowing' El Capitan, then that means the copy I'm running belongs to them. Therefore, any intellectual property I develop using my copy could technically belong to them?
If these guys are serious about their business, then they should behave like a good netizen and obey robots.txt directives.
What about for the small time, personal servers? How do we get our mail delivered without having to use a third party service like Mandrill?

I'm not blaming you personally, but the way Gmail handles email originating from personal servers is reprehensible.
If you disobey robots.txt it's unethical and rude.
If you are a good netizen, could you plese provide your user agent so I can block your bot on all sites I operate?

Thank you.

EDIT: found that in your FAQ:

"Since disclosing IP’s and user agents would allow anyone to identify all traffic coming from our system – we naturally never do."

That is the opposite of being a good netizen and I hope I'll be able to sue you once I find out your services are helping to scrape my content.

2nd EDIT: Found out that you reside in Denmark and therefore in the EU, that makes it way easier then.
Not a citation and not a proof, just pointing out an additional group - there is a whole class of mental problems that can lead one to poverty and keep them there. They often need money and stable situation (have time to visit a doctor, have money to buy drugs OR have a job to have an insurance to get drugs) to be kept at bay, and if they force you into bad situation it becomes very hard to get out of it.

Some people are employable only because huge inefficiencies that exist in job market (e.g. it's easy to pass a programming test and hard for your employer to determine your actual productivity) and that would be better off on an UBI, providing some value without the stresses of not getting paid for being unable to e.g. maintain 9-5 schedule, or your employer not understanding that you have random periods of downtime due to depression.
Come to Linux my brother, heed the call of salvation!
Changing SMTP would create a lot of interoperability problems. I agree with this. This is why I concluded that we need a new protocol that solves the problem of SMTP. If it's good it will take over SMTP's market share. That's the way to go. It's like IMAP taking over market share of POP, ...

It's been some years now that I'm thinking on this messaging and spamming problem. It is not a protocol or technical issue. The problem is the abuse of the communication system by spammer.

The worst is that people have to hide their contact address or use semi private messaging systems. This is totally contradictory to the evolution of the communication systems. We have smartphones and can't reliably send a message to any body in the world ? Internet is lacking a solution for that.
While your abstract theory is very interesting, it's not really addressing my point, which is that, in practice, parents mostly seem to do a better job than welfare case workers of identifying necessities and allocating money to them. I was giving some anecdotes to clarify how this works in practice, but also I think this article provides another useful piece of empirical evidence showing that it does.

So maybe instead of coming up with social prescriptions based on abstract bullshit theories that sound good to you, which is because they flatter your preconceptions or because you've heard them repeated frequently, you should open your eyes to the things that are actually happening in the actual world, and see what happens in reality.
This post looks good. Please email hn@ycombinator.com if you would like us to send you a repost invite. This is an experiment we've been working on to give good stories a second chance at attention on HN.
This site helps you work, study, sleep and relax much better
Amazon sues 1,000 'fake reviewers'
Good thought. I work with people who are quite often wheelchair bound and with many of them the fear of falling is very apparent and obviously logical.